- Brief description
- Letter, from Charles Dickens to Daniel Maclise, 14 June 1846
- Label
- Dickens wrote this letter to his friend, the artist Daniel Maclise, to update him on the progress of the family's holiday in Switzerland. The Dickenses were staying in Lausanne, a French-speaking city in western Switzerland. The country had an impact on the author, who set parts of later stories there, including scenes in David Copperfield and Little Dorrit. He also had a Swiss chalet built in the grounds of his home in Kent, Gad's Hill Place.
- Collection
- Archives & Manuscripts
- Object number
- A379
- Object type
- letter
- Production person
- Dickens, Charles
- Production date
- 14/06/1846
- Inscription content
- Angleterre | Daniel Maclise Esquire. R.A. | 14 Russell Place | Fitzroy Square | London | England.
Hotel Gibbon, Lausanne Switzerland
Sunday Night Fourteenth June 1846.
My Dear Mac.
Notwithstanding the strange leaves you take of your friends, I think you will be still glad to hear of and from them, when they are such friends as Self and Co. Therefore I sit down to write you a short assurance of our safe arrival here last Thursday in good health, and after a most extraordinarily hot journey--borne, by the whole camp, with surpassing good humour and patience. We had only one wet day, and that was among the Mountains--only one discomfort, and that was the loss of a trifling portmanteau containing all the childrens' clothes: which has not yet come to hand.
We have taken a house, in all respects the opposite of our Italian Palazzo; being a kind of beautiful bandbox. It stands in a most lovely situation on the brink of the high slope that rises from the Lake, with the Alps piled up in tremendous majesty before it. It is surrounded by a lawn, a vineyard, a garden, a corn-field, and some other agricultural trifles, of its own--and is, at present overwhelmed in a cluster of Roses. It is called Rosemont. So WHEN you write, address me at Rosemont, Lausanne. I feel like a landed proprietor, and think of writing a Pamphlet on the Free Trade question.
We move, tomorrow. In the meantime we are in this large hotel which is as ugly, I think, as anything can be made, in a situation of such extraordinary beauty. There are no Italian-Catholicity-Symptoms here, and no Monks or Friars in the streets. For which the people are all the more thriving and happy. We rode today some six or eight miles along the lake to see a little fête, in honor of the Republican Independence of this Canton. It consisted of a dinner and ball in the open air; and between the dinner and the ball a good deal of speaking, in the "propogition" of toasts, from a tribune made of flags and flowers, where each Speaker mounted in succession with an immense silver Goblet in his hand. After each toast the artillery fired some Brass field pieces that are on the ground, and the soldier's band played some appropriate air. I wish you could have seen it. It was one of the prettiest sights I have ever seen. The women, in their immense straw hats and gay dresses looked like parti-colored Mushrooms (Brayvo Dick!)
As this letter is merely a trial of your remembrance of the person whose name is subscribed to it, I say no more at present: merely repeating that my address is, as above. All join in kind love to you. And I am ever My Dear Mac Your most affectionate friend CHARLES DICKENS
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