The Charles Dickens Letters Project

To THOMAS RODD,1 4 OCTOBER 1847

MS Huntington Library.

Devonshire Terrace

Monday Evening Fourth October | 18472

Mr. Charles Dickens sends his compliments to Mr. Rodd, and begs to say that the other books he wants and could not remember today, are: A good copy, bound or half-bound, of the complete works of Rousseau.3 In the French.

–––of Madame de Stael.4 In the French.

–––of Junius5

He will be glad if Mr. Rodd will have the goodness to get them for him.6

• 1. Thomas Rodd(d. 1849), bookseller and publisher, 9 Great Newport Street, Long Acre.
• 2. Address and date at foot of the letter.
• 3. Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-78), Swiss-born French philosopher and writer; author, amongst others, of La nouvelle Héloȉse (1761), Du contrat social (1762), and the Confessions (written 1765-70). No identifiable work by him appears in the 1878 sale Catalogue of the Library of CD, ed. J. H. Stonehouse, 1935. CD cites the Confessions (bk IV) to Bulwer Lytton (5 June 60; Pilgrim Letters 9, p. 259 & n).
• 4. Anne-Louise-Germaine, Mme de Staȅl (née Necker) (1766-1817), French novelist and writer. Author of Corinne (1810) and De l’Allemagne (1810), for which Napoleon exiled her for a third time. CD had Ses Oeuvres Complètes, 17 vols, Paris, 1820-21 (Catalogue of the Library of CD).
• 5. Pseudonym of the author of a series of letters in the Public Advertiser, 1769-72, denouncing, from a Whig perspective, those in government. Junius’s identity has never been certainly identified. CD had the Letters, 3 vols, 1814 (Catalogue of the Library of CD).
• 6. CD wrote to Rodd again, 7 Oct, presumably about these books, and was acquiring a number of books about this time: see To Chapman, 4 Oct 47 (Pilgrim Letters 5, p. 169 & n).