859. RB to Charles Dickens [1]
As published in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 5, 140.
New Cross, Hatcham, Surrey.
Thursday Mg [7 October 1841] [2]
Dear Dickens,
I am far luckier than the rest of your friends in having heard of your illness no sooner than of its partial abatement. [3] Pray get well, and keep so, for all our sakes.
Forster tells me you don’t absolutely reject an apple, roasted or otherwise! May I offer you two or three?—no more, because the Scripture blessing of the good man in “his basket and his store” [4] —has only been half-accomplished with us here—the only remains of the best article we can muster for the moment being spectrally true to one’s notion of “Osier’s Ghost”! [5]
Ever yours faithfully,
R Browning.
Chas. Dickens Esqr
Publication: Dickens, 2, 401n.
Manuscript: Huntington Library.
1. For details of RB’s friendship with Dickens, see pp. 368-370.
2. Dated by reference to Dickens’s illness.
3. On Friday, 8 October 1841, Dickens underwent an operation for the removal of a fistula; Macready visited him that evening and “suffered agonies” as the details were recounted to him, and saw Dickens again on 11 October, this time in the company of RB (Macready, II, 145).
4. Cf. Deuteronomy, 28:5.
5. Francis Hosier (1673–1727) was in command of a naval squadron blockading Porto Bello, in the West Indies, to prevent the sailing of Spanish treasure ships. While he was thus engaged, a virulent fever broke out among the crews, claiming some 4,000 lives, including that of Hosier himself. A poem dealing with these melancholy events, “Admiral Hosier’s Ghost,” was included in Thomas Percy’s Reliques of Ancient English Poetry.
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