The Charles Dickens Letters Project

To HENRY GARDINER ADAMS,1 12 DECEMBER 1865

MS Drake University Archives.

OFFICE OF ALL THE YEAR ROUND
Tuesday Twelfth December 1865.

My Dear Mr Adams.

    I have received your note and its enclosures, here, this morning.

    Mt Otway2 will be with me, and shall have his tickets. Mr Layard3 will probably benefit by one of them.4

    My man5and the gas-man6will come down by train on Monday Morning.

            Faithfully Yours alwys

            CHARLES DICKENS

H.G. Adams Esquire

• 1. Henry Gardiner Adams (?1811-81), apothecary dispenser to the Rochester, Chatham and Strood Dispensary. Wrote books on birds, insects and flowers, religious verse, and a biography of David Livingstone; edited God's Image in Ebony (1854). As Secretary of the Chatham and Rochester Mechanics' Institute, he was frequently in touch with CD during the 1860s, at a time when the author was President of the institution.
• 2. Sir Arthur John Otway (1822-1912), Liberal MP for Chatham 1865-74; in 1860 he had arranged for Layard to deliver a lecture at the Mechanics’ Institute on “Recent Discoveries in Assyria and in the Ruins of Nineveh”; see Pilgrim Letters 9.228, n2. On Otway’s invitation to CD’s reading see To Layard, Pilgrim Letters 11. p. 113; dated 27 Nov 1865.
• 3. Austen Henry Layard, (1817-94; Dictionary of National Biography), 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 for Aylesbury 1852-7; Under-Secretary for Foreign Affairs 1852. Knighted 1878. He had known CD since the early 1850s. For CD’s suggestions about travel before the reading see Pilgrim Letters 11, pp. 120, 123; dated 10 and 17 Dec 1865.
• 4. CD delivered a reading of A Christmas Carol and The Trial from Pickwick at the Mechanics’ Institute on 19 December. The Chatham News, 23 Dec, praised his generosity and commented on his “triumph of art ... as author and actor combined”. The reading raised £69.1.8 for the Institution, after expenses (Chatham News, 27 Jan 1866).
• 5. Henry Scott, CD's valet and dresser.
• 6. George Allison, who looked after the arrangement of gas lighting on stage for CD’s readings.