The English writer, on his part, reciprocated in no small degree the feeling of admiration which his works had aroused in the young American.  His biographer, John Forster, relates that Dickens called his attention to two sketches by Bret Harte, “The Luck of Roaring Camp” and “The Outcasts of Poker Flat,” in which, writes the biographer, “he had found such subtle strokes of character as he had not anywhere else in later years discovered; the manner resembling himself but the matter fresh to a degree that had surprised him; the painting in all respects masterly and the wild rude thing painted a quite wonderful reality.  I have rarely known him more honestly moved.”

Dickens gave evidence of this feeling of appreciation in a letter addressed to Harte in California, commending his literary efforts, inviting him to write a story for “All the Year Round” and bidding him sojourn with him at Gad’s Hill upon his first visit to England.  This letter was written shortly before Dickens’ death and, unfortunately, did not reach Bret Harte until sometime after that sad event.

When word of the passing of “The Master,” as he reverently styled him, reached Bret Harte he was in San Rafael.  He immediately sent a dispatch across the bay to San Francisco to hold back the forthcoming publication of his “Overland Monthly” for twenty-four hours, and ere that time had elapsed the poetic tribute to which the title was given of “Dickens in Camp” had been composed and sent on its way to magazine headquarters in the Western metropolis.  That was in July, 1870.

Late in the ’70s, while on his way to a consulship in Germany, Bret Harte visited London for the first time.  There he was taken in charge by Joaquin Miller, the Poet of the Sierras, who in his reminiscences relates:  “He could not rest until he stood by the grave of Dickens.  At last one twilight I led him by the hand to where some plain letters in a broad, flat stone just below the bust of Thackeray read ’Charles Dickens.’  Bret Harte is dead now and it will not hurt him in politics, where they seem to want the hard and heartless for high places, it will not hurt him in politics nor in anything anywhere to tell the plain truth, how he tried to speak but choked up, how tears ran down and fell on the stone as he bowed his bare head very low, how his hand trembled as I led him away.”

Many years later, in May, 1890, Bret Harte, in response to a request for a facsimile of the original manuscript of “Dickens in Camp” replied in part: 

“I hurriedly sent the first and only draft of the verses to the office at San Francisco, and I suppose after passing the printer’s and proof-reader’s hands it lapsed into the usual oblivion of all editorial ‘copy’.

“I remember that it was very hastily but very honestly written, and it is fair to add that it was not until later that I knew for the first time that those gentle and wonderful eyes, which I was thinking of as being closed forever, had ever rested kindly upon a line of mine.”