Remember me to all.  I will endeavour to bear my miseries patiently.  A person in my state of health should not have such miseries to bear.  Write a short note to my sister, saying you have heard from me.  Severn is very well.  If I were in better health I would urge your coming to Rome.  I fear there is no one can give me any comfort.  Is there any news of George?  O that something fortunate had ever happened to me or my brothers!—­then I might hope,—­but despair is forced upon me as a habit.  My dear Brown, for my sake, be her advocate for ever.  I cannot say a word about Naples; I do not feel at all concerned in the thousand novelties around me.  I am afraid to write to her.  I should like her to know that I do not forget her.  Oh, Brown, I have coals of fire in my breast.  It surprises me that the human heart is capable of containing and bearing so much misery.  Was I born for this end?  God bless her, and her mother, and my sister, and George, and his wife, and you, and all!...

THOMAS HOOD

1799-1845

To CHARLES DICKENS

American Notes

17 Elm Tree Road, 12 Oct. 1842.

DEAR DICKENS,

Can you let me have an early copy of the American Notes so that I may review it in the New Monthly?  Is it really likely to be ready as advertised?  I aim this at Devonshire Place, supposing you to be returned, for with these winds ’tis no fit time for the coast.  But your bones are not so weather unwise (for ignorance is bliss) as mine.  I should have asked this by word of mouth in Devonshire Place, but the weather has kept me indoors.  It is no fiction that the complaint, derived from Dutch malaria seven years ago, is revived by Easterly winds.  Otherwise I have been better than usual, and ’never say die’.  Don’t forget about the Yankee Notes.  I never had but one American friend, and lost him through a good crop of pears.  He paid us a visit in England; whereupon in honour of him, a pear tree, which had never borne fruit to speak of within memory of man, was loaded with ninety dozen of brown somethings.  Our gardener said they were a keeping sort, and would be good at Christmas; whereupon, as our Jonathan was on the eve of sailing for the States, we sent him a few dozens to dessert him on the voyage.  Some he put at the bottom of a trunk (he wrote to us) to take to America; but he could not have been gone above a day or two, when all our pears began to rot! His would, of course, by sympathy, and I presume spoilt his linen or clothes, for I have never heard of him since.  Perhaps he thought I had done him on purpose, and for sartin the tree, my accomplice, never bore any more pears, good or bad, after that supernatural crop.

Pray present my respects for me to Mrs. Dickens.  How she must enjoy being at home and discovering her children, after her Columbusing, and only discovering America!