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WIGGIN, Kate Douglas : A Child's Journey with Dickens. (SIGNED PRESENTATION COPY TO THE LIBRARY OF THE HOSPITAL IN HARROW WHERE THE AUTHOR DIED)

Hodder and Stoughton. London. 1912

First edition, UK. Slim 8vo. 34pp. Portrait frontis. of Dickens with tissue guard. Bowden House, Harrow stamp to front paste-down. Beige paper covered boards with brown cloth spine, sl. wear to extremities, occasional light foxing o/w VG+. Presentation copy from the author to the library of Bowden House, in Harrow. She writes on the front free endpaper, "I was the child and this my first journey outside my little New England village. It chanced that I met .... on the way . Kate Douglas Wiggin" and beneath, "To Bowden House Library. From the author, a happy patient, 1923." This is a particularly moving and unique presentation copy as it was here that Wiggin died, after contracting bronchial pneumonia. During the spring of 1923 Kate Wiggin travelled to England as a New York delegate to the Dickens Fellowship Conference. She became ill and died, at the age of 66, in Harrow. At her request, her ashes were brought home to Maine and scattered over the Saco River. This is possibly the last book that the author of 'Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm' signed. Bowden House is still a health facility on Harrow Hill but now helps patients with psychiatric problems and addictions. In March 1868 eleven year old Kate Douglas Smith met her literary hero Charles Dickens on a train while travelling between Portland, Maine and Boston, Massachusetts. He was on a second reading tour of America. At fifty-six he was nearing the end of his life. His novels and this meeting were to have a profound effect on Kate's life.

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