The Charles Dickens Letters Project

To THOMAS MITTON,1 28 MARCH 1851

Replaces extract in Pilgrim Letters 6, p. 338.

Text from facsimile in Bloomsbury Auctions online catalogue, Dec 2016.

Knotsford Lodge Great Malvern | Twenty Eighth March 1851

My Dear Mitton

           If you want a laugh, fit the enclosed pieces together (I tore them by mistake just now) and consider the astonishing impudence of this young rascal.2 He has written me half a dozen begging letters, of which I have taken no notice. This is his last. I think it is a kind of epistle that could be sent to nobody on earth but me.

           I am here with Kate3 for her health – cold water cure!4 My father I am afraid, is very dangerously ill.5

Ever faithfully

CD.

• 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.
• 2. See To W.H. Wills, 28 March 1851: “I find in the letter of yours which I missed when I came up, a begging letter (about the twentieth from the same hand) signed Thomas Lewis. I can’t make out whether the man’s mad or only an unusual vagabond – I merely mention him, as a caution to you, not to give him anything” (Pilgrim Letters 6, p. 339).
• 3. CD's wife Catherine, née Hogarth (1815-79).
• 4. Catherine wrote to Fanny Kelly on 11 March 1851 that she was “very unwell”. She described herself as suffering from “such violent headaches etc, that I have been ordered to go at once to Malvern and try what change of air and cold water will do for me” (Pilgrim Letters 6, p.309n). She visited Malvern 13 March-15 April for treatment with Dr James Wilson. He introduced the water-cure to Malvern in 1842; his patients included Edward Bulwer Lytton and Thomas Carlyle; see Pilgrim Letters 6, p.309 and n.
• 5. John Dickens died 31 March 1851.