^#559 ^Lot 586 Charles Dickens

ALS, one page, 4.5 x 7, Gad’s Hill Place letterhead, November 4, 1857. Letter to Herbert Watkins. In full: “I send you a thousand thanks for the remarkable, interesting, and admirable collection of photographs you have sent to me. I shall always prize them high, and shall never tire of them. They are not less agreeable to me for including two capital heads of yourself. The Library Edition in its Holiday Dress shall not fail to appear, as soon as it is out of the tailor’s (or binder’s) hand.” Some mild toning, a couple light pencil notations, and some skipping to the handwriting, otherwise fine condition. Item comes in its original dealer folder from The American Art Association, stating the letter comes from the Collection of Rev. Dr. Roderick Terry, Catalogue Number 65.

George Herbert Watkins opened a photographic studio on Regent Street in London in 1856 where he produced a series of the contemporary leaders and celebrities of the day, including Napoleon III, Anthony Trollope, Wilkie Collins, and Alexander Dumas. Dickens received an invitation from a William Charles Kent to arrange a sitting with Watkins that year, but the author refused. By 1858, he had a change of heart, resulting in a series of photographs taken between April-June 1858 in which Dickens requested "five and twenty impressions for private friends"on July 17, 1858. Watkins, in turn, sent him a copy of his National Gallery of Photographs, a published collection of his 1856-1858 portrait photography with accompanying biographies.