BIB_ID
420463
Accession number
MA 1352.61
Creator
Dickens, Charles, 1812-1870.
Display Date
Lausanne, Switzerland, 1846 August 17.
Credit line
Purchased with the assistance of the Fellows, 1951.
Description
1 item (1 page, with address) ; 22.3 x 18.8 cm
Notes
Address panel with seal, postmarks and Dickens' signature to "Angleterre / Miss Burdett Coutts / Stratton Street / Piccadilly / London."
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.
Written from "Rosemont, Lausanne, Switzerland / Seventeenth August 1846."
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.
Written from "Rosemont, Lausanne, Switzerland / Seventeenth August 1846."
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
Explaining comments he made in his previous letter to her (MA 1352.60) concerning temptation; saying "I would not write to you on so slight an occasion but that I am very anxious you should not suppose me to have intended to convey the least hint to you in the case I put, touching your clerks and servants. I instanced you, as having everything about you on so great a scale, and as representing great wealth and a large establishment - but with no more reference, believe me, to your affairs as differing in the least from those of any other person similarly situated, or from mine as far as they go, than to those of the Great Mogul. As you had objected that we should leave temptation to the Almighty, I merely meant to ask you to consider whether we are not all (under His direction or permission) tempted by and through one another, in our common daily life, and whether that was not a reason for giving these unfortunates the means of testing their own power of resistance and their own practical repentance, within the Asylum;" adding "[t]he thick paper is an unspeakable comfort. The sensation of reading a long letter written on the impracticable paper specially intended for Foreign Service is (I should think) very like having to cut all one's teeth in a given time, without any Soothing Syrup."
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