The Charles Dickens Letters Project

To MADAME PAULINE VIARDOT,1 14 OCTOBER 1867

MS Live Auctioneers catalogue, April 2005.

GAD’S HILL PLACE, | HIGHAM BY ROCHESTER, KENT.

Monday Fourteenth October, 1867

My Dear Madame Viardot

I send you, out of my heart, my most earnest thanks for your affectionate note and kind wishes. I would that I could always have you among my American audiences, for there is no genius in this world more sympathetic and responsive than yours,2 or that I could have a greater pride and interest in addressing! Your photograph is one of the best I ever saw, and is already stationed in a post of honour in this house. I send my kind regards to M. Viardot,3 and am ever

Your affectionate Friend | And enthusiastic admirer

CHARLES DICKENS

• 1. Pauline Viardot, née Garcia (1821-1910). French mezzo-soprano, of Spanish origin. Made her stage debut, London, 1839. Greatly admired for her musical and dramatic gifts, in Rossini, Meyerbeer, and above all Gluck. Married (1840; not 1841, as in Pilgrim Letters 7, p. 224n) Louis Viardot; their home established as a centre for writers, musicians, and artists: the Russian writer, Turgenev, a particularly close member of her circle. See further Alan Watts, “CD and Pauline Viardot”, Dickensian, 91 (Winter 1995), 171-8.
• 2. Viardot had presumably sent CD best wishes for his American tour (he sailed in November). It was Viardot’s responsive power above all that marked her out: Berlioz decribed her in Gluck’s Orfeo (a role she performed over 130 times, 1859- 63) as fusing “an indomitable verve, thrilling and commanding, with a deep sensibility and an almost shattering ability to express great sorrow” (The Art of Music [A Travers Chants], trans. Elizabeth Csicsery-Rónay, Bloomington & Indianapolis, 1994, p.77).
• 3. Louis Viardot (1800-83), journalist and miscellaneous writer; director of the Théâtre Italien, 1838-40; radical in politics: see Pilgrim Letters 7, p. 763n.