TV Watch: Dickens in Italy, Sky Arts
Feb. 28th, 2024 02:37 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
callmemadamAfter my understandably bad-tempered day yesterday, I was able to relax for a couple of hours in the evening touring Italy in the agreeable company of actor David Harewood. While revering Shakespeare, Harewood had always thought of Dickens as ‘an author I wouldn’t like’, until a copy of Pictures of Italy ‘landed on my desk’. (How did that happen? one wonders rather cynically.) People think of Dickens as forever tramping the mean streets of London at night or playing the country gentleman at Gad’s Hill but he spent a surprising amount of time abroad. His visit to Italy took place in 1844, between the publication of Martin Chuzzlewit and Dombey and Son. This was before the Risorgimento, when Italy was still divided into separate states and kingdoms. Dickens had met Mazzini, in exile in London, and was all in favour of unification and modernisation.
Harewood loves Italy and obviously knows it well. He carried with him Pictures of Italy and one of Murray’s guides. These guidebooks were published from 1836 and designed for the wealthy tourist. They are full of deadly dull facts and figures, such as the exact dimensions of St Mark’s Square. Dickens’ approach was quite different. As one of the Italian Dickens experts said, ‘his eye was like a camera’; he aimed to describe Italy for those who couldn’t afford to go there. The number of these experts reminds one of the wide appeal of Dickens’ work, almost up there with Shakespeare. Pictures from Italy, published in 1846, was based on his letters home to his friend Forster.
First stop was Genoa, which Dickens found dirty and smelly. His short book The Chimes, the second of his Christmas books, was written as a direct result of hearing the incessant chiming from the various campaniles of Genoa. It was also in Genoa that he gave the first ever public reading of A Christmas Carol. Later, these readings would make him rich and probably hastened his death. Rather than describe the buildings and paintings to be seen, Dickens concentrated on the people, especially the poor. In Rome, the Colosseum impressed him not with The Grandeur That Was Rome but with the horrors which had taken place within it. The splendid ruins of Rome seemed to him symbolic of a clinging to the past when there was so much need for change. He became increasingly critical of the Roman Catholic church; its wealth and power contrasting with the poverty of its people. Like most people, though, he was seduced by Venice, which he described poetically. His Italian adventure did influence his later novels: David Copperfield’s wanderings after Dora’s death, for instance but especially Little Dorrit in Rome. This is the book which Harewood says he now ‘must read’.
It was curious to see, in Genoa, a plaque on a building commemorating the fact that ‘Carlo Dickens’ once stayed there. Carlo; I like that. Somehow, when you think of Dickens as Carlo, you see him in a new light.
Harewood loves Italy and obviously knows it well. He carried with him Pictures of Italy and one of Murray’s guides. These guidebooks were published from 1836 and designed for the wealthy tourist. They are full of deadly dull facts and figures, such as the exact dimensions of St Mark’s Square. Dickens’ approach was quite different. As one of the Italian Dickens experts said, ‘his eye was like a camera’; he aimed to describe Italy for those who couldn’t afford to go there. The number of these experts reminds one of the wide appeal of Dickens’ work, almost up there with Shakespeare. Pictures from Italy, published in 1846, was based on his letters home to his friend Forster.
First stop was Genoa, which Dickens found dirty and smelly. His short book The Chimes, the second of his Christmas books, was written as a direct result of hearing the incessant chiming from the various campaniles of Genoa. It was also in Genoa that he gave the first ever public reading of A Christmas Carol. Later, these readings would make him rich and probably hastened his death. Rather than describe the buildings and paintings to be seen, Dickens concentrated on the people, especially the poor. In Rome, the Colosseum impressed him not with The Grandeur That Was Rome but with the horrors which had taken place within it. The splendid ruins of Rome seemed to him symbolic of a clinging to the past when there was so much need for change. He became increasingly critical of the Roman Catholic church; its wealth and power contrasting with the poverty of its people. Like most people, though, he was seduced by Venice, which he described poetically. His Italian adventure did influence his later novels: David Copperfield’s wanderings after Dora’s death, for instance but especially Little Dorrit in Rome. This is the book which Harewood says he now ‘must read’.
It was curious to see, in Genoa, a plaque on a building commemorating the fact that ‘Carlo Dickens’ once stayed there. Carlo; I like that. Somehow, when you think of Dickens as Carlo, you see him in a new light.
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Date: 2024-02-29 08:28 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2024-02-29 08:43 am (UTC)I'd really like to read that book now.