The Charles Dickens Letters Project
To FREDERIC CHAPMAN,1 7 JANUARY 1869
Text from facsimile in Swann Auction Galleries online catalogue, March 2015.
Shelburne Hotel, Dublin
Thursday Seventh January 1869
My Dear Sir
The late Mr Townshend’s will obliges me to produce a Volume of his “religious opinions”.2
Will you send me an estimate to this address, of the cost of print, paper, binding and publishing, of a handsome octavo volume, containing from 200 to 300 easy pages. Good paper. An edition of 200 would be amply large enough. Under the term “publishing” I include your commission and some moderate advertizing. I do not, of course, expect your estimate to be exact; but I want it to represent the extreme cost likely to be incurred.
I have to thank you for some books at Christmas. The book on mines and miners has interested me exceedingly.3
Faithfully Yours always
CHARLES DICKENS4
- 1. Frederic Chapman (1823-95); joined Chapman & Hall 1841; chief proprietor 1864; managing director 1880-95.
- 2. The Rev. Chauncy Hare Townshend (1798-1868; Dictionary of National Biography), poet and antiquarian, whom CD had known since 1840, and to whom Great Expectations was dedicated. As his literary executor, CD published Religious Opinions of the Late Chauncy Hare Townshend in November 1869.
- 3. Probably Louis Simonin, Underground Life: or Mines and Miners (Chapman & Hall, 1869); see Catalogue of the Library of Charles Dickens, ed. J. H. Stonehouse, 1935, p. 102.
- 4. Correspondent's name, written bottom left, has been removed by a strip being cut off the paper at the left-hand edge. Tops of a few letters show at the cut edge. At the foot of the page, another hand has written: "? To Mr Chapman Publisher | To Chapman publisher".