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Auction: 16043 - Autographs, Historical Documents, Ephemera and Postal History
Lot: 53

Documents
Charles Dickens
1853 (24 April) folio A.L.S. from Tavistock House to Major Lake, "My difficulty about Friday, is, that I am not sure when my Scotch friend departs from Edinburgh, but I rather think he will not go until Saturday at the earliest ... I think our only course is, to trust to our better fortune – autumn – and India! Or possibly you may find yourself near Boulogne in the course of the summer ..." and is signed "Charles Dickens". Folded into envelope with Dickens’s monogram in blue within a blue buckler on the flap, the envelope with the embossed supplier’s name ("J. SMITH Inventor and Patentee"), addressed to "Major Lake/9 Charles Street/St.James’s"), and signed in the lower left corner by Dickens, postmarked 1853 (21April); the stamp has been washed from the envelope, otherwise all in very good condition.


The editors of the Dickens Collected Correspondence suggest that the recipient might have been Major Edward John Lake (1823-1877) of the Bengal Engineers, a supposition vindicated by Dickens’s reference to India in the above. His ‘Scotch’ guest was John Gordon, a radical Scottish lawyer, who was known to have been in London at that time. This letter was written during the serial publication of Bleak House, the April issue (Part XIV) comprising chapters 43 to 46. Photo

Charles John Huffam Dickens (1812 – 1870) was an English writer and social critic. He created some of the world's best-known fictional characters and is regarded as the greatest novelist of the Victorian era

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