ABSTRACT
It is a point of critical agreement that unlike American Notes for General Circulation, Dickens’s account of his Italian experience, Pictures from Italy - initially a cluster of “Travelling Letters Written on the Road” appearing in the Daily News between January and March 1846 - contains, in its very title, an explicit allusion to those visual features which in the nineteenth century revive the conventions of travel literature, by rewriting - especially when Italy is the subject of a travel book - a much used palimpsest, for the use of a new generation of readers, tourists and, indeed, spectators. The fundamental rule of travel writing being that each author has to provide novelty and yet stick to a narrative pattern, so that existing models may be quoted and even criticised to the benefit of the reader, one has to acknowledge that Dickens was well aware of his “duty,” having already faced the ordeal with American Notes: “I do perceive a perplexingly divided and subdivided duty in the matter of the book of travels!” he wrote to Forster in 1842 (Letters III 211), with a witty reference to Othello (I.iii.181). In 1862, when retracing Dickens’s steps in North America, Anthony Trollope would observe of the travel-book writer:
His first duty is owed to his readers, and consists mainly in this; that he shall tell the truth, and shall so tell the truth that what he has written may be readable. But a second duty is due to those of whom he writes... (Trollope 2-3)
It is my suggestion that in his second travelogue, Pictures from Italy, while trying to fulfil his duty towards Italy and the Italians, Dickens disregards his duty to the reader by moving away from a literary geography made of solid objects and well-timed, reliable descriptions: travel-writing conventions are dealt with in ways that, rather than marking an active interest in the genre per se, reveal the modes of Dickens’s vocation as a novelist. As a matter of fact, the Italian experience does not map a terra nova in terms of travel-book writing: it could be defined as an ambiguous text in terms of genre, in some ways still observant of inherited patterns, in many instances closer to fiction than to travel writing (Rem 131-45).
