Item Info

Accession Number: 83-1329
Physical Description: [4] pages
Material: paper
Transcription:

 3, ALBION VILLAS, FOLKESTONE, KENT,

  Tuesday, Seventeenth July, 1855

Dear Madame

          Your manuscript, entitled a Wife's Story has come under my own perusal within these last three or four days. I recognise in it such great merit and unusual promise, and I think it displays so much power and knowledge of the human heart, that I feel a strong interest in you as its writer.
          I have begged the gentleman who is in my confidence as to the transaction of the business of Household Words, to return the MS. to you by the post which (as I hope) will convey this note to you. My object is this. I particularly entreat you to consider the catastrophe.[1] You write to be read, of course. The close of the story is unnecessarily painful--will throw off numbers of persons who would otherwise read it, and who (as it stands) will be deterred by hearsay from so doing - and is so tremendous a piece of severity, that it will defeat your purpose. All my knowledge and experience, such as they are, lead me straight to the recommendation that you will do well to spare the life of the husband and of one of the children.[2] Let her suppose the former dead, from seeing him brought in wounded and insensible--lose nothing of the progress of her mental suffering afterwards when that doctor is in attendance upon her--but bring her round at last to the blessed surprise that her husband is still living, and that a repentance which can be worked out, in the way of atonement for the misery she has occasioned to the man whom she so ill repaid for his love, and made so miserable, lies before her. So will you soften the reader whom you now as it were harden, and so you will bring tears from many eyes, which can only have their spring in affectionately and gently touched hearts. I am perfectly certain that with this change, all the previous part of your tale will tell for twenty times as much as it can in its present condition. And it is because I believe you have a great fame before you if you do justice to the remarkable ability you possess, that I venture to offer you this advice in what I suppose to be the beginning of your career. [3] 
        I observe some parts of the story which would be strengthened, even in their psychological interest, by condensation here and there. If you will leave that to me, I will perform the task as conscientiously and carefully as if it were my own. But the suggestion I offer for your acceptance, no one but yourself can act upon.
       Let me conclude this hasty note with the plain assurance that I have never been so much surprised and struck by any manuscript I have read, as I have been by yours.[4]                                                        

Your faithful Servant. 
  Charles Dickens

MssDate: Tuesday Seventeenth July, 1855
Media Type: Letters
Source: Rare Book Department
Notes:

[1] The wife of the story, proud of her intellectual powers and frustrated by her good but intellectually limited husband, has given way to her darker passions, thereby alienating her husband’s love; at the end of the third installment, rejected by her he goes out, “riding in reckless misery”, is thrown of his horse and dragged along (HW, 15 Sep 55, XII, 155). CD’s advice makes it clear that in Miss Jolly’s first version he died, as he did both children: Miss Jolly accepted the changes CD proposed, at some cost to credibility.  
[2] In the fourth installment, the son dies of fever; his sister, though stricken, recovers.

[3] Mr. Arle (1856) is her first separately published fiction and A Wife’s Story clearly an early work.
[4] In her Prefatory Note to A Wife’s Story, 1875, Miss Jolly gives CD’s three letters (17 and 21 July 55 and 22 July 69) as “hitherto unpublished”, but with the permission of Mr. Dickens’s executors”, because they “not only lend an interest beyond their own” to the tales, but “are , in themselves, noteworthy as characteristic evidences of the great novelist’s generous and helpful sympathy with you writers”. The present letter was sold at auction with a copy of Wife’s Story (1875 edn) inscribed by the author to W. and E. Jolly. 

Recipient: Jolly, Emily
Provenance: Christie's, 3/1983, Misc.Income.

Bibliography:

Volume 7, pp. 676-677, The Letters of Charles Dickens, edited by Madeline House & Graham Storey; associate editors, W.J. Carlton…[et al.] 

Country: Creation Place Note:3 Albion Villas, Folkestone
Country:England
City/Town/Township:Kent

Call Number: DL J685 1855-07-17