The Charles Dickens Letters Project
To WILLIAM DARE MORGAN,1 2 NOVEMBER 1863
MS Robin Lloyd
Address: W.D. Morgan Esquire | 15 Cunningham Place (or terrace) | St. John’s Wood | N.W.
OFFICE OF ALL THE YEAR ROUND,
Monday Second November 1863
My Dear Morgan.
I am afraid this note may anticipate your return, but it will be none the worse for lying at your office a while.
Frank2 has come out second, for the second time, in the competitive examination, and has therefore lost the Foreign Office for good; – or it would be more to the purpose to say, for bad.3
He wants to be sent to try his fortune “somewhere in the New World.” I am so completely at a loss to know where to send him with any one hope of his alighting on his legs, that I have been casting about in my mind for some sound adviser. Your means of knowing the ins and outs of such a matter are as good as anybody’s whom I know, and I4 rely upon your good sense quite as much as on your readiness. I should very much like to have some talk with you at your convenience, about him.
Faithfully Yours alwys
CHARLES DICKENS
W.D. Morgan Esquire
- 1. William Dare Morgan (1838-87), son of CD’s friend Captain Elisha Ely Morgan (?1805-64). Joined his father’s shipping firm, the Black X Line, and spent most of the period 1861-4 in London, safeguarding the family’s interests during the American Civil War. See Leon Litvack, 'Messages from the Sea: New Dickens Letters to E.E. and W.D. Morgan', Dickensian 110.2 (2014), 242-54.
- 2. Francis Jeffrey Dickens (1844-86), CD's son.
- 3. By the early 1860s admission to the Foreign Office required not only nomination by the Foreign Secretary, but also success in an examination that included handwriting; English and French dictation; translation of French into English and vice versa; spoken French; translation in one of German, Latin, Spanish, or Italian; writing a précis; geography; and modern history since 1789. See Ray Jones, The Nineteenth-Century Foreign Office: An Administrative History (London: London School of Economics, 1971), p. 43. A new appointee was unwaged for the first five years of service. Frank Dickens’s stammer may have been a factor in his failure.
- 4. Written after ‘your’ cancelled.