The Charles Dickens Letters Project

To HENRY KERMOT,1 14 MAY 1841 

Text from facsimile in Raptis Rare Books online catalogue, Nov 2020.

1 Devonshire Terrace, York Gate.

May The Fourteenth 1841. 

Sir.

            I regret I assure you, – and I beg you to inform the Committee of Management that I do so, quite sincerely – the not being able, at this time, to subscribe towards the Funds of the Saint Martin's Library.2 I have no doubt the Institution is a very excellent one, and deserves support, but I have contributed to so many Public Societies of late,3 that I really cannot at present increase the list.

                                    Faithfully Yours

                                                CHARLES DICKENS

Henry Kermot Esquire.

• 1. Clearly a member of the committee of management of St Martin's Library; otherwise unidentified.
• 2. St Martin's Library, in Castle Street, Leicester Square. This public library, the first in London, was established in 1684 by Thomas Tenison (1635-1715), then Vicar of St Martin-in-the-Fields and later Archbishop of Canterbury. By the 1840s the library was funded by subscriptions, and had run into financial difficulties; it eventually closed in 1861.
• 3. CD had spoken at the Royal Literary Fund dinner on 12 May. Earlier in the month, he had solicited support from Lord Jeffrey, and had offered to write to Thomas Babington Macaulay on behalf of David Booth, author of An Analytical Dictionary of the English Language (1835), who had suffered a third bout of paralysis in 1840 (see To Mrs Booth, 4 May 1841, Pilgrim Letters 2, pp. 278-79). Booth was awarded three grants from the Royal Literary Fund from 1840-45 (see Pilgrim Letters 2, p. 279n).