Item Info

Accession Number: 87-0875
Physical Description: [3] pages
Transcription:

OFFICE OF HOUSEHOLD WORDS
Monday, Twenty-eighth February, 1853
My Dear ______,
It is my misfortune that I can only consider papers offered for insertion here, with one plain and direct reference to their suitability to these pages.  If I could take any other circumstances into account, I should have a prodigious staff of contributors, of great merit in various other capacities but unfortunately possessing such slender pretensions to appear in print, that they would speedily settle this benevolent journal.
The lady who has written the paper I unwillingly return, appears to me to have some talent for description;  but I am afraid she does not quite distinguish between what is easily written and what is easy writing.  A word of patience, labor, and care, separates the two.  The paper contains a quantity of words and a mustard seed of matter.  The constant address to the reader is a tiresome avoidance of any Art in saying what is to be said, of which we have the most wearisome experience here at least a hundred times a week.  But the boy and his mother are very well observed and very well described; and if the sketch had in it any other phase of peasant-life, of equal merit in the setting forth, I should be glad to accept it.  I don't know what the lady may be able to tell in this regard, nor would I by any means urge her to try once more, for she might still be wide of the mark.  But I feel it right to say thus much.
I would advise her further, for ever and a day to dismiss Gentle Reader as a monster of the Great Mud Period, who has no kind of  business on the face of the literary Earth;  to remember if she sit down to write for a journal like this, that she is just an English woman writing the English language for a large English audience, and to consider whether she can not get on in such an aim without German lines and French words;  to forget herself as utterly as the Gentle Reader, and only to remember what she is describing.
Faithfully Yours always
Charles Dickens

MssDate: Monday Twenty Eighth February 1853
Media Type: Letters
Source: Rare Book Department
Notes:

Recipient's name inked out in salutation.
Record created by BZ.

Recipient: Unidentified Recepient
Provenance: Hamilton 1956, Matlack Fund.

Bibliography:

The Letters of Charles Dickens, Pilgrim Edition, Volume Seven, pages 33-34.

Country: Creation Place Note:No. 16, Wellington Street North, Strand
Country:England
City/Town/Township:London

Call Number: DL Z 1853-02-28
Creator Name: Dickens, Charles, 1812-1870