DICKENS, Charles (1812-1870). Autograph letter signed (“CD”), to [Thomas] Mitton (“My Dear Mitton”). Devonshire Terrace, 18 April 1844.

1 1/4 pages, 8vo, on a bifolium. Folds, minor mounting remnants along hinge fold on verso.

Discussing financial matters in advance of his pivotal travels to Italy and Europe: “I am sorry to say that plan won’t do. Because, although Coutts’s were so prompt and polite last time, still they did say ‘that it wasn’t the kind of note’ &c &c - as I wrote you at the time. Indeed, I remember to have often heard that they avoid discounting: not having that kind of insurers[?].

I wish to Heaven you could think of any other way. I will come down today, between 2 and 3.

I have not seen [Thomas James] Thomson yet. He wrote that he was coming. Likewise that his house had not bedrooms enough for all[?] - and talking wildly about Houses near Belgrave Square!! Faithfully Always / CD.”

A fine letter to his close friend and solicitor, Thomas Mitton. Dickens wrote Mitton the previous day: “I am very much and pressingly in want of a hundred pounds until June. Though the time is short, my father’s debts, two quarters income tax &c, coming all at once, drive me, sailing so near the wind by not drawing any profits from C[hapman] and H[all], into a most [un]comfortable corner. Ca[n you oblige] me with this, or devise any [means of doing so?…” (Letters, 17 April 1844, pp. 107-08).

This letter might conversely relate to Mitton's purchase of a share in the legal firm of Smithson and Dunn [later Smithson, Dunn and Mitton]. Money for the purchase was borrowed from his family, while Dickens stood as security for the debt.

Not in The Pilgrim Edition of The Letters of Charles Dickens, Edited by Kathleen Tillotson, Oxford, 1977.