Sir Charles's main interest of these months was making up the case against those responsible for bad housing, and he fixed responsibility on some who showed themselves honourably sensitive:

'About this time I received a very strong and detailed anonymous letter calling my attention to the condition of the Northampton tenants in Clerkenwell, and I sent it to Lord William Compton— afterwards Lord Compton, and later Lord Northampton—who was serving as a clerk in the Turkish Department of the Foreign Office. At my request he went down to Clerkenwell and looked into the matter for himself, and found the state of things so horrible that he warmly took up the question, and I then took him down to Clerkenwell again. I found Clerkenwell to be my strongest case, as it was the only parish in which the local authority was entirely in the house-farmers' hands, and from this time forward I put it in a prominent place in all my speeches.'

Before departing, on December 20th, for Toulon,

'I had a correspondence with the Archbishop of Canterbury (Benson) with regard to the condition of the property in London of the Ecclesiastical Commissioners, which I thought a disgrace to the Church. He only asked me to send him the facts, which I did, pointing out that the district "in the Borough" at the meeting of St. Saviour's, Bermondsey, Newington, and St. George the Martyr, was in a shameful state.'

The outcome of these inquiries was the appointment of the Royal Commission on Housing. The subject afforded safe ground on which to meet the Queen when he first went down as a guest to Windsor, and it was supplemented by another matter, on which much correspondence had passed between him and Sir Henry Ponsonby—that of certain cement works near West Cowes, the smoke from which killed the Queen's shrubs at Osborne.

'On Tuesday, November 27th, I dined and slept at Windsor, and the Queen talked artisans' dwellings and Osborne chemical works. Ponsonby I thought very able and very pleasant. I suppose I had Dizzy's rooms, because there was not only a statue of him, but also a framed photograph, in the sitting-room, while in the bedroom there was a recent statue of the Empress Eugenie. The Queen was, of course, very courteous, but she was more bright and pleasant than I had expected. The Duke and Duchess of Albany were at Windsor, and I had her next me at dinner. Lorne was also there, and after the Queen had gone to bed the Duke and Lorne showed me all the curiosities, having had the whole of the galleries lighted. We sat up very late. Loene is serious- minded … through his real attempt to understand his work, and would do most things well….'

In this year Sir Charles opposed the scheme of "assisted emigration" under which was offered to the world the amazing spectacle of a Government paying its own subjects to quit its shores and its flag. Irish peasants, half starved, clad in garments promiscuously flung out from the slop-shop, often quite unfit to make their way in a strange country, were induced by the offer of a free passage (without even inspection to see that they were decently accommodated on board) to pour in thousands out of a country whose rulers had no better thing to offer them than this cynical quittance in full. Sir Charles 'violently opposed the scheme' in one of his first Cabinets (May 5th), and again on July 25th tried to abolish it, but 'only succeeded in getting a promise that the second year of it should be the last.'

At the beginning of 1883 his brother Ashton was very ill at Algiers, and on February 17th the manager of his paper, the Weekly Dispatch, brought to Sloane Street a communication in Ashton Dilke's own hand, which contained, amongst other directions to be carried out after his death, the actual paragraph by which it was to be announced. When the end came, on March 12th, 1883, it meant 'a serious breaking with the past. William Dilke alone was left to me, if, indeed, at eighty-eight one could speak of a man as left.' This old grand-uncle, with his military memories of Waterloo days, whom Sir Charles Dilke yearly visited at Chichester, and who often stayed at Sloane Street, was also at this moment very ill, and supposed to be dying; but he recovered, and lived on for more than two years. In April Sir Charles ordered from Mr. W. E. F. Britten, the painter, whom Leighton had commended to him, a portrait of his brother, which 'proved very good,' and which hung always in 76, Sloane Street.

He clung to family ties, and later in the year paid a visit to distant kindred, the heads of the Dilke family:

'On Saturday, August 25th, I went to Maxstoke, and returned on Monday, the 27th. There dined on the Saturday night Lord and Lady Norton and their eldest son, Charles Adderley. The old man said a very true thing to me about the place. "What a good castle this is, and how lucky that it has always been inhabited by people too poor to spoil it!" From the Commonwealth times, when Peter Wentworth plundered the Dilke of his day for delinquency after the two years during which Fairfax had held the Castle, they have never had money, and no attempt was ever made to rebuild the interior house after the two fires by which two-thirds of it were successively destroyed. They are, owing to Mrs. Dilke having a little money, a little more prosperous just now, and there is a larger herd of deer than usual; on this occasion I counted over one hundred from the walls.'