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:

1841-1850

Theme(s):

Ragged Schools

education

To LORD JOHN RUSSELL,1 3 MARCH 1846

Text from facsimile in Lacy, Scott and Knight online catalogue, September 2017.

Private.

Devonshire Terrace

Third March 1846.

My Lord.

I could wish you would do me the favor of looking at the enclosed letter,2 and informing me whether you have any suggestion to offer in reference to my reply to it.

If you should see no ground of objection, I should be inclined to say, in answer, that I had already made another use (and the very best, but I did not feel myself at liberty to explain it in detail) of such information as I possess. In seeking to extend it, I have already said in effect, to the Ragged School people,3 that I had the means of making an excellent use of it, but did not consider myself at liberty to explain them4 particularly5

I hope I need not apologize for troubling you, my Lord. I should not feel quite at ease in answering the letter without your knowledge; and I do very earnestly desire that this question, as a main part of the great question of Christian6 Education on liberal principles and unshackled by any tests or theological7 instructions,8 should have the honor and advantage of being brought forward by You.

I am My Lord

Your faithful Servant

CHARLES DICKENS

The | Lord John Russell.

1. Lord John Russell (1792-1878; Dictionary of National Biography), leading Whig politician, principal architect of the Great Reform Act in 1832, and one of the main promoters of parliamentary reform; Prime Minister 1846-52, 1865-6. CD had known him at least since 1846, and dedicated A Tale of Two Cities to him.
2. Unidentified.
3. CD and Lord Russell shared an interest in education, and in Ragged Schools. See CD's comment to John Forster on 28 June 1846: "I had a good deal to write for Lord John about the Ragged schools" (Pilgrim Letters 4, p. 573). CD had written a long letter to the editors of The Daily News on the topic the month before (see To the Editors of the Daily News, 4 February 1846).
4. “it” deleted after “explain”; "them" written over caret.
5. Thus in MS.
6. “Christian” written above caret.
7. “theolo" deleted after "or".
8. Russell was Vice-Chairman of the Committee of the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge, founded in 1827, and dedicated to the cheap dissemination of entertaining and informative reading material; the organisation played a key role in the movement for popular education. CD became familiar with the Society in the 1830s, and possessed several of their publications; see inventory of the contents of 1 Devonshire Terrace in Pilgrim Letters 4, p. 712. The Society suspended operations in 1846 owing to losses on its Biographical Dictionary. See Leon Litvack, "Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge", in Oxford Reader's Companion to Dickens, ed. Paul Schlicke (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), p. 536. CD had touched on his concerns about religious education in the Ragged Schools in his February letter to the editors of the Daily News (see note 3 above); for CD’s concerns about religious teaching in the schools, see P. A. W. Collins, “Dickens and the Ragged Schools”, Dickensian 55 (1959), p. 98.