SD2940. Diary Entry of Annie Adams Fields
As published in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 32, 377 (in part).
[Boston]
Thursday, November 21 [1867]
Mr Dickens dined here. Agassiz, Emerson, Judge Hoar, Prof. Holmes, Norton, Greene, dear Longfellow, last not least, came to welcome him. Dickens sat on my right, Agassiz at my left. I never saw Agassiz so full of fun. …
Dickens bubbled over with fun & I could not help fancying that Holmes bored him a little by talking at him. I was sorry for this because Holmes is so simple and lovely but Dickens is sensitive, very. He is fond of Carlyle, seems to love nobody better and gave the most irresistible imitation of him. His queer turns of expression often convulsed us with laughter and yet it is difficult to catch them as when in speaking of the writer of books always putting himself, his real self in “which is always the case,” he said “but you must be careful of not taking him for his next door neighbor.”
He spoke of the fineness of his Parisian audience—“the most delicately appreciative of all audiences.” He also gave a most ludricrous account of a sea-sick curate trying to read the service aboard ship last Sunday. He tells us Browning is really about to marry Miss Ingelow and of Carlyle that he is deeply saddened, irretrievably, by the death of his wife. Just as we were in a tempest of laughter over some witticism of his, he jumped up seized me by the hand and said good-night. He neither smoked nor drank. I never do either from the time my Readings “set in” he said, as if it were a rainy season. …
Among other interesting personal facts Dickens told us that he had last year burned all his private letters. An appeal from the widow of Sydney Smith for some of his letters set him thinking on the subject & one day when there was a big fire. …
Publication: M.A. DeWolfe Howe, Memories of a Hostess (Boston, 1922), pp. 141–142 (in part).
Manuscript: Massachusetts Historical Society.
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