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Who really said it

There are hopes the bloom of whose beauty would be spoiled by the trammels of description

Not Charles Dickens — actually Ellen Pickering Ellen Pickering 1802–1843 · British novelist
Disputed Free to reuse

The sentence is Ellen Pickering’s, not Dickens’s. Lord Clanellon speaks it to Florence Lyle on page 298 of volume one of her novel The Merchant’s Daughter (London: Richard Bentley, 1836) — confirmed word for word in the scanned first edition. Dickens was first credited in Henry Southgate’s 1862 quotation anthology, and the error has travelled ever since.

Last verified 17 Aug 2026 · how we verify · spot an error?

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Disputed credit — copy with the correction

“There are hopes the bloom of whose beauty would be spoiled by the trammels of description” There are hopes the bloom of whose beauty would be spoiled by the trammels of description: too lovely, too delicate, too sacred for words, they should be only known through the sympathy of hearts! — Ellen Pickering, The Merchant's Daughter, vol. 1 (London: Richard Bentley, 1836), 298. Commonly misattributed to Charles Dickens; the Dickens credit dates to Henry Southgate's 1862 anthology. Verified at Quotle.info.

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In context

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Provenance

The source

Work
The Merchant’s Daughter
Published
London: Richard Bentley, 1836 · three volumes
Location
Vol. 1, chapter 9, page 298
Speaker
Lord Clanellon, to Florence Lyle

“No, indeed, Lord Clanellon! I am a poor, stupid creature, unable to understand the text of your poetical extravagance without explanatory notes.”

“There are hopes the bloom of whose beauty would be spoiled by the trammels of description: too lovely, too delicate, too sacred for words, they should be only known through the sympathy of hearts!”

Florence looked silent amaze, though a faint glow came on her cheek, perhaps from his fixed gaze and a flickering consciousness. Vol. 1, p. 298

Pickering’s 1836 text has no comma after “hopes” and a colon before “too lovely.” Southgate’s 1862 reprint inserted the comma, and most modern quote sites carry a semicolon — but the words themselves have not changed.

Scanned first edition, 1836
Read volume one at the Internet Archive
The Merchant’s Daughter, vol. 1 (Bentley, 1836), Internet Archive scan

How the credit moved

  • 1836 — The line appears on page 298 of The Merchant’s Daughter, vol. 1, whose title page names no author at all: it reads only “by the author of ‘The Heiress,’ ‘Agnes Serle,’ &c.” Scanned first edition ↗
  • 25 January 1850 — The Lincolnshire Chronicle reprints the passage in its “Varieties” column with no author named, cutting it loose from the novel. Quote Investigator ↗
  • 1862 — Henry Southgate’s Many Thoughts of Many Minds prints it under the heading “HOPE—Beauty of” and signs it simply “Dickens.” Southgate’s compilation ↗
  • 1884 — Edward Parsons Day’s Day’s Collacon welds Pickering’s sentence onto a genuine Dickens passage about budding hopes from Dombey and Son, crediting the merged text to Dickens. Quote Investigator ↗
Public domain

The Merchant’s Daughter was published by Richard Bentley in London in 1836, so the novel and this sentence have been in the public domain in the United States for well over a century. Ellen Pickering died in 1843, the text is English in the original, and no later translation or edition is involved.

Rights status is our research, not legal advice — and copyright varies by country and edition. For commercial or published use, confirm with the rightsholder. See terms.

Fact-check

Why Dickens gets the credit

This is one of the tidiest misattributions on record: a real sentence by a real novelist, lifted out of its novel by a newspaper, handed to a more famous name by a Victorian anthologist, and never given back.

Charles Dickens Misattributed

Dickens never wrote it. The line belongs to Lord Clanellon in Ellen Pickering’s The Merchant’s Daughter (1836), volume one, page 298. The Dickens credit begins with Henry Southgate’s 1862 anthology Many Thoughts of Many Minds, which prints the passage under “HOPE—Beauty of” and signs it “Dickens” with no work named. Southgate, 1862 ↗

Dombey and Son, chapter 10 Conflated

Dickens did write about hopes in floral terms — “It is when our budding hopes are nipped beyond recovery by some rough wind, that we are the most disposed to picture to ourselves what flowers they might have borne, if they had flourished” — but that is about hopes destroyed, not hopes too lovely to describe. Quote Investigator shows Day’s Collacon (1884) running the two passages together under Dickens’s name. Dombey and Son at Project Gutenberg ↗

The version circulating online Lightly altered

The words are Pickering’s exactly; only the punctuation has drifted. Her 1836 text reads “There are hopes the bloom of whose beauty” with no comma, and closes on an exclamation mark. Southgate’s 1862 reprint added the comma after “hopes” and ended on a full stop, and most quote sites today substitute a semicolon for her colon. The 1836 text ↗

