The Charles Dickens Letters Project

To T. J. OUSELEY,1 26 OCTOBER 1869

MS Nicholas Kneale.

GAD’S HILL PLACE, | HIGHAM BY ROCHESTER, KENT.

Tuesday Twenty Sixth October, 1869

Dear Sir

I am very sensible of the Earnest terms in which you propose to dedicate your Volume to me,2 and I hasten to assure you that I shall highly esteem that honor. The Volume of poems to which you refer, still holds its place on my book shelves.3

T. J. Ouseley Esquire

Believe me | 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. Poems (London & Isle ofMan), 1870. A lengthy dedication to CD, “whose prose is the poetry of the Heart”, compares him to Jesus and Shakespeare, and hails him as the “Novelist of the Hearth”. An inscribed copy is in the 1878 sale Catalogue of the Library of CD (ed. Stonehouse).
• 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); one presumably A Vision, the second possibly The Porte-Feuille and Miscellaneous Poems, 1836. Neither volume appears in the Catalogue of the Library of CD.