The Charles Dickens Letters Project

To MRS LYNN LINTON,1 19 JUNE 1869

Text from G. S. Layard, Mrs Lynn Linton, her Life, Letters and Opinions, 1901, pp.160-1.

26 WELLINGTON STREET, STRAND,

Saturday, 19th June 1869.

My Dear Mrs. Linton

Although your article on our old friend is interesting as a piece of personal remembrance, it does not satisfy my desires as a review of Forster’s book.2 It could hardly be otherwise than painful to Forster that I, one of his oldest literary friends, and certainly of all others his most intimate and confidential, should insert in these pages an account of Landor – or touch the subject – without a word of commendation of a biography that has cost, to my knowledge, a world of care and trouble. I find from your letter to my son that you do not think well of the said book. Admitting that the life was to be written at all, I do. And it is because I think well of it, and wish highly to commend it on what I deem to be its deserts, that I am staggered and stopped short by your paper,3 and fear that I must turn to and write another in its stead.4

I want you to understand the case on my own presentation of it, and hence I trouble you with this note.

Believe me always | faithfully yours,

CHARLES DICKENS

• 1. Eliza Lynn (1822-98; Dictionary of National Biography), journalist and novelist known as Mrs Lynn Linton after her marriage to W. J. Linton, 1858; close friend of Walter Savage Landor, at whose house she first met CD in 1849; regular contributor to All the Year Round: see Pilgrim Letters 7, p. 114 and later vols.
• 2. John Forster’s W. S. Landor: a Biography, pubd June 69: see Pilgrim Letters 12, p. 352 and n. CD had asked Mrs Lynn Linton to write a review for All the Year Round, no doubt because he knew she was a very old friend of Landor’s. For CD's return of the unpublished review see To Eliza Lynn Linton, 21 June 1869.
• 3. According to G.S. Layard in his Life (see above), the article she wrote began with the words: “The Life of Walter Savage Landor has yet to be written”.
• 4. CD wrote a review himself, recommending Forster’s book and describing Landor himself with affection and understanding; it appeared in All the Year Round, N.S. Vol II, No. 34, 24 July 1869: see “‘The Uncommercial Traveller’ and Other Papers”, ed. Michael Slater and John Drew (Dickens’ Journalism, 2000, Vol. 4, pp. 396-403).