BIB_ID
421078
Accession number
MA 1352.229
Creator
Dickens, Charles, 1812-1870.
Display Date
Great Malvern, England, 1851 March 20.
Credit line
Purchased with the assistance of the Fellows, 1951.
Description
1 item (4 pages) ; 17.8 x 10.9 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.
Written from "Knotsford Lodge, Great Malvern / Twentieth March 1851. / Thursday."
Written from "Knotsford Lodge, Great Malvern / Twentieth March 1851. / Thursday."
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
Telling her what he has found out about English reprints of Strauss's Life of Christ [Das Leben Jesu]; enclosing "...the first proof of the design which Bulwer and I have projected, and for which he has written the Comedy. It is still susceptible of many little improvements and explanations which we are gradually getting into it. The Duke of Devonshire has taken it up (on my shewing it to him) in a most generous and noble manner, and we are going to play the Comedy for the first time, at his House, in the last week in April. On which occasion the Queen is to be invited, and I don't know how much money made. The maze of bewilderment into which I have got myself with carpenters, painters, tailors, machinists, and others, in consequence - to say nothing of two nights every week when the whole company are drilled for five hours, the undersigned presiding - or of this trifling addition to my usual occupations - is of the most entangled description; but, if I could help to set right what is wrong here and what I see every day to be so unhappily wrong, I should be munificently recompensed. Mrs. Dickens has derived great advantage, I am glad to say, from this place. Charley has been 'out of school', laid up with Influenza, but is much better."
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