The Charles Dickens Letters Project

To JAMES LIVERMORE,1 14 AUGUST 1845

Text from facsimile in Lion Heart Autographs online catalogue, Oct 2022.

Devonshire Terrace
Thursday Fourteenth August 1845.

Dear Mr Livermore.

I have had a cask of Italian wine sent me, from Carrara.2 And I want you to be good enough to send up a man tomorrow morning, to bottle it off. It seems there was an old hole in the cask; and thirteen gallons have leaked away on the passage!3 So I want to take care of the rest, without delay. It is only the common wine of the country, but I wish to see whether it will keep in this climate. Six or seven dozen bottles will be quite as many as I shall require, I fear, after this waste.4

            Faithfully Yours
            CHARLES DICKENS

Mr Livermore.

• 1. James Stafford Livermore (1805-87), importer of foreign wines and spirits, with premises at 27 Mincing Lane.
• 2. CD had visited Carrara from 21 to 23 January 1845; see Pilgrim Letters 4, p. 249. He remarked of the city: "There is a beautiful little theatre there, built of marble; and they had it illuminated that night, in my honour. There was really a very fair opera: but it is curious that the chorus has been always, time out of mind, made up of labourers in the quarries, who don't know a note of music, and sing entirely by ear. It was crammed to excess, and I had a great reception; a deputation waiting upon us in the box, and the orchestra turning out in a body afterwards and serenading us at Mr. Walton's (see To John Forster in Pilgrim Letters 4, p. 251). CD returned to the city on 7 April 1845, after noting, in a letter to Angus Fletcher, "If I ever said, I should be in Carrara by the first of April, it must have been after innumerable fiaschi of Carrara Wine. For no such idea ever entered my rational head, or my rational pocket-book, wherein I find myself entered as due to leave Florence either on Friday the fourth or Saturday the Fifth of April. To that purpose I still hold, with a bulldog tenacity. So write me a note, addressed Poste Restante Florence, . . . with a view of passing One Day in and about some quarries or other" (Pilgrim Letters 4, p. 288). He later described this second visit, in a letter to Madame de la Rue, as "an evening of intoxicating and rapturous excitement" (Pilgrim Letters 4, p. 389). For his positive impressions of Carrara — described as "very picturesque and bold" — see the chapter "To Rome by Pisa and Siena" in Pictures from Italy.
• 3. CD returned to Devonshire Terrace, after his continental sojourn, on 3 July 1845.
• 4. On 1 Sept 1845 CD paid Livermore £20: too large a sum to have been solely for the service requested; it must have included the purchase of other wines or spirits. Livermore was also paid £16.15s on 24 Feb 1843, and £53.14s on 26 May 1846 (MS Messrs Coutts).