Brief description: Letter, from Charles Dickens to Thomas Beard, 25 June 1851
Label: Thomas Beard was one of Dickens’s oldest friends and fellow journalist when they wrote at ‘The Morning Chronicle’ in the 1830s. In this letter Dickens refers to his office at 16 Wellington Street North as a ‘gipsey tent’. This word, also spelled gypsy, is an offensive term for the Roma people or travelling communities in general. It is still used today.
Collection: Archives & Manuscripts
Object number: A103
Object type: letter
Production person: Dickens, Charles
Production date: 25/06/1851
Inscription content: Thomas Beard Esquire | 42 Portman Place | Edgeware Road | London.
Sherborne, Dorsetshire | Wednesday Evening 25th. June | 1851.
My Dear Beard
I write to you from Macready's where we have been staying a few days, to enquire if you can make next Tuesday the 1st. July a holiday?--For this reason. I have promised Charley that I will appear at 11 that morning at Slough, armed with a hamper from Fortnum and Mason's, and take him and three other young Etonian Shavers up the river. He "knows a bank" where we can dine; and if you can come, you and I will console ourselves for our antiquity, after dinner, with a trifle of tobacco and champagne* in the starn of the wessel.
I shall be at my gipsey tent at the Household Words office 16 Wellington Street North, tomorrow evening, and probably until after Wednesday. If you will send me a line there, I hope it will be to say that you can come--and we'll try to make out jovially.
Ever Heartily Yours
CHARLES DICKENS
Thomas Beard Esquire

*N.B. Ice in the Hamper

Letter from Charles Dickens to Thomas Beard, 25 June 1851