The Charles Dickens Letters Project

To JOHN PRITT HARLEY,1 [7 FEBRUARY] 1837 

Text from facsimile on eBay, Aug 2020. 

Address: J.P. Harley Esquire | Upper Gower Street

Furnivals Inn | Tuesday Evening 

My Dear Sir

            Don't be frightened about the "Loaf".2 It shall be delivered in the course of a day or so; I have altered it; it only wants the song,3 and copying. I shall be going out of town on Saturday Morning,4 but will see you at the Theatre on Friday Night. I have made you Felix Tapkins Esqre (formerly of the India House)5 –

                                                            Believe me (in haste)

                                                                        Faithfully Yours

                                                                        CHARLES DICKENS

J.P. Harley Esqre

P.S. Have the goodness to let one of the Theatre Messengers6 bring home my "Strange Gentleman" portmanteau.7 I want to pack it.

• 1. John Pritt Harley (1786-1858; Dictionary of National Biography), actor and singer. Stage-manager and leading comedian at St James's Theatre from Sep 1836; chiefly celebrated for his Shakespearean clowns. CD's sister Fanny had played at his benefits, Drury Lane 1827 and 1828; but there is no evidence that he and CD met before 1836, when at John Braham's request the part of Martin Stokes was added for him to CD's comic operetta The Village Coquettes (which CD dedicated to Harley).
• 2. A package containing the manuscript of CD's one-act farce Is She His Wife? For the delay in Harley's receipt of the package see To Harley, [6 Feb 1837], in Pilgrim Letters 1, pp. 233-4. The play was first performed at St James's Theatre on 6 March 1837.
• 3. One of the many songs, sung by Harley in his lead role as Felix Tapkins in Is She His Wife; is reproduced as part of the Lord Chamberlain's copies of CD's plays, in Pilgrim Letters 1, pp. 699-700.
• 4. CD made several visits in February to Mrs Nash's, the cottage in Chalk, near Gravesend, where he and Catherine spent their honeymoon.
• 5. “Felix Tapkins, Esq. (formerly of the India House, Leadenhall Street, and Prospect Place, Poplar; but now of the Rustic Lodge, near Reading)”. A good-natured bachelor with whom Mrs Lovetown flirts to make her husband jealous, leading to the confusion of the play's title; Tapkins comes to believe she is married to someone else, while the jealous husband schemes to entrap his wife and her lover.
• 6. At St James's Theatre, London; Harley was a member of the company.
• 7. The character of the "Strange Gentleman" carries a portmanteau (and refuses to be parted from it) in Act 1 Scene 1 of CD's play.