Not identified. The Office Book assigns "The Uses of Sorrow" to "Sophy Traddles", the name being written in quotation marks. The memorandum attached to the entry records a post-office order sent to Miss Norris, Camden House, Peckham. "The Son of Sorrow" is also assigned to "Sophy Traddles", with memorandum of post-office order to Miss Norris, Camden Lodge, Peckharn. For this entry both the name and the notation are marked out; by the marked-out name is written the direction "(See No. 7)"—i.e., the number in which "The Uses of Sorrow" appeared.

The Post Office London Directory, 1850, gives no Camden House or Camden Lodge at Peckharn, but does give Camden Place. No Norris is listed at Camden Place, but two schools are there listed: Robert Sugden's boarding school, and the "ladies' school" of the Misses Louisa and Emily Grove. The contributor who sent her verses to H.W. under the Dickensian pseudonym may have been a young lady attending or teaching at the Misses Grove's school.

The name of Tommy Traddles's "dearest girl" first appears in David Copperfield in chap. xxxiv ("My Aunt Astonishes Me"), one of the three chapters that formed the eleventh monthly installment, published March 1850. Traddles's marriage to Sophy is reported in chap. lix ("Return"), which formed part of the nineteenth monthly installment, published (with the twentieth) in November 1850. In her pseudonym, the contributor thus anticipated by more than five months Dickens's announcement of the happy conclusion of Traddles's love story.

Harper's reprinted "The Uses of Sorrow" with acknowledgment to H.W.

Author: Anne Lohrli; © University of Toronto Press, 1971.