Modern quotation databases No source given

Pages crediting the line to Dickens name no book, chapter or letter — because there is none to name. An attribution with no work behind it is the standard signature of a quotation that has been passed hand to hand rather than read in place. Quote Investigator’s account ↗

The sentence is Ellen Pickering’s, written for The Merchant’s Daughter in 1836 and printed on page 298 of volume one. Quote Investigator traced the Dickens credit to Henry Southgate in 1862, and the scanned first edition confirms the original. Quote Investigator ↗

Context

What it actually means

Read as an aphorism about hope, the line sounds like philosophy. Read in place, it is a man dodging a question. Lord Clanellon has been talking in what Florence Lyle calls “poetical extravagance,” and when she asks him flatly to explain himself, this is his answer — a beautifully constructed refusal to say out loud that he is in love with her. Florence, unimpressed, replies that his meaning is still beyond her comprehension and suggests they send for someone “more versed in the sentimental.”

That courtship scene is exactly what the misattribution erases. Once The Lincolnshire Chronicle lifted the sentence into a filler column in 1850, it stopped being a character’s evasion and became a free-floating thought about hope — the shape a sentence has to take before an anthologist can file it under a subject heading and sign it with whichever famous name is nearest.

“Too lovely, too delicate, too sacred for words” — a man declining to say he is in love.

How a novelist disappears

Ellen Pickering was not obscure in her own time. She began publishing around 1825, produced sixteen three-volume novels, and earned roughly £100 a year at her peak — a working professional in the circulating-library trade. Her most successful book, Nan Darrell (1839), was still being reprinted in the 1860s. She died of scarlet fever at Bath on 25 November 1843.

Two things made her easy to overwrite. Her novels appeared in the anonymous house style of the period — the 1836 title page of The Merchant’s Daughter credits only “the author of ‘The Heiress,’ ‘Agnes Serle,’ &c.” — so a sentence quoted out of it carried no name to lose. And by the time Southgate’s anthology assigned it to Dickens in 1862, Pickering had been dead nearly twenty years, with no estate and no reputation to object.

The Dictionary of National Biography’s judgement on her has held: she enjoyed real success among her contemporaries and achieved no lasting legacy. This sentence is the one piece of her work most people have read — under someone else’s name.

Explore

Filed under

More provenance-checked quotes on the same theme, each with its reuse status.

Hope Simplicity

Go further

Dig deeper

Trusted places to keep pulling the thread — primary archives, fact-checks, and scholarship. We show how we used each one before you leave.

Quote Investigator: the full investigationquoteinvestigator.com

Traces the line from Pickering's 1836 novel through the 1850 newspaper reprint to Southgate (1862) and Day's Collacon (1884).
The Merchant's Daughter, vol. 1 (1836)archive.org

Scanned Richard Bentley first edition. The quotation is on page 298, in chapter 9.
Many Thoughts of Many Minds (1862)archive.org

Henry Southgate's compilation, where the passage appears under "HOPE—Beauty of" signed "Dickens" — the earliest documented false credit.
Dombey and Songutenberg.org

Dickens's actual budding-hopes passage, in chapter 10 — the text later fused with Pickering's sentence.
Ellen Pickering in the Dictionary of National Biographyen.wikisource.org

Nineteenth-century biography listing her novels, including The Merchant's Daughter (1836), and her death at Bath in 1843.
Ellen Pickering at the Circulating Libraryvictorianresearch.org

Bibliographic database of Victorian fiction, recording The Merchant's Daughter as 3 vols., London: Bentley, 1836.

The real author

Who was Ellen Pickering?

Ellen Pickering

1802–1843 · British novelist, Bath

Ellen Pickering was an English novelist who wrote sixteen three-volume novels for the circulating-library market between the mid-1820s and her death in 1843. She was popular and professionally successful in her lifetime — Nan Darrell (1839) was reprinted into the 1860s — but her books were published in the anonymous “by the author of” style of the period, and her name faded fast after she died of scarlet fever at Bath on 25 November 1843. Her best-known sentence has spent well over a century attributed to Charles Dickens.

For writers & researchers

Cite this

Primary source

Ellen Pickering, The Merchant's Daughter, 3 vols. (London: Richard Bentley, 1836), 1:298. The earliest known attribution to Charles Dickens is Henry Southgate, comp., Many Thoughts of Many Minds (London: Griffin, Bohn, and Company, 1862), 292, per Quote Investigator, "Quote Origin: There Are Hopes the Bloom of Whose Beauty Would Be Spoiled by the Trammels of Description," 21 November 2018.

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