The Charles Dickens Letters Project
To LORD ROBERTSON,1 6 MAY 1847
Replaces extract in Pilgrim Letters 5, pp. 64-5.
MS Charles Dickens Museum.
Regents Park2
Sixth May 1847.
My Dear Lord Robertson
In case I should not find you at home when I call with this, I write to say how grievously vexed I am that I engaged myself to dinner on Saturday the fifteenth,3 just before the receipt of your note. All sorts of bad dispositions have been impelling me to throw that bidder overboard, on some desperately false pretence, and come to Mr. and Mrs. Pat4 (to whom pray present my compliments instead); but Virtue triumphs, and I am sorry for it.
Kate5 is in a brilliant state, and will be delighted to see you before you go away. Will you tell me, in so many words, when you purpose going, as I want to make a little Greenwich expedition6 first, if possible? I should have been to see you before now; but on Monday last I drove down to Chertsey, cottage-hunting;7 and one of the horses I drove, took it into his head (I believe under the impression that I had gone into his stall to steal his corn, which upon my honor I had no intention of doing) to make a sudden attack upon me in the stable, tear my coat-sleeve and my shirt-sleeve off, and very nearly take the great muscle of my arm with it. As it was, however he merely struck the arm with his teeth and head, but bruised it so, that I have worn a poultice ever since, and am still invested with that Decoration.8
Jeffrey9 was here yesterday, very brown and hearty, and even confessing to a sort of good health.
Ever Faithfully Yours
CHARLES DICKENS
- 1. Patrick Robertson (1794–1855; Dictionary of National Biography), advocate; often known by the diminutive ‘Peter’. Became a Lord of Session 1843, and took his seat on the bench as Lord Robertson. Known for his warm-heartedness and wit. At the Edinburgh dinner for CD he proposed the health of Scott. "With what enthusiasm", he said, "—with what delight and cordiality would the author of Waverley have hailed the advent of the author of the Pickwick Papers." He envisaged various meetings between characters in Scott's and CD's novels: how, e.g., Davie Gellatley (the half-witted servant in Waverley) would "jump with delight to hail his brother Barnaby Rudge" (a parallel Bulwer clearly recognized too, though with disapproval); and how at Dotheboys Hall "Dominie Sampson would have exclaimed at the arrangements of Squeers — Pro-digious!" (Caledonian Mercury, 26 June 1841).
- 2. CD rented 1 Chester Place, Regent’s Park, from 8 March until the end of June 1847.
- 3. With CD’s friend, the actor William Charles Macready. CD is not recorded by Macready among those present (The Diaries of William Charles Macready, ed. William Toynbee [New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1912], vol. 2, p. 366); but Walter Savage Landor reported the occasion, writing “Dickens looks thin and poorly, Forster fat and ruddy as usual” (Letters of W. S. Landor Private and Public, ed. S. Wheeler [London: Duckworth & Co., 1899], p. 160).
- 4. Perhaps a name for the Robertsons used by the Dickens children. Lady Robertson (1797–1875; née Mary Cameron Ross), daughter of the Rev. Thomas Ross, DD, married Robertson in 1819.
- 5. CD’s wife Catherine (1815–79).
- 6. CD often dined at Greenwich with friends—particularly at the Trafalgar Tavern.
- 7. See To Henry Austin, 23 May 1847: “I wish to Heaven you could help me to a cheap Willa, either up or down the river—with a field whither you would come and play trap-bat and ball” (Pilgrim Letters 5, p. 69). CD did not find a suitable property near the riverside market town of Chertsey.
- 8. The incident had a lasting effect on CD: he wrote to Thomas Chapman on 10 May to say, “I have been very unwell these last few days, with a low dull nervousness of a most distressing kind—a rare complaint with me—but I hope I am getting over it, and seem to have a faint consciousness of myself again this morning”; on the same day he said to Macready, “I am still queer—was, on getting up, hideously queer—but hope I am turning the corner. The Whittingtonians, however, I feel I must—sorely against my will—avoid; for my speaking nerves are all unstrung”. He wrote to Angela Burdett Coutts on 16 May to say that he was still not fully recovered: “I have been so very unwell from an accident, that I have not been able to write” (Pilgrim Letters 5, pp. 66, 67). Had CD not improved, there was a risk that he would have had to delay publication of Dombey and Son Part 9 (chapters 26-8); in the letter to Austin of 23 May he admitted, “I was very unwell when I left town, and had not the heart to go at my Number!” (Pilgrim Letters 5, p. 69).
- 9. Francis Jeffrey, Lord Jeffrey (1773–1850; Dictionary of National Biography), Scottish judge and critic. Whig MP 1831–4; Judge of the Court of Session 1834–50. He helped to found the Edinburgh Review, and was its editor 1803–29; contributed over 200 papers, including the famous criticisms of Wordsworth and Byron. His intimacy with CD dates from 1841. After an illness in 1842, Jeffrey's workload was reduced by transfer to a lower division of the court; he remained lively enough, though steadily weakening until his death.