Item Info

Accession Number: 87-413
Physical Description: [2] pages
Transcription:

 Office of All the Year Round,

Thursday Twenty Seventh February 1862

Sir

Your letter is a very difficult one to answer. I should wish to make my reply acceptable to you, but I must not compromise what I have some reason to suppose to be the truth.

Because I suppose it is to be the truth, and not because I seek to discourage you, I am bound to tell you that the circumstance of your having written “a poem of three hundred lines in an evening”, or “as much in eight hours as would make fourteen printed columns of All the Year Round”, is not at all favourable to your pretensions. After some slight experience of the pains and patience inseparable from authorship, I believe you to be laboring under a very complete, though not very uncommon, mistake.

Therefore I can but give you the assurance that whatever is offered for acceptance here is honestly read, and that if there be the slightest ray of hope in it, it comes before me; but not otherwise.

Yours

Charles Dickens

Herbert Lawrence Esquire

MssDate: Thursday Twenty Seventh February 1862
Media Type: Letters
Source: Rare Book Department
Recipient: Lawrence, Herbert
Provenance: Sessler 11/4/57

Bibliography:

 The British Academy Pilgrim Edition: The Letters of Charles Dickens, Volume Ten, 1862-1864. Graham Storey, ed. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998, p. 39

Country: Creation Place Note:Office of All the Year Round
Country:England
City/Town/Township:London

Creation Year: 1862
Call Number: DL L436 1862-02-27
Creator Name: Dickens, Charles, 1812-1870 - Author