The Charles Dickens Letters Project

To RICHARD CREED,1 23 JULY 1847 

Extract and summary from facsimile in Sotheby's online catalogue, July 2017.

Thanking him for his attention and consideration,2 explaining one of the party certainly, and two possibly, may have to go down by the express train tomorrow morning, and ... the Sunday party will undergo that much diminution3 ... Confirming that he will pay for the tickets the following morning.

I will do myself the pleasure of calling on you at your office,4 at Eleven o’Clock

                        Dear Sir

                                    Yours faithfully and obliged

                                                Charles Dickens

R. Creed Esquire.

• 1. Richard Creed, Secretary, London & Birmingham Railway, 1833-46; later joint Secretary of the London & North Western Railway.
• 2. See To Creed, 22 Jul 1847, in Pilgrim Letters 5, p. 132, in which CD outlines his travel requirements for a journey to Manchester, on 25 July 1847, together with his amateur theatrical company. They performed in Manchester on Mon 26th; travelled to Liverpool Tues 27th; and that evening attended a soirée given by Richard V. Yates, Chairman of the local committee. On Wed 28th they performed in Liverpool; spent Thursday there; and on Fri 30 July returned to London. CD himself stayed until Saturday.
• 3. The members of the party were CD and his wife Catherine, Georgina Hogarth, Mark and Nelly Lemon, John and Annie Leech, Thomas and Christiana Thompson, Betsy Shaw, Dudley and Mary Costello, George Henry and Agnes Lewes, Leonora Wigan, Douglas Jerrold,  John Forster, John Willmot, Frank Stone, Daniel Maclise, George Cruikshank, Augustus Egg, Alfred Dickens, and Frederick Dickens.
• 4. At Euston Station.