The Charles Dickens Letters Project

To THOMAS MITTON1 [13 APRIL 1836]

Text from facsimile in Galerie Bassenae online catalogue, October 2015.

Date: same day as City of London Conservative Association dinner at Covent Garden, reported on in the Morning Chronicle, 14 April 1836, p. 4.

Furnivals Inn

 Wednesday Morning

Dear Tom,

I am obliged to go to Covent Garden Theatre, to the Conservative Dinner to-night, but if you will look in, and play a Rubber2 with the girls3 and their Uncle,4 I shall be as glad when you were here as they will be to see you,

Believe me 

                                                                        Ever Yours

                                                                         CHARLES DICKENS

• 1. Thomas Mitton (1812-78), solicitor, one of CD’s closest friends. Son of Thomas Mitton, publican, of Battle Bridge (the district now known as King's Cross), where the Mitton and Dickens families may at some time have been neighbours – perhaps in The Polygon, where the Dickenses were living 1827-8. In recollections given to the Evening Times when she was 95, Mitton's sister Mary Ann claimed to have known CD well as a small girl. Mitton and CD were clerks together for a short time during 1828-9 in Charles Molloy's office, 8 New Square, Lincoln's Inn, where Mitton served his articles. He acted as CD’s solicitor for twenty years. On Mitton as the addressee see William F. Long and Paul Schlicke, 'Dickens and the City of London Conservatives', Dickens Quarterly 34.3 (2017): 197-220.
• 2. A set of card games, usually whist or cribbage (OED).
• 3. Catherine Dickens (1815-79) and her sister, Mary Hogarth (1820-37).
• 4. Possibly Robert Hogarth, father of Mary Scott Hogarth (Catherine’s cousin).