The Charles Dickens Letters Project

To WILLIAM STORY BULLARD,1 9 OCTOBER 1851

Text from facsimile on eBay, July 2021.
On mourning paper.2

Broadstairs, Kent3
Ninth October 1851.

Dear Sir
    Mrs Dickens4 and I exceedingly regret that by reason of our being a hundred miles from London5 at present, we cannot have the gratification of seeing you and your well-remembered wife;6 to whom we beg you to present our cordial regards and congratulations.7But if you should be in London in December,8 when we hope to be re-established there, it will give us great pleasure to compensate ourselves for this disappointment.
    If you should write to Felton,9 will you give him my love and regard.10
    Dear Sir
    Very faithfully Yours
    CHARLES DICKENS

W.S. Bullard Esquire.

• 1. William Story Bullard (1814-97), merchant and ship owner, of Richmond, Virginia. With his partner Henry Lee Jr., he managed the international shipping business Bullard & Lee (later Bullard, Lee, & Co.) at India Wharf, Boston, Massachusetts (George Adams, The Boston Directory 1848-9 [Boston, MA: James French, 1848]).
• 2. CD's daughter Dora had died suddenly on 14 Apr 1851.
• 3. CD stayed at Broadstairs from 28 May to 20 Oct 1851.
• 4. Catherine Dickens, née Hogarth (1815-79).
• 5. Broadstairs is, in fact, about 80 miles from London.
• 6. Louisa Bullard, née Norton (1823-1915), sister of CD's friend Charles Eliot Norton, who worked in Bullard's shipping business in the late 1840s. Dickens and Catherine had met Louisa and other members of the Norton family in Boston in 1842.
• 7. Bullard proposed to Louisa in the summer of 1850; they married on 27 Jan 1851.
• 8. Bullard applied for new passports for himself and Louisa in Dec 1850. After their wedding they embarked on an eight-month honeymoon tour of Europe, in the company of Louisa's sister Jane Norton (James C. Turner, The Liberal Education of Charles Eliot Norton [Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999], p. 100).
• 9. Cornelius Conway Felton (1807-62; Dictionary of American Biography), Eliot Professor of Greek Literature at Harvard since 1834; President of Harvard 1860-2. Became CD's closest American friend and most regular correspondent. The son of poor parents, he taught at Round Hill School, Northampton, and other Massachusetts schools while at Harvard 1823-7 and for two years after graduating. Intimate at Harvard with Longfellow, Sumner, Hillard and S. G. Howe. Widely read in English literature; spoke several European languages; contributed to the North American Review, Christian Examiner and other periodicals. Described by L. G. Clark in Harper's New MonthlyM, August 1862, as "one of the most kind-hearted and best of men. In person ... very comfortably fleshy and compact; of fair complexion, and with the sweetest expression gleaming through gold spectacles from his fine blue-gray eyes." Felton was Charles Eliot Norton’s beloved classics professor at Harvard, and also a long-time intimate of the Norton family and their circle of friends (Turner, Ch.1). CD, knowing of Felton’s close connection to the Boston family which Bullard had just joined through marriage, sent affectionate regards through Bullard to Felton. In letters to or about Felton, CD frequently mentioned their shared passion for oysters; see, for example, Pilgrim Letters 3, pp. 127-8, 129, 291, 547.
• 10. Thus in MS.