The Origins of “Sketches by Boz”: Dickens’s Letters from May 1833 to December 1834

Post #3 of the Dispatches from Dickens Series

Dickens at 23, by Rosa Emma Drummond

May 1833: The drama with Maria Beadnell and Mary Anne Leigh continues…

The next reading portion that I’m tackling of Volume One begins with Dickens’s biting letter to Mary Anne Leigh. While with the excuse of returning her “Album” which he’s not had time (or inclination, doubtless) to write in, he essentially tells her that she’d better not be spreading the rumors that he made her his confidante in the whole relationship drama with Maria Beadnell—that, while on the surface he says diplomatically that he could hardly have found a better confidante than her, it is a thinly-veiled jab: he’d have chosen a more discreet and tactful confidante if he’d intended to take one. “I would much rather mismanage my own affairs, than have them ably conducted by the officious interference of any one, because I do think that your interposition in this instance however well intentioned, has been productive of as much mischief as it has been uncalled for” and he wants to spare her “the meanness and humiliation, of acting in the petty character of an unauthorized go-between” (27).

In short, Miss Leigh: mind your own business and shut up.