"I sat beside [Cruikshank] at dinner at Dickens's, in Devonshire Terrace..."
Autograph letter signed ("Henry W. Longfellow"), to the English novelist Fanny Aikin Kortright, mentioning dinner with Cruikshank and others at Dickens' place.
Cambridge, Mass: February 15, 1878.
Price: $2,500.00
About the item
Bifolium. 3 pp. 8vo. "I sat beside [Cruikshank] at dinner at Dickens's, in Devonshire Terrace..." Minor dustsoiling. Not in Hilen, The Letters of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.
Item #315675
A terrific Longfellow letter. In part:
"It gives me very great pleasure to sign the paper that has been sent me. But as I am not a British subject, I think Lord Beaconsfield [Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli] will smile when he reads my name. No matter if he does, provided he smiles on the paper.
It was not without emotion I saw the name of George Cruikshank. I remember him so well in 1842, when he was in full power and activity. I sat beside him at dinner at Dickens's, in Devonshire Terrace. [Clarkson Frederick] Stanfield was also there, and [Daniel] Maclise.
Trusting that this petition will be granted, and wishing you all success in all ways...."
Cruikshank had died just two weeks prior, on February 1, at age 85. Longfellow had been one of Dickens's earliest American admirers, and was part of a group of five friends and Harvard colleagues who formed a kind of Pickwick Club of their own, styled the Five of Clubs. When Dickens arrived in Boston in 1842 for his first American visit it was to extraordinary acclaim. Longfellow spent all of a Sunday showing Dickens around Boston and Cambridge, initiating a friendship that would last the rest of the two men's lives. Longfellow visited England later that year and stayed at Dickens's house 1 Devonshire Terrace at Dickens's insistence. For more on the friendship between Longfellow and Dickens, including Longfellow's account of the dinner with Cruikshank et al, see "Longfellow and Dickens. The Story of a Trans-Atlantic Friendship" by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow Dana" https://www.hwlongfellow.org/pdf/danamanuscript.pdf
The "paper" that Kortright sent Longfellow to sign seems to have been a petition seeking a ban on the practice of vivisection, or performing operations on living animals for the purposes of research. Kortright (an author of sensationilst novels) was on the executive committe of the International Association for the Total Suppression of Vivisection.
