The Charles Dickens Letters Project

To UNKNOWN CORRESPONDENT, [?JUNE 1858]

Fragment, consisting of lower half of one page, with closing and signature on reverse.
Text from facsimile in University Archives online catalogue, Aug 2024.

I think that’s all the news I have — except that the glass is at 90 in the shade,1 and that elderly persons collapse in the streets and are found under umbrellas — which they carry as sunshades. Poor Walter2 has had small pox, and now has fever, and is invalided and sent to the Hills.3 I had a letter from him. . .

      . . . down.

          Ever affectionately4

          CHARLES DICKENS

• 1. On 16 June 1858 the temperature in London reached a high of 94 degrees Fahrenheit; on 15 June CD wrote to Edmund Yates to warn him “don’t go out until past 6” (Pilgrim Letters 8, p. 588). This was the summer of the “Great Stink”, when hot weather exacerbated the smell of untreated human waste and industrial effluent on the banks of the Thames.
• 2. Walter Savage Landor Dickens (1841–63), CD’s son, who was nominated to a cadetship in the East India Company, and sailed to India in 1857. He rose to the rank of Lieutenant in the 42nd Highlanders, and distinguished himself during the Indian Rebellion of 1857.
• 3. See CD’s letter to Catherine Gore of 7 Sep 1858, in which he consoles her on the illness of her son Augustus, and recalls Walter’s illness: “Be of good heart about your brave boy. My boy was invalided long ago, and carried in a litter God knows how far and how long. But he began to get well, the moment he arrived at a Hill-Station, and his only care now, in the letters he writes home, is to get away from that easy life and be on service again. He had sun-stroke, a passing attack of small pox, and smart Fever. But he rallied, gaily — and so will your boy, please Heaven, before you can believe in his having had time to think of it (Pilgrim Letters 8, p. 654). In a letter of 20 Oct 1858 CD told Francis Henry Ramsbotham, “My boy. . . went through the last campaign until he was invalided (from fever), and sent up to the hills” (Pilgrim Letters 8, p. 684).
• 4. In this year CD used this form of closure when addressing family members (including Georgina Hogarth, Mamie Dickens, Henry Austin) and close friends (including Mark Lemon, Mary Boyle, Frank Stone, Clarkson Stanfield, James White, and William Charles Macready).