September 18, 1888.
I have spent most of the morning in clearing up business, and
dealing with papers and letters. Among the accumulations was a big
bundle of press-cuttings, all dealing with my last book. It comes
home to me that the book has been a success; it began by slaying
its thousands, like Saul, and now it has slain its tens of
thousands. It has brought me hosts of letters, from all sorts of
people, some of them very delightful and encouraging, many very
pleasant--just grateful and simple letters of thanks--some vulgar
and impertinent, some strangely intimate. What is it, I wonder,
that makes some people want to tell a writer whom they have never
seen all about themselves, their thoughts and histories? In some
cases it is an unaffected desire for sympathy from a person whom
they think perceptive and sympathetic; in some cases it proceeds, I
think, from a hysterical desire to be thought interesting, with a
faint hope, I fear, of being possibly put into a book. Some of the
letters have been simply unintelligible and inconceivable on any
hypothesis, except for the human instinct to confess, to bare the
heart, to display the secret sorrow. Many of these letters are
intensely pathetic, affecting, heart-rending; an invalid lady
writes to say that she would like to know me, and will I come to
the North of England to see her? A man writes a pretentious letter,
to ask me to go and stay with him for a week.
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