DICKENS LETTERS

Otago Daily Times, Issue 22204, 6 March 1934, Page 10

DICKENS LETTERS

COLLECTION OPEN FOR INSPECTION. (From Oub Own Correspondent.) LONDON, January 19. A meeting of the trustees of the British Museum was held a day or two ago to consider the future of certain letters written by Charles Dickens to his wife. These have been in a sealed box in the museum for the past 35 years.

In presenting them to the museum in her lifetime, Mrs Perugini, the author’s daughter, made a proviso that they should be reserved from readers until her own death and that of her brother, the late Sir Henry Dickens. In a statement accompanying the gift, Mrs Perugini mentioned that the letters had been given her by her mother for ultimate publication, as a proof that Dickens had ince loved her, and that, whatever the causes of the separation, the fault was not on her side.

The trustees have now decided to release the 136 letters for the perusal of students and others as soon as they can be bound. Some people expected that the letters would contain references to the trouble between Dickens and his wife which led to their separation, but they do not.

Sixty of the letters were written before Dickens’s marriage took place on April 2, 1836 ; 72 were written during the period of the marriage, and four after the separation in May, 1858. The early letters relate to Dickens’s love and engagement, and there are references to “Sketches by Boz” and to “ Pickwick,” of which only some extracts relating to “ Pickwick " have been published as yet. The second series, recording the novelist’s absences from his family on professional and other business, includes some 20 liters published in “The Letters of Charles Dickens” '1880), edited by his daughter and Js sister-in-law. Georgina Hogarth. The letters not published in this edition are in the main of little importance, except one touching letter, written on April 14, 1851. in which he broke the news of the death of their child, Dora. None of the letters representing his married life was written after 1856, and there is nothing directly bearing on the difference between Mrs Dickens and himself.