Item Info

Accession Number: 87-1169
Physical Description: [3] pages + envelope
Material: paper
Transcription:

    Tavistock House
         Twenty Third January 1858
My Dear Lady Gordon
       Your letter charms me-and emboldens me to make a confession of weakness. Freely confiding it to you and my two other sympathizing correspondents, I hereby assure the blessed triumvirate that I affected myself so strongly by Gill Davis's misplaced love, as to be for days and days, really unable to apporach the Proofs. As often as I tried to correct them, I turned them over, looked at the last page, and was so completely overcome, that I couldn't bear to dwell upon it.  It was only when the Steam Engine roared for the sheets, that I could find it in my heart to look at them with a pen in my hand dipped in any thing but tears!
       The Second chapter was done, on the persusal of my first and third, by Wilkie Collins. We planned it out, and it seems to me a very notable and happy piece of execution.
        I should have been very happy to have immediately acted on your suggestions concerning M. De Wailly, but that I have "conceded" (which is polite for sold), to a Publishing House in Paris, the right translating any thing and everything I may write, if the said house chose to claim the right within twleve months of the original publishing in English.
       What am I doing? Tearing myself-My usual occupation, at most times.  Wild and misty ideas of a story are floating about somewhere (I don't know where), and I am looking after them. One fo the most restless of men at all times, I am at such crisis worse than ever. Kill them all-and bear her off, triumphant. I might finish the story in the usual way, but settling down and living happy ever afterwards-Perhaps; I am not sure even of that.
        Forget her?-I mean Mathilde, but my previous antecedent would do-have I ever forgotten her? Sits she not aways on my left hand, at the supper-table of the Frozen Deep?
       Dear Lady Gordon Ever Yours (and Their-viz: Janet's and Mathilde's)
                                                                           Faithful
                                                                                   CD.

MssDate: Twenty Third January 1858
Media Type: Letters
Source: Rare Book Department
Recipient: Duff Gordon, Lucie, Lady, 1821-1869
Provenance: Sotheby's London 12/1986, Gift of Jacques Benoliel.

Bibliography:

Volume 8, pp. 507-508, The Letters of Charles Dickens, edited by Madeline House & Graham Storey; associate editors, W.J. Carlton…[et al.].

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

Call Number: DL D873L 1858-01-23
Creator Name: Dickens, Charles, 1812-1870 - Author