Democratic Sentinel, Volume 15, Number 42, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 6 November 1891 — The Last Letter Written by Dickens. [ARTICLE]

The Last Letter Written by Dickens.

Charles Dickens’ last letter, one of the most interesting that he ever wrote, came into the market a few days ago at Bristol, England, and was speedily snapped up for a couple of guineas. It was written to a Mr. Makeham, and runs as follows: “It would be quite inconceivable to me—but for your letter—that any reasonable reader could possibly attach a scriptural reference to a passage in a book of mine, reproducing a much abused social figure of speech, impressed into all sorts of service on all sorts of inappropriate occasions, without the faintest connection of its original source. I am truly shocked to find that any reader can make the mistake. "I have always striven in my writings to express veneration for the life and lessons of our Savior, because I feel it; and because I rewrote that history for my children l —every one of whom knew it from having it repeated to 1 them long before they could read,, and almost as soon as they could speak. “But I have never made proclamation of this from the housetops.” Mr. Makeham explained in the London Daily News the circumstances under which' he wrote to Dickens after the novelist’s death. The figure of speech of which this gentleman complained was drawn, he says, “from a passage of the Holy Writ which is greatly reverenced by a large number of his countrymen as a prophetic description of the sufferings of our Savoir,” and is to be found in the tenth chapter of “Edwin Drood. ”