The letter ran thus: "MY DEAR LYDIA,--I belong to the great company of disappointed men.
But for you, I should now write myself down a failure like the rest.
It is only a few years since it first struck me that although I had
failed in many ambitions with which (having failed) I need not
trouble you now, I had achieved some success as a father. I had no
sooner made this discovery than it began to stick in my thoughts
that you could draw no other conclusion from the course of our life
together than that I have, with entire selfishness, used you
throughout as my mere amanuensis and clerk, and that you are under
no more obligation to me for your attainments than a slave is to his
master for the strength which enforced labor has given to his
muscles. Lest I should leave you suffering from so mischievous and
oppressive an influence as a sense of injustice, I now justify
myself to you.
"I have never asked you whether you remember your mother. Had you at
any time broached the subject, I should have spoken quite freely to
you on it; but as some wise instinct led you to avoid it, I was
content to let it rest until circumstances such as the present
should render further reserve unnecessary. If any regret at having
known so little of the woman who gave you birth troubles you, shake
it off without remorse. She was the most disagreeable person I ever
knew. I speak dispassionately. All my bitter personal feeling
against her is as dead while I write as it will be when you read. I
have even come to cherish tenderly certain of her characteristics
which you have inherited, so that I confidently say that I never,
since the perishing of the infatuation in which I married, felt more
kindly toward her than I do now. I made the best, and she the worst,
of our union for six years; and then we parted. I permitted her to
give what account of the separation she pleased, and allowed her
about five times as much money as she had any right to expect. By
these means I induced her to leave me in undisturbed possession of
you, whom I had already, as a measure of precaution, carried off to
Belgium. The reason why we never visited England during her lifetime
was that she could, and probably would, have made my previous
conduct and my hostility to popular religion an excuse for wresting
you from me. I need say no more of her, and am sorry it was
necessary to mention her at all.