The Charles Dickens Letters Project

To BRYAN WALLER PROCTER,1 5 NOVEMBER 1868 

Replaces extract in Pilgrim Letters 12, p. 216.

Text from facsimile in Jarndyce online catalogue, May 2020.

GAD'S HILL PLACE,

HIGHAM BY ROCHESTER, KENT.

Thursday Fifth November, 1868

My Dear Procter

            A thousand thanks! I am happy to be free from reading on the 21st of this month, and be with you please God.2

            I wish I could write as plainly as you do.3

                        With my love to Mrs Procter4

                        Ever Your affectionate

                        CHARLES DICKENS

• 1. Bryan Waller Procter, (1787-1874; Dictionary of National Biography), writer (under his pen-name "Barry Cornwall") and lawyer. At Harrow with George Gordon Lord Byron; a friend of Leigh Hunt. As a young man wrote songs, dramatic verse and one tragedy, Mirandola (performed at Covent Garden 1821); and in 1835 published The Life of Edmund Kean. After his marriage in 1824 he devoted his chief energies to the law; Commissioner for Lunacy 1832-61. Gave valuable encouragement to many young writers, including Algernon Charles Swinburne and Robert Browning, and was much loved for his kindly and generous nature.
• 2. CD kept this dinner appointment with the Procters; see To Anne Procter, 18 Nov 1868, in Pilgrim Letters 12, p. 223.
• 3. CD admired Procter's poems, and published several in Household Words and All the Year Round. He also praised his memoir of Charles Lamb (Edward Moxon, 1866) for “the force and vigour of the style” (To B.W. Procter, Pilgrim Letters 11 pp. 234); Thomas Carlyle similar praised its "Brevity, perspicuity, graceful clearness" (qtd. in Bryan Waller Procter (Barry Cornwall): An Autobiographical Fragment and Biographical Notes, with Personal Sketches of Contemporaries, Unpublished Lyrics, and Letters of Literary Friends, ed. Coventry Patmore [Boston: Roberts Brothers, 1877], p. 106). Procter, who had been writing sadly of his age and increasing infirmity since the late 1850s, had suffered a stroke earlier in 1868 which left him partially paralysed and reliant on an invalid’s chair. CD’s comment may have been in response to Procter’s characteristic self-deprecation, particularly in light of the impairment to his speech caused by the stroke which had left him isolated from his friends.
• 4. Anne Procter (1799-1888), daughter of Captain Thomas Skepper and Anne Dorothea (afterwards the third wife of Basil Montagu); married Bryan Waller Procter 1824; well known as the witty hostess of a wide literary circle. CD had known the couple since the late 1830s.