Dickens, Charles (1812-1870)

Autograph letter signed, three pages, sm. 8vo; dated Tuseday, 6th August, 1867, to Mrs. Ross Church (Florence Marryat). On Gads Hill Place stationery; with original mailing envelope (Ventnor Villas, Hove, Sussex), in Dickens's hand, with his signature at the lower left.

Tuesday sixth August, 1867

Dear Mrs. Ross Church,

I have read your book, and I think it evinces your possession of considerable power. I cannot honestly say that I find your power to be always well directed, or that I do not find many evidences of its being imperuously and daringly used. But I have not the slightest doubt of its existence within you.

You will excuse my adding that I think you unwise in freely touching forbidden topics. If I also object that you do so with a certain "coarseness", I do not use that word in its conventional acceptation, but as meaning with an absence of that very great delicacy of art which can alone carry so difficult a load. The[?] general idea too, of the dissipated part of such a life as your hero's, is (so far as I know) not like the Truth, and suuggests something worse. Similarly, he very often speaks as educated gentlemen (to say nothing of this gentleman's being imaginative too) do not speak.

It is very remarkable to me that while you are indignant with men for making laws unjust and offensive towards women, you do not see that the cruel persecutors of erring women are their own sex. Against the cruelty of women to women, men are mostly powerless. And yet in the very same breath you indicate this last lamentable fact.

The opening of the book is very good indeed, both as an indication of character and a piece of construction. Gerald's father and mother both highly meritorious. The father's death excellent. Ada (except that she does not swim as well in philosophical waters as in those of the Isle of Wight) very good too. All about her child, natural and affecting.

I write with difficulty, being laid up with erysipelas in the foot, which puts me into a highly inconvenient attitude. But I desired to lose no time in telling you what you ask me to tell you -- the truth to the best of my belief.

Always

Faithfully yours

Charles Dickens

The last volume looks as if it had cost you the least pains?

Note: Dickens is here commenting upon Florence Marryat's sixth novel, *The Confessions of Gerald Eastcourt*, published in three volumes by Richard Bentley in 1867. The unease expressed by Dickens about "touching forbidden topics" was shared by many critics at the time. "During the first part of her writing life Florence Marryat was bracketed with Annie Thomas as a purveyor of dangerously inflammatory fiction, unsuitable for reading by young ladies, yet highly to their taste." -- Sadleir. Dickens was at this time recuperating from a long and gruelling, but highly successful, series of public readings (between January and May, 1867). His health was a cause for some concern, but he was shortly to commit himself to another long tour, this time in America; he left for Boston on November 9, 1867. Florence Marryat had just turned 29; she was the youngest daughter of the novelist Capt. Frederick Marryat, whom Dickens had known well some twenty years earlier. Between 1865 and her death in 1899 she published some ninety novels, many of which were translated into French, German, Swedish, Flemish, and Russian, and became popular in America.