The Charles Dickens Letters Project

To DESMOND RYAN,1 25 MARCH 1847

Text from facsimile in Jarndyce online catalogue, Mar 2023.

Address: Desmond Ryan Esquire | “Musical World” office | 60 St Martin’s Lane

Regents Park

Twenty Fifth March 1847

Mr Charles Dickens presents his compliments to Mr Desmond Ryan, and begs to say, in reply to Mr Ryan’s letter of the 8th of January last, that he has requested the attention of his publishers2 to its contents.

    Mr Dickens has been abroad for nearly twelve months,3 and is but now — on his return home — in the receipt of Mr Desmond Ryan’s favor.4 Otherwise, he would have been happy to have replied to it long since.

• 1. (Michael) Desmond Ryan (1816–1868; Oxford Dictionary of National Biography), drama and music critic. Contributor to The Musical World from 1844; sub-editor 1845–68; music and drama critic with the Morning Post, the Morning Chronicle, the Morning Herald, The Standard, and other journals.
• 2. Bradbury and Evans, publishers of Dombey and Son; see note 4.
• 3. CD was in Switzerland and France from 31 May 1846 to 28 Feb 1847.
• 4. Probably the favourable review of Part 4 of Dombey and Son published in The Musical World in Jan 1847: “MR. DICKENS has, in this number of his new work, directed his powerful pen against the system of precocious education. Impressed with the beneficial results following his exposure of the Yorkshire cheap schools, the author has flown his wit at higher quarry, and has laid bare the flagrancies and absurdities of certain Academies of pretence, who undertake to train up youths  in the way they should go…. The picture of Doctor Blimber, the head of this choice institution, is vividly and graphically drawn, and realises the very impersonation of pomposity and self-conceit” (The Musical World 22.3 [16 Jan 1847]: 37).