The Charles Dickens Letters Project

To SAMUEL ROGERS,1 [MAY-AUGUST 1839]

Text from facsimile in Freeman’s online catalogue, Apr 2023.
Date: CD had rented Elm Cottage from 30 Apr to 31 Aug 1839.

Elm Cottage Petersham.
Thursday morning

My Dear Sir.

    I did not receive your kind Invitation until last Monday or I should have been delighted to come to town and avail myself of it. I send you my address at full length (my summer address that is to say)2 to prevent delays in future.

    My Dear Sir I am always

        Faithfully Yours

        CHARLES DICKENS

Samuel Rogers Esquire.

• 1. Samuel Rogers (1763-1855; Oxford Dictionary of National Biography), the banker-poet, famous since his Pleasures of Memory, 1792. Knew most writers of importance from the 1770s to the 1850s, and was financially generous to many. In his journal in March 1836 Thomas Carlyle described him as "A well bred man; easy, yet with whom no mortal could be frank; not so spare a figure as I had looked for, Flattery laid on pretty thick; sarcasm of slow quietly-decisive sort; perfect à-propos: the man is a shrewd frozen sardonic old Whig,—worth meeting, not worth running to meet" (Carlyle Letters Online). CD probably first met Rogers at Holland House in 1839; he was the dedicatee for The Old Curiosity Shop.
• 2. CD had rented Elm Cottage from 30 Apr to 31 Aug 1839.