DICKENS (Charles)


Autograph letter signed ("Charles Dickens"), to Dr Stallard, telling him that he has written to George Russell about "your project for establishing Scrap Kitchens" and that he is "generally favorable" to another of his schemes ("...although I have great doubts of the discretion of boards of unpaid Visitors, and am inclined to believe that the sincerer and better order of Poor would not like to submit themselves to that amiable Inquisition. Decidedly, I do not think it calculated to 'postpone the question of the public treatment of the Poor', for I am persuaded that official personages will of themselves postpone it to the utmost confines of human endurance..."), 1 page, printed Gad's Hill letterhead, one small fox-mark, integral blank pasted onto an album leaf (with presentation signature of Jefferson Davis, a Longfellow fragment and letter by Lord Lytton on the verso), 8vo, Gad's Hill Place, 19 December 1866
|'OFFICIAL PERSONAGES WILL OF THEMSELVES POSTPONE IT TO THE UTMOST CONFINES OF HUMAN ENDURANCE' – Dickens mockingly doubts whether a scheme "calculated to 'postpone the question of the public treatment of the Poor'" is really needed. The letter Dickens wrote that same day to George Russell is printed in the Pilgrim edition, and included in the selected edition. In it, he tells Russell that he is also writing to Stallard; our letter being otherwise unknown. The Pilgrim editors note that Joshua Stallard was physician at St George's and St James's Dispensary and was author of Workhouse Hospitals (1865).