The Charles Dickens Letters Project
To JULIA COLLINSON STRETTON,1 7 JANUARY 1865
Text from facsimile in Dominic Winter Auctions online catalogue, Jan 2018. On mourning paper.2
GAD’S HILL PLACE,
HIGHAM BY ROCHESTER, KENT.
Saturday Seventh January 1865
My Dear Madam
I hope you will excuse my having detained your MS3 a little longer than I might have done at another time of the year, and when less occupied with a book of my own.
It has received — as I hope I need not assure you — my most careful attention and consideration. The result is, that I feel thoroughly convinced it would not bear division into portions for periodical publication. It is not strong enough or various enough to stand that severe test and carry the reader on. As a domestic story, with a plain good purpose, not much change of scene, and no great force of incident, it must be read complete.4 I think in that entire form it would achieve a fair success, and I recognize in the heroine5 many of those delicate womanly touches of character in which you excel. But I have not the slightest doubt that it would fall flat and fail, if it were published in serial chapters.
It shall be packed in a6 convenient parcel at the office, and sent to you on Monday. I am more disappointed in not being able to accept it than I trust you may be for the receipt of this note.
Believe me my Dear Madam
Faithfully Yours alwys
CHARLES DICKENS
Mrs Collinson7
- 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. D’s son Walter had died in Calcutta on 31 Dec 1863.
- 3. The Pemberton Family, eventually published in three-volume format by Hurst and Blackett in July 1865.
- 4. Featuring a rural setting and religious overtones, The Pemberton Family’s plodding and sentimental action would seem to justify Dickens’s assessment in turning it down for All the Year Round.
- 5. Emmeline Barnard, a character who is graceful and conscientious, despite her romantic tribulations.
- 6. Letter deleted after ”a”.
- 7. Stretton was never known as “Mrs Collinson”; however CD used this designation (derived from her birth name) to distinguish her from Sara Smith (1832-1911), who wrote under the pseudonym “Mrs Stretton”. The name “Mrs Collinson” also appears against the three “Patty” pieces in the annotated set of All the Year Round; see Jeremy Parrott, “The Annotated Set of All the Year Round: Questions, Answers and Conjectures”, Dickensian 112.1 (2016): 10–21; see also Leon Litvack, “Dickens and the Codebreakers: The Annotated Set of All the Year Round”, Dickens Quarterly 32.4 (2015): 314-38.