The Charles Dickens Letters Project

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Individual letter:

Dickens, Charles. To [addressee], [date of letter]. Charles Dickens Letters Project, ed. Leon Litvack, Emily Bell, Lydia Craig and Jeremy Parrott (London: Dickens Fellowship). [URL of individual letter], [date of access].

Database:

Charles Dickens Letters Project, ed. Leon Litvack, Emily Bell, Lydia Craig and Jeremy Parrott (London: Dickens Fellowship), DickensLetters.com.

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Period:

1861-1870

Theme(s):

Post Office

sabbatarianism

To JAMES HENRY NEWMAN,110 FEBRUARY 1866

MS Charles Dickens Museum.

GAD’S HILL PLACE,
HIGHAM BY ROCHESTER, KENT.
Saturday Tenth February 1866

Sir

An announcement is set in the window of the Post office at Rochester, informing those who object to the proposed cessation of the Sunday Delivery of letters at this place,2 that they should forward their objections to you.

I beg to say that I most decidedly and strongly object to the infliction of any such inconvenience upon myself. There are many people in this village of Higham, probably, who do not receive or dispatch in a year, as many letters as I usually receive and dispatch in a day. It is easy to understand that their signatures are obtained without difficulty to any Memorial in favor of a change which does not affect them; also, that it may be agreeable to their consciences to set up a Jewish Sabbath at my expense;3but I submit to you that deference to such unreason is not the duty of a great national institution such as the Post office, and that my case as a public man with a large correspondence is very much stronger than theirs, and should far outweigh it.4

I am on the best terms with my neighbours, poor and rich, and I believe they would be sorry to lose me. But I should be so hampered by the proposed restriction that I think it would force me to sell my property here, and leave this part of the country.

I am Sir

Your faithful Servant

CHARLES DICKENS

J.H. Newman Esquire

1. James Henry Newman (1809-1902), surveyor at the General Post Office, Middlesex.
2. Recipients of letters in individual rural postal districts could petition the Postmaster General to withdraw Sunday delivery; such appeals required the agreement of six-sevenths of Sunday post recipients in any particular area. This controversy led to a series of letters in the press. See, for example, ‘Sunday Post in the Country’, Times, 8 Aug 1866, p. 12; 10 Aug 1866, p. 5; and 16 Aug 1866, p. 7. There were no plans to extend the potential withdrawal to towns and cities.
3. CD’s outspoken anti-Sabbatarian views feature in his tract Sunday Under Three Heads (1836); he mentions the Post Office specifically in “The Sunday Screw” (Household Words 1 [22 June 1850]: 289-92).
4. CD’s output of correspondence was sufficiently large so as to merit the installation of a wall-box at the entrance to Gad’s Hill. See his letter to Edmund Yates (who was employed in the Secretary's Department of the Post Office): “I think that no one, seeing the place, can well doubt that my house at Gad's Hill, is the place for the letter box. The wall is accessible by all sorts and conditions of men, on the bold high road; and the house altogether is the great land-mark of the whole neighbourhood” (Pilgrim Letters 9, p. 44; dated 9 Mar 1859).