The Charles Dickens Letters Project

To GILBERT ELLIOT,1 6 May 1854

Replaces extract in Pilgrim Letters 12, p. 658.
MS Charles Dickens Museum.

Tavistock House
Sixth May, 1854.

My Dear Dean.

    I have read your excellent discourse2 (as I have heard many of its family in Trinity Church) with very great pleasure. Let me express my sincere hope that you will never depart from the admirable habit of remembering me.

    Stress of (Evangelical and very cloudy) weather, has driven me into the Foundling,3 whence I see no prospect of getting out, until you are Bishop of London.4

    Alwys Very 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 (married 1825), daughter of Patrick Brydone , 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. Probably the sermon that Elliot preached at Bristol Cathedral on Wednesday 26 April 1854, which was deemed by royal proclamation to be a “Day of Humiliation and Prayer” on account of the Crimean War. Elliot took his text from 1 Corinthians 16; see Bristol Mercury, 29 Apr 1854, p. 6.
• 3. The Foundling Hospital, in Guilford Street, where CD rented a pew. The institution, founded in 1739 to care and educate deserted young children, was described by CD and W.H. Wills in “Received, A Blank Child”, Household Words 7 (19 March 1863): 49–53.
• 4. Elliot never became Bishop of London.. The incumbent was Archibald Campbell Tait (1811–82).