The Begging-Letter Writer

"The Begging-Letter Writer" is a short story by Charles Dickens that explores themes of poverty, social class, and the impact of charity. The narrative follows a writer who is asked to compose begging letters for the impoverished, revealing the struggles of the lower class and the complexities of compassion and deception. Through sharp wit and poignant observations, Dickens critiques societal attitudes toward the needy while illustrating the moral dilemmas faced by those on both sides of the begging letter. The story serves as a commentary on the human condition and the intricate relationships between wealth, desperation, and morality.

• Short story

								
THE amount of money he annually diverts from wholesome and useful
purposes in the United Kingdom, would be a set-off against the Window
Tax.  He is one of the most shameless frauds and impositions of this
time.  In his idleness, his mendacity, and the immeasurable harm he does
to the deserving,—dirtying the stream of true benevolence, and muddling
the brains of foolish justices, with inability to distinguish between the
base coin of distress, and the true currency we have always among us,—he
is more worthy of Norfolk Island than three-fourths of the worst
characters who are sent there.  Under any rational system, he would have
been sent there long ago.

I, the writer of this paper, have been, for some time, a chosen receiver
of Begging Letters.  For fourteen years, my house has been made as
regular a Receiving House for such communications as any one of the great
branch Post-Offices is for general correspondence.  I ought to know
something of the Begging-Letter Writer.  He has besieged my door at all
hours of the day and night; he has fought my servant; he has lain in
ambush for me, going out and coming in; he has followed me out of town
into the country; he has appeared at provincial hotels, where I have been
staying for only a few hours; he has written to me from immense
distances, when I have been out of England.  He has fallen sick; he has
died and been buried; he has come to life again, and again departed from
this transitory scene: he has been his own son, his own mother, his own
baby, his idiot brother, his uncle, his aunt, his aged grandfather.  He
has wanted a greatcoat, to go to India in; a pound to set him up in life
for ever; a pair of boots to take him to the coast of China; a hat to get
him into a permanent situation under Government.  He has frequently been
exactly seven-and-sixpence short of independence.  He has had such
openings at Liverpool—posts of great trust and confidence in merchants’
houses, which nothing but seven-and-sixpence was wanting to him to
secure—that I wonder he is not Mayor of that flourishing town at the
present moment.

The natural phenomena of which he has been the victim, are of a most
astounding nature.  He has had two children who have never grown up; who
have never had anything to cover them at night; who have been continually
driving him mad, by asking in vain for food; who have never come out of
fevers and measles (which, I suppose, has accounted for his fuming his
letters with tobacco smoke, as a disinfectant); who have never changed in
the least degree through fourteen long revolving years.  As to his wife,
what that suffering woman has undergone, nobody knows.  She has always
been in an interesting situation through the same long period, and has
never been confined yet.  His devotion to her has been unceasing.  He has
never cared for himself; he could have perished—he would rather, in
short—but was it not his Christian duty as a man, a husband, and a
father,—to write begging letters when he looked at her?  (He has usually
remarked that he would call in the evening for an answer to this
question.)

He has been the sport of the strangest misfortunes.  What his brother has
done to him would have broken anybody else’s heart.  His brother went
into business with him, and ran away with the money; his brother got him
to be security for an immense sum and left him to pay it; his brother
would have given him employment to the tune of hundreds a-year, if he
would have consented to write letters on a Sunday; his brother enunciated
principles incompatible with his religious views, and he could not (in
consequence) permit his brother to provide for him.  His landlord has
never shown a spark of human feeling.  When he put in that execution I
don’t know, but he has never taken it out.  The broker’s man has grown
grey in possession.  They will have to bury him some day.

He has been attached to every conceivable pursuit.  He has been in the
army, in the navy, in the church, in the law; connected with the press,
the fine arts, public institutions, every description and grade of
business.  He has been brought up as a gentleman; he has been at every
college in Oxford and Cambridge; he can quote Latin in his letters (but
generally misspells some minor English word); he can tell you what
Shakespeare says about begging, better than you know it.  It is to be
observed, that in the midst of his afflictions he always reads the
newspapers; and rounds off his appeal with some allusion, that may be
supposed to be in my way, to the popular subject of the hour.

His life presents a series of inconsistencies.  Sometimes he has never
written such a letter before.  He blushes with shame.  That is the first
time; that shall be the last.  Don’t answer it, and let it be understood
that, then, he will kill himself quietly.  Sometimes (and more
frequently) he has written a few such letters.  Then he encloses the
answers, with an intimation that they are of inestimable value to him,
and a request that they may be carefully returned.  He is fond of
enclosing something—verses, letters, pawnbrokers’ duplicates, anything to
necessitate an answer.  He is very severe upon ‘the pampered minion of
fortune,’ who refused him the half-sovereign referred to in the enclosure
number two—but he knows me better.

He writes in a variety of styles; sometimes in low spirits; sometimes
quite jocosely.  When he is in low spirits he writes down-hill and
repeats words—these little indications being expressive of the
perturbation of his mind.  When he is more vivacious, he is frank with
me; he is quite the agreeable rattle.  I know what human nature is,—who
better?  Well!  He had a little money once, and he ran through it—as many
men have done before him.  He finds his old friends turn away from him
now—many men have done that before him too!  Shall he tell me why he
writes to me?  Because he has no kind of claim upon me.  He puts it on
that ground plainly; and begs to ask for the loan (as I know human
nature) of two sovereigns, to be repaid next Tuesday six weeks, before
twelve at noon.

Sometimes, when he is sure that I have found him out, and that there is
no chance of money, he writes to inform me that I have got rid of him at
last.  He has enlisted into the Company’s service, and is off
directly—but he wants a cheese.  He is informed by the serjeant that it
is essential to his prospects in the regiment that he should take out a
single Gloucester cheese, weighing from twelve to fifteen pounds.  Eight
or nine shillings would buy it.  He does not ask for money, after what
has passed; but if he calls at nine, to-morrow morning may he hope to
find a cheese?  And is there anything he can do to show his gratitude in
Bengal?

Once he wrote me rather a special letter, proposing relief in kind.  He
had got into a little trouble by leaving parcels of mud done up in brown
paper, at people’s houses, on pretence of being a Railway-Porter, in
which character he received carriage money.  This sportive fancy he

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