DICKENS, Charles.

£4,500 · Offered by Peter Harrington · No longer available

Autograph letter signed to Thomas Wright. An autograph letter penned just six days before the author's death, sent in apology and reading in full, "Dear Sir, In the hurry of saving the day's post for many letters, the enclosed was left in my cheque book when I wrote to you. I am very sorry to have caused you trouble. Faithfully yours, Charles Dickens."It is accompanied by the original envelope, addressed in Dickens's hand to Thomas Wright of Regent's Park and dated 3 June 1870. Dickens previously wrote to Wright on 31 May to donate three guineas to a fund in support of the writer George Linnaeus Banks (1821-1881). Dickens realized a few days later he had overlooked to include the cheque.The scholar Graham Storey argues that the recipient is "probably" the prison philanthropist of Manchester (1789-1875) who Dickens discussed on the front page of the Household Words issue of 6 March 1852: "A worn but not a weary man of sixty-three, who has for forty-seven years been weekly servant in a large iron foundry... Poor as he was - toiling as he did, a modest man of humble origin, with no power in the world to aid him but the wonderful spiritual power of an earnest will - Thomas Wright has found means, in his little intervals of leisure, to lead back, with a gentle hand, three hundred convicted criminals to virtue; to wipe the blot from their names and the blight from their prospects; to place them in honest homes, supported by an honest livelihood".Dickens spent the last week of his l

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