Charles Dickens ALS to Edmund Saul Dixon

FULL DESCRIPTION: Dickens to Dixon

DICKENS Charles (1812-1870). A.L.S. [London] June 21, 1849, to Reverend E[dmund] S[aul] DIXON.
(17.8 x 11 cm). 1.5 pages, a single sheet folded once.

Here Dickens thanks Dixon for sending him a letter and a “charming little work” [Ornamental and Domestic Poultry] which the recipient read “with the utmost satisfaction and interest.” The volume remained in Dickens’s possession until his death and is recorded in both the 1871 Sotheran’s evaluation and the 1878 Stonehouse Catalogue. Dixon inscribed the book mentioned in the letter, “To Charles Dickens, Esq., from the Author, with sincere and kind respect. June 18, 1849.” The two authors had been acquainted as early as 1836, when Dickens wrote a letter to the publisher John Macrone introducing him as "my friend the Reverend Mr. Dixon." The Reverend would eventually publish articles in Household Words as well.

* Not in Pilgrim Letters nor the Charles Dickens Letter Project.

As one reader has observed, Dickens may have appreciated Dixon’s work on poultry for its Dickensian insights, consider the following passage: [regarding the Musk Duck:] “In both sorts the female is very much smaller than her spouse, and the couple suggest the idea of those unequal matches occasionally seen in the human species, where a little dumpy woman trips with evident satisfaction by the side of a husband who is twice her length, and four times her size” [Dixon, Ornamental and Domestic Poultry, p. 68].