Dear Dr. Ruke,

I received your kind note yesterday & thank you much for kind enquiries. There has been nothing serious the matter & we are all fairly well again.

This morning I received enclosed card from Mrs Cohen, as you will see she says that Cohen is very ill & wld be much obliged if you could manage to go & see him. They are living at 6 Dean St. Soho on the 3rd floor. She is evidently anxious poor little woman, & if you can manage it I feel sure you will look him up.

Hoping that we may soon see you again / I remain / Yours in the Cause

Olivia Rossetti

A letter from Olivia Rossetti (later Agresti; 1875-1960) to an unidentified Dr. Ruke recommending his care to the Cohen family in Soho. On household stationary, headed with the address 3 St. Edmund’s Terrace, the family home of Rossetti’s father William Michael Rossetti in Primrose Hill, and the same address from which the Rossetti children published the earliest issues of their famous anarchist newspaper The Torch (1891-96). Given the absence of Agresti in the signature, the letter predates Rossetti’s marriage to Antonio Agresti (who first contributed to The Torch in 1894) in 1897 and their move to Italy in 1896, and is, especially given “Yours in the Cause,” very likely of The Torch era with some association. The socialist community surrounding the paper would also have fostered connections such as that documented here, between sympathetic doctor and patient; in this case coreographed by the eldest of the teenage Rossetti’s.

In a very good state of preservation; spots of foxing without any serious fading, presumed bacterial. Lightly folded across the middle as it would have been sent, with a little smudging possibly resultant. Gentle wear at the edges. Not accompanied by the Cohen card mentioned by Rossetti.