Dickens, Charles

providing an exuberant account of a public speech at Birmingham Town Hall ("...A committee of ladies had decorated that immense building with artificial flowers, to such an extent that it looked like a vast garden...") with a humorous description of his own performance ("... as hard as iron and as cool as a cucumber...") before a large crowd, four pages, 8vo, Athenaeum, [London], 1 March 1844, approx. 50mm at the bottom of the second leaf cut away with loss of text and signature, some soiling, crudely window mounted

[with:] cut signature and four lines of autograph text from a letter to Henry Small, two photographic portraits of Dickens, and three other Victorian photographic portraits, these items mounted together on a page from an album

The Letters of Charles Dickens, IV, pp.56-57

This charming letter - a fine example of Dickens's inimitable prose - was written to his elder sister Frances Burnett (1810-48). She had accompanied him to Liverpool where Dickens had given a speech on education to an enormous crowd, but then had returned to London whilst Dickens had continued to Birmingham and given a similar speech for the Polytechnic Institute. In this letter he reports back to Fanny the following day on the success of his Birmingham speech.