Some Thing(s) About Italy: Dickensian Objects, Interiors and Pleasures

Abstract

here is something about things in Charles Dickens's Pictures from Italy (1846). And there is something about the effect of things on Dickens that helps generate this travelogue's distinctive character, underpinning its idiosyncratic fusion of concrete detail with dreamlike abstraction. In the context of its unusual tone, many critics have noted that Pictures from Italy focuses less on Italy than on the feelings of The Inimitable himself. In 1906, G. K. Chesterton famously (and happily) declared Pictures from Italy to be more about its author than its subject: His travels are not travels in Italy, but travels in Dickensland, he wrote, (T)here is nothing Italian about (them) (155-56). And although Chesterton's admiring voice harkens back to William R. Hughes' 1891 A Week's Tramp in Dickens- Land, it echoes forward in time, as well. Indeed, Chesterton has very recent company in observing that Pictures from Italy features a tour guide with no greater interest than himself and his own sensations. In her introduction to the Penguin Classics edition, for example, Kate Flint similarly observes that Pictures from Italy is at its most vivid when Dickens is focused on his own responses to his surroundings: Fascinated both by the spectacle (Italy) offers, and by himself as spectator she notes, he is constructing not just a version of a country, but of himself (Flint vii, xii). Coming from opposite ends of the twentieth century, and from different critical traditions, Chesterton's and Flint's observations nevertheless overlap on the issue of Dickens's inward focus. I want to connect this long-standing recognition of Dickens's interest in his own responses to Italy with a second theme, specifically, the presence and significant effects of things, objects and details as another defining characteristic of Pictures from Italy. In this essay, I explore the ways in which the text structures the interior energies of Dickensland by examining how the subjective feelings of the observer are linked to the vigorous descriptive deployment of material objects. And