Pictures from Italy - Charles Dickens

For the Back to the Classics 2021 category, Adventure or Travel, I had a couple of possibilities but landed on Pictures from Italy, by Charles Dickens.

In 1844, after the disappointing reception of Martin Chuzzlewit and more expenses than income, Dickens and his already large family (wife and 5 children and sister-in-law) went to live in Italy for 18 months.

Pictures from Italy recounts his journey from London to Paris and then through France to Genoa, where the family lived while Dickens traveled around Italy with and without other family members. It was in Genoa that he wrote one of his Christmas stories, The Chimes. Other than that, the travelogue that became Pictures from Italy was the only writing, apart from letters, that he did during this time.

Much as I love Italy and reading about traveling in Italy, I found this mostly a somewhat tedious book that could have benefitted from editing. Some of the chapters are quite short (just a handful of pages) while others are very long (Rome clocks in at 46 pages and covers a variety of topics that could have been broken into more digestible parts). I got the feeling that Dickens simply handed over his travel notes to his publisher and moved on to his next long fictional project, Dombey and Son.

What I found most interesting were the parts where I could glimpse future works, particularly Little Dorrit, when the Dorrit family travels to Venice, traversing the Alps. Dickens also witnessed and slavishly recounts the beheading of a criminal, which I am sure informed such scenes in A Tale of Two Cities.

I found his disdain of the Catholicism of the Italians off-putting--respecting the faith of the locals is the least one can do when visiting their country--and he observed with what I thought was an arrogant eye. 

I did love and appreciate the feelings of awe he had when visiting the Colosseum and the Forum in Rome, and like him, I couldn't get enough of them either. Same when he visited Pompeii, although his trip up Vesuvius and back down was harrowing to the point of disbelief.

His writing on Naples was the most Dickenesque of the entire book. He does paint a vivid, if chaotic, picture full of color and motion and drama. In fact, the writing did get better as the book progressed, with the last sections far superior to the beginning. It just needed editing and structure--I really felt like I was reading his notes.

Map of Charles Dickens' Travels throughout 1844-1845

The other interesting thing about reading this particular book is that Italy was undergoing tremendous change at this time, having experienced revolutions in the 1820s and 1830s, and moments away from plunging into the Risorgimento, or Italian unification, that really got underway in 1848 and was a reality by 1871. 

This is another one of those books that I'm glad I read, but may not feel the urge to reread. That said, Dickens' descriptions of Genoa and Verona have made me definitely add them to my next trip to Italy, so I may dip into this book again to refresh my memory with what he visited so that I can retrace his steps to some degree.