Letter 16 | 27 September 1849 | to F. M. Evans, page 2

Charles Dickens
(1812–1870)

Autograph letter signed with initials, Winterbourne, 27 September 1849 to the publisher F. M. Evans

Purchased on the Fellows Fund, 1971

MA 2762
Item description: 

In 1849 John Leech, illustrator of A Christmas Carol, was injured in a swimming accident. In this letter Dickens reports using hypnotism to restore Leech's health: "I soon began to magnetize him. He became composed immediately, and lay in a perfect calm." Dickens was convinced of the therapeutic effect of his efforts on this occasion and recalled observing "exactly this effect several times, in a lady whom I magnetized every day for Six months, in Italy [Madame de la Rue]. Her disorder was tic Doloreux [trigeminal neuralgia, a severe, stabbing pain to one side of the face] in a most horrible form. In some states of nervous excitement she never went to sleep for more than a minute or two at a time, but was invariably tranquillized and made easy by the process."

Exhibition section: 

Mesmerism

In his life and art, Dickens worked energetically for healing. His fiction exposed many of the social ills of his day, and a significant portion of his later journalism is devoted to an impassioned campaign to improve sanitation and public health. Although he was a committed evolutionist and progressive in his attitude toward science and the improvements wrought by technological advances, he was also, by imagination and temperament, attracted to the fantastic and pseudoscientific. This was manifested in his interest in spontaneous combustion and phrenology as well as his fervent belief and active experiments in mesmerism (or "animal magnetism"), an early type of hypnotism.

Dickens was introduced to mesmerism through Dr. John Elliotson, his family physician and one of his "most intimate and valued friends." He became convinced of the therapeutic effects of mesmerism after witnessing Elliotson's demonstrations in 1838, and, although there is no record of Dickens undergoing the procedure, he learned to mesmerize others. Throughout the 1840s, he conducted mesmeric experiments on his wife and friends.

Transcription: 

thought it best to come home, and leave John there to call me in case I should be wanted. He slept very well, however, (though he woke often) and there was not the least necessity to send.

(I observed exactly this effect several times, in a lady whom I magnetized every day for Six months, in Italy. Her disorder was tic Doloreux in a most horrible form. In some states of nervous excitement she never went to sleep for more than a minute or two at a time, but was invariably tranquillized and made easy by the process.)

I am going up there at 12 o'Clock, and will finish this letter after I have sat with him for an hour or two, and seen how he is.

———

2 oClock. afternoon

He is greatly better, and has very much surprised the Doctor. He had a haddock and a bit of boiled mutton for his dinner, and dispatched them in a twinkling. He made