The Charles Dickens Letters Project

To SARAH ROGERS,1 23 JANUARY 1841

1 Devonshire Terrace.
Saturday Twenty Third January | 1841.

Mr Charles Dickens exceedingly regrets that a previous engagement prevents his having the pleasure of accepting Miss Rogers’ kind invitation for Friday.

• 1. Sarah Rogers (?1773-1855), only unmarried sister of banker-poet Samuel Rogers, with whom she was on close and affectionate terms. She visited France, Switzerland and Italy with him in 1814, and saw through the press Part I of his Italy (1822; P. W. Clayden, Rogers and his Contemporaries, 2 vols. [London: Smith, Elder & Co., 1889] vol. 1, pp. 314-35). George Ticknor described breakfast parties at her house in Hanover Terrace, Regent's Park, in 1838, itself "a sort of imitation ... of her brother's at St. James's.... She has some good pictures ... keeps autographs, curiosities, and objects of virtù, just like her brother" (Life, Letters and Journals of George Ticknor, ed. George S. Hillard, 2 vols., [London: Sampson Low, Marston, Searle & Rivington, 1876,] vol. 2, p. 181). On her death, at the age of 82, Rogers is said to have only commented "What a great blessing! I wish I could die too" (Clayden, vol. 2, p. 444).