My desk is piled high with books about Dickens (and here come two more! Yikes!). But to be honest, I need a bit of a break, so my next read is a book by Dickens. Imagine that. 🙂 I've just started Pictures from Italy, Dickens's travelogue published in 1846. I won't be reviewing as I go along, as I did with The Last Dickens and Drood; that process can get to be pretty long and tedious. But I will be providing plenty of quotes, which I hope you'll enjoy!
First of all, though, here's a quote by G. K. Chesterton that I found while doing a little research on Pictures from Italy. Even though I just started the book, I have a hunch that there's a lot of truth in it:
insist on them considered as Italian sketches; there is no need
whatever to worry about them as a phase of the mind of Dickens when he
travelled out of England. He never travelled out of England. There is
no trace in all these amusing pages that he really felt the great
foreign things which lie in wait for us in the south of Europe, the
Latin civilisation, the Catholic Church, the art of the centre, the
endless end of Rome. His travels are not travels in Italy, but travels
in Dickensland. He sees amusing things; he describes them amusingly.
But he would have seen things just as good in a street in Pimlico, and
described them just as well. . . .
He respected catacombs and gondolas, but that very respect was English.
He wondered at brigands and volcanoes, but that very wonder was
English. The very conception that Italy consists of these things was an
English conception. The root things he never understood, the Roman
legend, the ancient life of the Mediterranean, the world-old
civilisation of the vine and olive, the mystery of the immutable
Church. He never understood these things, and I am glad he never
understood them: he could only have understood them by ceasing to be
the inspired cockney that he was, the rousing English Radical of the
great Radical age in England. That spirit of his was one of the things
that we have had which were truly national.
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