With love to the ladies, ever faithfully,

    C.D.

During my stay in England in that summer of 1869, I made many excursions with Dickens both around the city and into the country.  Among the most memorable of these London rambles was a visit to the General Post-Office, by arrangement with the authorities there, a stroll among the cheap theatres and lodging-houses for the poor, a visit to Furnival’s Inn and the very room in it where “Pickwick” was written, and a walk through the thieves’ quarter.  Two of these expeditions were made on two consecutive nights, under the protection of police detailed for the service.  On one of these nights we also visited the lock-up houses, watch-houses, and opium-eating establishments.  It was in one of the horrid opium-dens that he gathered the incidents which he has related in the opening pages of “Edwin Drood.”  In a miserable court we found the haggard old woman blowing at a kind of pipe made of an old penny ink-bottle.  The identical words which Dickens puts into the mouth of this wretched creature in “Edwin Drood” we heard her croon as we leaned over the tattered bed on which she was lying.  There was something hideous in the way this woman kept repeating, “Ye’ll pay up according, deary, won’t ye?” and the Chinamen and Lascars made never-to-be-forgotten pictures in the scene.  I watched Dickens intently as he went among these outcasts of London, and saw with what deep sympathy he encountered the sad and suffering in their horrid abodes.  At the door of one of the penny lodging-houses (it was growing toward morning, and the raw air almost cut one to the bone), I saw him snatch a little child out of its poor drunken mother’s arms, and bear it in, filthy as it was, that it might be warmed and cared for.  I noticed that whenever he entered one of these wretched rooms he had a word of cheer for its inmates, and that when he left the apartment he always had a pleasant “Good night” or “God bless you” to bestow upon them.  I do not think his person was ever recognized in any of these haunts, except in one instance.  As we entered a low room in the worst alley we had yet visited, in which were huddled together some forty or fifty half-starved-looking wretches, I noticed a man among the crowd whispering to another and pointing out Dickens.  Both men regarded him with marked interest all the time he remained in the room, and tried to get as near him, without observation, as possible.  As he turned to go out, one of these men pressed forward and said, “Good night, sir,” with much feeling, in reply to Dickens’s parting word.