Item Info

Accession Number: 87-411
Physical Description: [2] pages
Transcription:

Waterloo Hotel, Edinburgh

Tuesday Twenty Sixth November 1861.

My Dear Lane.

I write in the greatest haste. For I find your letter and Proof here on my arrival, and wish you to experience no delay in receiving my reply.

On the other side is the signature you want for the margin of the published impressions.

I do not pretend to know my own face. I do pretend to know the faces of my friends and fellow creatures, but not my own. While I descry great delicacy, and art, and pains, in your treatment of the subject, the result looks--to me--fiercer than the original. I have a strong impression that this is inseparable from the highly unnatural and exaggerated light in which one is photographed; because of course I see (as anyone with eyes may) that the Photographer himself, in his own operating-room, is very unlike the same man elsewhere.

Many thanks for your kind work and kind spirit.

Ever Faithfully

CD

MssDate: Tuesday Twenty Sixth November 1861
Media Type: Letters
Source: Rare Book Department
Notes:

Richard James Lane (1800-72, DNB) was a lithographer.

The "Proof" Dickes refers to is Lange's engraving of a full-face photograph of CD by ohn Watkins, exhibited at the RA in 1864, reproduced in F. G. Kitton, CD by Pen and Pencil, between pp. 80 and 81.

The British Academy Pilgrim Edition: The Letters of Charles Dickens, Volume Nine, 1859-1861. Graham Storey, ed. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997, p. 523.

Recipient: Lane, Richard James (1800-1872)
Provenance: Sotheby Sale 23-24 June 75 lot 307 thru Maggs

Bibliography:

 The British Academy Pilgrim Edition: The Letters of Charles Dickens, Volume Nine, 1859-1861. Graham Storey, ed. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997, p. 523.

Country: Creation Place Note:Waterloo Hotel
Country:Scotland
City/Town/Township:Edinburgh

Creation Year: 1861
Call Number: DL L244 1861-11-26
Creator Name: Dickens, Charles, 1812-1870 - Author