Dickens Charles - Pictures from Italy

Charles Dickenss Italy was made up of violent contrasts. In Genoa, where he stayed first, he noted the rapid passage from a street of stately edifices, into a maze of the vilest squalor (p. ). Dickens presents Italy like a chaotic magic-lantern show, fascinated both by the spectacle it offers, and by himself as spectator, sometimes in pursuit of new sensations, sometimes confirming what he already knows for Italy, as he is well aware, is a country already well represented within English culture, however freshly aspects of it may strike the new visitor.

This is the record of travelling impelled by restlessness it is such a delight to me to leave new scenes behind, and still go on, encountering newer scenes, Dickens writes (p. ).

The whole of Dickenss stay in Venice is encompassed by the heading An Italian Dream. The reversal of normal topography the phantom streets which are canals and the buildings made by fairy hands (p. ). This was no dream: rather, it is an indication of the way in which Dickens, in the midst of the aesthetic pleasures which Italy has to offer, keeps returning not just to the continual presence of poverty, but to the persistent undercurrent of political cruelty. This undercurrent was still to be found in the contemporary Italy that Dickens was visiting, and its underpresence in this work is something to which we shall return.

Pictures from Italy is an account of Dickenss extended stay in Italy during 1844 and 1845. This was a deliberate break from novel writing: the final number of Martin Chuzzlewit came out on 30 June 1844, and his next novel, Dombey and Son, began publication three and a half months after Pictures from Italy appeared, on 30 September 1846.

By the time that Dickens published Pictures from Italy, travel books about Italy were far from a novelty. Still less were English tourists a rarity in the country: James Buzard, in his excellent The Beaten Track (1993), which studies the relationship between tourism, literature and culture in Europe between 1800 and 1918, writes of the pervasive impression of English ubiquity in Italy in the nineteenth century, an impression created partly through the tendency of English residents and visitors to cluster in the same places, and the increasing availability of English amenities in the most visited locations.). Nor, in some ways, is Dickens an atypical visitor. He does not fail to note down a catalogue of complaints against precisely those things which most irritated and distressed English visitors to the Continent: the brutality of foreigners towards animals; dirt; garlic-eating; the constant demand for tips; solid, lumpy furniture; women searching for lice in each others hair; a lack of reverence towards the dead; the peculiarly unhygienic practice of licking or kissing icons or statues toes or the stones of a church pavement; gesticulations; mangled pronunciation of English names; and the ubiquitous presence of mosquitoes, flies and fleas.

But however firmly Dickens establishes his national identity through such reactions to his immediate environment, what he determinedly refuses to do is to offer the kind of amalgamation of topographical notation and history that characterized so many examples of current English travel writing. Not for him the approach taken by Catherine Taylor, in her Letters from Italy to a Younger Sister (184041), where she claims that she has endeavoured to give such brief historical sketches as might lead to a further and deeper study of the events in which Italy has acted so great a part; in literature, to advert to the treasure which the Italian language contains and in art, to furnish such information as might assist in the formation of a pure and correct taste.). And, we shall see, despite his admiration for High Renaissance art, Dickens had plenty of scepticism about the unquestioned claim that those such as Roscoe made for the greatness of the Italian past: it contained far too much corruption and cruelty for that.

In Pictures from Italy, Charles Dickens is constructing not just a version of a country, but of himself. He announces his concern, at the outset, with those places to which the imaginations of most people are attracted in a greater or lesser degree (p. ), but in practice what emerge are recreations of those locations and moments which particularly struck him, strongly filtered through his own personality at times exuberant, at others caught in a kind of melancholy passive reverie. Again, Dickens was not the first traveller to Italy to foreground this way of writing. Frances Trollope opens A Visit to Italy (1842) by commenting on the numerous accounts that already existed, and then by justifying one more: