The Charles Dickens Letters Project

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Correspondent

How to cite:

Individual letter:

Dickens, Charles. To [addressee], [date of letter]. Charles Dickens Letters Project, ed. Leon Litvack, Lydia Craig, Jeremy Parrott, and Scott Caddy (London: Dickens Fellowship). [URL of individual letter], [date of access].

Database:

Charles Dickens Letters Project, ed. Leon Litvack, Lydia Craig, Jeremy Parrott, and Scott Caddy (London: Dickens Fellowship), DickensLetters.com.

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Period:

1841-1850

Theme(s):

social engagements

travel

America

To NATHANIEL PARKER WILLIS,1 27 JANUARY 1842

Replaces extract in Pilgrim Letters 3, p. 25.
MS Heather Witt.

Tremont House, Boston2
Twenty Seventh January 1842.

My Dear Sir.

I am exceedingly obliged to you for your cordial welcome and shall be very glad indeed to renew our acquaintance.3

I can scarcely hope — our movements being very rapid and uncertain — to enjoy the hospitality of your cottage,4 but I shall look forward to seeing you at least; and to making Mrs Dickens known to your lady;5 to whom she writes with me in begging to be cordially remembered.

By the time I reach New York, I shall (I hope) be a little more certain of purpose.6 If I should not see you there, I will write to you again before I leave.
With many thanks to you, believe me my Dear Sir

Faithfully Yours

CHARLES DICKENS

N. P. Willis Esquire.

1. Nathaniel Parker Willis (1806-67; American National Biography), poet and journalist; published his first poems at Yale University. Travelled abroad 1832-7 as correspondent of the New York Mirror, enjoying considerable social success in England; entertained by the Countess of Blessington (through whom he met Walter Savage Landor, who entrusted him with his latest "Imaginary Conversations"). Willis spent 1831–5 in England, as correspondent for the New York Mirror; these contributions were published as Pencillings by the Way (1835). The pieces included travel sketches from the Mediterranean to Scotland, and gossipy descriptions of life among Europe’s literary and social elite (which infuriated many). He engaged William Makepeace Thackeray to write travel letters for the Corsair, a New York weekly he edited 1839-40. Sympathised with CD's stand on copyright (see his long letter, mainly giving his impressions of CD at the Boz Ball, printed in Dickensian 12 [Sep 1916], 241-4). For his “impudence” and “audacity” in asking CD’s wife Catherine to give him Daniel Maclise's picture of the Dickens children, see Pilgrim Letters 3, p. 155n.
2. Boston's leading hotel, opened in 1829 and then regarded as the best hotel in America. CD and his wife Catherine had arrived in the city on 22 Jan, aboard S. S. Britannia.
3. In Nov 1835 Willis had accompanied CD on a visit to Newgate Prison; see Pilgrim Letters 1, p. 88n.
4. Glenmary, on Oswego Creek, Tioga County, New York.
5. Mary Leighton Willis (née Stace), daughter of General William Stace, Royal Ordnance Storekeeper at Woolwich. She married Willis in 1835, and died in childbirth in 1845.
6. Mary Willis was at Glenmary when CD and Catherine were in New York (12 Feb–15 Mar), and did not meet them; but Willis took Catherine sight-seeing (Henry A. Beers, Nathaniel Parker Willis [Boston: Houghton, Mifflin & Co., 1885], p. 264).