Royal Academy Banquet 1853

Speech at the Royal Academy Banquet (30 April 1853).

Dickens, Charles

Dickens, Charles. 'Speech at the Royal Academy Banquet' (30 April 1853). Dickens Search. Eds. Emily Bell and Lydia Craig. Accessed [date]. https://dickenssearch.com/speeches/1853-04-30_Speech_Royal-Academy-Banquet.

After tendering his acknowledgement of the toast, and the honour done him in associating his name with it, Dickens said that those acknowledgements were not the less heartfelt because he was unable to recognize in this toast the President’s usual disinterestedness; since English literature could hardly be remembered in any place, and certainly not in a school of art, without a very distinct remembrance of his own tasteful writings, to say nothing of that other and better part of himself which, unfortunately was not visible upon these occasions.

If, like the noble lord, the Commander-in-Chief, he might venture to illustrate his brief thanks with one word of reference to the noble picture painted by a very dear friend of his, which was a little eclipsed that evening by the radiant and rubicund chair which the President now so happily toned down, he would beg leave to say that, as literature could nowhere be more appropriately honoured than in that place, so he thought she could nowhere feel a higher gratification in the ties that bound her to the sister arts. He ever felt in that place that literature found, through their instrumentality, always a new expression, and in a universal language.