The Charles Dickens Letters Project
To GILBERT ELLIOT,1 26 DECEMBER 1868
MS Charles Dickens Museum.
GAD’S HILL PLACE,
HIGHAM BY ROCHESTER, KENT.
Saturday Twenty Sixth December 1868
My Dear Dean
I should have written to you sooner to acknowledge the receipt of the book you kindly sent to me,2 if I had received3 it. But it had not come to hand when I left London for Scotland a fortnight ago, and it was only on my return last Tuesday that I found the Volume on my table. In the meantime I had seen many extracts from it, and I have since read it intact. It is highly interesting — full of bright pictures of society and nature — and contains some excellent specimens of letter writing. The impression it conveys of your father4 is throughout delightful; perfectly delightful.
I had a kind letter from Lady Russell5 yesterday, giving me two whole months out of which to choose a day and night for Pembroke Lodge.6 But the insatiable “Readings” yawn for the whole of that space of time, and for March April and May to boot.7 I have a wild fancy that I shall sometimes try when idle afterwards, but it is one of the many things I have never been able to do yet.
Layard8 is with us here for Christmas, and expounds ferocious designs in connexion with Public Works.9 It is long surely, since any Government10 had such chances before it as this Government has. But I miss Lord Russell sorely.11
With many thanks for your remembrance.
Always my Dear Dean
Faithfully Yours
CHARLES DICKENS
- 1. The Very Rev. Gilbert Elliot, DD (1800-91), Dean of Bristol 1850-91. Son of Rt Hon. Hugh Elliot, Governor of Madras and nephew of 1st Earl of Minto. BA St John's College, Cambridge, 1823; MA (from Trinity Hall) 1828; priest 1824. Held livings in Kent, Westmorland and Essex. No doubt met CD when Rector of Holy Trinity, Marylebone, 1846-50, and living near him at 6 Albany Terrace. Chaplain to Archbishop of Canterbury 1850. Strongly anti-Tractarian, was involved in controversy soon after his installation as Dean of Bristol in May 1850. CD probably read, or perhaps heard, some of his Marylebone sermons; a copy of his Sermons on Subjects of the Day (1850) was in John Forster's library, and his Sermons on Charitable Institutions in Marylebone (1847) shows his deep and practical concern for the education of poor children in the district and his appeal to laymen for their help. His first wife, Williamina, daughter of Patrick Brydone (married 1825), died in 1853, leaving two daughters; CD’s letter to Mowbray Morris, 24 Mar 1850, suggests that CD may have known her (Pilgrim Letters 6, pp. 72-3). The author became good friends with the Dean’s second wife, the heiress and miscellaneous writer Frances Vickris Geils, née Dickinson (1820-98), whom the Dean married in 1863.
- 2. A Memoir of the Right Honourable Hugh Elliot (1868), by Emma Eleanor Elizabeth Elliot Murray Kynynmound, Countess of Minto.
- 3. Word deleted after “received”.
- 4. The Rt Hon Hugh Elliott (1752-1830) was an adventurer and diplomat, who held important postings in Berlin, Copenhagen, and Paris; towards the end of his career he was appointed Governor of the Leeward Islands (1809-13) and Madras (1814-20).
- 5. Lady Frances Anna Maria Russell (1815-98; née Elliot), daughter of Gilbert Elliot Murray Kynynmound, 2nd Earl of Minto (1782-1859); in July 1841 married Lord John Russell (1792-1878; Prime Minister 1846-52, 1865-6).
- 6. The residence of the Russells, in Richmond Park.
- 7. Dickens gave 23 readings in March and April 1869; there were no readings in May. See Malcolm Andrews, Charles Dickens and His Performing Selves (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), pp. 288-9.
- 8. Austen Henry Layard, (1817-94), excavator of Nineveh and Liberal politician. After working in a London solicitor's office, travelled in Turkey and Persia; commissioned by Stratford Canning, British Ambassador to Constantinople, to explore site of Nineveh 1845. Published Nineveh and its Remains (1848-9); superintended further excavations 1849-51. Returned to England Spring 1851. Liberal MP Aylesbury 1852-7; Under-Secretary for Foreign Affairs 1852. Knighted 1878. He had known CD since the early 1850s. For CD’s invitation to Layard for Christmas see Pilgrim Letters 12, p. 237.
- 9. Layard was appointed as First Commissioner of Works in W.E. Gladstone’s government in 1868; he hoped that he could place London, which he called “the ugliest capital in the civilized world” (“The Functions of the Minister of Public Works”, Times, 10 Nov 1869, p. 8), on a footing with the rest of Europe.
- 10. “has” deleted after “Government”.
- 11. After the Earl Russell’s government fell in 1866 he never again held office.