Plan your visit. 225 Madison Avenue at 36th Street, New York, NY 10016.

Plan your visit. 225 Madison Avenue at 36th Street, New York, NY 10016.

Letter from Charles Dickens, Broadstairs, to Angela Burdett-Coutts, 1841 August 16 : autograph manuscript signed.

BIB_ID
419874
Accession number
MA 1352.12
Creator
Dickens, Charles, 1812-1870.
Display Date
Broadstairs, England, 1841 August 16.
Credit line
Purchased with the assistance of the Fellows, 1951.
Description
1 item (3 pages) ; 18.2 x 11.2 cm
Notes
The letter is part of a collection, MA 1352, which consists of letters from Charles Dickens to the Baroness, to her companion Hannah (Meredith) Brown, or the latter's husband, William Brown; with 70 letters written by others to Miss Coutts or to Dickens in his capacity as her unofficial almoner; and a few others. See the collection-level record for more information.
Provenance
The letters formed part of the Burdett-Coutts sale (Sotheby, 17 May 1922); they were purchased for Oliver W. Barrett in whose collection they remained until it was sold by his son (Parke-Bernet, 31 October 1951).
Summary
Apologizing for his carelessness with respect to her invitations; saying "A kind of daymare comes upon me sometimes, under the influence of which I have dismal visions of your supposing me careless of your kind Invitations - regardless of your notes - insensible to your friendship - and a species of moral monster with the usual number of legs and arms, a head, and so forth, but no heart at all. This disorder, instead of diminishing within the cheerful influence of the Sea, is so much aggravated by distance from Stratton Street and the obstacles in the way of telling you about it by word of mouth, that I am fairly driven to the desperate step of writing to you, to tell you how notes and cards of Invitation from you have reached me in Scotland, in Yorkshire, in Kent - in every place but London - and how I have reason to suppose that some others are still taking sportive flights among the Post offices, and getting very brown from change of air in various parts of the United Kingdom. I have too much pleasure and gratification in the sympathy you have expressed, with my visionary friends, to let you forget me if I can help it. In duty to myself therefore - this is a description of moral obligation which most men discharge with the utmost punctuality - I raise my still small voice from the ocean's brink, and humbly desire to live in your recollection as an innocent, and not erring Individual, until next October. If Miss Meredith should remember a fair young man with whom she had a community of feeling in reference to the impossibility of getting up in the morning during the Great Frost of eighteen hundred and forty one, I beg to say that I am the person, and that I send my compliments."