Details
DICKENS, CHARLES. Autograph letter signed ("Charles Dickens") to Dr. Thomas Southwood Smith, declining to attend a committee meeting. Devonshire Terrace, 3 June 1841. One page, small 8vo, mounting remnants along right margin of verso. With a carte-de-visite photograph of Dickens, by J. Gurney & Sons, New York, n.d. [circa 1867]. 105 x 63 mm. (4 1/8 x 2½ in.) including mount.
Smith was a sanitary reformer who wrote valuable works on epidemics and sanitary improvements. Dickens first met the doctor when he was Commissioner on the Employment of Young People early in the 1840s. Smith's influence led him to realise that good houskeeping was essential if the terrible sanitary conditions of slum dwellings were to be banished. Dickens's article "To Working Men" published in Household Words called on the working classes to "turn their intelligence, their energy, their numbers, their power of union... in this straight direction in ernest..." (2)
Smith was a sanitary reformer who wrote valuable works on epidemics and sanitary improvements. Dickens first met the doctor when he was Commissioner on the Employment of Young People early in the 1840s. Smith's influence led him to realise that good houskeeping was essential if the terrible sanitary conditions of slum dwellings were to be banished. Dickens's article "To Working Men" published in Household Words called on the working classes to "turn their intelligence, their energy, their numbers, their power of union... in this straight direction in ernest..." (2)