The Charles Dickens Letters Project

To LEONARD HORNER,1 [?13 MAY 1843] 

Text from facsimile of final page of a 4-page letter in Sotheby’s online catalogue, July 2018.

Date: the dinner for John Black, with the same references to time and number of attendees, appears in To John Wilson, Pilgrim Letters 3, pp. 488-9.

quarter before 6 for 6 exactly. I am arranging the matter, and shall be truly glad to include your name among the number.

            We shall not, at the most, be more than fifteen. I believe you are acquainted with every member of the party;2 and I take the liberty of asking you if you feel disposed to join it, because I am well assured that you sympathize with its object.

                                    Faithfully yours

                                                            CHARLES DICKENS

Leonard Horner Esquire

• 1. Leonard Horner (1785-1864; Dictionary of National Biography); factory inspector, geologist, and educationist. Between 1840 and 1843, member of the Children's Employment Commission; published On the Employment of Children in Factories in the United Kingdom and in some Foreign Countries (1840). Introduced to CD by Lord Ashley (see Pilgrim Letters 2, p. 164n).
• 2. A private dinner intended to rally round John Black, planned for 20 May 1843 at the Trafalgar Tavern, Greenwich. Black had been dismissed from his editorship of the Morning Chronicle due, in part, to comments made in an after-dinner speech in Edinburgh (see To John Forster, [3 May 1843], Pilgrim Letters 3, p. 480 and n). Attendees at the event included John Forster, Richard Lalor Sheil, William Makepeace Thackeray, Albany Fonblanque, Charles Buller, Thomas Southwood Smith, William Johnson Fox, William Macready and Daniel Maclise. The dinner was postponed (see To W. C. Macready, 16 May 1843, Pilgrim Letters 3, p. 491, and Life of Charles Dickens [London: Cecil Palmer, 1928], p. 295).