Pictures from Italy

The 1846 publication recounts Dickens' impressions of his 1844 travels around Italy with his usual penetrating detail and social awareness.

Charles Dickens (Author)

9781108033848, Cambridge University Press

Paperback / softback, published 27 October 2011

284 pages, 4 b/w illus.
21.6 x 14 x 1.6 cm, 0.36 kg

In 1844 Charles Dickens (1812–70) and his family moved to Italy for a year, eventually settling in Genoa. This book, Dickens' second travel memoir, describes his experience of travelling through France and exploring Italy. Based on letters to friends, particularly John Forster, it was first published in instalments from January to March 1846 in the Daily News (a new radical newspaper which Dickens himself founded and briefly edited). The edition in book form reissued here appeared in May 1846. The main focus of the book is the northern regions of Italy, including Tuscany, Milan and Venice. It also includes substantial sections on Rome and Naples as well as a brief sketch of Switzerland. Landscapes, architecture, lodgings and food are described with selective but penetrating detail. The shrewd social observations characteristic of Dickens' novels are found here, especially in his critical remarks about poverty, popular religion and the Catholic clergy.

One reader's passport
Going through France
Lyons, the Rhone, and the Goblin of Avignon
Avignon to Genoa
Genoa and its neighbourhood
To Parma, Modena, and Bologna
Through Bologna and Ferrara
An Italian dream
By Verona, Mantua, and Milan, across the Pass of the Simplon into Switzerland
To Rome by Pisa and Siena
Rome
A rapid diorama.

Subject Areas: Literary studies: c 1800 to c 1900 [DSBF]