Item Info

Accession Number: 87-1706
Physical Description: [2] pages + envelope
Material: paper
Transcription:

  Saturday Seventeenth July, 1858
Dear Mr. Watkins
  I owe you many thanks for your most obliging note. I am glad to hear so good an account of the Portraits, and I do not doubt that they will be admirable.
  It would give me great pleasure to have some five and twenty impressions for private friends, if those should not be too many.
  I hope the colored Portrait will be ready in the last week of this month. I go away on a tour, on the 1^st of August, and particularly wish to send that packet to its destination (I have already foresworn myself for a long time), before I leave.
  Faithfully Yours
  Charles Dickens

I have already foresworn myself for alongtime 
  H.W.
 Herbert Watkins Esquire

MssDate: Saturday Seventeenth July 1858
Media Type: Letters
Source: Rare Book Department
Notes:

Transcription in pencil of phrase from letter, in hand of recipient. Removed from album, Spring 1989.
When posing on 17 June, CD was asked by Watkins to write the following words on a sheet which he was holding "I want you to write very strong, and as large as you can: so that the light may catch it—which done, believe me to remain." CD went on to add in French "Je vous avoue que je suis fache de tout cela, mon cher", and to make a rough sketch of a head with what may be a photographer's hood. At the top of sheet, presumably in Watkin's hand, is "Written for me when posing".

Recipient: Watkins, Herbert, b. 1828
Provenance: Sessler, 1968, Friends of the Free Library.

Bibliography:

Volume 8, p. 607, The Letters of Charles Dickens, edited by Madeline House & Graham Storey; associate editors, W.J. Carlton…[et al.].

Country: Creation Place Note:Gad's Hill Place, Higham by Rochester
Country:England
City/Town/Township:Kent

Creation Year: 1858
Call Number: DL W324 1858-07-17
Creator Name: Dickens, Charles, 1812-1870 - Author