The Charles Dickens Letters Project

To BERNHARD TAUCHNITZ,1 10 MAY 1859

Text from facsimile in the possession of Dietmar Böhnke.

Replaces extracts (aa) in Pilgrim Letters 9, p. 63.2

OFFICE OF ALL THE YEAR ROUND | Tuesday Tenth May 1859

My Dear Sir

aI beg to acknowledge the safe receipt of your bill fora £45, aand I beg you to accept my thanks.3

The first monthly part of the Tale of Two Cities, shall be forwarded to Messrs. Williams and Norgate4 in good time,5 and I will also send them the authority for the admission into England of the books you are so kind as to offer me.a

My dear Sir

Believe me always

Very faithfully Yours

CHARLES DICKENS

The Chevalier Bernhard Tauchnitz

• 1. Baron Bernhard Christian Tauchnitz (1816-95), publisher, of Leipzig. Born at Schleinitz; nephew of the publisher Karl Tauchnitz. Founded his own firm in Leipzig in 1837. The firm began its “Collection of British Authors” Sep 1841 with Bulwer Lytton’s Pelham. Pickwick Papers, Oliver Twist, and American Notes had appeared before the end of 1842, and Nicholas Nickleby in June 1843. He and CD became friendly, and CD sent Charley to Leipzig to learn German. According to John Forster, Tauchnitz always paid liberally. He wrote to Forster after CD’s death: “All Mr Dickens’s works have been published under agreement by me. My intercourse with him lasted nearly twenty-seven years. The first of his letters dates in October 1843, and his last at the close of March, 1870 [see To Tauchnitz, 31 March 1870]. Our long relations were not only never troubled by the least disagreement, but were the occasion of most hearty personal feeling; and I shall never lose the sense of his kind and friendly nature. On my asking him his terms for Edwin Drood, he replied, ‘Your terms shall be mine’” (John Forster, The Life of Charles Dickens, ed. J.W.T. Ley [London: Cecil Palmer, 1928], p. 807n).
• 2. The precise amount of the bill was excluded from the previously published extract.
• 3. CD's bank account with Coutts & Co. indicates that this bill for £44.19s.6d was drawn on the German bank Fruhling & Goshen, of Austin Friars, London, on 3 June 1859.
• 4. Williams & Norgate, 19 Henrietta Street, Covent Garden and 2 Queen’s Passage, Tauchnitz’s London agents. See Pilgrim Letters 4, p. 384 and n.
• 5. The novel was published in two different serial forms, virtually simultaneously: it appeared weekly in All the Year Round, from 30 April to 26 November 1859, without illustrations; it also appeared in eight monthly parts, with illustrations, between June and December 1859 (the 7th and 8th instalments appeared as a double number). See To Tauchnitz, 18 April 1859, asking Tauchnitz if he would like the instalments of A Tale of Two Cities to appear weekly or monthly.