The Charles Dickens Letters Project

To GEORGE HENRY HAYDON,1 26 SEPTEMBER 1848

Replaces extract in Pilgrim Letters 7, p. 891.
Text from facsimile in Ahlers & Ogletree online catalogue, Feb 2024.

Broadstairs.
Tuesday Twenty Sixth September | 1848.

   Mr. Charles Dickens presents his compliments to Mr. Haydon and begs to acknowledge the receipt of Mr. Haydon’s obliging note. He would have replied to it yesterday, but for his having been in another part of the country nearly all day.

   Mr. Dickens regrets that he must entreat to be excused from availing himself of Mr. Haydon’s offer. He is always unwilling to sit for any new portrait of himself; and his doing so in one case would involve the fulfilment of several conditional promises.2

• 1. George Henry Haydon (1822-91), explorer and amateur sketcher; trained as an architect; spent the early 1840s in Australia. After return c. 1846, published two books on his experiences: Five Years' Experience in Australia Felix, Comprising a Short Account of its Early Settlement and its Present Position, with Many Particulars Interesting to Intending Emigrants (1846, with engravings from his own drawings), and The Australian Emigrant: a Rambling Story, Containing as Much Fact as Fiction (1854). He later befriended John Leech, and drew for Punch in 1860–2.
• 2. In the period 1848–52 CD sat for a portrait by Augustus Egg (now in the Charles Dickens Museum) depicting him in the character of Sir Charles Coldstream in the play Used Up; see Pilgrim Letters 5, p. 566.