Item Info

Accession Number: 87-363
Transcription:

                                                   Doughty Street  /  Thursday Night
My Dear Mrs. Hogarth.
     I need not thank you for your present of yesterday; for you know the mournful pleasure I shall take in wearing it and the care with which I shall prize it, until—so far as relates to this life—I am like her.
     I have never had her ring off my finger by day or night, except for an instant at a time to wash my hands, since she died.  I have never had her sweetness and excellence absent from my mind for so long.  I can solemnly say that waking or sleeping I have never once lost the recollection of our hard trial and sorrow, and I feel that I never shall.
     It will be a great relief to my heart when I shall find you sufficiently calm upon this sad subject to claim the promise I made you when she lay dead in this house, never to shrink from speaking of her as if her memory were to be avoided but rather to take a melancholy pleasure in recalling the times when we were all so happy—so happy that increase of fame and prosperity has only widened the gap in my affections by causing me to think how she would have shared and enhanced all our joys, and how proud I should have been (as God knows I always was) to possess the affection of the gentlest and purest creature that ever shed a light on earth.  I wish you could know how I weary now for the three rooms in Furnival’s Inn, and how I miss that pleasant smile and those sweet words which, bestowed upon an evening’s work in our merry banterings around the fire, were more precious to me than the applause of the whole world would be.  I can recal everything we said and did in those happy days, and could show you every passage and line we read together.
     You and I will probably be oftener alone together in Kate’s coming confinement, which will be a truly heavy time to me, reminding me how we spent the last.  I see now that you are capable of making great efforts even against the affliction you have to deplore, and I hope that then our words may be where our thoughts are, and that we may call up those old memories,--not as shadows of the bitter past, but as lights upon a happier future.
                           Believe me My Dear Mrs. Hogarth
                               Ever truly and affectionately yours
                                   Charles Dickens

Media Type: Letters
Source: Rare Book Department
Call Number: DL H678g1 1837-10-26