Page:The Story of the Cheeryble Grants.djvu/31

Rh it?” His difficulty was that this was a footnote written by the editor of the old volume forty years after the event, and was apparently right in the teeth of Mr. Dickens’s own words written and published only nine years after the event in question.

The above was followed on March 12th by the following note:—

The Rev. W. Hume Elliot writes:— “Kindly allow me to refer briefly to a paragraph in the Miscellany column of the ‘Manchester Guardian’ of Tuesday last. I have a very reverent regard for the memory of the author of ‘Nicholas Nickleby,’ and nothing short of incontestable evidence ought to convince one that if Charles Dickens had met the Grants in 1838-9 in social intercourse, either at Mr. Gilbert Winter’s or anywhere else, he would, in 1848, have deliberately written these words:— ‘The originals of the Brothers Cheeryble, with whom I never interchanged any communication in my life.’ — (Preface to ‘Nicholas Nickleby,’ dated ‘Devonshire Terrace, May, 1848.’) For years after 1848 Daniel Grant — the younger Cheeryble — was one of the best-known figures on the streets of Manchester, yet, so far as I know, this explicit statement of Mr. Dickens was not challenged by anybody at the time.” 