Item Info

Accession Number: 87-381
Physical Description: [2] pages
Transcription:

 Gad’s Hill Place

Higham by Rochester, Kent.

Sunday Thirty First May, 1863.

My Dear Mr. Hunt.

I should have immediately complied with your request but for the sufficient reason that I really have nothing to tell, which the public has any claims to know. The dear fellow was always one of the most popular of the party—always sweet-tempered, humourous, conscientious, thoroughly good, and thoroughly beloved. I always advised with him about the composition of the figures, and the like; and his artistic feeling and his patience were what you know them to have been. There is not a single grain of alloy, thank God, in my remembrance of our intimate personal association. But I look back upon his ways and words, in that half-gipsey life of our Theatricals, as sanctified by his Death and as not belonging to the public at all. In that aspect of his life as in every other, he was a thoroughly staunch, true, reliable man. All else I regard as private companionship and confidence.

Believe me ever

Faithfully Yours

Charles Dickens

W. Holman Hunt Esquire

MssDate: Sunday Thirty First May 1863
Media Type: Letters
Source: Rare Book Department
Notes:

Hunt's request was for Dickens's recollections of Augustus Egg, for the memoir Hunt wrote in the Reader (31 Oct 63, 11, 516). (Pilgrim vol. 10, p. 256n)

Recipient: Hunt, William Holman, 1827-1910
Provenance: Sessler 1958

Bibliography:

 The British Academy Pilgrim Edition: The Letters of Charles Dickens, Volume Ten, 1862-1864. Graham Storey, ed. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998, p. 256.

Country: Creation Place Note:Gad's Hill Place
Country:England
City/Town/Township:London

Creation Year: 1863
Call Number: DL H919 1863-05-31
Creator Name: Dickens, Charles, 1812-1870 - Author