The Charles Dickens Letters Project

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Individual letter:

Dickens, Charles. To [addressee], [date of letter]. Charles Dickens Letters Project, ed. Leon Litvack, Emily Bell, Lydia Craig and Jeremy Parrott (London: Dickens Fellowship). [URL of individual letter], [date of access].

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Charles Dickens Letters Project, ed. Leon Litvack, Emily Bell, Lydia Craig and Jeremy Parrott (London: Dickens Fellowship), DickensLetters.com.

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1841-1850

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friends

family

Scotland

Dombey and Son

To WILLIAM GREGORY,1 10 JANUARY 1848

MS Armstrong Browning Library

1 Devonshire Terrace

York Gate Regents Park

Tenth January 1848

My Dear Sir

I have had the greatest pleasure in the receipt of your cordial letter. The approval and interest of such men as you, and the assurance that I have such readers, and live in their regard as the friend of their leisure moments, are among the most delightful incidents of my life.

Rely upon it, I shall never come to Scotland again, or near it, without receiving my personal knowledge of you. I seem to have been on friendly terms with you, any length of time, and can hardly believe that we first shook hands only the other day.

Mrs Dickens is, I am happy to say, quite recovered, though she has been exceedingly unwell since we came home, and kept her own room until yesterday.2 She very much regrets not having come to your house and seen Mrs Gregory,3 to whom, nevertheless, she sends her best regards as freely as to you. The conclusion at which Mrs Gregory has arrived regarding me, is exactly the conclusion at which I have arrived concerning her. It is therefore quite clear, either that you and she must come over the border soon, or that Mrs Dickens and I must go over it again.4

I am perfectly stupefied with a bad cold, – and a blank quire of paper intended for the manuscript of Dombey No 17,5 is staring very hard in my nipped face6

Believe me, with great esteem,

Faithfully Your friend

CHARLES DICKENS

1. William Gregory (1803-58; Dictionary of National Biography), educated at University of Edinburgh; MD 1828; studied on the Continent; lectured at Edinburgh, Glasgow and Dublin; appointed to Chair of Medicine and Chemistry at Aberdeen 1839, Chair of Chemistry at Edinburgh 1844. CD called him the "great chemist", who spoke at a soirée held in CD's honour by the Glasgow Athenaeum on 28 Dec 1847; see To John Forster, 30 Dec 1847, in Pilgrim Letters 5, p. 215.
2. Catherine Dickens suffered a miscarriage on the train from Edinburgh to Glasgow, on 28 Dec 1847; see To Alfred Dickens, 1 Jan 1848, in Pilgrim Letters 5, p. 221.
3. Lizette Barbara Gregory, née Scott (b. 1805).
4. CD mounted one-night fundraising performances in Glasgow and Edinburgh between 15 and 18 July 1848, for the endowment of a Curator for Shakespeare’s House. There is no evidence that he saw Gregory then.
5. The seventeenth monthly number of Dombey and Son concerned Carker's flight to Dijon, to rendezvous with Edith Dombey. While CD had difficulty in beginning the number, by the time he had finished he had overwritten it; see To J. MacGregor, 24 Jan 1848, in Pilgrim Letters 5, p. 237.
6. No full stop in MS.