Pictures from Italy

Question 1

Why did Dickens go abroad? and when?

Answer 1

extended stay 1844-1845
June 1844: Martin Chuzzlewit came out
September 1846: Dombey and Son began publication

Question 2

How did Dickens feel about handbooks like Murray’s?

Answer 2

• critical of this form of disseminating cultural information
• felt they diminished both a personal response to the broad sense of pastness and were stifling to the imagination

Question 3

What evidence is there that Dickens also experienced the disappointment of imagination vs. reality?

Answer 3

“like most things connected in their first associations with school-books and school-times… was too small”

Question 4

How does Dickens’ mind work in ‘Pictures from Italy’?

Answer 4

presents his mind as an open screen receiving impressions

- reflected in the title of his chapter ‘A Rapid Diorama’

Question 5

How does Dickens occupy an uneasy position between the tourist and the traveller?

Answer 5

• stands back from direct interaction with individuals, intrigued by the crowd, but also not blind to social reality
• he is the prototype of the flaneur but he refuses to be distant from the realities of what he experiences

Question 6

Dickens sets out to see the ‘great scenes’ but what happens in reality?

Answer 6

• there is something curiously second-order, recycled and premeditated about his experience of the ‘great scenes’ he set out to see

Question 7

it looked like—I am half afraid to write the word—like LONDON!!!

Answer 7

• uncomfortably hyperbolic criticism
• but also something satisfying about the dissatisfaction
• possibly in the years after 1815 - he is looking for a means of reasserting his refined taste

Question 8

What was it published?

Answer 8

1846

few years after the first excursion of Thomas Cook 1841

Question 9

is to see the ghost of old Rome, wicked, wonderful old city, haunting the very ground on which its people trod.

Answer 9

• ruins become a medium of imaginative revelry

Question 10

This man touched every stair with his forehead, and kissed it

Answer 10

• at the Scala Santa

Question 11

The manner in which Judas grew
more white-livered over his victuals, and languished, with his head
on one side, as if he had no appetite, defies all description

Answer 11

“defies all description”

Question 12

The manner in which Judas grew
more white-livered over his victuals, and languished, with his head
on one side, as if he had no appetite, defies all description

Answer 12

“defies all description”

beyond what “description can paint”

Question 13

Still, carriages on carriages, dresses on dresses, colours on colours, crowds upon crowds, without end.

Answer 13

• repeated repetition, layers the effect of the language - each term takes on more weight

Question 14

Still, carriages on carriages, dresses on dresses, colours on colours, crowds upon crowds, without end.

Answer 14

• repeated repetition, layers the effect of the language - each term takes on more weight

Question 15

we went conscientiously to work, to see Rome

Answer 15

• potentially falls into the tourist cliche while attemptin g to avoid it

Question 16

Mrs. Davis invariably replied, ‘You’ll be buried alive in a foreign country, Davis, and it’s no use trying to prevent you!”

Answer 16

• criticism of tourists

Question 17

There are several Crosses in Rome too, the kissing of which, confers indulgences for varying terms

Answer 17

• criticism of the Church

Question 18

‘Good Heaven, if, in a sudden fit of madness, he should dash the torches out, or if he should be seized with a fit, what would become of us!

Answer 18

• so eager to strive towards otherness that his imagination becomes wild

Question 19

there was another lady (in a back row in the same box) who improved her position by sticking a large pin into the ladies before her

Answer 19

• farce of the dignified tourist - ultimately cannot avoid carrying with you the consequences of who you are at home etc.