The Charles Dickens Letters Project

To THE SECRETARY OF THE ST DAVID’S BENEVOLENT SOCIETY,1 1 MARCH 1842

Text from The Teetotaller and General Newspaper (Sydney, NSW), 29 Mar. 1843, p. 3.

Carlton House, New York, March 1st. 1842.

Dear Sir,
    I beg to acknowledge the receipt of your invitation on behalf of the St. David’s Benevolent Society of New York, for their festival this afternoon.2

    I exceedingly regret that I have made arrangements for going to Philadelphia to day.3 Under any other circumstance it would have afforded Mrs. Dickens and myself pure gratification to have been among you. Let me assure you most cordially that it would have been a real pleasure to me to have shared in your temperate festivities;4 and that I have a high respect for the great objects which your Society promotes.

    If I may send a sentiment in lieu of giving it myself, I would propose – “Cold water – the element which in old times destroyed the people of the earth, and which, in these later days, is working out their regeneration.”5

    I have the honour to be, Sir,

        Your faithful servant,

        CHARLES DICKENS.

• 1. The Society was founded in 1801, to assist needy immigrants from Wales to the United States. At the time of CD’s visit to America the President of the Society was the lawyer and philanthropist David Cadwallader Colden (1797-1850; Dictionary of American Biography), whom the author first met in England, in the summer of 1840, and befriended (see Pilgrim Letters 3.30, 41, 109, 115, 183-4, 218, 242, 290; 4.326). It was presumably as a result of this friendship — and particularly Colden’s attentiveness to his guest — that CD’s presence was sought at the St David’s Day celebrations. The invitation was significant: in 1843 an act (No. 236) was brought before the New York State Assembly, to incorporate the St. David’s Benevolent Society in New York and Brooklyn; attention would have been drawn to the cause by inviting CD to speak at the 1842 event. Colden was also Joint Secretary of the New York Boz Ball Committee (which fêted CD on 14 Feb), and a member of the Dinner Committee (which hosted CD on 18 Feb 1842). In 1855 the St David’s Society published The Cymry of ’76, authored by Alexander Jones; it documented the organisation’s activities, and recounted the history of the Welsh people in America; on Colden see Jones’s appendix, pp. 125-6.
• 2. St David’s Day falls on 1 March.
• 3. CD in fact left for Philadelphia on 5 March, because his wife Catherine had fallen ill.
• 4. While CD did not attend, this letter was read out to the assembly. The abstention from alcohol at the New York Society’s event caused the Australian editor to remark: “It would appear from this that ‘Boz’ has become a disciple of Father Mathew”  (The Teetotaller and General Newspaper [29 Mar 1843]: 3; Theobald Mathew [1790-1856] was an Irish Catholic priest and teetotalist reformer).
• 5. An 1843 report on the New York Benevolent Society’s St David’s Day celebration observed that “although water was the only beverage on the board, we could not perceive that there was any lack of cheerfulness and hilarity on that account” (“St. David’s Day”, in The Albion: A Journal of News, Politics and Literature 2.9 [1843]: 115).