The Charles Dickens Letters Project
To JULIA COLLINSON STRETTON,1 20 SEPTEMBER 1864
Text from facsimile in Dominic Winter Auctions online catalogue, Jan 2018. On mourning paper.2
GAD’S HILL PLACE,
HIGHAM BY ROCHESTER, KENT.
Tuesday Twentieth September 1864
My Dear Madam,
I am very happy to accept your story.3 I cannot positively decide that it can be brought into the Xmas No. until I know more than I know at this time of the general turn of its contents — meaning of that part of it which will not be written by myself.4But I think that with a little condensation and slight touching, I can make it available for that purpose. If not, you may be perfectly sure of my finding it a conspicuous place in "All The Year Round."
Allow me to add a word of sincere praise of the very pretty, graceful and skilful manner in which the characters are indicated. If I had seen the story in print anywhere, I should have desired with much interest to know from whose pen it proceeded.
Believe me Dear Madam
Very faithfully yours
CHARLES DICKENS
Mrs Collinson5
- 1. Julia Cecilia Stretton (née Collinson, 1812-1878), novelist; daughter of the Rev John Collinson of Gateshead. Married Walter Wilkins (1809-40), MP for Radnorshire; the couple changed their family name to de Winton. Married Richard William Stretton in 1858. Published a children’s book, Yr Ynys Unyg: or, The Lonely Island. A Narrative for Young People (1852), then 11 three-decker novels, all with Hurst and Blackett, including Margaret and Her Bridesmaids (1856), The Valley of a Hundred Fires (1860), and The Ladies of Lovel-Leigh (1862).
- 2. CD’s son Walter had died in Calcutta on 31 Dec 1863.
- 3. One of a series of three stories by Stretton, published in All the Year Round vol 13 in 1865: “Patty's Vocation” (4 Feb 1865: 38-48), “Patty's Tea-Parties” (17 June 1865: 497-504), and “Patty Resumes her Vocation” (1 July 1865: 546-52). The Pilgrim editors wrongly attribute these pieces to Sara Smith (“Mrs Stretton”); see Pilgrim Letters 11, p. 62 n2.
- 4. The story did not appear in the 1864 Christmas Number of All the Year Round.
- 5. Stretton was never known as “Mrs Collinson”; however CD used this designation (derived from her birth name) to distinguish her from Sara Smith (1832-1911), who wrote under the pseudonym “Mrs Stretton”. The name “Mrs Collinson” also appears against the three “Patty” pieces in the annotated set of All the Year Round; see Jeremy Parrott, “The Annotated Set of All the Year Round: Questions, Answers and Conjectures”, Dickensian 112.1 (2016): 10–21; see also Leon Litvack, “Dickens and the Codebreakers: The Annotated Set of All the Year Round”, Dickens Quarterly 32.4 (2015): 314-38.