Item Info

Accession Number: 87-112
Physical Description: [3] pages + envelope
Material: paper
Transcription:

My Dear Beard
  We go to Broadstairs tomorrow. I have the house next Barnes’s mainly because it is the most cheerful, and partly because (I don’t know how may years ago) I started the old man and the child on their Curiosity-Shop wanderings, from that Mansion.
  Kate went down the other day expressly to arrange for your weekly quartering a yard or two off. Which she satisfactorily accomplished, and now we are ready for you.
  You’ll come down next Saturday of course. And I hope besides your weekly visitations you’ll take Baldwin by the throat, and squeeze a month’s holiday out of him.
  I have another piece of good news. The Margate Theatre will certainly be opened.  But I have not heard of Conway Lingham’s engagement.
  I don’t send the Railroad list with this, because mine is not for July. But the trains go and come at all sorts of times. You will get the paper in the Regent’s Circus.
  Having shamed the Government into doing something handsome for Leigh Hunt, we mean to drop our proposed Covent Garden performances, but I think we shall play, towards the end of July, at Manchester and Liverpool.  I had arranged to dress the Merry Wives, in the legitimate costume of Henry the Fourth—everybody from a picture. It would have been very curious and complete.
  Write me a line at Broadstairs to say you are going to nail yourself to the Mast, and ever believe me.
  My Dear Beard
   Heartily Yours
  Charles Dickens

MssDate: Sunday Twenty Seventh June 1847
Media Type: Letters
Source: Rare Book Department
Notes:

 The House is 38 Albion Street. Dickens was staying at this house when he wrote No. XII (June 20) of Master Humphrey's Clock, in which which The Old Curiosity Shop began.

Recipient: Beard, Thomas, d. 1891
Provenance: Maggs, 11/1971, Matlack Fund.

Bibliography:

Volume 5, pp. 102-103, The Letters of Charles Dickens, edited by Madeline House & Graham Storey; associate editors, W.J. Carlton…[et al.]

Country: Creation Place Note:Athenaeum [Club]
Country:England
City/Town/Township:London

Call Number: DL B379 1847-06-27
Creator Name: Dickens, Charles, 1812-1870 - Author