DICKENS (CHARLES)

Autograph letter signed ("Charles Dickens"), to the actor and theatre manager Samuel Phelps, expressing his pleasure at receiving Phelps' unexpected letter, Broadstairs, 21 September 1847

Footnotes

'I HAD NOT GIVEN YOU AT ALL CLEARLY TO UNDERSTAND MY WHEREABOUTS': Dickens writes to a much-admired theatre manager from his own amateur theatrical tour.

Charles Dickens is responding here to Samuel Phelps' reply to Dickens' flattering letter of 29 August 1847, in which Dickens complimented him in the highest terms on his production of Cymbeline, writing that it gave him 'extraordinary gratification' and expressing his wish for a more 'private and personal' association. The author was clearly a great admirer of the work of Phelps, who took on the lease of the Sadler's Wells theatre from 1844 to 1862 and staged many Shakespearean revivals over his tenure and produced Charles Webb's adaptation of A Christmas Carol. Dickens was to publish a complimentary article about Phelps' performances and his management of the theatre in Household Words in October 1851: 'a well-conducted Theatre is a good place in which to learn good things and we wish to show what an intelligent and resolute man may do...' (volume 4, p.25).

Dickens spent the latter part of 1847 in Broadstairs and remained there until October '...with intervals of absence for amateur theatrical tours (which Mr Forster calls "splendid strolling"), in which he was usually accompanied by his wife and sister in law... Several new recruits had been added to the theatrical company... Mr. George Cruikshank, Mr. George Henry Lewes, and Mr. Augustus Egg; the supreme management and arrangement of everything being always left to Charles Dickens... Every Man in his Humour and farces were again played at Manchester and Liverpool...' (Ed. Dickens & Hogarth, The Letters of Charles Dickens, volume I), which would explain why he was so difficult to locate and so surprised that a letter from Phelps had reached him.

This letter is published in the Pilgrim Edition of Dickens' letters (volume 5, 1881, p.166), the text taken from May Phelps's and Forbes-Robertson's The Life and Life-Work of Samuel Phelps, 1886, p.389, and comes from the collection of the descendants of George Buckston Browne. An accompanying note states that it was "given to us 3 July 1922 by Mr Harry Plowman FSA". Plowman acted as executor for the last member of the Phelps family, and the estate included many items from the effects of Samuel Phelps.