Autograph Letter Signed. 6pp. To her uncle Emil Lehmann, German translator of “The Mystery of Edwin Drood”, Dickens’ last book, posthumously published though never completed: 

She writes: “…your letter of queries on the subject of Edwin Drood reached me. You must have heard of the sudden death of poor Charles Dickens. It seems somehow incredible that he who has amused us so long and so often should be gone – there will be few…in England who in hearing of his loss will not feel as if they had lost a personal friend. Only on Monday last, I heard from Anthony Trollope… looking better than he had looked for a long time…he fancied ‘Edwin Drood’ was finished, all but the two last numbers. Do you know if this is the case? And will this sad event stop your translation?... I think he died in time, for to judge from the involved and affected style of ‘Edwin Drood’, the master’s hand was losing its cunning…”  Zimmern, then only 24 years old, would later become both a respected author and the first English translator of Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and the epic Persian poetry of Firdusi (a now rare volume with etchings by Alma Tadema). Conversely, her uncle was German translator of notable British writers, including George Eliot and Dickens. (Charles Darwin once said he would have been “honored” to have Lehmann translate his scientific writings.)  But even Lehmann struggled with some puzzling phrases in “Drood”.  Here, Zimmern advises him (“my opinion in all humility”) about the meaning of “gentlemanly ashes”; the “rare closet” with “a lock in mid-air”, “yellow continuations” (trousers); the “thorn of anxiety”, found in the “bombastic harangue” of the character Grewgious; “some queer Joss” (carved image of a Chinese God); “groin” (architectural meaning); “the baleful tree of Java” (Upas Tree); “convey the wise it call” (Shakespearean, but used by Dickens in a “wholly different sense”); “Circomlocution Department” (a Dickens invention during the Crimean War to refer to the “tedious.doings” of Government”, now “in vogue” and  “often employed” by Trollope). One phrase she explains (“railway clips”) does not seem to appear at all in the now-standard Drood text.  A remarkable literary letter.