While social gatherings with friends and family can be the most enjoyable part of the holiday season, accepting too many invitations can result in exhausting treks through perilous weather to a seemingly endless round of Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Year’s parties. However, refusing invitations without offending your would-be host can be tricky, which is why we’re happy to provide this example from the UI Libraries’ Leigh Hunt manuscript collection. As Charles Dickens demonstrates in this 1854 letter to essayist, poet, editor, and political activist Hunt, one strategy for softening the blow is to counter with an invitation of your own:

“No. I won’t come and take tea with you — and I’ll tell you why. If I do, I foresee that that leg of mutton which has never come off, will walk again into the misty future, like a vagrant trotter as it has proved itself to be. Therefore I am non-producible except on this my dunghill. Name your day… I am muttonable at half-past five…”

Additional digitized correspondence from Hunt’s other friends such as Percy Bysshe Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley and William Thackeray will soon be forthcoming, thanks to the efforts of library science/book arts student and Olson Fellow Nana Diederichs.

–Jen Wolfe
Metadata Librarian