Portraits · Novelists · VII of X
Charles Dickens
1812–1870 · Novelist
Read it in the source →…a habit of composition, and of disciplining one's thoughts like a regiment, and of studying the art of putting each soldier into his right place.
...a habit of composition, and of disciplining one's thoughts like a regiment, and of studying the art of putting each soldier into his right place.
Charles Dickens wrote this in February 1851 to his friend Mary Boyle, after spending two hours tightening a piece she had sent him. Good writing, he told her, comes from a habit: thoughts drilled, every soldier in his right place.
He hoped she would not be alarmed by his use of the pruning-knife.
Letter to Miss Mary Boyle, Devonshire Terrace, 21 February 1851. The Letters of Charles Dickens, ed. Georgina Hogarth and Mamie Dickens (London: Chapman and Hall, 1880), vol. I, p. 245.
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