The Charles Dickens Letters Project

To GEORGE DOLBY,1 26 JUNE 1866 

Replaces mention in Pilgrim Letters 11, p. 217.

Text from facsimile in International Autograph Auctions online catalogue, December 2016. 

GAD’S HILL PLACE

HIGHAM BY ROCHESTER, KENT. 

Tuesday Twenty Sixth June 1866. 

My Dear Dolby

Assuming that your domestic anxieties will be over2 by Saturday the 14th July, will you come down here on that day and arrange to stay over the Monday, so that we may see something of the country?3 I have asked Mr Arthur Chappell4 for the same time, and have told him (both by this same post), that I am writing to you. 

Faithfully Yours ever 

CHARLES DICKENS 

George Dolby Esquire.  

• 1. George Dolby (1831-1900), manager of CD’s reading tours, 1866-70, on behalf of Chappell & Co. Became a personal friend of CD; author of Charles Dickens as I Knew Him (1885).
• 2. Dolby’s wife Ursula was then heavily pregnant with their daughter, Charlotte, born on 5 July; she was probably named after Dolby’s mother, Charlotte, who died on 1 July.
• 3. These dates did not suit Dolby; see To Dolby, 1 July 1866.
• 4. Samuel Arthur Chappell (1834-1904), youngest son of Samuel Chappell, of Chappell & Co., music publishers, and a member of the firm that organised CD’s public readings. See To Chappell, 26 June 1866.