The Charles Dickens Letters Project

To T. J. OUSELEY,1 24 JULY 1839

MS Nicholas Kneale. Address: T. J. Ouseley Esquire | 6 Exeter Row. | Birmingham. PM Richmond 23 JY 1839.

Elm Cottage, Petersham, Surrey.2

July 24th. 1839.

My Dear Sir.

Let me thank you heartily for your elegant volume3 and for your dedication of it to myself. Let me thank you too for the more than pleasure I have derived from the perusal of it, and for the delight it has afforded me. I should have acknowledged the receipt of your kind communication sooner, but that I am residing out of town for the Summer and only receive letters and parcels from London now and then. This was the cause of some delay before it reached me, and I was unwilling to write to you until I had read your book.

I have sent your parcels to the different gentlemen to whom they were directed, and I wish—with reference to Mr. Bentley4—that I could expedite the appearance of “The Dream of the Dying Girl.”5 I may mention to you, however, that the postponements, delays, excuses, promises, and equivocations which would seem to be an essential part of Magazine publishing and editing very speedily disgusted me with that one with which I was connected, and that I never experienced in my life a greater relief than when I was enabled to retire from it.6

T. J. Ouseley Esquire7

Always believe me | My Dear Sir | Faithfully Yours 

 CHARLES DICKENS

• 1. Thomas John Ouseley (d. 1874), minor poet and for a short time publisher and editor of the Manx Punch: see Pilgrim Letters 1, p. 526n.
• 2. CD had taken Elm Cottage for four months from 30 April.
• 3. A Vision of Death’s Destruction, and Other Poems, 1839 (3rd edn). The 1844 Devonshire Terrace Inventory lists two copies of poems by Ouseley (Pilgrim Letters 4, p. 713); Ouseley sent CD an inscribed copy of Poems, 1870 (Catalogue of the Library of CD, ed. J.H.Stonehouse, 1935).
• 4. Richard Bentley (1794-1871; Dictionary of National Biography), publisher: see Pilgrim Letters 1, p. 164n.
• 5. Not published in Bentley’s Miscellany, though eight other poems by Ouseley were, 1840-4.
• 6. CD, editor of Bentley’s Miscellany from Nov 1836, had resigned 31 Jan 39: see Pilgrim Letters 1, 496n.
• 7. Written at the bottom of the first page below “speedily disgusted” and not, as usual, at foot of letter after CD’s signature.