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To Marian Evans   30 March [1873]1

16, Montague St | Portman Sq

March 30th.—

My dear Mrs. Lewes.

I hope that you will forgive me for venturing to beg a great favour. Yours & Mr. Lewes’ kindness towards me when I have called is my sole & rather poor excuse.2 My eldest daughter & her husband, Mr. Litchfield,3 have the strongest wish to be allowed to call on you some Sunday evening.— I think that it will be some recommendation of Mr. Litchfield when I tell you that he has aided in every possible way during many years the Working Mens College; having first taught mathematiks & of late music & singing.— If you will grant your permission, the briefest line on a Post-Card will suffice. If I do not hear, I will understand that you have, as is too probable, already too many callers.

I beg leave to remain like so many other englishmen & english women4 | Yours very truly obliged | Charles Darwin

My wife complains that she has been very hardly treated, & that I ought to have asked permission for her to call on you with me when we next come to London; but I tell that I still have some shreds of modesty.—

1
The year is established by the relationship between this letter and the letter from Marian Evans, 31 March 1873.
2
CD had first visited Evans and her partner George Henry Lewes in 1868 (Correspondence vol. 16, letters from G. H. Lewes, 12 November 1868 and [17 November 1868], and letters to G. H. Lewes, [13 November 1868] and 18 November 1868).
4
CD was an admirer of Evans’s writing; he and his family had read a number of her novels, published under the pseudonym George Eliot, including Adam Bede (Eliot 1859; see Correspondence vol. 7, letter to J. D. Hooker, [26 May 1859]), Mill on the Floss, and Silas Marner (Eliot 1860 and Eliot 1861; see Correspondence vol. 13, letter to J. D. Hooker, 27 [or 28 September 1865]).

Manuscript Alterations and Comments

1.2 me] interl

Please cite as “DCP-LETT-8831,” in Ɛpsilon: The Charles Darwin Collection accessed on 5 June 2025, https://epsilon.ac.uk/view/dcp-data/letters/DCP-LETT-8831