The Charles Dickens Letters Project

To JOHN LIPTROT HATTON,1 13 JULY 1848 

Replaces summary in Pilgrim Letters 5, p. 382. 

Text from facsimile in Kotte Autographs online catalogue, May 2020.

1 Devonshire Terrace

York Gate, Regents Park

Thirteenth July 1848. 

Dear Sir

            I regret to say that I have not the least knowledge of any musical person in America.2 I am very happy to bear my testimony to your merits as an accomplished musician and composer, and as one whom I would much desire to see so occupied at home here, in the lucrative exercise of his knowledge and abilities, as to have no leisure for "fresh fields and pastures new."3

                                    Faithfully Yours

                                    CHARLES DICKENS

J.L. Hatton Esquire.

• 1. John Liptrot Hatton (1809-86; Dictionary of National Biography), musician. Pianist, conductor, singer and comic actor; composed over 300 songs and part-songs.
• 2. Hatton made a professional tour of the United States from Aug 1848 to spring 1850; he went again in September 1851.
• 3. A misquotation of the last lines of John Milton's poem 'Lycidas'; this misquotation appears four times in Household Words in articles by William Howitt, Charles Kent, Robert Barnabas Brough and Samuel Sidney (see Anne Lohrli, “‘'Fresh fields and pastures new’ (misquotations of the last lines of John Milton's poem 'Lycidas')", Notes and Queries 41.3 [1994)]: p. 351).