Item Info

Accession Number: 84-1332
Physical Description: [2] pages
Transcription:

                 Tavistock House

                    Saturday Twenty Ninth November

                                                                1856

My Dear B and E,

     You have made a most fatal mistake, which puts me in greater concern than I can possibly describe. You have omitted a correction of mine in the revise of No XIII of the last importance. It is a reference certain to be mischievously perverted, and used against me. I wrote it in the text more as a joke which Forster shewed me in the proofs than for any other purpose. I knew that he would see that it was unsafe, and he came here directly to ask me to take it out. The moment I saw him I said, “I know what it is; I have already taken it out in my mind”. How is it possible for me ever to explain that the grossest carelessness of the Printers’, and their placing me in the damned absurd position of making corrections which are pitched into the fire, occasions its going forth? The passage is at page 404, 4 lines from the bottom, where I most carefully took out from the revise a reference to “baptismal water on the brain”. If it were not too late, I would suppress the whole issue. I never was so vexed in my life.

                                                                                               Faithfully Ever

                                                                                                                      CD

 

MssDate: Saturday Twenty Ninth November 1856
Media Type: Letters
Source: Rare Book Department
Notes:

Dickens was mortified when a numbe of Little Dorrit was published with copy that he had written as a joke to needle Forster, who had warned Dickens to be careful of offending religious sensibilities. Dickens had written of Christopher Casby, the landlord of Bleeding Heart Yard in Little Dorrit, that his “. . . forehead looked as christian in every knob as if he had got baptismal water on the brain.”

Recipient: Bradbury & Evans
Provenance: Sotheby's, Gratz Fund

Country: Creation Place Note:Tavistock House
Country:England
City/Town/Township:London

Call Number: DL B726 1856-11-29
Creator Name: Dickens, Charles, 1812-1870 - Author