The Charles Dickens Letters Project

To MARION ELY,1 23 MAY 1847

Text from facsimile (1 p.) in Bonham’s catalogue, 23 March 2004; MS 2 pp.; with envelope.

148 King’s Road, Brighton2

Sunday Twenty Third May 1847.

My Dear Miss Ely.

You little know the extent of my fetters. Baron Trenck3 was never so [ ]4 as I have been on this Sea-shore. I had been so unwell before I left town, that I had not been able to write my Dombey;5 and when I received your kind note the other day, I was (as I still am) up to my eyes in ink and interest, and unconscious perforce, of anything else but Dombey in the World – except you. As I never hope to be introduced to a more “charming woman”6 than yourself, I bear that part of my disappointment with philosophy. 

• 1. Marion Elizabeth Ely (1820-1913), daughter of Charles Ely and Sara, née Rutt; niece of Rachel Talfourd (1792-1875), wife of CD's friend Thomas Noon Talfourd (1795-1854).
• 2. CD was in lodgings kept by William Dennett, 17-29 May, recovering from an illness, “a low dull nervousness of a most distressing kind” (Pilgrim Letters 5, p. 66).
• 3. Friedrich, Baron Trenck (1726-94), Prussian adventurer, imprisoned by Frederick the Great, 1754-63; guillotined as Austrian spy, Paris, 1794. He wrote a popular biography, which shows him as victim of the arbitrary tyranny of kings. It was translated into English by the Radical Thomas Holcroft (Life of Baron Frederic Trenck, 4 vols, 2nd edn, 1789-93). CD refers elsewhere to Trenck about this time (Pilgrim Letters 5, pp. 96, 111). Trenck lays great stress on his fetters and the frontispiece to vol. 1 shows him shackled with irons of 68 lbs weight, with a detailed “Explanation” of them.
• 4. Word of about seven letters illegible; the context requires a meaning like “shackled”.
• 5. CD was writing No. IX, Chs 26-28, the June No.
• 6. Possibly quoting Byron, Beppo (1818), “A charming woman whom we like to see” (l. 450).