Letter from Charles Dickens, Cremona, to Douglas Jerrold, 1844 November 16 : autograph manuscript signed.

Repeating an invitation to Jerrold to attend a private reading of Dickens's Christmas book (i.e. The chimes) and recounting his travels in Italy, with observations on Mantua, Verona, and a visit to the Palace of the Capulets ("It is a miserable Inn."); thanking Jerrold for his "affectionate mention" of A Christmas Carol in a recent issue of Punch, urging him to come with Mrs. Jerrold and stay with him and Mrs. Dickens in Genoa and describing the comfortable accommodations they shall have there, recording his impressions of Venice ("It is the wonder of the world. Dreamy, beautiful, inconsistent, impossible, wicked, shadowy, damnable old place") and the "Pozzi" prison cells ("the cells below the water, underneath the Bridge of Sighs; the nook where the monk came at midnight to confess the political offender; the bench where he was strangled; the deadly little vault in which they tied him in a sack, and the stealthy crouching little door through which they hurried him into a boat, and bore him away to sink where no fisherman dare cast his net").