Footnotes

'THAT MOST NOBLE UNDERTAKING IN WHICH YOU ARE ENGAGED' – DICKENS VISITS THE RAGGED SCHOOL THAT INSPIRED HIM TO WRITE A CHRISTMAS CAROL.

Dickens was, as Michael Slater puts it, 'a man with a highly active social conscience, and mindful always of that desperate time in his own childhood when he "lounged about the streets, insufficiently and unsatisfactorily fed"' (ODNB). In the course of his wanderings through the slums of London, he had come upon the Field Lane Ragged School in the area then known as Saffron Hill: 'In the unsavoury neighbourhood of Field Lane, Holborn, subjected to raids from young hoodlums who pelted the teachers with filth and smashed their furniture, one of the schools was under the guidance of a lawyer's clerk named Samuel Starey. He had appealed to Miss Coutts for support, and in response to her request Dickens had arranged to visit the school' (Edgar Johnson, Charles Dickens: His Tragedy and Triumph, 1977 edition, pp.254-5); writing to her 'I blush to quote Oliver Twist for an authority, but it stands on that ground, and is precisely such a place as the Jew lived in' (Pilgrim Edition, 16 September 1843).

Following his visit, 'Dickens immediately busied himself with plans for improving the institution. He asked Starey [in our letter] to find out how much it would cost to install a large trough or sink, with a good supply of running water, soap, and towels... For the Edinburgh Review, Dickens offered to write a description of the Ragged Schools... but confusions arose about the delivery date of the article. By the time they were straightened out Dickens was too busy in other work to write it... The undertaking that diverted Dickens from writing on the Ragged School was a tale that came to be called A Christmas Carol (Johnson, pp.255-6): 'It was out of this vision of the world that Dickens now found his new subject; his imagination was seized by the conditions of a ragged school in Saffron Hill and within a few weeks he had created A Christmas Carol, the wonderful story of redemption in which appear the two children, Ignorance and Want, infants who are "wretched, abject, frightful, hideous, miserable". This was the book he had been wanting to write all along; and so this powerful Christmas tale, which has achieved a kind of immortality, was born out of the very conditions of the time' (Peter Ackroyd, Dickens, 1990, p.407).

His visit to Starey and his school can be dated to ten days earlier, 14 September 1843. Our letter is printed in the Pilgrim Edition and in the The Selected Letters, taken from that edition, edited by Jenny Hartley (2012). A letter by Starey to Dickens of 18 October, in reply to one of the day before, is in the Morgan Library & Museum (MA 1352.672).

This letter is sold in aid of Livability, a charity helping the disabled in the community, which was formed in 2007 by the merger of the Shaftesbury Society and the John Grooms Association. It comes to the charity from the collection of the Ragged School Union (later the Shaftesbury Society), founded by Samuel Starey and his colleagues in April 1844 (see note to the following lot).