The Charles Dickens Letters Project

To MRS LYNN LINTON,1 21 JUNE 1869

Text from Swann Auction Galleries catalogue, Oct 2002.

OFFICE OF ALL THE YEAR ROUND,

Monday Twenty First June 1869

My Dear Mrs. Linton

I had not the least intention of returning you the enclosed paper,2 and had ordered it – in right of our long association – to be placed to your credit in the business account. That order I shall certainly not cancel (except under compulsion) but you are perfectly free to publish the paper nevertheless.

Believe me Very faithfully Yours

CHARLES DICKENS

• 1. Eliza Lynn (1822-98; Dictionary of National Biography), journalist and novelist known as Mrs Lynn Linton after her marriage to W. J. Linton, 1858; close friend of Walter Savage Landor, at whose house she first met CD in 1849; regular contributor to All the Year Round: see Pilgrim Letters 7, p. 114 and later vols.
• 2. Clearly Mrs Linton had asked CD to return her review of John Forster’s Biography of Walter Savage Landor. Fraser’s Magazine, N. S. Vol. II, July 70 published an article by her entitled “Reminiscences of Walter Savage Landor” in which she endeavoured “to redress, by my testimony, the unjust balance of public opinion by which he has been weighed only according to his demerits”; although she mentions both Forster and Dickens, nowhere does she refer to Forster’s book; no review with the opening words quoted by Layard (To Eliza Lynn Linton, 19 June 1869, n) yet discovered.