LINKS WITH CHARLES DICKENS

Dominion, Volume 22, Issue 139, 8 March 1929, Page 10

LINKS WITH CHARLES DICKENS

FAMOUS CHALET-TO BE SOLD Dominion Special Service. London, January 17. The chalet in which Di.ckens wrote the last chapter of "Edwin Drood,” as well as. other works, is to be sold. It is now in the grounds of Cobham Hall, Kent, and it was given by sons of Dickens to the sixth Lord Darnley shortly after the author's death, and re-erected in the gardens. It originally stood in _ Dickens’s garden at Gad’s Hill, two miles away ’rhe auctioneers are authorised to sell the chalet only provided' it is kept intact in perpetuity. Dickens’s last letter, written a few hours before his death, is to be sold at Sotheby's. It consists of one and a half nages. and was written from Gad’s Hill, on Wednesday, June lB7O, to John M. Makeham. On May 17, Dickens was to have attended the Queen’s Hall with his daughter, but on the 16th there was an intimation of a sudden disablement. “I am sorry to report,” he wrote to John Forster,, “that in the old osterous endeavour to dine at preposterous hours and places, I have been nulled up by sharp attack in my foot.” There will also be sold a letter which Dickens wrote a fortnight later, making a request for a voltaic band for his right foot, “as a remedy against, what he supposes to be neulargia there, originating on overwalking, deep snow, to which he is occasionally liable." Dickens spent the whole of June 8 writing in his chalet, and he was to be in London the following day. Writing that night to Mr. Makeham. there were several references to “Edwin Drood/’ "I have always striven in my writings,” he added, “to express veneration for the life and lessons of our SaViour. because I feel it, and because I re-wrote that history for my children —every one of whom knew it from having it repeated to them ’ long before they could read, and almost as soon as they could speak. But I have never made proclamation of this from the bousetapi,”