Page:Fitzgerald - Pickwickian manners and customs (1897).djvu/96

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88
PICKWICKIAN ORIGINALS.

success with you on Sunday. When you have sufficiently recovered from the fatigues of publication, will you just let me know from your books how we stand. Drawing £10 one day, and £20 another, and so forth, I have become rather mystified, and jumbled up our accounts in my brain, in a very incomprehensible state.

"Faithfully yours,

"Charles Dickens."

This must have been written at the conclusion of the story in 1837, and is in a very modest tone considering how triumphant had been the success. Connected with this is a paper of yet more interest, a receipt for payment for one of the early numbers.

For this Pickwickian Banquet, he had reluctantly to give up one at the home of his new friend Forster. In an unpublished letter, he writes to him as "Dear Sir"—the beginning of a four-and-thirty years' friendship—"I have been so much engaged in the pleasing occupation of moving." He was unable to go to his new friend to dinner