The Charles Dickens Letters Project

To THOMAS BATTAM,1 31 MAY 1852

MS Gavin John Adams.

Tavistock House, London | Thirty First May 1852

Dear Sir

Pray accept my very sincere thanks for the elegant present2 you have had the kindness to send me. I am glad you were amused by the Paper3 which my interesting visit to the Works4 over which you preside—and to the Dodo5—suggested. Mr. Wills had brought me such alarming reports of the indignation of the people of Stafford in behalf of their bird, and their town,6 that when I found myself, three weeks ago,7 obliged to wait at the Station there, three hours, I was not without personal apprehensions and a secret resolution never to be taken alive.

Thomas Battam Esquire.

With many thanks | My Dear Sir | Very faithfully Yours

 CHARLES DICKENS

• 1. Thomas Battam (1810-64), the art superintendent at Copeland’s (formerly and later Spode’s) china manufactory, at Herons Cross, Stoke-on-Trent. He claimed to be the originator of Parian Ware, developed at Copeland’s under his direction: see Vega Wilkinson, Spode-Copeland-Spode: The Works and Its People 1770-1970, Woodbridge, Suffolk, 2002, pp. 72-4; illustrations pp. 76-84; map of the works, p. 91.
• 2. Presumably a Parian ware figure.
• 3. “A Plated Article”, Household Words, 24 Apr 52, V, 117-21; written with Wills.
• 4. In early April, when visiting Birmingham and Shrewsbury with Wills.
• 5. CD’s name, in “A Plated Article”, for the Swan hotel, Stafford, “the extinct town-inn”, which is given extended treatment: “If the Dodo were only a gregarious bird — if it had only some confused idea of making a comfortable nest — I could hope to get through the hours between this and bedtime, without being consumed by devouring melancholy. But, the Dodo's habits are all wrong. It provides me with a trackless desert of sitting-room, with a chair for every day in the year, a table for every month, and a waste of sideboard where a lonely China vase pines in a corner for its mate long departed, and will never make a match with the candlestick in the opposite corner if it live till Doomsday (“A Plate Article”, 117)..
• 6. The article refers to the Town Hall as a “brick and mortar” private on parade and to Stafford as “dull and dead a town as any one could desire not to see”. The Staffordshire Advertiser, 24 Apr, quoting “A Plated Article” (Household Words, dated 24 Apr, was issued 21 Apr), defended the town against CD’s strictures.
• 7. Presumably on 11 May, when the Guild company of actors was travelling from Shrewsbury to Birmingham.