ALS, two pages, 4.25 x 6.75, December 19, 1857. Addressed from the Tavistock House, a handwritten letter to journalist and writer John Hollingshead, in full: “I wish you would put the Farce by, for a little while, and not try Buckstone now. I know his hands are full, and—though they were not—I am almost sure he would not accept it as it stands. I very much doubt his approving of that Stomach-ache, and I doubt still more the audience’s approval of it. It seems to me to be by no means an improvement. He would say to me, I believe, if I wrote to him a note for you to send with the MS, ‘What do you say to the Piece? Honestly tell me that I ought to play it, against my apprehension that I can’t make much of it—and I will.’ Now, I could not honestly tell him so, and therefore I would rather not address him about it as it stands.” Matted and framed by Goodspeed's Book Shop with an artistic print of Dickens by Thomas Johnson (who signs below) to an overall size of 15.75 x 16. In fine condition. Accompanied by a tattered invoice from Goodspeed's Book Shop, dated 1960. Hollingshead started his journalism career in 1854 under the tutelage of Charles Dickens at the magazine Household Words, and then under W. M. Thackeray at Cornhill Magazine. The “Buckstone” referenced is assuredly John Baldwin Buckstone (1802-1879, an English actor, playwright, and friend of Dickens who starred as a comic actor during much of his career for various periods at the Adelphi Theatre and the Haymarket Theatre, the latter of which he managed from 1853 to 1877; his ghost is said to still watch the theatre.
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