The Charles Dickens Letters Project
To WILLIAM DARE MORGAN,1 19 March 1863
MS Robin Lloyd
Address: W.D. Morgan Esquire
OFFICE OF ALL THE YEAR ROUND,
Thursday Nineteenth March 1863.
My Dear Morgan.
I should not find it easy to tell you if I tried – and I am not going to try – how very much obliged to you I feel for your prompt assistance and sound good sense in the matter of Frank.2 I do not write for any such impracticable purpose, but merely to advise you that Charley will give you my cheque for £20, for remittance to your good father.3 If he will kindly undertake (as you suggest he will) to provide the boy with money according to his – your father’s – discretion, I shall have a far higher reliance on its being a sound one in such a case, than I should have upon the soundness of my own. Nor should I think of questioning the expedience and advantage of any drafts that your father4 might draw upon me, if he were satisfied that they were to Frank’s real advantage.
This is not a likely time, I fear, for any thing to open out before Frank in America. If he could find any suitable way of life there, he would be better there than here; but if no such thing, or hope of it, comes to pass, I suppose he will return aboard the same ship. What I hope you will let your father know, with my love, is, that I send him out with perfect confidence in the novelty and discipline – and, not least of all, the check of having his money in such good keeping – doing him lasting service any way.
Faithfully Yours ever
CHARLES DICKENS
W.D. Morgan Esquire
- 1. William Dare Morgan (1838-87), son of CD’s friend Captain Elisha Ely Morgan (?1805-64). Joined his father’s shipping firm, the Black X Line, and spent most of the period 1861-4 in London, safeguarding the family’s interests during the American Civil War. See Leon Litvack, 'Messages from the Sea: New Dickens Letters to E.E. and W.D. Morgan', Dickensian 110.2 (2014), 242-54.
- 2. Francis Jeffrey Dickens (1844-86), CD's son.
- 3. Captain Elisha Ely Morgan(?1805-64), CD's friend. CD paid W.D. Morgan £20 on 23 March 1863 (CD’s account, Coutts’s Bank).
- 4. ‘He’ cancelled; ‘your father’ added over caret.