The Charles Dickens Letters Project

To (GEORGE) HERBERT WATKINS,1 15 FEBRUARY 1859 

Replaces extract in Pilgrim Letters 9, p. 29. 

Text from facsimile in Freeman Auctions online catalogue, February 2017. 

TAVISTOCK HOUSE,

TAVISTOCK SQUARE,

LONDON W.C. 

Tuesday Fifteenth February 1859 

My Dear Mr. Watkins 

I am exceedingly obliged to you for your kind and handsome letter. Pray accept my cordial thanks.

The best edition of my books (which is called The Library Edition) is now in course of publication. The Publisher will immediately send you all the Volumes that are out,2 and an additional volume every month. Please consider these, as a set in their working clothes for common use. When the Edition is completed, I shall hope to send you another set, in bright holiday costume.

I have gone through the highly interesting scenes3 I return with this, and venture to enclose a list of a dozen that I should like to have. I hope I am not encroaching too much on your liberality and good nature. 

Believe me

Very faithfully Yours always

CHARLES DICKENS

Herbert Watkins Esquire 

• 1. (George) Herbert Watkins (1828-1916), photographer, opened his first studio in Regent Street, London, in the mid-1850s. His now famous studies of CD posing as a reader, and CD at his writing desk, were taken in 1858. For a complete account of his life and his photographic portraits of CD see Leon Litvack, "Dickens Posing for Posterity: The Photographs of Herbert Watkins", Dickens Quarterly 34.2 (June 2017): 96-158.
• 2. 14 out of the 22 vols had been published by mid-Feb, the latest being Dombey and Son, 2 vols.
• 3. Unidentified. As Watkins was predominantly a portraitist it is difficult to ascertain what CD means here.