The Charles Dickens Letters Project
To JULIA COLLINSON STRETTON,1 6 OCTOBER 1862
Text (2 pp.; closing and signature cut) from facsimile in Dominic Winter Auctions online catalogue, Jan 2018.
GAD’S HILL PLACE,
HIGHAM BY ROCHESTER, KENT.
Monday Evening, Sixth October, 1862
Dear Madam
I have read your pretty story with very great pleasure, and shall be happy to retain it for the Christmas No. of All The Year Round, if you will give me your free permission to condense it a little, and to alter some of the Dialogue.2 You may be quite sure that I will touch it with a delicate and sympathetic hand.
Excuse my suggesting that the servants are a little exaggerated in their talk, and may easily be made (with your permission) at once more life-like and less disagreeable.3 I mention this audacious opinion of mine, to explain my reference to the dialogue. It applies equally to Miss Fanny and Miss Florence.4
The omissions I would make, I feel sure would point your meaning, rather than weaken it anywhere.
I am doubtful whether I should address this note to a married lady, or a single one. But in the hope that the authoress who so well expressed such womanly and graceful thoughts may have a Blorage future before her,5 with the happiness of its anticipation to add to the happiness of its realization, — I take the latter course.
- 1. Julia Cecilia Stretton (née Collinson, 1812-1878), novelist; daughter of the Rev John Collinson of Gateshead. Married Walter Wilkins (1809-40), MP for Radnorshire; the couple changed their family name to de Winton. Married Richard William Stretton in 1858. Published a children’s book, Yr Ynys Unyg: or, The Lonely Island. A Narrative for Young People (1852), then 11 three-decker novels, all with Hurst and Blackett, including Margaret and Her Bridesmaids (1856), The Valley of a Hundred Fires (1860), and The Ladies of Lovel-Leigh (1862).
- 2. CD published two interconnected pieces by Stretton ('His Portmanteau' and 'His Hat- Box'), as part of ‘Somebody’s Luggage’, the 1862 Christmas number of All the Year Round. They concern Dick Blorage, a bank employee who was ‘universally liked, though vastly imposed upon’ (‘His Portmanteau’, All the Year Round Christmas number [4 Dec 1862]: 36). He has a dream about being visited by a spirit named Verita who enchants a chair, forcing its occupiers to tell the truth, as part of a scheme to procure a wife for him.
- 3. The story features the butler Penge.
- 4. Two sisters who are cousins of Blorage; they have a heated argument when seated in the Chair of Truth.
- 5. Blorage marries Gatty Bland, a poor but honest girl who lives nearby.