The Charles Dickens Letters Project
To BERNHARD TAUCHNITZ,1 18 APRIL 1859
Replaces extracts (aa) in Pilgrim Letters 9, p. 51.
Text from facsimile in the possession of Dietmar Böhnke.2
aTAVISTOCK HOUSE, | TAVISTOCK SQUARE, LONDON, W.C.
Monday Eighteenth April, 1859a
My Dear Sir
aI am obliged to ask you a question which must seem a very odd one. Did you send me, last week, a bill fora £35 aon account of the payment for my new story, “A Tale of Two Cities”?3 If you did, I have burnt it, and must ask you for another. If you did not, it is all right.
Last Wednesday night, having company here,4 I opened two or three letters very hurriedly, and afterwards burnt them among some waste paper, without intending to do so.5 I did not even6 read7 them. But I have the vaguest possible impression (I may have dreamed it, for any thing I know), that one of those letters was from you, and that it enclosed some bill or draft for £a35.
aPray excuse my giving you this trouble.
You understand that a Tale of Two Cities will appear in weekly portions, and every four weekly portions will afterwards appear separately re-published in a monthly part.8 How do you wish to have it sent to you? Weekly?a9
My dear Sir | Always faithfully Yours
CHARLES DICKENS
- 1. Baron Bernhard Christian Tauchnitz (1816-95), publisher, of Leipzig. Born at Schleinitz; nephew of the publisher Karl Tauchnitz. Founded his own firm in Leipzig in 1837. The firm began its “Collection of British Authors” Sep 41 with Bulwer Lytton’s Pelham. Pickwick Papers, Oliver Twist, and American Notes had appeared before the end of 1842, and Nicholas Nickleby in June 43. He and CD became friendly, and CD sent Charley to Leipzig to learn German. According to John Forster, Tauchnitz always paid liberally. He wrote to Forster after CD’s death: “All Mr Dickens’s works have been published under agreement by me. My intercourse with him lasted nearly twenty-seven years. The first of his letters dates in October 1843, and his last at the close of March, 1870 [see To Tauchnitz, 31 March 1870]. Our long relations were not only never troubled by the least disagreement, but were the occasion of most hearty personal feeling; and I shall never lose the sense of his kind and friendly nature. On my asking him his terms for Edwin Drood, he replied, ‘Your terms shall be mine.’” (John Forster, The Life of Charles Dickens, ed. J.W.T. Ley [London: Cecil Palmer, 1928], p. 807n). On the letters between CD and Tauchnitz see Dietmar Böhnke “The Correspondence between Charles Dickens and Bernhard Tauchnitz: General Observations and Newly Discovered Letters”, Archiv für das Studium dar neuernen Sprachen und Literaturen, Berlin, 2013, pp. 309-29; and Dietmar Böhnke, “The Lost Leipzig Letters: Charles Dickens, Bernhard Tauchnitz and the German Connection” in Stefan Welz and Elmar Schenkel (eds.), Dickens on the Move: Travels and Transformations, Charles Dickens Bicentenary, Conference 2012, Leipzig, Frankfurt am Main, Peter Lang, 2014, pp. 151-66.
- 2. The precise amount of the bill was excluded from the extract published in Pilgrim Letters.
- 3. No payment of £35 was received. CD received £29.19s.6d on 11 April 1859 from the Greman bank Fruhling & Goschen, of Austin Friars, London. In his letter to Tauchnitz of 7 April 1859, CD acknowledged receipt of a bill for £30 for A Tale of Two Cities. The Coutts & Co. bank ledger reads "Bill on Fruhling & Co. less stamp", which demonstrates that the bank made a 6d stamping charge on the transaction. The next receipt from Fruhling in CD's account was on 3 June, for £44.19s.6d (that is, £45 less 6d). On 2 December 1859, CD wrote to Tauchnitz to acknowledge receipt of an unspecified amount, in completion of payment for A Tale of Two Cities (Pilgrim Letters 9, p. 174); the bank account shows a receipt from Fruhling of £34.19s.6d (that is, £35 less 6d) on 9 Dec 1859. Thus, the total paid by Tauchnitz for A Tale of Two Cities was £110 (£30 + £45 + £35).
- 4. Not traced.
- 5. For CD's intentional burning of letters see To W.H. Wills, 4 Sept 1860 (Pilgrim Letters 9, pp. 303-4), and To W.C. Macready, 1 March 1865 (Pilgrim Letters 11, pp. 21-2).
- 6. "even" added above caret.
- 7. "even" deleted after "read".
- 8. The novel was published in two different serial forms, virtually simultaneously: it appeared weekly in All the Year Round, from 30 April to 26 November 1859, without illustrations; it also appeared in eight monthly parts, with illustrations, between June and December 1859 (the 7th and 8th instalments appeared as a double number). See To Tauchnitz, 10 May 1859.
- 9. Tauchnitz chose to publish the novel in monthly parts; his announcement of Part I survives (30 June 1859, but no copy has been located); see William B. Todd and Ann Bowden, Tauchnitz International Editions in English, 1841-1955. A Bibliographical History (New Castle, Delaware and London: Oak Knoll Press and The British Library, 1988), pp. 52, 114.