The Charles Dickens Letters Project

To THOMAS MITTON,1 18 OCTOBER [1840]

Text from facsimile in Jarndyce catalogue, autumn 2019.

Devonshire Terrace

Sunday 18th October.

My Dear Mitton.

           I am very sorry I had made an engagement last Monday evening, and could not very well break it. I shall most likely see you in the course of tomorrow; but if not, certainly on Tuesday morning.

           I have the Clock2 account, and you shall see it. It is mortal long and complicated, but here is the result.

!           !           !           !           !           !           !           !           ! 

So, you see all the profit is spent in stock,4 and this half year I'm half Master of God knows how many thousand reams of printed paper

                                                           Always Faithfully

                                                           CD.

• 1. Thomas Mitton (1812-78), solicitor, one of CD’s closest friends. Son of Thomas Mitton, publican, of Battle Bridge (the district now known as King's Cross), where the Mitton and Dickens families may at some time have been neighbours – perhaps in The Polygon, where the Dickenses were living 1827-8. In recollections given to the Evening Times when she was 95, Mitton's sister Mary Ann claimed to have known CD well as a small girl. Mitton and CD were clerks together for a short time during 1828-9 in Charles Molloy's office, 8 New Square, Lincoln's Inn, where Mitton served his articles. He acted as CD’s solicitor for twenty years.
• 2. Master Humphrey's Clock, the weekly periodical edited by Dickens, and featuring The Old Curiosity Shop and Barnaby Rudge; published between 4 April 1840 and 4 December 1841.
• 3. CD signed a formal agreement to undertake a new journal on 15 Oct 1839; the contract was signed on 31 March 1840. See Pilgrim Letters 1, p. 681; 2, pp. 464-71. The terms were set to ensure that he could exercise editorial control over the work, and that the primary financial rewards accrued to him, rather than the publisher. This agreement established many of the features of Chapman and Hall's later semi-annual reports to Dickens. For further information, see Robert L. Patten, Charles Dickens and His Publishers (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), pp. 82-4.
• 4. CD had expected to make between £10,000 and £11,000 on the project; but high cost of the numerous woodcuts meant much smaller profits – some £1,068 for Dickens – on top of his stipend of £50 per part.