The Charles Dickens Letters Project

To MR SMYTH,1 19 SEPTEMBER 1855

Text from facsimile in Bloomsbury Auctions online catalogue, March 2017.

Folkestone, Kent.

Wednesday Nineteenth September | 1855.

Mr Charles Dickens presents his compliments to Mr Smyth, and begs to say he cannot have the pleasure of complying with the request preferred in that gentleman’s note. He is very busily engaged at present with his own pursuits – will visit Sheffield at considerable inconvenience2  ­– and has his arrangements made for immediately returning to the avocations that now engross his attention.3

• 1. Unidentified.
• 2. CD had agreed to read A Christmas Carol on 22 December at Sheffield – an “old” promise (see To John Forster, 16 September 1855, in Pilgrim Letters 7, p. 701), although he did not ultimately do so.
• 3. CD was just beginning to write the third monthly number of Little Dorrit (Bk I, Chs 9-11).