The Charles Dickens Letters Project

To JOHN FORSTER,1 [?17 NOVEMBER 1843]

Replaces extract in Pilgrim Letters 7, p. 855. Third page of a letter pasted onto card, with postscript on recto of third page rendered partially legible by reversing image and manipulating levels with Photoshop.
Text from facsimile in Chiswick Auctions online catalogue, June 2024.

never the worse, and mean to go careering out for a stiff walk.2

Since writing this, I have read the letter again, [. . .]3 against him. Such an application on behalf of an officer in the Navy, now employed,4 might be injurious.

        Ever affectionately Yours

        CHARLES DICKENS

• 1. 1 John Forster (1812-76; Oxford Dictionary of National Biography), historian and man of letters; CD’s closest friend, literary and legal advisor, and co-executor of his will. Compiled the authorised 3-volume biography The Life of Charles Dickens, 1872-4.
• 2. The missing portion of this letter may be the same one recorded as a mention in Pilgrim Letters 3, p. 600, “describing with great bitterness one of his family's financial demands”; these were characterised by Forster as the “many, never-satisfied, constantly-recurring claims from family quarters, not the more easily avoidable because unreasonable and unjust” (The Life of Charles Dickens, ed. J.W.T. Ley [London: Cecil Palmer, 1928], p. 307). A letter to Forster of 19 Nov 1843 provides further details: “I was most horribly put out for a little while; for I had got up early to go at it, and was full of interest in what I had to do. But having eased my mind by that note to you, and taken a turn or two up and down the room, I went at it again, and soon got so interested that I blazed away till 9 last night; only stopping ten minutes for dinner! I suppose I wrote eight printed pages of Chuzzlewit yesterday. The consequence is that I could finish to-day, but am taking it easy, and making myself laugh very much” (Pilgrim Letters 3, p. 600).
• 3. wo words obscured here by writing on recto.
• 4. Unidentified.