With love,
Ever affectionately yours,
Charles Dickens
Facsimile note from Dickens to Fields
Among the papers preserved by Mrs. Fields there are, besides the manuscript letters of Dickens himself, many letters written after his death by his sister-in-law, Miss Georgina Hogarth. From bits of these, and especially from a letter written by Dickens’s daughter, while his death was still a poignant grief, the affection in which he was held in his own household is touchingly imaged forth.
“All the Old World,” wrote Miss Dickens, “all the New World loved him. He never had anything to do with a living soul without attaching them to him. If strangers could so love him, you can tell a little what he must have been to his own flesh and blood. It is a glorious inheritance to have such blood flowing in one’s veins. I’m so glad I have never changed my name.”
From one of Miss Hogarth’s letters a single passage may be taken, since it adds something of first-hand knowledge to the accessible facts about one piece of Dickens’s writing which—in so far as the editor of these pages is aware—has never seen the light of print. This letter was written in the September after Dickens’s death: