Proceedings of the Dickens and Tourism Conference September, 2009

Home , Eva Bergman, Henry Fielding Dickens, Peggotty, The Romantic Journey

ISSN 1471-1427

2009/1 University of Nottingham

Christel DeHaan Tourism and Travel Research Institute Nottingham University Business School Jubilee Campus Wollaton Road Nottingham NG8 1BB

Telephone: 0115 846 6606 Facsimile: 0115 846 6612 E-mail: [email protected] Proceedings of the Dickens and Tourism Conference, University of Nottingham, September 2009

Table of Contents

1. Introduction Page 3

2. Visiting Fictional London: The Demand for authenticity Anita Fernandez Young, Christel DeHaan Tourism and Travel Institute, Nottingham University Business School, UK Page 4

2. The tourist gaze in Dickens and Thackeray: uncommon variants on a common theme Britta Martens, University of the West of England Page 18

3. The Tourist as Spectator: Arthur Hugh Clough’s Amours de Voyage Cora Lindsay, Centre for English Language Education, University of Nottingham Page 30

4. Crime Tourism and the Branding of Places: An Expanding Market in Sweden Carina Sjöholm, Department of Service Management, Lund University, Sweden Page 32

5. Dickens and the history of tourism David Parker, University of Kingston Page 49

6. Water-borne pleasures in the time of Dickens Julia Fallon, Cardiff School of Management Page 65

7. Rome is Rome though it’s never so Romely’: Dickens and the nineteenth- century politics of leisure Jessica Hindes, Lincoln College, University of Oxford, UK Page 79

8. A “sort of superior vagabond”: Travel as a process of detachment in the context of Dickens’s visits to France John Edmondson, IP Publishing Ltd, UK Page 100

9. Architectural Anxieties: Pictures from Italy Mark Eslick, University of York, UK Page 121

10. Endnotes from Italy: Dickens's pictures illuminating the travel journals of Adlard Welby Sue Boettcher, University of Leicester, UK Page 139

11. Travelling/Touring with Nicholas Nickleby Tony Pointon, University of Portsmouth Page 153

12. Charles Dickens: The European connection Tony Williams, Associate Editor of The Dickensian; Honorary Research Fellow in Humanities, University of Buckingham; Honorary Life Member and Former Joint General Secretary of The International Dickens Fellowship Page 166

2 Introduction

Anita Fernandez Young, Lecturer in Tourism Management/Marketing

The theme of the conference was an unusual one, but it reflected the cross-disciplinary nature of tourism itself: we encourage students of cultural studies, geography, architecture and the built environment, management and marketing, literature and language, history and transport studies to get involved in the study of tourism. We also hope that students from many disciplines will recognise the value of English literature to their understanding of the social world, and Dickens is a powerful source of ideas and information about the industrial and early post-industrial world in which he wrote, through both his novels and his journalism.

As you will see from the following abstracts and papers, Dickens and his time are fascinating to students of tourism history. He helps us to understand the period between the Grand Tour and early mass tourism to the seaside, reflecting the middle class’s interest in travel for both business and leisure. The importance of literary tourism as an area for research as well as a source of enjoyment is growing, and we hope that this conference will stimulate research in and beyond the period we chose to concentrate on. We hope that the contributors will continue to maintain an informal network and that all readers of these proceedings will find them enjoyable and useful.

With best wishes

Anita Fernandez Young The Christel DeHaan Tourism and Travel Research Institute The University Of Nottingham UK

3 Visiting Fictional London: The Demand for authenticity

Anita Fernandez Young Christel DeHaan Tourism and Travel Institute Nottingham University Business School, UK [email protected]

ABSTRACT A tourist inspired to visit London by the work of Charles Dickens may contemplate up to three different London’s: 21st Century London, which is the physical reality of what she can visit; Victorian London, which remains only to some extent; and the fictional London of Dickens’s imagination as it appears in his writing. There is some overlap between all three of these, in that some of the places which appear in the fiction existed and do so still. Thinking in this framework implies first a distinction among literary tourists between those who seek to visit the London that is in the fiction (‘imaginary’ London) and those looking for the London in which the author lived (‘Victorian’ London) – or both. Secondly we have to confront the paradox that the only one of the three London’s in which the tourist can physically be present is neither of the foregoing, but 21st century London. Thirdly, we examine the conditions under which literary tourists visiting 21st century London can, through this, visit a sufficiently authentic version of the London they seek. Authenticity is examined with reference to what is demanded by tourists and the ability of London to satisfy them.

VISITING FICTIONAL LONDON: The demand for authenticity

Arthur Conan Doyle set his Sherlock Holmes stories in a place modelled on his contemporary London of the last quarter of the nineteenth century. Conan Doyle’s ‘London’ was very much like 19th century London, but it differed in certain ways, the most significant of which is perhaps that he had Holmes and Watson live, and many dramatic scenes take place, at a notorious address, 221b Baker Street, which did not exist. Consider a person who reads the Holmes stories and then visits London. Either the reading of the stories was a cause of the visit or it was not. Our primary (but not exclusive) interest is in cases in which the reading was a cause of the visit. Assuming this to be the case, we have to ask what it was in the reading that caused the visit.

4 In relation to this question, there are two constructions of causing. The first is causality: the tourist read the Holmes stories and this increased the probability of her visiting London. To some extent, the visit occurred because of the reading. The second construction and, for our purposes, the more fruitful one is teleological: the visit was made so that … In other words, the tourist made the visit to London for some purpose and that purpose arose out of the reading.

Many things may have arisen out of the reading of the Holmes stories. A notable example is an interest in Holmes’ deductive (or inferential, or dramatic) method. This is, perhaps, the sine qua non of a Holmes story. It is central to what Conan Doyle evidently conceived of the stories as being about. There are instances in which Watson tries his hand at it. There are stories set outside London, including some (such as The Hound of the Baskervilles) in which an extra-London setting is integral. The Holmesian method is an essential feature of the stories, but it is hardly a plausible cause of a want to visit London.

Many of the stories are set in London and the characters reside there throughout (although not always together). This London is one of genteel rooms in Baker Street, gas lamps, beggars and urchins, concerts at the Wigmore Hall, banks in the City, the river and an opium den. Presumably it is something in all this that inspires the reader to want to visit London. However, this prompts two questions. The first of these is which London we are talking about, because we have three Londons here. First, there is the London a 21st century tourist can visit. Secondly, there is Victorian London. Thirdly, there is the London in which Holmes lived: the London of Conan Doyle’s imagination. For ease of reference, let us abbreviate these to L21, L19 and LCD.

None of these three Londons is unrelated to the other two, but no two are identical. L21 and L19 have much in common because much of London was built in or before the 19th century. On the other hand, there is a lot of modern London built after the 19th century and a lot of the London in which Conan Doyle lived has gone. LCD and L19 have much in common. LCD’s Baker Street, riverside and the City are all very similar to their counterparts in L19. But there was no 221b Baker Street. There were real as well as fictional beggars and urchins, but there was no real Holmes.

5 There is some point in representing this diagrammatically, as follows. The sets represented in the following diagram are sets of artefacts in the wide sense of the term.

L21 L19 LCD

L21 and L19 have a substantial (but by no means perfect) overlap. LCD and L19 have a major intersection. Because of this, L21 and LCD have an intersection. For this to be so, it is sufficient (but not necessary) that each of L21L19 and LCDL19 have an overlap exceeding 50%. But if this condition does not apply, the result of an intersection of L21 and LCD does not necessarily come about. For example, we might have had

L21 L19 LCD

This is the situation that might have been if London had changed even more from Victorian days and if Conan Doyle’s fictional London had been much more loosely based on the real London of his time. Like his brother Mycroft, Sherlock Holmes might never have strayed outside of Pall Mall and Pall Mall and the surrounding territory might have been destroyed in 1945 and replaced by an enormous Ferris wheel.

6 Reading the Sherlock Holmes stories may well, in some readers, instil a want to visit LCD, to be in the London in which our good acquaintance, and perhaps friend, Holmes rules OK. It is less plausible, but still possible, that the reader might be inspired to visit L19, the London that Conan Doyle knew. Either of these wants might derive from reading the Holmes stories. We might want to imagine ourselves with the author or, perhaps the more plausibly, the character. However, there is a difficulty with both of these wants. L19 no longer exists. LCD never did exist. Fortunately, tourism to non-existent places is by no means an impossible, or even a new, idea. ‘The wise traveller travels only in imagination,’ says Somerset Maugham in his short story Honolulu; however, this does not amount to saying that remaining in one’s armchair is the optimal way of visiting a non-existent place. Thus far, we have assembled the following ingredients of the situation. First, the London to which the Holmes stories are most closely connected is (by definition) LCD and it is to this London that reading the stories most plausibly induces a want to visit. Second, LCD does not exist but that is no impediment to tourism to it. Third, via L19, LDC and L21 have some artefacts in common.

A natural consequence of this situation is that reading the Holmes stories may cause a potential tourist to visit LCD and this person may find an actual visit to L21 useful to that end. For such a tourist the visit to London is not an end but a means to an end. The tourist is a tourist to Sherlock Holmes’ London, the London of Conan Doyle’s imagination. The visit to 21st century London assists the tourist in going to Sherlock Holmes’ London. We can make a comparison with this same Holmes reader watching a movie or television dramatisation of a Holmes story. The screen product can, like a visit to London, serve to assist the imagination. To serve this role there must be enough in the screen product or in present day London that the reader can seize upon to construct a visit to Holmes’ world. Besides this, those parts that do not assist must be sufficiently unobtrusive. They must be so to the extent that they do not prevent the reader’s suspension of disbelief. She knows that the person she is looking at on the screen is Basil Rathbone. She knows that Basil Rathbone is not Sherlock Holmes. Not even Jeremy Brett is Sherlock Holmes. But she can set this knowledge aside – suspend her disbelief, in Coleridge’s terms.

The London Eye did not exist in Holmes’ London, but she can set this aside. She can stand opposite 221b Baker Street and set aside the Eye and the motor traffic. She can even set aside the fact that until recently 221b Baker Street existed only in Holmes’ London, because 7 this tourist, like Conan Doyle, is an author. She is the re-creator of the place she visits and being in London is an input to her creative process.

Our proposition goes only a little further than asserting that this is one possible connection between literature and tourism. Certainly, we do not suggest that it is the only such connection. A person who has read the Holmes stories may visit London to be in the place where Conan Doyle worked. Similarly, a tourist may visit Holmfirth to assist her in tourism to the world of Last of the Summer Wine, or she may visit Holmfirth to see where the programme was made. Even though she has read the Sherlock Holmes stories, she may visit London for some entirely unrelated reason (even if having read the stories adds to her enjoyment from a visit she would certainly have made anyway). However, we do go a little beyond just asserting that tourism to an imaginary place is one reason among others for visits to a real place. Our suggested motive is not unique but it does have a special property.

Consider the question of authenticity of the destination. In the first place, suppose that we mean 19th century authenticity. How authentic is 21st century London by this standard? There are two dimensions to consider. The first is how true is it that any particular part of London is authentic (let this be t). The second is how much of London is authentic to that extent (let this be T). The following diagram represents the actual state of affairs.

t t

The downward sloping line indicates that the higher a standard of authenticity we set in respect of particular places, the smaller is the proportion of London that meets that standard.

8 Suppose we have a tourist who wants to visit Victorian London. This tourist’s wants in terms of authenticity are illustrated by point V in the following diagram.

t This tourist would really like to visit the actual London of the past. Realistically, she would like as much as possible of 21st century London to be as unchanged as possible since the 19th century. This tourist is bound to be disappointed and an attempt to lessen that disappointment would raise a conflict with the practical needs of Londoners. The next diagram illustrates the wants of a visitor to 21st century London who is a tourist to the London of Sherlock Holmes.

t The tourist to a fictional place wants a high standard of authenticity, but only in respect of enough places that she can use the visit to fuel the imagination of her tourism. In this lies the special property of the type of literary tourism we have identified: the tourism is to an 9 imaginary place in which there are no corporeal residents with needs in conflict with the wants of the tourist. However, in order to fulfil the needs of various types of literary tourist, to the London of Charles Dickens or Conan Doyle or to the Londons of their fiction, we may take the three Londons of the original Venn diagram and translate them into the three dimensions of a cube. We can then place in that cube the various manifestations of London which could be used to feed or stimulate the imagination and see how they relate to one another and to the various needs of literary tourists.

Figure 6 221B

DSt DSt (pot)

TVSet  LS House

Fictional Modern

Victorian

221B = 221B Baker St DSt = 48 Doughty St DSt(pot) = 48 Doughty St restored TVSet = Granada TV set for SH series LS House = Linley Sambourne House, 18 Stafford Terrace

In this figure, we have the three Londons: the Victorian and Modern London are the two horizontal axes, the Fictional London axis is vertical. To illustrate the issues we can place on this cube of Londons four places related to Dickens’s and Conan Doyle’s fictions and Victorian London: 48 Doughty Street, 221B Baker Street, Linley Sambourne House and the Granada Studios set for the Sherlock Holmes series. The TV sets remain on the plane made by the Fictional and Victorian axes, since they no longer exist (and were never in London either), and the same could be said of the sets from any of the Dickens dramatisations of recent years. They have no place in today’s London, any more than they existed in Victorian times. On the other hand, Linley Sambourne House is on the plane at the other side of the

10 cube: it is perfectly Victorian (having remained unchanged since the Sambournes first occupied it) but is also still there in 21st Century London, and can be used by the tourist to assist to a small extent in using the imagination to enter into late Victorian fiction – Doyle rather than Dickens as the Sambournes did not move into the house until 1874, four years after Dickens died, and decorated it in the aesthetic style which had recently become fashionable. It is therefore low on the Fictional London axis. 48 Doughty Street is likewise on the same plane, but its position is different: unlike Linley Sambourne House, the contents of 48 Doughty Street have not remained intact since their famous resident lived there, nor has the building itself remained untouched, so while the house is on the back plane as existing completely in the modern world it is not entirely Victorian. It is higher up the Fictional London axis than Linley Sambourne House because of the assistance it can give to the literary tourist who wants to imagine the kinds of houses lived in by Dickens’s characters, especially when visiting the drawing room on the first floor and Mary Hogarth’s bedroom. 221b Baker Street is high on the Fictional London axis, since it is furnished as far as possible in accord with the Sherlock Holmes stories, is entirely in the modern world, but is not at all genuinely Victorian, although the proprietors of the Sherlock Holmes Museum claim that because it was a boarding house in Victorian times this gives it more authenticity as possibly the kind of house Conan Doyle had in mind when he wrote the stories. The building dates from 1815 but its Sherlock Holmes connection and the re-creations of the interiors of Holmes’s fictional living quarters are naturally entirely speculative and built from the imaginations of the set-dressers or museum curators. Many of the objects in the house are genuinely Victorian but the fictional world of Sherlock Holmes never in fact existed, in Victorian times or modern.

If the tourist wants to visit the fictional world of Sherlock Holmes, the Museum is a better means to do this than visiting the set that was part of the Granada Studios tour in Manchester (now dismantled), because the Museum tries to maintain the fiction of Holmes’s reality whereas the studio set was clearly just that, open to the sides for camera access and with the view from the windows obscured, with ceilings only in parts of rooms and so on. Linley Sambourne House, as a genuinely Victorian house of the type occupied by potential clients of Holmes, might also be a useful site for the literary tourist to visit as its consistent and authentic Victorian-ness could be used to enable the imagination. 48 Doughty Street presents a different question: the Dickens House Museum tries to provide for all types of literary tourism, and combines rooms furnished and displayed much as they might have been 11 when Dickens was in residence there with displays about Victorian times, about Dickens himself and his family and about his writing. If the visitors want to visit the London of Charles Dickens they are quite well served. If, on the other hand, they are more interested in visiting the London of Dickens’s fiction there is less potential at Doughty Street than there might be: Mary Hogarth’s bedroom, where she, his sister-in-law, died in Dickens’s arms, could be used by the tourist to Fictional London to facilitate the imagination of Dora’s death in David Copperfield, perhaps, or the drawing room could be used to imagine rooms in many of the novels (the Lammle’s apartment in Our Mutual Friend, the Jellybys’ house in Bleak House, or even Todgers’s boarding house in Martin Chuzzlewit). The display cases and exhibition materials in some of the rooms could detract from the potential for imagining, however useful they may be to other types of tourist. On the other hand, if the rooms were all dressed with Victorian furniture to simulate the arrangements in Dickens’s occupation of the house, there would be less need for the process of imagination on the part of the tourist. All the imagining, as at 221b Baker Street, would be done by the curators. At Warwick Castle, as in other exhibitions, waxworks (shades of The Old Curiosity Shop and Mrs Jarley) have been used to give the impression of ‘what it must have been like’ in historical times. An animatronic Dickens could be created for Doughty Street, giving readings from the novels as he did in life; but whether this is what literary tourists want is as yet generally under- researched.

48 Doughty Street has the advantage that it can satisfy, up to a point, many different requirements of literary tourism, but if more of the space was returned to Victorian layout and appearance the tourist whose emphasis is on the fictions rather than on the author might be given more opportunities for exercising her imagination.

There are two different processes in action here: imagination and cogitation. At 221b Baker Street the tourist can imagine meeting Holmes and Watson and presenting them with mysteries to solve, but also think about how the fictional environment was created in Conan Doyle’s own imagination, presumably from his own experience; at 48 Doughty Street the tourist can consider how Dickens the writer used the realities of his everyday life and transformed them into his fictions. In other words, both sites can be means of exploring the creative mind: at Dickens World in Chatham there are realisations of the fictional environments Dickens wrote about which have a similar purpose to 221b, of somehow making an almost entirely imaginary world present and actual to the reader. 12 There also remains the question whether any of the sites in the London cube could be moved to different positions in the three-dimensional space. 48 Doughty Street could be made more thoroughly Victorian by importing more authentically Victorian artefacts and by restoring more of the building to exactly how it was in Dickens’s day. 221b Baker Street could only be changed by making it even closer to the descriptions in the Holmes stories. Linley Sambourne House is firmly rooted in the realities of Victorian London, but it could perhaps be given more potential to reflect Victorian fiction. In terms of their ability to facilitate the intuitive imagination it is clear that the Sherlock Holmes Museum is preferable to the studio set, but not that 48 Doughty Street is better than Linley Sambourne House. The Sherlock Holmes Museum is much less useful in reflecting ‘real’ Victorian life than Linley Sambourne House, but may not differ very much from 48 Doughty Street, whose purpose is more to explain and illustrate the life and times of the author rather than recreate the fiction.

The three dimensions we have used here, of fictional, period and modern place, could be applied to other periods and other places in order to consider how a particular building or site is being used by people engaged in literary tourism. The ideal position for the tourist to fictional worlds would be in the extreme top corner where Fictional, Victorian and Modern London meet, although stepping right into fiction and out of reality can never be completely achieved.

Figure 7 Fictional Tourist 221B 

DSt DSt (pot)  LS House (pot) TVSet  LS House

Fictional Modern

Victorian

13 221B = 221B Baker St DSt = 48 Doughty St DSt(pot) = 48 Doughty St restored TVSet = Granada TV set for SH series LS House = Linley Sambourne House, 18 Stafford Terrace LS House (pot) = Linley Sambourne House with additional fictional references

Is the Modern dimension redundant? The presence of the TV studio set on the Victorian/Fictional plane suggests that it is not. We could also place on that plane (or somewhere on the dimension between the origin and the wholly modern) those places which have existed and been used in fiction but which have changed completely, like the slums and tenements of Seven Dials or Saffron Hill. Fagin’s den exists on screen and at Dickens World, but the Saffron Hill of Oliver Twist exists somewhere between the mind of Charles Dickens and the minds of his readers. Only further research will help us to understand how much reality, realism or authenticity literary tourists seek in helping them to use their imaginations to recreate the worlds of fiction. Sartre and others have pointed out that the reader contributes to the fiction through the work of reading. We are beginning to understand that as the writer bases the fictional world on the world he knows, so the reader compares that fictional world with his own and in the process enriches both.

In his Atlas of the European Novel, 1800-1900 Franco Moretti superimposes the events of Our Mutual Friend onto a Victorian map of London (pp 125 – 128), and just as he has done, any tourist could do the same using a modern map. However, Moretti does not point out how very different the London of today is from Dickens’s London. His mapping of the Sherlock Holmes stories (p 135) and comparison with Charles Booth’s map, showing how the crimes represented in Conan Doyle’s stories are those of the middle classes, living in the West End, rather than of the East End poor and criminal classes, reveals the fascination with Victorian London which could, and does, tempt tourists to London to seek out the fictional world with which they have become familiar through their reading. Chinese students arriving in the UK for the first time are often puzzled by the lack of fog, which they expect to see everywhere in London.

There is no empirical study (as far as the author is aware) of what the literary tourist is actually trying to achieve through her tourism. Because London is particularly rich in sites of literary interest, there are many guide books which offer readers the opportunity to explore

14 the city from a literary perspective. However, the devotee of Dickens is not necessarily an enthusiast for Dan Brown. The blurring of fact and fiction, reality and fantasy, in these commoditisations of mostly dead, but increasingly still living, authors, is of course a postmodern phenomenon, but we have attempted in this paper to bring it into some sort of perspective. The creation of a Dickens ‘theme park’ experience in Dickens World at Chatham has been referred to earlier. Such places are described (Philips, 1999; Craik, 1997) as ‘space unequivocally devoted to pleasure’ or ‘tourist bubbles’ (safe, controlled environments. They are quite different in kind from heritage sites such as 48 Doughty Street, but similar to the Sherlock Holmes Museum at 221B Baker Street. It is relatively easy to understand why such places are developed and promoted, as they tap into the familiar world of the Victorians, brought to us more or less daily by the media, and have high recognition factors among international tourists as well as domestic. The frequent translation from page to screen of well-known and popular works such as the Holmes stories or Dickens’s best-known novels (there are not many screen versions of Martin Chuzzlewit or Barnaby Rudge, but very many of Oliver Twist and A Christmas Carol) ensure that if the tourist catches sight of a signpost to the Dickens House Museum or picks up a brochure, that will (all other attractions being equal) join the set of potential visits from which to select on this or another trip to London.

Theme parks are like film and television versions of novels in that they are taking the product of the creative imagination and ‘realising’ it, making it as much concrete as the necessary limitations of technology and script-writing will allow. However, as we have shown above, the sets for the Sherlock Holmes stories are limited in their ability to communicate with the imagination. Even on television, when they are peopled with actors speaking the appropriate lines, they convey only parts of the imaginary realities of the books. TV and film are not yet able to convey other than visually the atmosphere, the smells and ambient temperature which a writer may suggest. We have the paradox of ‘radio has better pictures’, where the imagination stimulated by reading is capable of creating a more complete and satisfying portrayal than Hollywood can manage. But still screen versions of the classics are popular, and the debate about the 1995 and 2005 versions of Pride and Prejudice still rages on IMDb. Those who create theme parks, movies and television series all run the risk that whatever they create in their re-imagining of the authors’ work may not satisfy their audiences.

15 However, as almost a hundred and forty years have passed since the death of Charles Dickens there can be few people alive today whose grandparents could have remembered and told them what it was like to live in Victorian England. What was taken for granted by the writers of the mid-Victorian period, or later by Conan Doyle’s contemporaries, an ambiance of gas lamps or candles, coal fires, servants in all but the poorest homes, education limited to those who could afford it, marriage for life and so on, can now only be imagined. London today with its regular garbage collections, electric light, mobile phones and internet cafés does not enable young people to begin to imagine that earlier world. The tourist to the imagination of Charles Dickens may need some signposts, whether from TV serialisations, Dickens World or Linley Sambourne House as well as 48 Doughty Street to derive the full richness of potential appreciation. Let us begin to find out what the tourist wants and what works, whether it is guided walks, ‘authentic’ buildings and artefacts or faked-up reproductions.

In The Literary Tourist, Nicola Watson is trying to examine the motivations for the consumption of literature beyond the practice of reading. Her view, however, is that literary tourism is ‘a deeply counter-intuitive response to the pleasures and possibilities of imaginative reading’ and that literary tourism because it cannot enable the tourist to enter the fictional world will necessarily be disappointing. This view seems rather a limited one, since there are plenty of continuing literary tourists, who return again and again to sites they have visited with pleasure and who seem to be able to increase the satisfaction they derive from their reading by visiting places associated with both the author and the fictions. In any case, the ability of readers to visualise the fictional worlds of 19th century authors may be limited by their own ability to mobilise their imagination. If what the tourist is seeking is assistance in developing her own imaginative powers, her ability to read creatively in the Sartrean sense, then it is reasonable for her to make use of any and every opportunity to expand her cultural capital (in the Bourdieuvian sense), which will include the ability to visualise and interpret the scenes from the past of London conveyed to her by Dickens and Doyle. Authentic Victorian London is there, in reality, on screen and canvas.

Tourists deserve better material to work with than many of the purported literary guides. In Literary London, Ed Glinert makes the point that ‘it is their (Shakespeare and Dickens) characters’ movements rather than their own lives that continue to interest successive generations, so their presence dominates….’. Unfortunately his quite useful book is less about the movements of characters than about the movements of writers. Close to Holmes, 16 Alistair Duncan’s ‘look at the connections between Historical London, Sherlock Holmes and Conan Doyle’ is badly written and full of ‘factoids’ about these connections but hardly adds anything to the imaginative scope of the lurid stories. A visit to a library with good stocks of Victorian and Edwardian newspapers for browsing would be a great deal more entertaining and productive of ideas about Victorian attitudes and crime. Novel Destinations by Schmidt and Rendon (‘Literary Landmarks from Jane Austen’s Bath to Ernest Hemingway’s Key West’) is a brief guide to a great many places, useful to the whistle-stop cultural tourist who wants to tick off as many ‘experiences’ as possible, but assuming very little in the way of real desire to engage the imagination. Anna Quindlen’s Imaginary London is full of solecisms, but at least she pays some respect to the literary tourist’s desire to experience something other than a 221b that has been, as she puts it ‘phonied up…in a gerrymander worthy of an old Chicago politician’. Her main point is that London is full of inspiration for writers: ‘the city where imagination found its great home’. Until we take more trouble to understand what those readers who become literary tourists to London really want we will not be able to provide them with advice about where to find what they are looking for, whether it is a chance to touch a surface Dickens would have touched, walk in the footsteps of David Copperfield, or imagine Little Dorrit’s feelings as she stepped out as a bride into the ‘roaring streets’.

REFERENCES Craik, J (1997) ‘The culture of tourism’ in Rojek, c and Urry, J (eds.) Touring Cultures, London: Routledge. Duncan, Alistair (2009) Close to Holmes London: MX Publishing Glinert, Ed (2000) Literary London London: Penguin Books Moretti, Franco (1998) Atlas of the European Novel 1800-1900 London: Verso Philips, D (1999) ‘Narrativised spaces: the functions of story in the theme park’ in Crouch, D (ed.) Leisure/tourism Geographies: Practices and Geographical Knowledge, London: Routledge Quindlen, Anna (2004) Imagined London: a tour of the World’s Greatest fictional city Washington DC: National Geographic Society Schmidt, S M and J Rendon (2008) Novel Destinations: Literary Landmarks from Jane Austen’s Bath to Ernest Hemingway’s Key West Washington DC: National Geographic Society Watson, N (2006) The Literary Tourist London: Palgrave Macmillan

17 The tourist gaze in Dickens and Thackeray: uncommon variants on a common theme

Britta Martens University of the West of England [email protected]

Abstract Much of the critical discourse about tourism revolves around what the tourist expects from touristic sights and how he responds to them. Nineteenth-century travel literature furnishes many textual cases for analysis. A counterpoint to the Baedecker-clutching collector of famous sights is a tourist who shows no interest in conventional sights. He either does not visit them, or he ‘does’ the sights but fails to respond to them, or he turns to unconventional ‘backstage’ regions (in Erving Goffman’s sense) but lacks the earnest engagement with the visited culture that distinguishes the traveller from the tourist. This paper examines examples of these behaviours in Charles Dickens’s essays about travel in France from The Uncommercial Traveller (1860-69) and William M. Thackeray’s The Kickleburys on the Rhine (1850). It suggests that the two authors choose to present these unusual tourists not only because they lend themselves easily to their satirical agenda and style; they also allow the authors to articulate their critical perception of the conventions of contemporary travel writing and to expose the tourist’s problematic, unselfconscious attitudes towards the visited culture and fellow tourists. This contrasts with the more self-aware stance of these two authors, who are also implicated in the touristic experience. Centring on the critical concept of the tourist gaze, the paper analyses how the tourists in Dickens and Thackeray are characterised through their deployment of the gaze and how they are made the object of the narrator’s observation. On a further level, in order to assess how far both authors are conscious of their own use of the tourist gaze and its limitations, the paper considers Dickens’s and Thackeray’s very similar use of the narrator as a fictionalised version of his author.

Keywords: Dickens, Thackeray, tourist gaze, traveller, satire, self-consciousness.

18 Analysts of tourism see it primarily as a visual experience, as encapsulated by the tautological term ‘sight-seeing’.1 The most influential critical concept in this respect is John Urry’s notion of the ‘tourist gaze’ (1990), developed in analogy with the Foucauldian gaze. Tourism critics focus their analyses on what the German sociologist Niklas Luhmann terms the second-order observation of the tourist, i.e. the observation of how an observer observes (1993). They describe and categorise how tourists view sights and what kinds of experience they seek in viewing them, for instance authenticity (MacCannell 1989: 42-43), the confirmation of preconceptions (Boorstin 1963: 102-107) or merely something ‘out of the ordinary’ (Urry 1990:3). They diagnose that the viewing of tourist sights involves ‘a much greater sensitivity to visual elements of landscape and townscape than is normally found in everyday life’ (Urry 1990: 3), or that tourism ‘is interested in everything as a sign of itself’ (Culler 1988:155). In comparison, Victorian literature about British tourists on the continent is less dispassionate and can revel in satirical portrayals of the Baedecker- or Murray- clutching tourist who is eager to tick off sights and to respond to them in the way the guide books and prevailing taste prescribe. 2 Such texts offer a less systematic, but more entertaining, analysis of the tourist gaze than today’s academic criticism. In addition to their second-order observation of the tourist, they give the reader the opportunity for yet higher levels of observation, since the way a narrator observes the tourist and evaluates the new phenomenon of tourism can also become the subject of our critical scrutiny. Finally, we can consider too whether the perspective of the author is distanced from that of his narrator persona. In this paper I propose to analyse sample passages from texts by Charles Dickens and William Makepeace Thackeray through a focus on 1. the way characters who are tourists observe their surroundings, 2. the narrator’s way of observing other tourist characters, and 3. the observation of the narrator by the author. Rather than choose representations of stereotypical tourists who are dutifully admiring the conventional sights, I will examine some more uncommon variants: those who ‘do’ the sights but fail to respond to them, or those who venture off ‘the beaten track’ of conventional tourism but fail to attain the earnest

1 This applies less to the types of holidays where tourists choose self-contained leisure complexes and prioritise relaxation over an encounter with otherness. 2 See e.g. Dickens’s governess Mrs. General in Little Dorrit who ‘made the tour of Europe, and saw most of that extensive miscellany of objects which it is essential that all persons of polite cultivation should see with other people’s eyes, and never with their own’ (Dickens 1982:375). 19 engagement with the visited culture that distinguishes the independent and open-minded traveller from the more superficial, inward-looking tourist as defined by Paul Fussell:

Tourism soothes you by comfort and familiarity and shields you from the shocks of novelty and oddity. It confirms your prior view of the world instead of shaking it up. Tourism requires that you see conventional things, and that you see them in a conventional way. (1987:651)

These unusual tourists, I would like to argue, offer particularly fertile ground for an analysis of the tourist gaze which reveals the attitudes and cultural norms of certain parts of Victorian society. In Thackeray’s Christmas story of 1850, The Kickleburys on the Rhine, the holidaymakers’ first stop is Antwerp. Predictably, we find some of them scaling the city’s greatest architectural sight, the tower of the cathedral, but the narrator, Michael Angelo Titmarsh, chooses not to join them:

Milliken went up the tower, and so did Miss Fanny. I am too old a traveller to mount up those immeasurable stairs, for the purpose of making myself dizzy by gazing upon a vast map of low countries stretched beneath me, and waited with Mrs. Milliken and her mother below. When the tower-climbers descended, we asked Miss Fanny and her brother what they had seen. ‘We saw Captain Hicks up there,’ remarked Milliken. ‘And I am very glad you didn't come, Lavinia my love. The excitement would have been too much for you, quite too much.’ All this while Lady Kicklebury was looking at Fanny, and Fanny was holding her eyes down; and I knew that between her and this poor Hicks there could be nothing serious, for she had laughed at him and mimicked him to me half a dozen times in the course of the day. (Titmarsh 1850)

We are presented with two interesting characters here. Our attention is first directed towards the narrator, Titmarsh, who calls himself an ‘old [...] traveller’, too blasé to be tempted by the view of the unfamiliar that still excites the tourist. Not only does he signal the traveller’s disdain for conventional sights; his reference to ‘a vast map of low countries’ also reveals 20 that he makes no distinction between seeing the authentic sight, the Dutch landscape, and the mere signifier, the map. This dismissive equation of sight and signifier reads like an anachronistic critique of Jonathan Culler’s semiotic analysis that the tourist is interested in the sign for its own sake (1988:155). For Titmarsh, the real sight and its representation are indistinguishable but similarly meaningless. This would suggest that he is an ironically distanced analyst of the tourist gaze. However, this reading of Titmarsh as a man of critical insight distanced from the tourist is undermined by three factors. Firstly, in declining to climb the tower, he betrays that he lacks the aesthetic appreciation of the picturesque that even the seasoned traveller should retain. Secondly, his explanation that he would make himself dizzy by looking at the sight may be read as an indication that a confrontation with the foreign and unfamiliar would make him lose his balance. This is something one would associate with the tourist who prefers to remain in the comfort zone of what he knows, while the confident, cosmopolitan traveller should seek such a disorientating experience. Finally, Titmarsh’s acute observation of tourism’s emptiness here stands in contrast to his striking lack of discernment on another matter throughout the story: he fails to notice that Miss Fanny, with whom he has fallen in love, ridicules Captain Hicks in front of him but is secretly looking favourably upon the Captain’s courtship and will get engaged to him at the end of the story. (Incidentally, Miss Fanny too communicates through her gaze, and it is her otherwise blundering mother, Lady Kicklebury, and not Titmarsh, who is able to read the significance of her daughter’s downcast eyes in this scene.) Thackeray’s narrator is thus an ambiguous character, whose claims to be a ‘traveller’ rather than a tourist are doubtful and whose perspicacity in some respects is balanced by blind spots on other issues. By contrast, Miss Fanny’s brother-in-law, Milliken, is clearly a tourist. He does climb the tower, but it is apparently the social encounter with Captain Hicks – rather than the picturesque view – that he finds too exciting for his wife. The comical mismatch between the question about what the climbers saw from the tower and the answer about who they met on the tower makes any explicit narrator’s commentary on this attitude unnecessary. Milliken’s inability to extend his gaze beyond the parapet of the tower makes him an obvious caricature of the tourist who goes abroad and prefers the encounter with the familiar to that with the foreign. These tourists only look at each other, engage in the socialising with their work colleagues and peers which they could have enjoyed without ever leaving London, and do not realise the missed opportunity to confront otherness. The main setting of Thackeray’s story, the gambling spa resort of Rougetnoirbourg, is just such a place prefiguring the self- 21 contained holiday camp. And elsewhere in the story, Titmarsh, who is one of the few visitors who stray from ‘the beaten track’ and show interest in the historic chateau and the deserted old town, clearly articulates his criticism of the glitzy new hotels and the absolute power of the casino’s proprietor over the town, thus demonstrating a critical second-order observation of the tourism industry. A less explicit criticism of the same kind of tourism can be found in Dickens’s Little Dorrit (1855-57). The Dorrits go to Italy to escape London society and the stigma of their embarrassing past in the Marshalsea debtors’ prison, only to find that they meet that very society abroad. And in engaging the services of the prim governess Mrs. General, Mr. Dorrit has taken British society with him anyway. There are several explanations as to why Dickens and Thackeray are drawn to focus on the flaws of tourists. Firstly, neither of them is known for his sensitive or memorable description of scenery and architectural sights, the two staples of straightforward travel writing. Instead, their interest lies in people and their social interaction, often presented through a satirical perspective, and tourists certainly make a ready target for satire. Secondly, the focus on the tourist rather than the sight arises from a sense of belatedness. By the mid-century, many British readers would have been familiar with the sights of the Continent – if not through personal experience, then through the substantial body of guidebooks, diaries, letters and other publications about European travel. 3 Writers therefore felt the need to acknowledge their predecessors and had ‘by way of various manœuvres, to assert originality in spite of belatedness’ (Buzard 1993:161). The absence of predictable narratives about conventional sights is one such manœuvre that would have been refreshing to some readers. Accordingly, Thackeray’s Titmarsh writes:

And so we pass by tower and town, and float up the Rhine. We don't describe the river. Who does not know it? How you see people asleep in the cabins at the most picturesque parts, and angry to be awakened when they fire off those stupid guns for the echoes! It is as familiar to numbers of people as Greenwich; and we know the merits of the inns along the road as if they were the ‘Trafalgar’ or the ‘Star and Garter.’ How stale everything grows!

3 See e.g. the chronology on books about Italy alone in Churchill (1980: 212-227). 22 And as Dickens states in the opening pages of Pictures from Italy (1846), ‘There is, probably, not a famous Picture or Statue in all Italy, but could be easily buried under a mountain of printed paper devoted to dissertations on it. I do not, therefore, though an earnest admirer of Painting and Sculpture, expatiate at any length on famous Pictures and Statues’ (1998b:5). There may also be a sly enjoyment on the authors’ part of disappointing readers who still expected the customary catalogue of awed descriptions. In Pictures from Italy, Dickens certainly seems to revel in this technique when he eventually does break with resolution not to describe works of art by denigrating the ‘considerable amount of rubbish’ on display in the Vatican museum (1998b:144). Thirdly, these ironic second-order observations of the tourist gaze allow Dickens and Thackeray to convey their evaluation of the new cultural phenomenon of tourism and to express their criticism of the Briton abroad. This forms part of their broader critique of the British upper and middle classes at home which can be found throughout the body of their work. In these travel narratives, as in their other texts, British class-consciousness, the emulation of the aristocracy and the jingoistic denigration of anything foreign are main targets of attack. 4 Scenes like that quoted earlier or the characters’ subsequent visit to Antwerp’s Rubens gallery, where Lady Kicklebury ceaselessly talks about the paintings in her country house without ever responding to the Rubens paintings she is actually viewing, are incisive vignettes of the failure of the British upper-middle class to engage with otherness.5 There is not even a hint here of Urry’s assertion that the viewing of tourist sights can open up a dialogue between the self and the other (1990:145).6 The question remains as to whether we can take the narrative voice in these texts to be the direct expression of the author’s views or whether the author is also distanced from his narrator. Pictures from Italy is a travel diary which reworks letters Dickens sent to John Forster during his stay in Italy in 1844-45 and clearly equates the author and narrator. The Kickleburys also suggests that there is no distance between the two: Michael Angelo Titmarsh is a writer and is indeed the nom de plume under which The Kickleburys and several of Thackeray’s publications in this period appeared. Similarly, the essays which Dickens

4 See e.g. Dickens’s 1856 essay ‘Insularities’ (1998a:338-346). 5 See also Mrs. Davis in Pictures from Italy, who visits all the sights in Rome but on whom Dickens remarks: ‘I don’t think she ever saw anything, or ever looked at anything’ (1998b: 129). 6 See also her failed comparison of the German and British high aristocracy: ‘“These German princes,” she said, “are not to be put on a level with English noblemen.” “Indeed,” we answer, “there is nothing so perfect as England: nothing so good as our aristocracy; nothing so perfect as our institutions.” “Nothing! NOTHING!” says Lady K.’ (Titmarsh 1850). 23 collected under the title The Uncommercial Traveller (1860-69), and which I will consider in a moment, are based on the author’s own experiences, as a comparison with his letters proves. An illustration of the Uncommercial Traveller who clearly bears Dickens’s physiognomy further confirms this identification (see Fig 1). Nevertheless, I want to argue for a fine distinction between both authors and their fictionalised selves, Titmarsh and the Uncommercial Traveller. More precisely, there is a convenient hovering between identification and distance. Both authors use their narrator personas to express authorial opinions, such as their sense of superiority over more ‘vulgar’ fellow tourists like Milliken; but at some points in these narratives, a distance is created that allows the authors to engage in an ironic second-order observation of their own behaviour as tourists. And here we see a self-conscious anticipation of Culler’s tenet that even the self- styled traveller who looks down on inferior tourists always remains a tourist himself (1988:157). This distance between the author and his persona is not noticeable at first sight because a first-person narrative contains of course no other voice that can convey the author’s evaluation of his narrator. But as in the genre of the dramatic monologue, the voiceless author can direct the reader’s judgement of the narrator through devices such as incongruities in the narrative, contradictions in the narrator’s opinions or indications of his limited perspective. As I have just argued, in Thackeray’s story Titmarsh’s authority is undermined through his unconvincing posing as an old traveller and also through his poor observational skills in relation to Miss Fanny’s affections. In The Uncommercial Traveller essays which are set abroad, the reader can also observe the narrator’s oscillation between the kind of observation which seems to lift him above the level of the ordinary tourist and moments when he conforms to touristic behaviour. A sign that he is not a mainstream tourist is that these essays concentrate on what Dean MacCannell (borrowing from Erving Goffman 1990:114) calls ‘backstage areas’ or ‘work displays’, i.e. they show the narrator’s observation of the foreign culture at work, its institutions, and its usually invisible practices away from touristic displays. In the 1840s, when continental travel was still a more novel experience for the British reader and for Dickens himself, Pictures from Italy covered the major Italian tourist sights, but by the 1850s and 1860s, when continental travel has become more widespread and Dickens is a regular

24 visitor to France, he presents his readers with more marginal French sights such as the Paris abattoirs and the city’s morgue or scenes in which no conventional sights feature at all.7 The behaviour of Dickens’s persona in these essays has been compared to that of the flâneur poised between immersion in the street culture of the foreign city and aloof detachment from the anonymous masses (Hollington 1997a and b). In ‘Railway Dreaming’ (1856), a scene in a Paris café depicts the narrator as a sedentary flâneur for whom the boulevard ‘becomes a stage, with an endless procession of lively actors crossing and re- crossing’ (Dickens 1998a:373). 8 The day-to-day business of the natives seems to be a spectacle that has been orchestrated for the entertainment of the tourist. But the narrator is also absorbed in the foreign culture and shares in the visual experience of other café guests, as the first-person plural indicates: ‘We are all amused, sitting seeing the traffic in the street, and the traffic in the street is in its turn amused by seeing us’ (Dickens 1998a:374). The observers here are in turn made objects of observation, blurring the distinction between the two (Schwartz 1998:22). Everyday life in mid-nineteenth-century Paris, the city of department store displays and shopping arcades, bears curious resemblances to the touristic experience with its emphasis on the visual. The Paris morgue with its display of decomposing, anonymous corpses was the city’s prime spectacular sight and frequently visited by foreign tourists. Yet like other writers about it, Dickens’s narrator tries to justify his fascination with the morgue by claiming a quasi- ethnographic interest in determining why the French are so drawn to this phenomenon. Accordingly, during one of his visits, recounted in ‘Some Recollections of Mortality’ (1863), when he witnesses a group of working-class people carrying a fresh corpse to the morgue, he decides to merge with the crowd in order to gain access to their experience of this event (Dickens 2000:220-4). Once more, he uses the first-person singular to describe the episode, which suggests that he is successfully sharing the natives’ experience and thus going beyond the tourist’s superficial contact with the visited culture. But, as I have argued elsewhere, this episode also reveals how much the narrator’s behaviour fits into the pattern of other British tourists to the morgue who can indulge in France, at a safe distance, their craving for the sensational with its lower-class stigma in Britain (Martens 2008). I would like to close with an episode from ‘Travelling Abroad’ (1860), which offers an intricate interplay of observations that shows the narrator’s awareness of his activity as an

7 For an analysis of these work displays which were routinely covered by English-language guidebooks, see MacCannell (1989:57-76).

25 observer while at the same time revealing how he is unselfconsciously acting in accordance with the stereotypes of the ordinary tourist. On a rainy Sunday evening in Strasbourg, the Uncommercial Traveller watches from his hotel window an enigmatic sequence of events involving the house opposite, the home and shop of a tradesman in an unidentified line of business called Straudenheim. He sees a woman in her Sunday finery – he assumes the housekeeper – sitting at an open first-floor window. She is being observed by two men from a window in a room above hers, one of them her master, who tries to spit at her. Both men then steal out of the house, not as the narrator at first fears to punish him for spying on the house, but to beat up another observer of the scene, a little soldier hidden below the narrator’s window, all of this in full sight of the laughing housekeeper at her window. Afterwards, the humiliated soldier in the company of friends returns several times to the front of the house to make gestures of defiance towards Straudenheim, who has long re-entered his home (Dickens 2000: 92-93). In this episode, the narrator presents himself as an observer of other observers, who tries to impose meaning on their behaviour. He indicates his self-consciousness about his interpretations of signs by repeatedly stressing that they are merely conjectures. His guesses about the characters are shaped by gender and racial prejudices: the housekeeper, who is ‘far from young, but of a comely presence, suggestive of a well-matured foot and ankle’ (Dickens 2000:92) and adorned with gold earrings and a seductive fan, is presented as a sexualised object of the male gaze. More tellingly, the implicit characterisation of Straudenheim as a Jewish usurer betrays a racism that recalls the national stereotyping of foreign natives of which tourists stand accused: ‘He wore a black velvet skull-cap, and looked usurious and rich. A large-lipped, pear-nosed old man, with white hair, keen eyes, though near-sighted’, he is first seen counting his money. From this, the narrator tries to draw conclusions about his trade: ‘A jeweller, Straudenheim, a dealer in money, a diamond merchant, or what?’ (Dickens 2000: 92) These conjectures are based on a lot of imaginative speculation. Like a stereotypical tourist, the narrator is on the lookout for evidence to confirm the prejudices that he wants to see confirmed. And like the tourist, he copes with the experience of cultural difference and a behaviour that he cannot decode by taking refuge in an assumption of national superiority and ridiculing the foreign culture, especially as represented by ‘the puniest of little soldiers begirt with the most innocent of little swords’ (Dickens 2000:93). Indeed, the narrator introduces the episode as follows: ‘an idle trifle of a vaudeville was played for me at the opposite house’ (Dickens 2000:92). This implies that the natives’ behaviour is a theatrical performance, a kind of touristic display, put on specially for the 26 tourist’s amusement. The windows which remain open and uncurtained after dark seem to invite the voyeuristic gaze of the tourist, who at first feels no guilt about availing himself of this opportunity. Moreover, the narrator only becomes a voyeur because he is a tourist: his occupation is looking at the visited culture, and since the rain forces him to remain indoors, he looks at the only sample of the foreign he can view, the house opposite. But he soon does develop a sense of self-conscious guilt at turning the natives into a spectacle, when he realises that ‘[t]hough unconscious of Straudenheim, she [the housekeeper] was conscious of somebody else – of me?’ (Dickens 2000:93) This is reinforced when Straudenheim and his friend cross the street to assault the hidden soldier: ‘They were coming over to me (I thought) to demand satisfaction for my looking at the housekeeper’ (Dickens 2000:93). This fear turns out to be unfounded, as the narrator remains safe in the protected tourists’ space, the hotel. Nevertheless, this short moment makes us realise that the gaze can be reciprocal and that the tourist may be just as much on display and vulnerable as the natives he observes. His way of observing and judging the visited culture can in turn become the object of scrutiny, in this case the critical scrutiny of an attentive reader of Dickens’s essay. In sum, then, I hope to have shown in this paper that both of these Victorian authors are perceptive analysts of the tourist gaze, who expose its mechanisms and also the porous boundary between the self-styled superior traveller and the vulgar tourist. They are self- conscious enough to include themselves in this critical observation by creating partly autobiographical, partly fictional narrator personas whose values and behaviour the reader is invited to judge critically. However, this criticism of tourism is attenuated by humour and the satirical exaggeration of the characters and situations which seem to distance them from real experiences. One might wish for a more outspoken criticism of the emerging tourism industry from these two authors who are not afraid to challenge their contemporaries’ ideas; but their self-directed irony without a heavy-handed authorial voice makes these texts more aesthetically appealing. Moreover, no strident attack on the tourism industry can be expected from men who are so implicated in that same industry. As frequent travellers to the Continent they benefit from its facilities, and as authors of commercially successful travel literature they rely on a market of (armchair) tourists eager to read their stories set in touristic locations.

27 Fig 1: ‘Leaving the Morgue’ (Dickens 2000:89).

28 References Boorstin, Daniel J. (1963) The Image Or What Happened to the American Dream, Harmondsworth: Penguin.

Buzard, James (1993) The Beaten Track: European Tourism, Literature, and the Ways to ‘Culture’ 1800-1918, Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Churchill, Kenneth (1980) Italy and English Literature 1764-1930, London: Macmillan.

Culler, Jonathan (1988) Framing the Sign: Criticism and Its Institutions, Oxford: Blackwell.

Dickens, Charles (1982) Little Dorrit, ed. Harvey Peter Sucksmith, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Dickens, Charles (1998a) ‘Gone Astray’ and Other Papers 1851-1859, ed. Michael Slater, The Dent Uniform Edition of Dickens’ Journalism, Vol. 3, London: Dent.

Dickens, Charles (1998b) Pictures from Italy, ed. Kate Flint, Harmondsworth: Penguin.

Dickens, Charles (2000) ‘The Uncommerical Traveller’ and Other Papers 1859-1870, ed. Michael Slater and John Drew, The Dent Uniform Edition of Dickens’ Journalism, Vol. 4, London: Dent.

Fussell, Paul (1987) ‘Introduction’, The Norton Book of Travel, ed. Paul Fussell, New York: Norton.

Goffman, Erving (1990) The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, London: Penguin.

Hollington, Michael (1997a) ‘Dickens, Household Words, and the Paris Boulevards (Part One)’. Dickens Quarterly, 14(3), pp. 154-164.

Hollington, Michael (1997b) ‘Dickens, Household Words, and the Paris Boulevards (Part Two)’. Dickens Quarterly, 14(4), pp. 199-212.

Luhmann, Niklas (1993) ‘Deconstruction as Second Order Observing’, New Literary History, 24, pp. 763-782.

MacCannell, Dean (1989) The Tourist: A New Theory of the Leisure Class, 2nd ed., Berkeley: University of California Press.

Martens, Britta (2008) ‘Death as Spectacle: The Paris Morgue in Dickens and Browning’, Dickens Studies Annual, 39, pp. 223-248.

Schwartz, Vanessa R. (1998) Spectacular Realities: Early Mass Culture in Fin-de-Siècle Paris, Berkeley: University of California Press.

Titmarsh, M. A. [Thackeray, William Makepeace] (1850) The Kickleburys on the Rhine, http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/2731

Urry, John (1990) The Tourist Gaze, London: Sage. . The Tourist as Spectator: Arthur Hugh Clough’s Amours de Voyage

Dr Cora Lindsay Centre for English Language Education, University of Nottingham [email protected]

ABSTRACT It is a much-quoted statement that Italy used to be, and to a certain extent still is, a geographical rather than a national entity. What are identified as Italian settings, however, have featured for centuries in English literature, and the region has accumulated paradoxical and even contradictory associations, not only for writers, but also for artists and tourists through the ages. Foremost of all Italian cities, Rome has in a number of ways summed up the extreme and contradictory values associated over the centuries with the Englishman’s generic concept of Italy.

This paper will look at the ways in which one nineteenth century writer exploits and frustrates the contemporary expectations of Rome. Arthur Hugh Clough (1816 – 1864) is generally known these days only as the author of the much-anthologised “Say not the Struggle”, or as a friend and contemporary of Matthew Arnold. However, his work Amours de Voyage, which was written in 1849, but only published in 1859, is a much under-rated epistolary poem set during the tumultuous events of Mazzini and Garibaldi’s 1849 Roman Republic and the subsequent French siege of Rome, one of the earliest episodes of the Italian Risorgimento.

In a letter of 1855 Clough suggested the epigraph “navibus atque / Quadrigis petimus bene vivere” [we search for the good life through ships and chariots] for the flyleaf of Amours de Voyage.9 Although this suggestion does not seem to have been followed up, the idea of travel and tourism remains a central metaphor of the poem. V.S. Pritchett describes Clough as “the poet of tourism”, and claims that Amours de Voyage is “the best evocation of the tourist’s Rome, indeed of the tourist himself”.10 In 1998 James Hamilton-Paterson chose Amours de Voyage as the poem he would most like to have written. He made that choice in the Guardian feature of the same title precisely because

9 AHC, “To F.J. Child,” 4 November 1855, Letter 448 of Correspondence II: 511 10 V.S. Pritchett, Books in General, “The Poet of Tourism” (London: Chatto & Windus, 1953) 1 30 the poem exposed “the sheer emptiness of mere tourism”.11 Patrick Scott argues that as professional sceptic Clough selected Claude, a tourist in Rome, as his central protagonist in Amours de Voyage because the tourist is the epitome of the “detached, puzzled, indecisive” figure who “inspects, [and] never participates”, and who in his capacity as foreign visitor is “seldom sure that he has understood sufficiently to act”.12 This persona of the detached observer is integral to Claude’s perspective not only on the monuments of Rome and the political conflict, but also on his failed romance.

This paper will look at the ways in which Clough exploits the image of the tourist to make comments on issues of romance, romantic nationalism, prejudice, and British preconceptions of the Latin peoples.

11 James Hamilton-Paterson, “I Wish I’d Written…” The Guardian Saturday Review, October 3 1998: 11 12 Patrick Scott, introduction, Amours de Voyage, by Arthur Hugh Clough (St. Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1974) 4 31 Crime Tourism and the Branding of Places: An Expanding Market in Sweden

Carina Sjöholm Department of Service Management, Lund University [email protected]

This article is also being published in: B Timm Knudsen & A M Waade (red.). Re-investing Authenticity. Tourism, Place and Emotions. Centre for Tourism & Cultural Change , Leeds Metropolitan University.

ABSTRACT My paper will focus on the expanding tourism connected to popular crime novels in Sweden. The Swedish crime genre has been exploding during the last decades, and several Swedish crime writers have had an immense success abroad, e. g. Henning Mankell, Liza Marklund and Karin Alvtegen. Some of these writers have chosen to connect their stories to a specific place or region; a fact, which has been exploited by the tourist business and a branch of cultural tourism, which can be labeled crime tourism, has developed.

I will present a case study, concerning prolific writer Henning Mankell, and his stories – both novels and filmic adaptations – about chief inspector Kurt Wallander at the Ystad police department in southern Scania. In a cooperation between several agents, mainly the local Tourist Office and the film production company which has produced several films based on the Mankell/Wallander stories, a concept has been developed where tourists are invited to follow a ”murder walk” in Ystad. During the walk they can experience and re-enact the Wallander adventures, and there are also are possibilities to identify with the biographical author – who lives in the neighborhood – and follow the creative process of the stories, from script to novel and film.

My study is ethnographic in character, and deals with this tourism as a /tourism of experience/, where the landscape is consumed by the tourist, often in a playful form: To be somewhere you have never been before, yet to be able to recognize the place, to feel the place and its corporeal qualities. In this perspective emotion and emotionality are resources to be affirmed, all in the context of place marketing and a renegotiation of regional identity.

Keywords: literary tourism, crime tourism, branding, place marketing, authenticity, storytelling

32 Crime Tourism and the Branding of Places: An Expanding Market in Sweden

In a brochure, issued by the Tourist Office of Ystad, Sweden, we can learn that “Inspector Kurt Wallander of Ystad police is the main character in a series of ten detective novels by Henning Mankell. A few years after the first Wallander book was published curious tourists started to appear in Ystad, that was ten years ago, and today Kurt Wallander is more popular than ever.”

In Ystad Studios the production company Yellow Bird has in fact produced thirteen films, three for cinema and ten for television and DVD-release, between 2004 – 2005, based on the character Chief Inspector Kurt Wallander of the Ystad Police Department. A new series of films is already on its way, and in the summer of 2008 three British films based on this character were shot in Ystad by BBC and Yellow Bird with Kenneth Branagh in the lead role.

The popularity of the novels by Henning Mankell as well as the filmic adaptations of them, has given rise to a vast public interest in the character Wallander and his whereabouts in Ystad, where there now are guided tours around the studio premises. There is a special Wallander studio where parts of the films were made. In the studio, which now is a part of a designated tourist attraction, you can find the apartment where Kurt Wallander lives, as well as parts of the police station and a forensics laboratory. In the brochure “In the footsteps of Wallander – A guide to Ystad and the surrounding area for fans of criminal inspector Kurt Wallander” one can read that a tour at Cineteket – the public part of the film studio – is “a must for any film fan. Well-informed guides talk about the studios’ background and share anecdotes from film sets and shoots”.

Ystad is a small town (around 17 200 inhabitants in the city proper) at the southeast coast of Skåne in Southern Sweden. Ystad is an old harbour, and a former garrison town, which recently has turned into a centre for film production in Southern Sweden, due to national and regional funding. Hitherto, the most successful product hitherto has been the films with Chief Inspector Wallander. The local tourist office together with several other agents are now marketing Wallander in order to establish a new kind of tourism, centred around experiences connected to fiction and film.

The sense of Ystad In this case study I will present how this specific practice of marketing of Wallander is organised, and deal with issues concerning authenticity and sense of place. The study is a part of a current research project, “Travels in the tracks of novels, films and writers. A cultural analysis of literary 33 tourism”. My presentation relies on field observations, participation in several guided tours, and interviews made in Ystad with people connected to the Wallander endeavour in different ways. For some years I have also participated in and been able to study several types of guided tours, connected to other novels and films. As a source I have also used tourist brochures, as well as other forms of public information. The fundament for some of my more general statements is primarily a quantitative survey with about 130 written answers from municipal tourist agencies from all over Sweden, concerned with different types of literary tourism. I have mainly studied tourism focused on crime novels and crime writers, but have in some field studies also collected facts around some other Swedish literary genres.

I will analyse the various products that have been created around the fictional character Kurt Wallander, as he appears not only in the novels and the films, but also in the guided studio tours and in the murder walk, the latter which is possible to conduct on the base of a map with specific instructions. My aim is to show how subjective feelings for a place, the sense of place, interact with the physical location, and how it is possible to understand these both materially and symbolically. These places develop new local meanings, where social relationships can be created, maintained, and enacted. Place is thus in this context something which continues, a process.

Fiction and concepts of authenticity interact within the limits of a specific cultural genre, the murder walk. During these murder walks, the concept of authenticity is revised, since fictitious characters and places are mixed with real ones. The participants in the walks embody the geography; they place themselves inside the fiction, and thereby transgress the traditional border between fantasy and reality, otherwise upheld in crime stories and movies. Only through this walk is the embodiment – and thus the rethinking – possible to achieve.

One could ask if these places are imaginary or real. They have at least created a sense of place in the reader or the moviegoer, and do exist according to this mediated experience. ”Wallanderland” is here an example of how a place can be created and fictionalised through economic and commercial conditions. The fictitious Wallander has helped to establish Ystad as a destination for tourists. ”It is impossible to value how much we earn due to Kurt”, says one of the guides of the Wallander tours.

With the novels, the films, guided tours and a brochure of how to follow the Wallander foot steps; I want to give some examples of synergy effects between literature, film, and tourism, an expanding market (Frost 2006, Jones & Smith 2005, Rodhanthi 2004).

34 Murder walks and literary tourism – Creating products and spaces There are over 120 literary societies in Sweden, and many of them take care of buildings, museums and places that in all sorts of ways are connected to writers, and sometimes the fictions that the books deal with. Many tourist projects have been built around events and locations depicted in novels, and their success as attractions has been tremendous at some places.

The crime novels of Henning Mankell and the cinematic adaptations produced in Ystad are some of the vital elements in a specific practice of something between film- and literary tourism; that is tourism focused on geographic spots and sights that are connected to authors and/or their literary creations. The relationship between tourism, literature and film tends right now to be in a formative moment within the field of research. At the same time it has become a commercially attractive sector within tourist business (Herbert 1996, 2001, Robinson & Andersen 2003, Squire 1994). Growing amounts of people read and plan their travels based on the concept of following a writer in his/her tracks, alternatively following a route from a novel, or, to experience something they have seen in the cinema (Beeton 2004, Thompson 2007). The example of Wallander shows that the combination tourism-novel-writer-film is a successful product; the market creates the needs, and the service business has found a new concept, a product that is ”easy business to set up” (Strömberg 2007).

It is noteworthy that the staff at Cineteket and the personnel within the tourist agency of Ystad when interviewed point out the different strata of visiting tourists. They claim that there is a difference between literary tourists and film tourists; the literary tourists, travelling in the tracks of writer Henning Mankell and his character Wallander, seem to be a bit embarrassed by their own interest, and find it important to show that they are also interested in other cultural events and traditions in the region, while the film tourists are much clearer with their ambitions, they often have very precise questions, connected to the locations. “Sometimes film tourists enter and seem quite astonished to find that there also are novels about Inspector Wallander”, says the guide, and “the films help the books to find new readers”.

A touristic site like this is constantly recharged with meaning, dependent of whom you are, when you travel and how. You can be a reader of novels, you can be a moviegoer, you can just look for some rest or distraction, or you can more actively seek experiences. And when you return to this place you have new expectations. Traditionally tourism deals with things you have not seen before. Literary and film tourism is primarily a way of searching for the things you have read about or seen

35 in other representations. Often it is the reading of fiction or what you have seen on the screen that motivates travel in this kind of tourism. You have been there already, almost. But when you arrive at the actual site, other things may be of greater importance than what you have read...

Our diverse experiences, mediated as well as others, have a great importance for our interpretation of a place. Place is something that not only exists a priori, it becomes, and when – as in this case – the places are made into products and commercialised through fiction and film, they also develop a strategic meaning (Urry 1995). Place is created through use. You can be interested in the stories of the novels, the filmic adaptations or of the writer as a biographic person. You can be interested in the writer’s experiences of his writing in more general terms or his interpretation of a certain location or even attracted by stories told by other visitors.

There are thus different motivations for tourists to visit literary areas (Busby & Klug 2001). Some tourists visit a literary place because of its connection to their own childhood memories; some don’t even know that it was a literary spot before they were there (Busby & George, 2004). Several tourists travel to gain more knowledge about the writer and the books, and some visit the place since they had read about it in novels, and thereafter wanted to get to know the literary landscape.

It is possible to speak in terms of how places are made into products, and to ask if there are strategies to turn a place into a touristic attraction. Locally represented practices are increasingly important, due to the expansion of this kind of tourism, and like Sandvik & Wade (2007) you can describe this as a media-scape. One can note that guided tours in the tracks of diverse media narratives are disconnected from their first source of inspiration, and do lead to a kind of experience travel in which the tourists become characters in a role play. In order to fictionalise a place, you have to have a certain amount of ”fantasy”, a way of ”seeing” the place according to the reader’s experiences.

Films produced regionally are seen as an important factor for economic growth. They generate incomes at a regional level, and they also promote the region when they expose the landscape and surroundings of Ystad. But when they finally attract tourists they are also part of the industry of experiences (Löfgren 2003). The promotion of the films lead to the promotion of the landscape that in turn leads to the promotion of other products, mostly experiences and services.

36 In the tracks of Wallander Ystad Tourist office has published a brochure, ”In the tracks of Wallander: A guide over Ystad and surroundings for those who like the fictional character Kurt Wallander, Chief Inspector at Ystad Police Department”. In the brochure Henning Mankell as well as his creations Kurt Wallander and Linda Wallander (Wallander’s daughter) are presented, but above all there is a map with 32 Ystad sights, mentioned or used in the novels and the films. This brochure is for free and is printed in about 30.000 copies each year. The latest issue (2007) also has a list with 20 locations where the films actually were shot. Besides compulsory statistics about the books, their selling rates, and translations, there are also some biographical facts, e. g. that Henning Mankell, married to theatre director Eva Bergman (daughter to Ingmar Bergman), lives partly outside Ystad, partly in Mozambique, where he is artistic adviser for Teatro Avenida, and you will also be informed about his engagement in the struggle against AIDS. Here I will use this brochure to show how it is possible to follow the character Kurt Wallander in his footsteps through Ystad.

When entering Ystad Tourist Office you will see portrait pictures of actor Krister Henriksson as Kurt Wallander, there are Mankell novels for sale in several languages, Wallander post cards, the book Wallanders Ystad (Ambrius 2004), published by the local newspaper, Ystad Allehanda, and featuring texts in Swedish, English and German, making it evident that Ystad and Wallander are connected with each other. You are also handed the brochure: The intention is that you will read this brochure and then travel around Ystad on your own. During the summertime it is also possible to go on different Wallander tours, arranged by the Volunteer Fire Corps, with their vintage fire squad car. “The ride starts at Stortorget (The Market Square), and takes in the famous (and not so famous) sites and locations from the books and films”. The Fire Corps is a part of the Ystad community that is not directly involved in the Wallander universe but has a lot to gain through the affiliation.

You can also enjoy a guided tour in the studio where parts of the films were shot, and you can buy a Wallander package: dinner at one of Wallander’s favourite restaurants, accommodation at the hotel where he used to eat lunch, and coffee at Fridolf’s konditori, labelled as Wallander’s favourite coffeshop, where he often either drinks coffee or beer and orders a herring sandwich, typical of the region.

The Wallander package also includes a ”Wallander pastry ”. It is a blue coloured fancy cake with marzipan and a taste of arrack. The story is worth telling; in the café there is a certificate, attesting to the fact that the confectioner has the approval of the Wallander family to use the name for the

37 pastry; for immaterial right reasons the pastry does not – officially – allude to Chief Inspector Wallander – the copyright holders of the character name Wallander denied this license – but to a family, who happened to have the same name, who cared for the confectioner when they read in the papers about his problems. The story of the pastry is now a part of a web of storytelling’ as well as other contextual stories, like the fact that Henning Mankell is politically and socially engaged. The stories help to maintain each other, and create new layers of meanings.

All this, from the Fire Squad car to the blue pastry, builds the experience of Wallanderland. But each part individually can also function either as an element in Wallander tourism, or as an isolated experience. There is a possibility for a visitor to come to Ystad and have the blue pastry without connecting it to the writer Mankell or his character Wallander. The experience industry, designed to promote Wallander, can also function as conventional tourism. The old can be a vessel for the new, and vice versa.

What kind of places do we see then, if we follow the maps and lists in the brochure? It all starts with the Police Department, which is described as the second home of Kurt Wallander. Then you go to Mariagatan no. 10, the home address of Wallander in the books. But in the brochure there is no mention of the fact that this house in not the actual location which is used in the films. This often causes confusion among the tourists. In the films, there is another house at Mariagatan which is used for the exterior shots, and which then has been rebuilt in the studio for the interior shots. The text in the brochure tries to make this place concrete, sensual: ”The street lamp spreads a yellow light, the car is parked in the street. Often you can hear opera arias from the apartment. Mabasha was abducted from this place in The White Lioness, and murderers have been sneaking around here when trying to get Wallander”. It is easy for the crime reader to be transported to the books and the films by the presentation, which makes the scenes visible.

Further on in the tour, sketched out by the brochure, Kurt Wallander has been transformed into ”Kurt”; the relationship to the main character is now of a personal nature. An important element in the narrative, novels, and films (and especially the earlier ones) is the bad health of Wallander. He tries to get help at the Ystad municipal hospital (also marked on the map) to handle his stress symptoms, but also to cure his diabetes. This is sometimes used as an explanation of the popularity of this fictional character; he has an anti-heroic stature – he is an ordinary man.

Furtheron, the tour in the brochure brings you to locations connected to other characters in the novels and films, and includes locations where crimes have been committed and where murderers

38 live. The distances between the places or sights start to increase and, consequently, you cannot walk between them, you have to use a bike or go by car. A certain order, a certain walk from point to point, is proposed in the brochure, but you are very free to choose.

The guided film studio walk is of a more traditionally preconditioned kind; you follow a route ordained by the guide. The film studio is located at the former garrison, and has a public part, called Cineteket, where there also are expositions on filmmaking more generally, and a presentation of the Ystad film environment. The guide tells about the two versions of Wallander; one acted by Rolf Lassgård in an earlier series of films, produced in Trollhättan in Western Sweden, in a ”fake Skåne”, and the other one, acted by Krister Henriksson, produced here in Ystad. The latter one is, the guide points out, a more international figure, fit for the 21th century; slimmer, healthier, and with a better relationship with his daughter. Several times it is mentioned that 26 million copies of the Wallander books have been sold. Now there is a third Wallander, Kenneth Branagh…

When entering the studio the guide greets us, saying that it is time to ”visit Kurt and Nyberg” (Nyberg is the chief medical examiner at the police department). The question about the two addresses at Mariagatan, no 10 and no 11, is raised. Furthermore, the guide carefully points out which scenes were shot in studio, and which scenes were shot on location.

We are told that the work begins when ”Henning” (the author) presents a story outline, later to be developed by several co-writers. ”Henning thought it was a good idea to make films with his Kurt”, says the guide, and implies the personal relationship to the writer by using the given name. This is a common device in guided writer’s tours (Kaijser 2002, Meurling 2006). Another way of showing how close one is to the famous author is demonstrated when the guide tells us that Mankell has a cottage nearby Ystad, but she has promised him not to disclose where…

In the studio apartment when we enter Kurt’s living room, the guide turns on the CD and plays some opera music as a means of creating the right atmosphere. The guide ends the tour by asking us to ”stroll around in Kurt’s apartment and see how he lives”. She hopes that we have had some ”insights in the world of film”, and that we realize that much of it ”is fake”.

Fact and fiction The art of the moving picture is of great importance for our way of looking at landscapes. Regional developers and tourist businesses alike are ready to manage this as a new form of “branding culture” where – place specific – qualities are marketed and sold. Many of the new crime novels 39 represent a specific place and a recognisable geography, which is of importance for those who read them, but also for the adaptation possibilities. It often creates a somewhat confused interchange between filmic representation, literary text, and geographical facts. Few things pique the imagination as much as a well-known geography.

But what happens with an actual place when it is marketed through a fictional text? The motivations for the different agents when they market their region are different. Some think in terms of marketing, and others about educating or mediating. And different novels relate to factual conditions in different ways. Some crime novelists point out that all places mentioned in their books are factual, and recreated after thorough research, while others feel free to blend facts and fiction. The reception of the stories in the audience depends on several factors, e. g. how the fictional stories are related to the ”real ones”, who is conveying to the stories and whose stories are told. One can wonder what happens when a surrounding, a writer, and a work of art, together constitute a tourist attraction.

A tourist attraction is a social construction, and in this process there are many factors involved: it is a matter of practical and economical considerations, but also the expectations of the visitors. The visitors are influenced by diverse kinds of former experiences of the actual place. It does matter if you have read the book which the promoted writer has written, or of you know anything at all about the writer, if you know anything about the fictional characters, if you have seen an adaptation or read about other people’s experiences of the place, the books, or the writer.

It is intriguing to reflect over what it is that local authorities and business find possible to develop these days when tourism often is promoted as a saviour for local problems. Cultural tourism has become more and more important in the global tourist business but also on a local level. When a place has had some success, it will inspire others. It is usual within the Swedish tourist business to copy successful enterprises, rather than to take the risk to develop some of your own. It is quite clear in my survey that several tourist agencies in Sweden have tried to duplicate the Ystad model of literary tourism, of course with other names and characters than the ones we find in Wallanderland. And when the Wallander concept is discussed in Ystad a new layer of fiction tends to merge with the others, i.e. the metafictional level where the story of the touristic enterprise becomes a part of the touristic attraction.

An ethical question worth consideration concerns who uses whom in this local game. Who benefits? Is it the writer, the fiction or the place that is at stake? Or is it a matter of exploitation? Is

40 it even possible – or necessary – to discuss the processes at work here in terms of the wearing out of a place?

Multisensationalism and situated travels The marketing of writers and their works is a phenomenon that has been around for a long time in Sweden. Jubilees of authors as well as guided walks have a long tradition, something which finally has reached the tourist business.

A basic assumption is that the visitor can make the connection between a writer’s biography and his/her works. This biographical aspect in reading is very popular and highly feasible within the tourist business – in spite of scholarly research in literature and literary theory that for decades has tried to turn away from the biographical writer and instead explore the text and the encounter between text and reader. The common interest in personal history is great, and in my interviews it is clearly stated by tourist business representatives that this personal history is what the tourist wants to hear.

A significant trait in our time is new fusions and hybrids (Löfgren 2003, Willim 2005). Of the research that has been conducted upon the experience industry, a great deal has focused on additive factors; many experiences are meant to give customers components that they can blend and compose themselves, according to the situation and context (O’Dell 2001). In that way consumers are turned into producers of their own experiences. In classical cultural analysis it is the processual element of the experience that is accentuated, and not only when it comes to the more exceptional experiences – those that we approach in a clear and visible way. Sometimes a visitor can find that he or she has been involved in a process, which afterwards is possible to define as an experience. Transposed into the travels of the kind we are discussing here, it is obvious that experiences are organised around a row of discrete units, which seen individually are rather trivial. But in this context they appear as symbolic bridges, connecting the different parts of the experience, and making it all into something extraordinary.

In this context it is possible to speak of ”multisensationalism”; diverse kinds of sensual experiences are added in order to gain the complete experience (see Sjöholm 2003). It can be wise to distinguish between the kind of experiences that are sensual, emotional, or connected to a certain place and time, and those experiences that are of a more transcendent nature, conscious, cognitive, something which makes you wiser in a cumulative process (O’Dell 2002). The economy of experience

41 presupposes a great deal of reflexivity; you have to judge the experience in order to be able to retell it or dream about another one.

The importance of being authentic For a sight to be worth seeing several things are required. There are many who travel, trying to find out how a real person (for example a writer) could have been living, but there are also those who travel in the tracks of fictitious persons. A fictive event can also turn a place into an attraction. The paradox is that the tourist can find the fictitious as the most authentic; the reality needs an aesthetic form in order to appear real.

At the touristic arena the souvenir is a material artefact that is often judged after its level of authenticity and the unicity is a central criterion when tourists value authenticity (Löfgren 1999). The evaluation of the authenticity is not only connected to the thing itself; it has also to do with the person who has produced it. Local handicraft is often seen as a guarantee for authenticity. Another quality here is the situation during which the artefact is acquired. The material artefacts or souvenirs that are treated in the realm of literary tourism are often the books and the films, and maybe maps and the kind of documentation made by the tourist; photographs, notes, diaries.

Are these medial places imaginary? Obviously they have created a sense of place for those who have read the books or seen the films; thus, they exist. Here, I do not discriminate between the places that a novel reader wants to see, and the ones that a cinema spectator wants to see again, even if we know that the guides of Ystad studios claim that there are differences between the literary tourist and the film tourist. Independent of the source of inspiration, the landscape is interpreted through the novels you have read or the films you have seen. The landscape is re-created through this new context. As well as a literary text is able to describe an existing place with great exactitude; a reader is able to transform the place into an imaginary place, with the help of imagination and experience. In the imagination of the reader, the diverse dimensions of the reading are mixed with certain visual and corporeal impressions. Many elements in the reading are important in the experience of the actual place; the writer’s ability to describe the place as well as the mood of the actual reader. The mixture of real and imaginary landscape provides space for the imagination.

The true power of concepts and views obtained from literary texts, is their ability to get the reader to confirm them, says Krolikowski & Chappel (2004). As time passes, notions of a place are so internalised that a great deal of effort is required if one is to see something else. Literary images can

42 thus dominate and make it difficult to see something of “one’s own”. But a literary text can also function as a gate to a landscape that does not exist in reality, but is possible to reach through the fiction. And the same goes for “real” historical events. Some archaeologists describe how they at times try to understand a place by imagining its original features. The place is in this way interpreted through knowledge or acquaintance.

Literary tourism deals to a great extent with the staging of experiences. Everyone has to make his/her own composition. The balance between public representation and individual experience is crucial. It gives way to a cultural process where a new public sphere is created when the writer and the literary work arethe condition for literary tourism, for example a guided tour (Squire 1994). In this process, literary landscapes are commodified, and oscillate between being public images and individual arenas. And by individual we can mean both the writer’s and the reader’s visions.

To be in a place where you have never been before, but at the same time feel that you have experienced that place – and also in a physical sense – is of great importance. There is in a way a consumption of the landscape, a game of sorts. Sometimes it is more important to have been there than to be there. In the age of the experience economy the importance of emotions is decisive.

The local has gained more importance as this kind of tourism is growing when certain places are promoted, packaged, and marketed (Hansen & Wilber 2006). Often that are already well known in one way or another are chosen. Ystad is a village that has attracted German tourists for quite some time now. But through the creation of Wallanderland a new Ystad has been born, which is reinforced by commercial and cultural values. Mankell and Wallander have together secured Ystad as a tourist destination.

There is a geographical aspect to authenticity. Travels to certain places are supposed to be more authentic than others (Sheller & Urry 2004). This has partly to do with the established historiography of the location; the way one travels to and through it, and the level of consumption taking place there. What is thought of as an original setting has a certain value, and another important factor is selection. Several scholars, e.g. within tourism research of sociological origin, have emphasized the subjectivity of the authentic (see Andersson-Cederholm 2007, Cohen 1988, Taylor 2001, Wang 1999). Authenticity is not a singular entity, but is often layered. That which is true for me does not have to be true for you! This does not automatically mean that authenticity is an illusion, lost in subjectivity and thereby impossible to grasp. However, truth is always negotiated.

43 In artists’ and writers’ homes there are often several kinds of activities being staged, such as expositions. Often it is claimed that these activities are conducted “in the spirit” of the writer or the artist or even the fictitious character. When the Cineteket guide asks us to sit in Kurt’s chair and be photographed, the concept of authenticity becomes a tool that is used and mobilised to charge the setting with a particular aura of “authenticity” and thereby – which may be a paradox – make the location, the films and the books more sellable.

The performative and the tourism of experience In today’s tourism the enactment of feelings is accentuated (Frykman & Löfgren 2004). The performative dimension and the presence of the different senses have become increasingly important in the tourism and experience industry. In tourism research you can note that the highlight of the tourist gaze – to see what the tourist sees – has been augmented by the production and creation of experiences through the involvement of the tourist in different activities. It is, for example, obvious in the kind of walks that I have mentioned above, and which are essential elements in something I would like to label crime tourism or mystery tourism. You are guided as before, but you are also expected to interact.

Guided tours are actually a genre in their own right, a performance of sorts. Of course there are as many aspects and stories as there are guides. And there is also space for a dialogue between the guide and the visitor, an interaction, as well as a transfer between different guides and even different generations of guides.

The concept of authenticity produces values, meaning and coherence for the audience, the visitors or participants. It functions as a tool for social categorisation and positioning, and creates and maintains identities and styles. It becomes a means of distinguishing between ”us” and ”them” – ”we who like this” apart from ”you who like that”. As French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu would say, the place is charged with cultural capital. This all takes place in a complex interaction with several agents: journalists, travel agencies, museums, and audiences. The evaluation of experiences and the thoughts around authenticity and non-authenticity is an interplay that creates meanings and new values, where we compare our own experiences with those of others. To discuss what we were engaged in becomes a way of prolonging the pleasure and re-creating the experience.

There are many interacting factors behind the success that has characterised guided tours of this kind. There is a Museum pedagogy that cherishes ”learning by doing” and has chosen not to expose 44 the cultural heritage but to enact it. This has become part of a marketing strategy. The Cineteket guide notes, for example, that it is always a success to show the studio and ask the visitors to touch things, and use the furniture. Tactility is a kernel in the staging of experiences.

Regional politics is another factor, with its need for the district’s ability to compete and develop a brand, and with employment effects and attractivity for the service sector. The mission of today’s museums has less to do with lifelong learning than with regional development. Nowadays the public sector is expected to work in a self-sustaining manner, which in turn demands a certain amount of creativity

Within the tourism industry today it is commonly understood that many tourists expect to participate in the attractions they visit. But what is it all about? What is a true experience? The guide is a mediator and a guarantor for the truth of the message. In spite of that, there are obvious fictitious traits in all guided tours, and it can as a matter of fact be a part of the sport to find blots and errors. In most visitor groups you will find the Expert: the one who knows the streets best, the district, the books, the films, the technology…

You are what you experience. In order to be seen as a whole human being there are certain things that you have to have been through. Often it is the story itself that is the point of it all, not just the fact that you travelled at all, but also that you return and can tell stories (Löfgren 1999, O’Dell 2001). The experience of travel has as much meaning as the products. To be on holiday and travel is not just to be off duty – it is also and always a question of larger ideological discourses: social class, cultural capital, economic limits and national identity all work to delineate boundaries and create possibilities. As a tourist you perform according to these patterns, and there is a complex and meaningful connection between these socio-cultural conditions and the way you tell and retell your experiences as stories. You will find what you are looking for, something which several of my informants confirm in their stories.

Conclusion With a broad approach it is possible to see the importance of the many parts in the whole, and to grasp the cultural situations that surround reading in combination with travel. Interaction and co- production are of great importance. Fiction influences reality, which in turn influences the fiction, which in turn… and so on. Fiction can function as an optical lens for reality. The difference between fiction and reality creates dynamics. To distinguish between the two worlds is almost

45 impossible – and maybe not the most important task. Literary tourism deals with the staging of people’s experiences, some real, some fictitious.

It is a question of a consumption of the place, often in a playful form: To be somewhere you have never been before, yet to be able to recognize the place, to feel the place and its corporeal qualities. Emotion and emotionality are resources to be affirmed (Bærenholdt et.al. 2004, Crouch 1999).

In this study I have tried to give some examples of how fiction in diverse forms has been used in order to create locations and spaces – both with respect to incoming tourists and the local inhabitants. You do not have to come from afar to experience Ystad as exotic – if you accept the fictionalised reading of it.

What happens then with the inhabitants in a town, marketed with imaginary geographies? Do they see it as a potential or as a colonising threat? Probably both, depending upon how strong the attraction is and how it is developed (“what if everyone goes by car?”). Something is due to happen with a village or a city that becomes mediated through the tourist business and the experience industry. Evidently Wallander is used for branding and marketing Ystad – because nowadays every place with some self-respect must find its identity, something significant, and a representative face. You have to have a value on the experience market.

The body is a hazardous term, possible to connect both to the corpse in the murder mystery and the actual body of the tourist, the receiver of sensations and empirical data. The space term is no less complex; it covers the actual place – such as Mariagatan in Ystad – as well as the theoretical relations that occur or are possible to interpret between the actual place and the fictitious events. In the crossroad of body and space the walking tourist embodies the detective, the victim or the murderer and is still someone – or something – else. That something else is the core of the murder walk.

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48 Dickens and the history of tourism

David Parker University of Kingston [email protected]

Dickens influenced the history of tourism in two ways, connected only by the fact of this influence.i To begin with, he helped to shape the mind-set that sustains tourism today. More obscurely, his books motivated generations of a particular kind of tourist.

When we compare Dickens’s two travel books, American Notes (1842) and Pictures from Italy (1846), we can see how a lesson he learned made the later book better. And the lesson learned, essentially, was how to be the sort of tourist we recognise today. The difference between the books is marked by a very small adjustment of sensibility, but one which makes Pictures from Italy familiar to readers of modern travel literature, in contrast to American Notes which speaks to us in the voice of a bygone age. American Notes is characterised—spoiled in my view—by a compulsion to judge. Although there are judgments in abundance in Pictures from Italy, they are more muted. The later book is characterised by an openness to experience, a readiness to enjoy even while disapproving, a readiness to let enjoyment outrun both judgment and understanding. This, I submit, is the mind-set we try to cultivate, when we check in at Heathrow or Gatwick. Modern travel writers, and thoughtful modern tourists, do not seek to objectify an unfamiliar culture, to pin it down through judgment. They conduct transactions between cultures. They go equipped with judgments and expectations shaped by their own culture—prejudices if you like—but they test them in the circumstances of unfamiliar cultures. Sometimes, to be sure, they condemn, but they nevertheless place themselves in learning situations, and succeed only when perspectives are adjusted, however slightly (I am thinking of writers like Eric Newby and Paul Theroux). Dickens was among the first to see how to do this. Disappointment with America, during his 1842 visit, sours American Notes. In it Dickens seeks to reject—not just to criticise but to reject—important features both of the culture he is discovering and the culture that produced him. He strives for a lofty perspective. Magisterial praise is mixed with magisterial indignation. He cannot resist the roles of extoller of a brave new republic, or exposer of scandals. Too rarely do we hear the voice of a man changing through experience, and welcoming the change. Resentment is more usual. Dickens told Bostonians he had “dreamed by

49 day and night, for years, of setting foot upon this shore, and breathing this pure air” (Speeches 19). Seven weeks later he told Macready, “This is not the Republic I came to see. This is not the Republic of my imagination. I infinitely prefer a liberal monarchy—even with its sickening accompaniments of Court Circulars, and Kings of Prussia—to such a Government as this” (Letters 3:156). He denounced America for not vindicating his dreams. American Notes is impoverished by the confrontation of prejudice with the unexpected, instead of being enriched by it. There are wonderful things to be found in the book, it cannot be denied. The description of the pig on Broadway shows Dickens at his best. It is

in every respect a republican pig, going wherever he pleases, and mingling with the best society, on an equal, if not superior footing, for every one makes way when he appears, and the haughtiest gives him the wall, if he prefer it. He is a great philosopher, and seldom moved, unless by the dogs before mentioned. Sometimes, indeed, you may see his small eye twinkling on a slaughtered friend, whose carcase garnishes a butcher’s door- post, but he grunts out “Such is life: all flesh is pork!” buries his nose in the mire again, and waddles down the gutter: comforting himself with the reflection that there is one snout the less to anticipate stray cabbage-stalks, at any rate. (ch. 4)

This kind of writing is overshadowed, however, by platform didacticism. Dickens judgment of the Shakers, for instance, may well have been just. It is certainly consistent with his views on comparable matters. And it may well have been what readers in the 1840s looked for in a book about the USA. But it fails to address the needs of the traveller, the would-be traveller, the traveller, even, in imagination alone. It does not give readers the jolt of actuality, the sense of having an experience and enjoying it as such, even while making an adverse judgment:

I cannot, I confess, incline towards the Shakers; view them with much favour, or extend towards them any very lenient construction. I so abhor, and from my soul detest that bad spirit, no matter by what class or sect it may be entertained, which would strip life of its healthful graces, rob youth of its innocent pleasures, pluck from maturity and age their pleasant ornaments, and make existence but a narrow path towards the grave: that odious spirit which, if it could have had full scope and sway upon the earth, must have blasted and made barren the imaginations of the greatest men, and left them, in their power of raising up enduring images before their fellow-creatures yet unborn, no better than the beasts: that, in these very broad-brimmed hats and very sombre coats—in stiff-necked, solemn-visaged piety, in short, no matter what its garb, whether it have

50 cropped hair as in a Shaker village, or long nails as in a Hindoo temple—I recognise the worst among the enemies of Heaven and Earth, who turn the water at the marriage feasts of this poor world, not into wine, but gall. (ch. 15)

Readers are not exposed by this to the challenging otherness we look for in travel literature, the challenging otherness we hope to confront as tourists. In its way it is a comfortable judgment: “This is something I know about,” it declares, “something I can understand. Behold otherness objectified.” It could be said, I suppose, that in American Notes Dickens was not trying to write what we would now call a travel book, or that he was writing a kind of travel book now defunct: that he was writing a dissertation on American civilization for those who would never cross the Atlantic, a book for those anxious mentally to map the world and to paint each nation with appropriate moral colouring. But such a contention in no way challenges my point that it was not until he wrote Pictures from Italy that Dickens came to discover the art of modern travel-writing and the mind-set of the modern tourist. Dickens makes unfavourable judgments in Pictures from Italy, to be sure, but the book is never sour. In it we find a new Dickens. It is marked by nothing less than an open enjoyment of failure to understand, and it frequently stops contentedly short of judgment. Dickens rejoices in things and people and places that challenge explanation. Genoa, for instance:

There seems to be always something to find out in it. There are the most extraordinary alleys and by-ways to walk about in. You can lose your way (what a comfort that is, when you are idle!) twenty times a day, if you like; and turn up again, under the most unexpected and surprising difficulties. It abounds in the strangest contrasts; things that are picturesque, ugly, mean, magnificent, delightful, and offensive, break upon the view at every turn. (ch. 4)

It is a rejoicing that comes to the fore in the most memorable section of the book, built upon a conceit of utter inability to distinguish between reality and dream. I am speaking of “An Italian Dream,” Dickens’s description of Venice:

I thought I entered the Cathedral, and went in and out among its many arches: traversing its whole extent. A grand and dreamy structure, of immense proportions; golden with old mosaics; redolent of perfumes; dim with the smoke of incense; costly in treasure of precious stones and metals, glittering through iron bars; holy with the bodies

51 of deceased saints; rainbow-hued with windows of stained glass; dark with carved woods and marbles; obscure in its vast heights, and lengthening distances; shining with silver lamps and winking lights; unreal fantastic, solemn, inconceivable throughout. I thought I entered the old palace; pacing silent galleries and council-chambers, where the old rulers of this mistress of the waters looked sternly out, in pictures, from the walls, and where her high-prowed galleys, still victorious on canvas, fought and conquered as of old. I thought I wandered through its halls of state and triumph—bare and empty now!—and musing on its pride and might, extinct: for that was past; all past: heard a voice say, “Some tokens of its ancient rule and some consoling reasons for its downfall, may be traced here, yet!” (ch. 7)

And a special feature of this book is the way Dickens mingles delight with disapproval. He does so from time to time in American Notes, to be sure, but in Pictures from Italy it is the default setting. Describing the ritual of the Scala Santa in Rome, a staircase said to be from Pontius Pilate’s house, Dickens declares, “I never in my life, saw anything at once so ridiculous, and so unpleasant, as this sight.” But he still enjoys it. He delights in the behaviour of a group of schoolboys ritually climbing and descending the stairs with everyone else, whom other devotees give “as wide a berth as possible, in consequence of their betraying some recklessness in the management of their boots.”

The boys got on brilliantly, and were up and down again before the old lady had accomplished her half-dozen stairs. But most of the penitents came down, very sprightly and fresh, as having done a real substantial good deed which it would take a good deal of sin to counterbalance; and the old gentleman in the watch-box [collecting cash contributions] was down upon them with his canister while they were in this humour, I can promise you. (ch. 10)

Any intelligent travel writer, any intelligent tourist, is going to make moral judgments, but the twenty-first-century sensibility objects to their being foregrounded. We do not care for moralising in such a context, not because we do not care for moralising ever, but because we feel the unmediated instant experience is what we should savour first. Judgment can be subordinated to it, as here, or come later. Between American Notes and Pictures from Italy Dickens learned how to manage the experience of tourism. Comparing the two of them helps us reach an understanding of what it is as tourists we do.

52 We cannot exhaust an account of Dickens and the history of tourism, however, by dwelling only upon the way he helped to shape the tourist mind-set. There is a posthumous intersection between his books and tourism, usually overlooked not least because of its very modesty. It is easy to miss the fact that an extraordinary number of the earliest books on Dickens look at his life and works from the point of view of the rambler. Dickens died in 1870. In 1876, T. E. Pemberton published Dickens’s London. From 1880 onwards, a stream of titles appeared, ever more clearly suggesting the rambler’s perspective. Most of them approximate to one of two forms familiar to the rambler: either a record of rambles actually undertaken, that is to say, or what is called a footpath guide—notes on how to walk the route yourself. Typical titles include In Kent with Dickens (1880), A Pickwickian Pilgrimage (1881), About England with Dickens (1883), London Rambles “En Zigzag” with Dickens (1886), and A Week’s Tramp in Dickens-Land (1891). This kind of topographical writing stayed in fashion well into the 1930s, and still makes appearances from time to time. It is worth asking what gave rise to it. The word “ramble” seems first to have appeared in English in the seventeenth century and, until the beginning of the nineteenth, was used to indicate any kind of journey without definite direction, or purpose other than enjoyment for its own sake.ii It was swiftly picked up as a metaphor for mental activity with no planned end. In his periodical The Rambler (1750-52) Dr Johnson, for instance, demanded the freedom to publish “unconnected Essays,” the author’s privilege of selecting “those Subjects which he is best qualified to treat, by the Course of his Studies, or the Accidents of his Life” (no. 23). The metaphor, for obvious reasons, appealed to the writers who helped to shape the Romantic sensibility that first manifested itself late in the eighteenth century. The word was first used to denote a strictly pedestrian excursion, it seems, in George Crabbe’s poem The Borough, of 1810—the year during which William Wordsworth made himself one of the earliest popularisers of walking for pleasure, by publishing A Description of the Scenery of the Lakes in the North of England. He was preceded, though, by figures like Thomas West, author of A Guide to the Lakes (1778), and William Gilpin who, between 1782 and 1798, published a series of illustrated volumes devoted to picturesque scenery which, in the words of The Gentleman’s Magazine, created “a new class of travels” (74 (1804): 388-89). One of the many ingredients being stirred into the pudding of English Romanticism, evidently, was a growing enthusiasm for pedestrian tourism. Inspired by such publications, fashionable young men, in the late eighteenth century, took to making excursions on foot in the Celtic fringes of the country and in the Lake District, to see unfamiliar sights, to acquire new learning, and to cultivate their sensibilities. We are apt to forget, however, that their wanderings were paralleled by those of humbler folk from the new industrial

53 towns of the North and the Midlands, many of whom, in their spare time, escaped from the mills and streets into the nearby countryside, often with more than fresh air in mind. From the late eighteenth century, there grew up among mill-hands, for instance, a lively and well-informed interest in botany. Out of such recreations, the rambling movement was born. It survived the Romantic movement which gave birth to it. From the late 1870s, it promoted a new burst of activity, which had to do with several things. One was the near completion, by that date, of the national rail network.iii Another was the diminishing relative cost of rail travel. By 1880, the third-class ticket was, by far, the most commonly sold, and cheap day returns were readily available, especially to picturesque locations. Rail had become the conveyance of the middle classes and, to a considerable extent, of the working classes. Real wages for working men and women had increased. Factory Acts had increased their leisure. And education had increased their appetite for going to places in order to find things out. The Elementary Education Act became law in 1870. Subsequent amendments sharpened its effect: such education was made compulsory in 1876, free in 1891. In a, by now, predominantly urban population, would-be ramblers, as a result of these changes, could easily and cheaply reach good starting points for rambles, well beyond their immediate neighbourhood. Opportunities for rambling were increased, and one-day rambles around relatively distant locations became a more available option. From the start, it should be stressed, this new surge of interest in rambling was associated with intellectual and literary impulses. One of the first rambling clubs, founded in 1879, was the Sunday Tramps, who walked in Kent and Surrey, under the leadership of Sir Leslie Stephen (1832-1904), philosopher, literary critic, and editor of The Dictionary of National Biography. Among the figures connected with the club were George Meredith, Charles Darwin, and the editor of Mind, George Croom Robertson. Conversation during rambles, Meredith inelegantly declared, “would have made the presence of a shorthand writer a benefactor to the country” (Maitland 357). The Sunday Tramps were members of the metropolitan intellectual establishment, and indeed many of the leading figures in rambling, during this period, were grandees of one kind or another. The first Federation of Rambling Clubs, pre-eminently southern, was formed in London in 1905. Its earliest surviving official records date from 1913, and one historian of the movement has commented that its list of officers “reads like a page from Burke’s Peerage” (Stephenson 79). But interest in rambling in the provinces, and in less elevated social circles, by no means lagged behind. In the North and the Midlands, particularly, many of the keenest enthusiasts were men, self-educated way beyond the limitations of the new elementary education. The need to challenge the rights of landowners made rambling attractive to political radicals, and it suited the Muscular Christianity of evangelical and nonconformist religious groups. The Manchester Young Men’s Christian Association launched a rambling club in 1880. In 1893 an informal rambling club, begun

54 some years earlier, was developed into an ambitious Cooperative Holidays Association by T. A. Leonard (1864-1948). He was a Congregational minister of Colne in Lancashire, and later became first President of the Ramblers’ Association.iv There were many other such clubs. Few were inspired by an exclusive interest in walking as such. Their aims were wider and higher: the preservation of the countryside, geology, botany, photography—if nothing more, the pursuit of innocent and healthy enjoyment, in preference to other kinds. One prominent figure in the movement was John Cuming Walters (d. 1933), whose name will be familiar to students of Dickens.v The press magnate, Lord Northcliffe, is on record as telling him that one of his newspaper articles, “was written by a provincial, and provincials are no good. And you are a provincial.” Good or not, Cuming Walters was a provincial. He was editor of the Manchester City News, and first president of a Ramblers’ Federation founded in Manchester in 1922. Ramblers, he declared in his inaugural address, are “in search of the best that life can provide and that nature can supply.” He certainly was. He was a man of prodigious energy and boundless interests, one of them literature. Lord Northcliffe’s failure to perceive and appreciate this is a blot on the magnate’s record, not on his editor’s. Author of books on Tennyson, Shakespeare and, above all, Dickens, Cuming Walters was a founder member of the Dickens Fellowship, a regular contributor to its journal The Dickensian, and indeed president of the Fellowship from 1910 to 1911. As it happens, Cuming Walters wrote little on Dickensian topography, though literary topography was something that interested him. He took his wife, for instance, on a cycling tour of Tennyson’s Lincolnshire. But he does, in his person, symbolise the formal connection between the rambling movement and early Dickens studies. More than any other writer, perhaps, Dickens calls for such a connection. It is not simply that he is pre-eminently a novelist of place, or rather of places, identified, disguised or imagined—Jacob’s Island, Stucconia, Tom-All-Alone’s, Cloisterham. He loved to travel, to ride, to walk. At unhappier moments in his life, he travelled or walked compulsively. Trained as a journalist, almost instinctively he found significance in what he saw on his travels, and wrote about it. Arguably, his first novel, Pickwick Papers (1836-37) is about ramblers, in an older sense of the word. Mr Pickwick and his companions are encouraged, by members of the club he founded, to travel (nowhere in particular), to observe and to speculate. The Corresponding Society of the Pickwick Club is asked to send back from time to time, “authenticated accounts of their journeys and investigations, of their observations of characters and manners, and of the whole of their adventures, together with all tales and papers to which local scenery or associations may give rise” (ch. 1). Something of the same spirit informs Nicholas Nickleby (1838-39), The Old Curiosity Shop (1840-41), and at least parts of other Dickens novels. Later in his career, doubtless, he was

55 influenced by his friend and collaborator, Wilkie Collins, who wrote Rambles Beyond Railways in 1851. The Lazy Tour of Two Idle Apprentices (1857) is a thinly disguised account, by both authors, of a rambling holiday they took together. Dickens’s fascination with rambling may be attributed to many influences: to the Romantic Zeitgeist; to new transport technology and opportunities for travel; to his emergence from the expanding lower middle classes, newly mobile socially and geographically; to the eighteenth-century English novel and what it made of the picaresque tradition; to the works of Sir Walter Scott; to personal restlessness and energy. Whatever the causes, his rambling impulses are an undeniable fact. Early Dickens students, then, were readers of a novelist who delighted in rambling and in things akin to it. Well-educated or self-educated, metropolitan or provincial, they found themselves in a milieu in which rambling and intellectual interests were closely associated. Some, like Cuming Walters, had formal allegiances both to rambling and to Dickens studies. Little wonder, that so many early studies, coinciding with a surge of interest in rambling, seem to grow out of that movement. My thesis is tested by the fact that the pioneering work evidently does not. Dickens’s London (1876) is by T. E. Pemberton (1849-1905), Birmingham brass founder, novelist, playwright, drama critic and theatre historian.vi There is no record of his having any connection with the rambling movement. None of the many other books he wrote is on a subject remotely connected with it. Nor indeed is Dickens’s London formally structured as a record of rambles, or as a rambler’s handbook. Even so, something of the rambler’s spirit is evident, however confusedly, in what he writes. In his introduction, he contrasts planned sight-seeing with the serendipitous pleasures of rambling. The author, he tells us, has neglected the great monuments of London, but “has passed full many a pleasant hour there, while he has dwelled fondly upon a series of sights which he has invented for himself, and which may be summed up, in short, as the London streets and houses which the, to him, almost magic pen of Charles Dickens has made immortal” (3). An unpromising start perhaps, but the book is workmanlike for a first in its field. It trawls each major novel for topographical references, speculates sensibly about the more puzzling ones, and sometimes usefully describes identifiable ones as they were in the 1870s. It is not a profound book. It offers little new or background information. But it is good for modern students to have it confirmed that Barnard’s Inn was indeed dirty and close (211-12), to be told, only thirty-six years after Dickens wrote about the Mantalinis, that Wigmore Street milliners’ establishments were commonly as he described (41-42). The next significant date is 1879. A Pickwickian Pilgrimage is by John R. G. Hassard (1836- 88).vii It was published as a handsomely bound and handy pocket-sized book in 1881, but it first appeared two years earlier, as a series of letters in The New York Tribune, to which Hassard was a

56 frequent contributor. An American citizen, campaigning Catholic journalist, music critic and popular historian, he was, for much of the 1870s, New York correspondent of the Daily News. Towards the end of his life, he travelled much in Europe in fruitless search of health. In his 1881 preface, Hassard alludes to Pemberton’s book, and to a series of articles by B. E. Martin, published in Scribner’s Monthly during 1880, but his book, he asserts, is distinctive as a record of “random saunterings.” A record of saunterings, it certainly is, but scarcely random. It is true he eventually saunters away from Pickwick, and from Dickens altogether but, as the title suggests, the work is the first clear record in book form of what may be fairly called a Dickensian pilgrimage. It is, moreover, written in a lively fashion, and packed with interesting observations (though would-be readers should be warned it is hard not see one chapter as anti-semitic). Students of Bleak House can appreciate the atmospheric description of Cursitor Street and Took’s Court (model for Cook’s Court), where “there is a dense colony of stationers and of law-copyists besides; most of the latter class of persons living in humble lodgings, where the rickety windows are obscured by a thick crust of smoke and dirt” (91). This offers the sort of corroborative detail not to be found in more official sources. It is instructive, moreover, in the tracing of this sequence in cultural history, to see the way Hassard’s book illustrates a kind of back-tracking in the rambling movement, necessary, as it happens, for ramblers devoted to Dickens. Though the movement was born out of a desire to flee the city, by this stage it was re-entering the city, and promoting rambles even to the most dismal of quarters. But 1880 was the year when, for most British readers, the connection between Dickens studies and rambling was unmistakably established. Robert Langton’s classic study, which was to culminate in the 1891 edition of The Childhood and Youth of Dickens, began printed life in 1880, it is worth remembering, as a Manchester Literary Club paper entitled “Charles Dickens and Rochester.” It was swiftly reprinted between its own covers. In this work Langton strives for scholarly order and objectivity. He does not offer the rambler’s personal testimony or friendly advice. Even so, he notes that,

having passed perhaps the most impressionable part of my childhood at a school in Rochester, and having been familiar with the neighbourhood all through my life, I am able to testify to the wonderful accuracy and realism of the many sketches of life and scene in that part of Kent, which are to be found in some of the best works of Charles Dickens. (2)

This perspective enables him occasionally to include such colourful testimony as we find in his description of the Falstaff Inn, opposite Gad’s Hill Place:

57 In my boyish recollection of it, and since then, it had an old-fashioned swinging sign, on one side of which was painted Falstaff fighting with the men in buckram suits, and on the other, Falstaff being pitched into the Thames from a buck-basket, the merry wives of Windsor looking on approvingly. (10)

The boyish recollection of Langton (1825-1900) took him back almost to the period of Dickens’s childhood in Rochester, and he was a young man during the Gad’s Hill period, so we can assume it is pretty much Dickens’s own Rochester he is reconstructing for us.viii The first undeniable British product, however, of the meeting between rambling and Dickens studies is In Kent with Charles Dickens (1880).ix It is by Thomas Frost (1821-1908), radical journalist, author of fiction, biography, popular history and books on exploration. Evidently a partly fictionalized memoir of a rambling holiday undertaken by the author and two companions, the book is in the tradition of The Lazy Tour of Two Idle Apprentices. The companions are anonymous, but characterised in a manner, half cute, half tantalising, as one who looks like a clergyman but is nothing of the kind, one who does not but is. This whimsical touch sets the tone. The book is a curious mixture of inconsequence, purplish descriptions of the countryside, recondite information (of no great use to Dickens students), and interpolated fiction. Frost states his rambler’s credentials right at the start:

I love to turn my back upon the close streets of towns, to avoid the dusty highways, and to explore the narrow tracks among the golden-blossoming furze and broom or purple- flowering heath, of broad commons . . . . (3)

But by no means all is self-indulgence and the exploration, at least, is structured. Frost, moreover, can show common-sense caution. His reasoning on a model for Dingley Dell is sound, and concludes:

All the localities mentioned by Dickens in his narrative of the Pickwickians’ journey and their sojourns at Manor Farm must be regarded . . . as being equally with Mr Wardle and the fat-boy the creations of his fancy. (114)

About England with Dickens (1883) is by Alfred Rimmer (1829-93). Architect, illustrator, and author of books chiefly about architecture or topography, Rimmer became very much part of the

58 rambling movement.x Several of his books, from 1882 onwards, incorporate the word “ramble” in their titles. While neither an account of rambles, exactly, nor a footpath guide, About England with Dickens keeps the rambler’s needs in mind. It always carefully gives distances and directions. Rimmer is earnest and factual. There is nothing whimsical or inconsequential about this work. Parts of About England with Dickens have the solidity of earlier topographical works like Defoe’s Tour through the Whole Island of Great Britain. Rimmer often appears to be trying for an exhaustive account of a particular location. In his zeal, he tells us that the organ Tom Pinch plays in Salisbury Cathedral was donated by George III, and interfered with the perspective of the building (173). There are worse things, however, than an excess of information. The author of London Rambles "En Zigzag" with Dickens (1886) was Robert Allbut (1832- 1915). From its formation a member of the Dickens Fellowship, Allbut spent at least part of his career working for a tourist agency—as a professional adviser on rambling, so to speak.xi On the original title page of his little guide, mercifully republished and expanded in 1899 with a new title, Rambles in Dickens-Land, he declared himself to be the author of The Tourist’s Handbook to Switzerland and A Week’s Holiday in Paris. The pocket-sized book is very much a practical walking guide. “From the South-Eastern Terminus at Charing Cross,” he typically writes, “there are frequent trains by which the Rambler can travel to Spa Road Station, Bermondsey (about twenty minutes’ ride), from which point the situation of what was once Jacob’s Island may be conveniently visited . . . ” (29). The book contains some useful discoveries. The 1899 redaction, for instance, fascinatingly records how a lady, “personally acquainted with the great novelist,” pointed out to Allbut a house just off Leicester Square as Dickens’s model for the Old Curiosity Shop (12). A Week’s Tramp in Dickens Land (1891) is by William R. Hughes (1830-99) He was City Treasurer of Birmingham, and the Victorian equivalent of the Renaissance man.xii He was well- known in the city as a founding member of several societies, devoted to the flute, to natural history and to the philosophy of Herbert Spencer. He was also known as the biographer of Constance Naden, a local poetess. And he was known as a Dickens collector. His companion on the rambles described in the book, and provider of many of its illustrations, was F. G. Kitton (1856-1904), a major Dickens scholar in his own right, not least a Dickensian topographer. A photograph of them in the Dickens Museum’s archives, evidently taken in connection with the book, shows them striding valiantly in a simulacrum of the countryside, sensibly clad and shod, carrying umbrellas, Kitton with his sketch pad, Hughes with a knapsack and a geologist’s hammer. It is an icon of serious rambling. A Week’s Tramp in Dickens Land is the classic of its genre, chiefly because Hughes, in tracking down informants who had known Dickens, provides scholars with invaluable primary source

59 material, but it also displays the rambling mode of Dickens studies to advantage. Hughes’s geological hammer was no mere token. He enriches the reader’s understanding of Dickens and his world, by drawing on his remarkable knowledge, not only of geology and topography, but also of archaeology, botany, zoology, history, and half a dozen other disciplines. His book has the solidity of Rimmer’s, but carries itself more lightly. Hughes has an ear, too, for significant anecdote, as in this hypothesis to explain Dickens’s choice of name for the slum in Bleak House:

The Convict Prison at Chatham is said to have been built on a piece of ground which, in the middle of the last century, belonged to one Thomas Clark, a singular character, who lived on the spot for many years by himself in a small cottage, and who used every night, as he went home, to sing or shout, “Tom’s all alone! Tom’s all alone!” This, according to the opinion of some, may have given rise to the “Tom all alone’s” of Bleak House . . . . (268)

The book constantly snaps up such trifles, for scholars to consider. A Week’s Tramp in Dickens Land is probably the best work in this genre, and as such offers a pausing place in what can be no more than an introduction to the subject. But the list of rambling Dickensians could go on and on. It would have to include Bozland (1895) by Dickens’s friend Percy Fitzgerald, F. G. Kitton’s The Dickens Country (1905), J. A. Nicklin’s Dickens-Land (1911), and the remarkable loose-leaf Dickens Atlas (1923) by Albert A. Hopkins and Newbury Frost Read. Not surprisingly, the founding fathers of the Dickens Museum were students in the same tradition.xiii Among the books of B. W. Matz was Dickensian Inns and Taverns (1922), describing, not least, what the tourist of his day might still find. Walter Dexter’s publications include The London of Dickens (1923), written in the form of a series of walk plans, and still one of the most useful books of its kind. Nor could the student seeking to exhaust the subject stop at books. I have already mentioned how A Pickwickian Pilgrimage was first published serially in the columns of The New York Tribune, how it was preceded by articles in Scribner’s Monthly. Throughout the 1880s and 1890s, innumerable magazine articles were published on Dickensian topography, not a few in the form of practical guides or accounts of rambles.xiv Then there is rambling’s younger sibling, the cycling movement, which yielded such works as Duncan Moule’s Weekends in Dickensland: A Bijou Handbook for the Cyclist and Rambler with a Map.xv And many of the later works in the tradition are evidently written with the motorist in mind. The topic is vast and intricate. But obscure. Not all readers will find this dusty corner of literary and cultural history as interesting as I do. I hope you are pleased, though, to have been given an overview of it. The best

60 books in the tradition are no more than good, it has to be said. None are great. Some people dismiss the whole genre scornfully. “Such antiquarian titbits,” declared Ada Nisbet, “are of minimal value to the scholar” (Stevenson 86). Possibly, but that seems a bit prim to me. It is an incomplete account of Dickens’s greatness, that ignores his effect on English culture at large. And we are talking about an effect upon English culture at large. The books and articles I have been discussing are a print-and-paper manifestation of something prior to print and paper. As early as 1879, Hassard was able to report the words of a Dorking bookseller of whom he inquired about the model for Susan Weller’s Marquis of Granby inn in Pickwick: “Dear me, sir, I could not tell you how many gentlemen have asked me that question, just as you are asking me now” (44). The books and articles are the tip of the iceberg. From early days, there were more tourists exploring Dickensian England than there were writers writing about it.

61 NOTES

In this paper I recycle material from two others I have already published: “Literature and Rambling,” Poets of Romanticism in Literary Museums: Descriptions, Theoretical and Historical Implications (Warsaw: Museum of Literature in Warsaw, 1990), 50-55; and “American Notes and Pictures from Italy” Dickens Quarterly 16 (1999), 94-103. I am grateful to the Muzeum Literatury im. Adama Mieckiewicza for allowing me to use the former, to the Dickens Society for allowing me to use the latter.

1 For information on the history of rambling I am indebted to the following sources: Stephenson chs 1 and 2; Holt ch. 1; and correspondence with Hugh Westacott.

1 For information about railway history, I am indebted to the National Railway Museum, York.

1 See In Memory of T. Arthur Leonard.

1 For most of the data I use on Cuming Walters, I am indebted to the late Charles Forsyte, who gave me access to the print-out of a book he had written, alas never published.

1 Information on Pemberton was assembled from the Dickensian 51 (1958): 38; and from the National Union Catalog.

1 Information on Hassard was assembled from the Dictionary of American Biography and Who’s Who in America.

1 The Dictionary of National Biography was my source of information on Langton.

1 Information on Frost was assembled from the Daily Telegraph (27 July 1908) and the National Union Catalog.

1 Information on Rimmer was assembled from the Dictionary of National Biography and the National Union Catalog.

1 My source for information on Allbut was the Dickensian 12 (1916): 16-17.

62 1 Information on Hughes was assembled from the Catalogue of the Birmingham Collection (Birmingham Public Library, 1918), Birmingham Faces and Places (1 April 1889), the North Birmingham News (23 April 1892), and the Birmingham Daily Post (20 November 1899).

1 See the Dickensian 19 (1923): 9-14.

1 Scrapbooks in London’s Dickens Museum abound in cuttings of such articles.

1 I am indebted to Philip McCormick for calling my attention to the existence of this work, which neither of us has seen.

63 WORKS CITED

Allbut, Robert. London Rambles "En Zigzag" with Dickens. London: Edward Curtice, 1886. -- Rambles in Dickens Land. London: Chapman and Hall, 1899.

Dickens, Charles. American Notes. American Notes and Pictures from Italy. Ed. F. S. Schwarzbach and Leoneé Ormond. London: Everyman, 1997. 3-279.

-- The Letters of Charles Dickens. Ed. Madeline House, Graham Storey, Kathleen Tillotson, et al. The Pilgrim/British Academy Edition. 12 vols. Oxford: Clarendon, 1965-2002.

-- The Pickwick Papers. Ed. Malcolm Andrews. London: Everyman, 1998.

-- Pictures from Italy. American Notes and Pictures from Italy. Ed. F. S. Schwarzbach and Leoneé Ormond. London: Everyman, 1997. 283-513.

-- The Speeches of Charles Dickens. Ed. K. J. Fielding. Oxford: Clarendon, 1960.

The Dickensian. London, 1902-

Frost, Thomas. In Kent with Charles Dickens. London : Tinsley, 1880.

The Gentleman’s Magazine. London, 1731-1868.

Hassard, John R. G. A Pickwickian Pilgrimage. Boston, MA: Osgood, 1881.

Holt, Ann (ed.). Making Tracks. London: Ramblers’ Association, 1985.

Hughes, William R. A Week’s Tramp in Dickens Land. London: Chapman and Hall, 1891.

In Memory of T. Arthur Leonard. London: Rambler’s Association, 1948.

Johnson, Samuel. The Rambler. Yale Edition of the Works of Samuel Johnson. Ed. W. J. Bate and Albrecht B Strauss. New Haven: Yale UP; 1969. Vols 3-5.

Langton, Robert. Charles Dickens and Rochester. London: Chapman and Hall, 1880.

Maitland, F. W. The Life and Letters of Leslie Stephen. London: Duckworth, 1906.

Pemberton, T. E. Dickens’s London. London: Tinsley, 1876.

Rimmer, Alfred. About England with Dickens. London: Chatto and Windus, 1883.

Stephenson, Tom. Forbidden Land. Manchester: Manchester UP, 1989.

Stevenson, Lionel (ed.). Victorian Fiction: A Guide to Research. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1964.

64 Water-borne pleasures in the time of Dickens

Julia Fallon Head of MBA Department Cardiff School of Management [email protected]

ABSTRACT

This paper addresses some of the developments of travel and tourism in the nineteenth century. There are many texts that write of this period but few attempt to bring together the wide-ranging experience of water-borne pleasures. The joy in water whether as part of an individual experience or with a group is related here along with the discomforts and difficulties. In Dickens life-time, as a result of steam transportation, the public attraction to travel on and be near water continued and the development of the amenities required to make travel easier to manage. In reality, by the accounts that have been passed on during the nineteenth century travellers preoccupations were similar to today; these were comfort, space, food and amusement. Such basic needs were well-documented by Dickens whose travels to America gave him plenty of opportunity to comment. He travelled at the boom time for steam transport and the developments of passenger facilities were increasing, leading to enterprising organisers like Thomas Cook to take advantage of this business opportunity throughout the world. Organisation and systems for travelling in large numbers were started at this time and this was based on demand and technological developments. The attraction of the water had been in evidence since the eighteenth century when water activities had been on the increase. Water for amusement and entertainment was available to people at different levels of society with spare time to enjoy it. The period of Dickens lifetime saw increased democratisation of the travel experience for many.

Keywords: Dickens, Thomas Cook, America, travel, tourism, water

65 The time of Charles Dickens (1812-1870) was an exciting time for exploration, Britons like Richard Burton (1821-1890) and John Speke (1827-1864) headed off to the so-called Dark Continent of Africa to seek the source of the River Nile and Americans like Nathaniel Bishop (1837-1902) explored the waterways of the New World. It was a time when the map of the world changed. Developments in infrastructure improved access to places far and near, and societal change led to increases in money and time for more popular than ever before, encouraging commercial organisers of travel and leisure. Dickens as Ackroyd (1990 p xv) says had ‘seen all the transitions of the century’ by the time of his death and whilst his life was not long, he recorded many of the changes in society and observed the move to increased democratisation of travel and leisure particularly whilst travelling in America. In answer to the question did Charles Dickens meet Thomas Cook (1908-92), it seems unlikely as Dickens was in London and Cook lived mainly in Leicester but Dickens joined one of Cook’s groups to Italy (Hamilton 2005). Certainly Dickens paper reported on Cooks activities and Dickens spoke in Cook’s Temperance Hall in Leicester. The lives of these two men contributed to change in the nineteenth century..

Many authors make reference to Dickens because he was a social commentator and an observer of his time. He was born when developments in travel and tourism were already in evidence and were to transform the lives of many by improved access and availability previously only available to the elite. The signs of what was to come were already in evidence however, as Withey (1979) amongst others that have written about the historical development of tourism explain that the introduction of the word tourism into general parlance was in the early nineteenth century as a result of the number of eighteenth century gentlemen who had taken tours of Europe. She notes that Gibbon complained of the number of people visiting Switzerland in 1784 (Withey 1997 ix) but that tourist should not be a pejorative term and that it should be seen as being an aspect of the much wider leisure experience.

Dickens himself took advantage of improved transport links and travelled to America and this journey in 1842 by steam instead of sail, shortened the length of the journey by about a week. His American Notes chronicle the travelling experience both across the Atlantic and within the USA by river and canal. Dickens is probably one of the most famous recorders of travel but at a time of population growth and increased literacy (Wilson 2003) many travellers chose to document their experiences and there is considerable evidence from personal and published journals like Leisure Hour (Wilson 2003) and the Field (Vine 1983). These publications give some insights into the travel and leisure experiences of the middle classes and reveal attitudes that whilst of their time are not so far-removed from the present day. It is some of these accounts of travel on the water that inform this paper alongside the aforementioned American Notes. In addition, books about water

66 transport and the history of travel have been used to combine information about changes in accessibility, amenities and the attraction of the water. Dickens’ own experience of travel on water in America is also included to add personal experience to the information provided.

The boundaries between journalism and travel literature were fluid and so it was arguably press coverage about travel that led to the perception that this was accustomed behaviour. These journalistic accounts were significant during Dicken’s lifetime and professional journalists were particularly eager to share. George Augustus Sala for example began his career as `a travel writer with his account of a journey to Russia’ and he worked with Charles Dickens as his editor at a time when there was lots of ridiculing of tourists in the press. This poking of fun is what Mackenzie (2005) recognises as indicative of a desire to be modern and that this idea fitted with the then notion of imperialism.

ACCESSIBILITY Dramatic technological advances at the time of the Industrial Revolution had significant ramifications for transport and travel. Trevithick’s portable high-pressure steam engine completely transformed transportation because ships were quickly able to accommodate the bulky steam engines that had been used to pump water from mine-shafts (Hindley 1983) and subsequently operated in a way that was less dependent on the weather and much faster. It should be noted that this was a time when road travel had been decreasing and the railways were not yet built and so steam travel became the mode of travel to reach previously inaccessible or difficult to reach places.

Little steam packet boats had been ‘plying profitably round the coasts of Britain’ (Hindley 1983 p196) for some time. One of the originators was William Symington of Glasgow who patented a steam boat in 1789 and his prototype the Charlotte Dundas towed a seventy-ton line of barges along the Forth and Clyde canal in 1802. A ferry service also operated between Glasgow, Oban and Fort William from 1812 and the first cross-channel steam passenger service across the Channel sailed in 1816. Steamboat services were therefore well-established by the 1820s and 1830s and travellers to France would join the steamboat and travel down the Seine to Rouen. Records show that passengers dined on deck and enjoyed the views.

At the same time, the squalor of the slums created in the cities at the time of the Industrial Revolution encouraged many people to seeking opportunities overseas and their need to escape deprivation led to a surge in demand for passages on cargo ships. Regular services carrying mail like the one between Liverpool and Boston (Hindley 1983) contributed to the establishment of

67 regular scheduled passenger services. The first steam crossing was in 1838 and this managed to shorten the journey time by about a week and this improved timing and regularity of service encouraged more people to travel.

Along with the move to steam, came the design of larger vessels and changes to the infrastructure to support them. The increased steamboat traffic particularly on larger rivers brought new life to towns and villages and transformed passenger travel. Hotel accommodation was established alongside waterways which were often a welcome change from the boat. In Ireland for example, the Shannin Harbour hotel was a provider of accommodation when there a great deal of emigration in the 1830s and 1840s (Delaney 1992).

The period from the 1820s to the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869 was the heyday for the steam boats used on larger rivers used for carrying both passengers and freight. The steamer service to Alexandria was run by P and O which started in 1837 and the company struggled with government subsidy and competition but they rebuilt their fleet and started the routes to Australia, New Zealand and the Far East.

At the same time there were further engineering developments of inland waterways and canals to create a network of links throughout Europe and the steamer ships designed by the Americans were the models copied for services on rivers like the Volga and the Don. The most popular River journey at this time was to cruise the Rhine. The Coblenz steamers were apparently full of the English and were noted to as extravagant in their tastes. These journeys would involve stops at riverside inns or sometimes the steamer had sleeping berths where there were very clear grades of travel based on fares paid. These steamers could be substantial in size sometimes allowing room for the horses and carriages of their passengers to be accommodated also (Hinley 1983 p198). In Britain the only rivers that had steamboat services of any significance were the Rivers Trent, Ouse and Aire, the emphasis was really on the coasting trade. The Rivers in Europe developed their steamboat trade and the lakes in central Europe also had steamboat services throughout the nineteenth century. When steamboat services declined in Europe because of increased use of railways where the services offered are for both passengers and freight. In Asia and later Africa there was a continuing service until very modern times (Hadfield 1986 p93).

The period when Dickens chose to travel to America was within the period between 1825 and 1850 often described as the Boom days for American canals. The first canal was the Erie Canal in New York State and its success meant that interest in canal building spread.In Pennsylvania where the

68 port of Philadelphia had been overtaken by New York because of the Erie Canal there was a strong desire to gain the same benefits and build a canal. Irish and German workers joined the engineers from the Erie and Ohio Canals in 1826 to build the Pennsylvania Canal starting in Harrisburg and its unusual route opened in 1834. The route was long and arduous but had an appeal because of its quirkiness. Travellers would first board a state railroad coach pulled by horses but its wheels remained on a track until the first large hill. The coach was the pulled by cable up the hill. Next came the hitching to a different team of horses pulling the coach along the track for 75 miles until reaching Columbia where they would join a canal boat. The route then followed the Susquehanna River including the passing through a series of aqueducts. The adventure continued through 88 locks lifting by 584 feet and then the canal boat could continue to Hollidaysburg, for an overnight stop. Next a further four miles by the horse-drawn railway when they would arrive at the most famous part of the Pennsylvanian Canal system, the Allegheny Portage railroad to cross the mountains separating Hollidaysburg from Johnstone. As before, the coach was attached to a cable and pulled up over 1000 feet comprising five steep slopes and at each slope horses were hitched again to transfer to the next pulley. Three more stages like this were needed before the summit was reached and travellers had another overnight stop. The next day they descended the mountain in the same manner but in reverse. The next stage was to pass along the longest 901 feet tunnel in America where another canal boat would be joined for the final 105 miles of canals through a series of locks to reach Pittsburgh. The slow and tiring journey was also quite an event in itself and the Pennsylvania Canal experienced certainly appealed to Dickens in its variety but it will surprise no- one that it was too costly to operate and was soon abandoned (Spangenburg and Moser 1992).

AMENITIES The idea of a traveller’s handbook had started in the 1830s with Karl Baedeker, a writer of guidebooks for the Germans. German Egyptologists for example, supplied the information for the Egypt guides produced in English later in 1877 and 1891 (Mackenzie 2005). Thomas Cook had written guides too, as early as 1845 and these became a good sideline for the company. All of these guidebooks are full of the perceptions and prejudices of the age.

Increases in travelling numbers meant that more organisation was needed for example a more systematic way of booking a crossing of the Atlantic was required rather than the usual approach to the ship’s captain. There also needed to be provision for the increased number of passengers on board. The first crossing by steam was in 1838 and when Dickens was to travel just four years later, any luxurious aspects of this type of travel were yet to be arranged for passengers and competition was not yet fierce. Passengers were accommodated on the upper-deck below the paddles and there

69 was always an issue about the amount of space available, when the priority was carrying as much mail as possible- especially in the case of the Atlantic -and cabin size was severely restricted as Dickens is quick to comment upon.

In the absence of any hospitality service, there was an expectation of self-catering for many and so this meant that food was often cooked on deck where there was little light or ventilation. The passengers tried to shelter when the weather was bad especially from the waves of sea water which covered everything. The experience was dehumanising and Swinglehurst (1974) likens it to the cattle that were herded on board to provide fresh meat. The fierce competition on the transatlantic crossings did lead to an improvement in provision over time but elsewhere a more civilised approach was possible for example, the East India Company was a good example of eastern hospitality when in 1834 they provided accommodation in a flat that was towed by the paddle steamer travelling down the Ganges.

These were a rarity in the west however and anticipating a lack of basic provision for tourists based on their travelling experiences to date Cook took the initiative and where services were not available he made arrangements and for example, when there were no hotels available he arranged a camp. Cook’s first tour arrived in Egypt before the opening ceremonies of the Suez Canal and there were plenty of journals kept about this trip and the following of the Royal party up the Nile. Cook later obtained the monopoly of Nile passenger traffic and set up his own fleet of steamers. These steamers were built in Scotland and then transported in pieces to be assembled in the shipyards in Egypt. The aim with these steamers was to provide all the comforts of home in palatial style (Swinglehurst 1974, p 87).

These steamers are described as Grand Hotels afloat because their facilities were extensive. ‘They had public rooms where the passengers could congregate, play cards or write their journals, a reading room in which the English papers and magazines provided a constant link with home, and a promenade deck which was covered with an awning and, completely closed at night ,provided a place where the elegantly clad ladies and men in evening dress could discuss the day’s excursions as they watched the starry Egyptian night through the smoke of their cigars. At hand, there would be servants white robed, white gloved, wearing red fez and cummerbunds and ready to give unobtrusive service at the wave of a hand’ (Swinglehurst 1974 p87).

Swinglehurst (1974) continues by identifying the guarantees that were included in the Cook advertisements by saying that the steamers offered a very healthy environment and included a

70 doctor amongst the staff who was equipped with ‘plenty of drugs’ ( Keatings cited in Swinglehurst 1974 p87). Cook was a man who was quick to recognise the demands of the moment and he was able to tap into previously unknown markets for example his organisation of trips allowed a sense of security especially for women and this feeling led to many of Cook’s tours being predominantly bought by women, who were drawn to the idea of a romantic escape. Cook was the first to provide such an opportunity for the less intrepid and many kept journals including substantial amounts of praise for Thomas Cook’s arrangements (Swinglehurst 1974). He also recognised the demand for trips overseas and those with a taste for the fashionable especially when the British seaside was being seen as inundated by the lower classes too. He managed to organise his first trip to Egypt to coincide with the visit by the Royal Family in 1869, his motivation being the combination of seeing both antiquities and the attraction of following in the footsteps of the royal family. The picture at that time is that the royal steamer was closely followed by Cooks boat and inevitably there was a backlash. There became a clear divide between those that were travellers and those who were tourists and whilst both afforded some opportunity to become more aware of the wider world the larger scale organised travel meant that tourists were distanced at a time of Empire and became those dreaded tourists to some. This early divide between what would now be called niche and mass market divisions were seen in 1878 when James Powell writes of the beauty of the Weser and its surrounds ‘ without hearing the dreaded name of Cook...’ (Powell 1879 Camp Life on the Weser cited in Vine 1983 ).

Advances in the engineering of ships led to the size and tonnage of ships increasing all the time. These developments allowed the building of the 2200 ton ship the Oceanic which saw a marked advance in the amount of comfort available to passengers including improved ventilation and lighting and the elimination of leaks. Thomas Cook felt that this was the ship for him to embark on his trip around the world. As it happened this coincided with Jules Verne’s Round the World in 80 days and reflected the avid public interest in travelling around the world by steamship. There were about ten in the group that undertook this journey and they were representative of a number of countries in Europe. On the transatlantic leg of the journey there were 778 steerage passengers and 117 in cabin class and Cook was pleased to note there were few complaints. After 5 days in New York they travelled onto Japan from San Francisco by paddle steamer and natural attractions could be in evidence when the waters were calm and tranquil and dolphins and flying fish were to be seen.

ATTRACTION The publicity of travel through the writing of the day captured the imagination of the middle class reading public. Many guide books were produced at this time that catered for the middle classes

71 comprising men and women in a variety of roles in society who sought advancement either by settling in or through a wider knowledge of the world (Mackenzie 2005). Tourism at this time started to contribute to personal and social identities (Steward 2005) and guidebooks and observational accounts helped with this and were written encouraging visitors for example, ‘In 1842 Thomas Waghorn published a guide to routes from Britain to ports whence Alexandria could be reached, and so India’ (Hadfield 1986 p102) or the work of Gosse and Lewis whose ‘seaside studies were published after a visit to Ilfracombe with George Eliot in 1856’ (May 1983 p198). Many of the travel guides produced at this time as Mackenzie (2005) has discovered reveal much about the attitudes to travel and expected market demand in the nineteenth century.

The ‘eighteenth century leisure revolution’ (Walton and Walvin 1983 p188) led to the development of seaside resorts. Early visitors to resorts like Ilfracombe included the Welsh Ironmasters like the Marquess of Bute and the Homfrays who were attracted by the climate, the bathing and the scenery and as the resort developed there became the creation of additional attractions like concerts and regattas (May 1983 p198).

These seaside resorts became fashionable places for taking the waters and bathing and the arrival of increasing numbers of people led to greater demand for all services. Such demand meant that change was required but service providers were not necessarily responsive. In Ilfracombe in the 1840s, when large numbers of Welsh excursionists were using the steamboat services across the Bristol Channel in the summer, boat owners were reluctant to change their schedules and the railway companies were therefore quick to compete. The increased accessibility brought more visitors and allowed the lower middle classes more travelling opportunity. The professional and commercial classes were the first to get a Saturday half-day holiday and with this time and the money they were now earning they were able to engage in leisure activities (Wilson 2003).

In the Diary of a Nobody by George and Weedon Grossmith (first appearing in Punch in 1888), Carrie and Charles Pooter holiday in Broadstairs. This taking of an annual holiday in a seaside boarding house indicates that there was sufficient level of income to allow an annual holiday and leisure. Along with taking the train to Margate or walking down the Parade, Carrie and Charles Pooter ‘went for a sail’ (Grossmith and Grossmith 1888 p43).Amusingly their son Lupin later scathingly comments ‘Oh you’ve been on the ‘‘Shilling Emetic ’, have you?’’ You’ll come to six- pennorth on the ‘‘Liver Jerker’’ next ‘(Grossmith and Grossmith 1888, p43), implying that they are rather old-fashioned and possibly indulging in what he sees as lower-class activity. As the fictional

72 Pooters reveal there is some anonymity at the seaside and people felt free of care (Swinglehust 1974).

This freedom and escape is connected to the joy of being on and near the water whether it is experienced by the thousand visitors to Blackpool in 1842 or by individuals canoeing on the rivers at the same time, there was a common pleasure in water in the Victorian era. Pleasure boating was predominantly a middle-class recreation in Victorian times (Vine 1986 xv) of course there is evidence of rowing and oarsmanship from before but in the period after 1837 , the Victorians saw rowing as healthy for the mind and body. The level of enthusiasm was such that in the summer of 1866, James Inwards had the idea of a canoe club and the club was founded in July that year. This group experience of the outdoors was followed by the Cycling club and the Camping club, and canoeists ventures in British rivers encouraged them to go overseas as did other club members too.

Boat races on the Thames started in the eighteenth century and were closely followed by regattas. The first Oxford and Cambridge boat race was in 1829 and then the Henley Regatta 10 years on led to widespread publicity of rowing. Those that were no longer racing liked to row for leisure and fitness and various types of boat were built to suit. Although the earliest recorded excursions were not in evidence until 1850, twenty years earlier they were seen as popular with Dickens writing that at Searles yard in Lambeth on a fine Sunday morning some dozen boats would be ready for the Richmond tide (Dickens Sketches of London 1835 Chapter X The River cited in Vine 1983 xv).

The River Thames was the British base for pleasure boating and as early as 1861 Salters of Oxford had 228 craft for hire these comprised sculling boats, skiffs, outrigged gigs, dinghies, canoes ,punts and funnies all used during the golden age of boating on the Thames. Lewis Carroll writing in his diary on 4 July 1862 recorded an excursion travelling along the river and than having afternoon tea (Vine 1983 p119.) The most famous account is probably Jerome K Jerome a boat lover since a small boy ( Vine 1983) wrote Three men in a boat (to say nothing of the dog) was published in 1889 and shows something of the leisure boating experience on the Thames in the preceding years.

Whilst many were happy to enjoy the Thames there were others that sought the independence, freedom and discovery of unknown waterways in Europe. The importance of water in leisure is quite well-documented in publications like the Field and the Canoeist. Vine (1983) suggests those that wrote about their experiences were men of art, rather than science but that they were varied in type, who in their way reflected the explorers going to Africa and the Arctic. He goes on to record that during the early nineteenth century there were a number of travellers who wrote about their

73 experiences travelling on water throughout Europe. There were those that used public transport like Robert Southey who wrote about his travels on the Dutch and Belgian canals in 1815 but Vine is most interested in those who travelled independently using a variety of different sailing craft and cites Manfield: It is the feeling of perfect independence and freedom in those extensive solitudes, where a human being scarcely ever sets his foot and where the silence was only broken by the dull roaring of a rapid the booming of a the bittern or the rush and rattle and rush of the wings of the wild geese’ ( Manfield cited in Vine 1983 pvvi).

Following on from the earlier point about the man-made and technological developments made during the Industrial Revolution it should also be noted that canals brought distinct changes to the landscape. As Hoskins points out not only did they bring stretches of water to areas where there was previously none, with accompanying changes in bird and plant-life (1981 p247) but for the first time there were aqueducts, cuttings and embankments, tunnels, locks, lifts and inclined planes and many attractive bridges and they greatly influenced the growth and appearance of many towns (Hoskins 1981 p248). The Exeter Canal for example, became a favourite walk in the eighteenth century for the citizens of Exeter and ‘its peaceful winding through the meadows of the Exe valley past congenial inns ...In the pastoral settings the canals followed clear and sparkling in the sunshine something new in the landscape with their towpaths, lock-keepers cottages, stables for canal horses , their navigation or canal Inns where they met a main road and their long and gaily- painted boats,’ (Hoskins 1981p253). A Dublin Guidebook in 1821 described a hotel’s location as having ‘The beauty and salubrity of the situation enlivened by the daily arrival and departure of the canal boats render it a truly delightful residence’. This joy in observation of the spectacle of what happened on the water was a significant inclusion within the aforementioned Jerome K Jerome’s work where he says: ‘On a fine Sunday, Moulsey lock presented this appearance all day long, while up the stream lay long lines of still more boats waiting their turn. Most of the inhabitants of Hampton and Moulsey dressed themselves up in boating costumes to come and mooch around the lock with their dogs to flirt and smoke and watch the boats’ (Vine 1983 p114).

Such pleasure in the water does seem to be away from large urban conurbations however, for as the Queen and Prince Albert discovered when taking a short pleasure cruise in 1858 the stench was so terrible, that they returned quickly. Dickens himself discussed the murkiness of the river in Our Mutual Friend (Wilson 2003 p155). Presumably the overpowering stench was just in the waters close to London itself but it should be remembered that this was at a time of cholera and other

74 water-borne diseases. There were other hazards too and there were many marauding gangs so that there were often armed guards kept on boats.

DICKENS EXPERIENCE The perils of travel by boat were included in Dickens’ American Notes and so water-borne transport for Dickens was a mixed experience. His account of travelling by steam boat to America in January 1842 whilst amusing in its recollection, leaves the reader in no doubt that the journey was hazardous. The turbulence of the water and its effect on the passengers is recounted in vivid detail in American Notes including the author’s own explanation of seasickness, by which he seems bemused. He says: To say that all is grand and all appalling and horrible in the last degree is nothing. Words can not express it. Thoughts can not convey it. Only a dream can call it up again, in all its fury rage and passion ( Dickens 2004, p 24).

Travelling west when he is in America however was seen to be venturing into far more dangerous territory than the east and Dickens describes how he was told of the explosions in steam-boats and the failings of coaches were the very least of ‘the terrible perils dangers and discomforts’ (Dickens 2004,p141). Dickens is directly affected by a blown-up steam-boat in Baltimore and has to change his itinerary to Baltimore. The uncertainty about all the itinerary planning is revealed again later when he says that he books his return journey on the George Washington packet Ship in June- that being the month in which I had determined, if prevented by no accident in the course of my ramblings, to leave America (Dickens 2004, p107).

The time of Dickens visit was a period of lively activity on the water and when he tells of leaving New Haven for New York amongst the different vessels carrying cargo and passengers, it is a clear indication that there was plenty of commercial activity taking place. The dependency on water for access was also made clear when Dickens describes visiting public institutions like the Long Island Jail by their own boat (Dickens 2004, p105).

Space in all passenger services was at a premium and whilst recounting his American sojourn Dickens notes ‘It certainly was not called a small steamboat without reason...a Lilliputian public house (Dickens 2004, p 82) and shortly afterwards: I am afraid to say how many feet short this vessel was or how many feet narrow: to apply the words length and width to such measurement would be a contradiction in terms’ (Dickens 2004, p83). The

75 size of cabins and the management of operations on board water- borne vessels was another source of fascination for Dickens. When describing the vessel that he boarded to travel along the Connecticut River he explains that they ‘all kept to the middle of the deck, lest the boat should unexpectedly tip-over’ (Dickens 2004, p83). Size was important to Dickens and he is pleased to see that the packet that he is to travel in to New York is an American steam boat of size although he goes on to say that ‘to an English eye it was infinitely less like a steam boat than a huge floating bath’(Dickens 2004, p87).

He does spend time highlighting the differences between American and English vessels by saying that the American boats are much higher out of the water with several decks and a complex layout. This is illustrated by his remarks about the gentleman’s cabin which occupied the whole length of the boat and he felt it was as long as the Burlington Arcade p88 and later describes in Volume 2 that one of these cabins can hold as many as 40 berths (.p146 which resemble hanging book-shelves as in a library, ‘and that they were to be arranged edge-wise until the morning ’(Dickens 2004, p165).

Canal boat transport seemed to fill Dickens again with some trepidation ‘Nor was the sight of the canal boat in which we were to spend three to four days ,by any means a cheerful one; as it involved some uneasy speculations concerning the disposal of passengers at night, and opened a wide field of inquiry touching the other domestic arrangements of the establishment, which was sufficiently disconcerting’. .p161 The experience overall was rich for Dickens he had chance to observe the captain and crew who he remarks are often compassionate and he marvels at their versatility. His fellow passengers are all subject to his observations and their close proximity affords plenty of opportunity for caustic comment but there were some positive remarks for example after train and ferry to Philadelphia, Dickens takes a steamboat to Washington. He remarks on the civility of the dining on this boat ‘where there was no more hurry or confusion than at such a meal in England and where there was certainly greater politeness exhibited than at most of our stagecoach banquets’ (Dickens 2004 p126).

After being disconcerted by the arrangements of canal-boat travel, Dickens goes on to say: And yet despite these oddities –and even they had for me at least, a humour of their own-there was much in this mode of travelling which I heartily enjoyed at the time. and look back upon with great pleasure. Even the running up, bare-necked, at five o clock in the morning, from the tainted cabin to the dirty deck ;scooping up the icy water, plunging one’s head into it, and drawing it out, all fresh

76 and glowing with the cold; was a good thing. The fast brisk walk upon the towing path, between that time and breakfast, when every vein and artery seemed to tingle with health; the exquisite beauty of the opening day ,when light came gleaming off from everything ;the lazy motion of the boat, when one lay idly on the deck, looking through, rather than at ,the deep blue sky ;the gliding on ,at night, so noiselessly, past frowning hills, sullen with dark trees, and sometimes angry in one red burning spot high up, where unseen men lay crouching round a fire; the shining out of the bright stars, undisturbed by noise of wheels or steam, or any other sound than the rippling of the water as the boat went on: all these were pure delights ( Dickens 2004 p170).

In sum, discomfort was commonplace when Dickens travelled to America. Trans-Atlantic ships were primarily geared for the transport of cargo,not passengers and were ill-equipped for human passage. In his life-time travel became more comfortable, faster and less weather dependent. Steam allowed many more people to relocate in other countries and explore a wider world. As demand grew, so did the need for the provision of basic needs and Thomas Cook was significant in the recognising this demand and in the organisation of travel overseas and he tapped the potential of new markets, keen to be part of the modern age and experience the then Empire. Steam transport was not only for faraway destinations but contributed to newly acquired leisure experiences, by making it possible for people to enjoy short cruises, when the transport was the tourism experience and this was most evident on river cruises in Europe. These routes offered views of attractive landscape but the draw of the water and nature was great at this time when the need to be outdoors and have a healthy lifestyle fitted with rowing and boating. The availability of a wider amount of activities on and around the water, both at home and overseas were influential in the aspiring minds of people with more money and time than ever before for leisure activity. Dickens’ accounts were entertaining and informative and told much about the travelling experience, the development of infrastructure and the developing nation of America, at that time.

77 REFERENCES

Ackroyd P (1990) Dickens Minerva, London

Delaney R (1992) Ireland’s Inland waterways Appletree Press,Belfast

Dickens C (2004) American Notes Penguin Classics London

Grossmith G and W (1998), The Diary of a Nobody Edited with and Introduction and Notes by Kate Flint Oxford World’s Classics Oxford University Press, Oxford

Hadfield C (1986) World canals Inland navigation Past and Present David and Charles Newton Abbott

Hamilton J (2005) Thomas Cook the Holiday Maker Sutton Publishing,Stroud

Hindley G (1983) Tourists travellers andpilgrims Hutchinson London

Hoskins WG The making of the English landscape Penguin

Mackenzie JM (2005) Empires of Travel: British Guide Books and Cultural Imperialism in the 19th and 20th Centuries in Histories of Tourism Representation, identity and Conflict edited by JK Walton Channel View Publications

Spangenburg R and Moser DK 1992 the story of Americas canals facts on File Inc, New York

Swinglehurst E (1974) The Romantic Journey The story of Thomas Cook and Victorian Travel Pica Editions, London

Vine PAL (1983) Pleasure boating in the Victorian era

Walton JK and Walvin J (1983) Leisure in Britain 1780-1939 Manchester University Press,

Wilson AN (2003) The Victorians Arrow Books London

Withey L (1997) Grand Toursand Cook’s Tours A History of Leisure Travel 1750-1915

78 ‘Rome is Rome though it’s never so Romely’: Dickens and the nineteenth-century politics of leisure

Jessica Hindes Lincoln College, University of Oxford [email protected]

ABSTRACT

A series of developments in the early nineteenth century made the Continent accessible for the first time to the middle-class strata of British society. Alarmed by the hordes of tourists flooding over the channel, the traditional elite retreated to Italy and its classical cities, emphasising the contextual knowledge that Roman travel demanded in an attempt to preserve the destination’s exclusivity. It was a criterion that excluded Charles Dickens, whose lack of education linked him to the new professional tourists rather than to the liberally educated elite; his Pictures from Italy, published in 1846, were denigrated for their author’s lack of qualifications. Dickens’s literary return to the country, in his 1857 tourist novel Little Dorrit, can be read as an exploration of the values and priorities of these two competing classes. Where other examples in this sub-genre share the conservative values that emphasise leisure as the primary qualification for entry into good society, Dickens’s novel prioritises the newly mobile professional classes. The discourse on leisure that runs through Little Dorrit emphasises Dickens’s allegiance to the working class pleasure-seekers who were his professional fellows.

79 ‘Rome is Rome though it’s never so Romely’: Dickens and the nineteenth-century politics of leisure

‘There is no place in Europe where a travelling Englishman can make himself more thoroughly at home than at Rome.’ George Augustus Sala’s claim, made in 1869 (p.353), reflects the peculiar status Rome enjoyed amongst British travellers in the nineteenth century. The popular equation of British and Roman Empires meant that Italy’s capital was supposed to offer a kind of instant familiarity to the Briton abroad, affording him a home from home amidst the continent’s bad roads and ill-appointed inns.

It is surprising, then, that the Victorian period’s greatest novelist should express such disquiet in his accounts of the city. Neither in Pictures from Italy nor in Little Dorrit, do Charles Dickens or his characters seem entirely at ease in their ancient surroundings. This is particularly true of the fictional characters. ‘“Just as Home is Home though it’s never so Homely, why you see,” said Mr Meagles… “Rome is Rome though it’s never so Romely.” (Dickens 1857/1998, p.551) The distinction is absolute; Rome set up as a contrast to the Home which was, for Victorians, almost sacred. As for Amy Dorrit, racked with homesickness as her family throw themselves into the frivolities of continental life; John Pemble unwittingly provides a direct point of comparison, in the words of Robert Louis Stevenson: ‘everybody goes comparing, and seeking for the familiar, and finding it with such ecstasies of recognition that one would think they were coming home after a weary absence, instead of travelling hourly further abroad.’ (Pemble, p.115) Amy writes to Arthur Clennam: ‘I long so ardently and earnestly for home… [that] I cannot bear to turn my face further away from it. My heart is a little lightened when we turn towards it, even for a few miles, and with the knowledge that we are soon to turn away again.’ (p.580) She is acutely conscious of distance where Stevenson’s companions are delightedly oblivious; transformed, like Cavaletto in the novel’s opening scene, into a kind of human compass pointing always towards the Marshalsea and Home.

It is a discomfort that speaks to the alienation Dickens felt from the wealthy travellers who saw their privileged access to Italy and its cities threatened, over the course of the nineteenth century, by the burgeoning tourist industry. Conservative reaction to the flood of vulgar visitors onto the continent - and their predilection for publishing accounts of their experiences - informed the lukewarm response Pictures from Italy received on its initial publication. Dickens, acutely aware that he lacked a university education, could not fail to recognise that this disqualified him, for many commentators, as an interpreter of the Roman cityscape.

80 This paper will situate Dickens’s literary treatment of Rome in the context of this critical snobbery. Beginning with a discussion of the development of mass tourism in the first half of the nineteenth century, and the distinctions that the Victorian intelligentsia made between different European destinations, I will move on to a tourist-centric reading of Little Dorrit. Taking the Dorrits, in their uncertain financial situation, as emblematic of the newly moneyed middle classes - and comparing their travels to other fictional family excursions, in works by Thackeray, Charles Lever and Frances Trollope - I will explore the way in which Dickens’s depiction of their experiences abroad reflects his awareness of their destination’s traditionally exclusive status, and his attitude to the issue of leisure more generally. I will draw out the discussion of leisure for the working classes which runs throughout the novel – which seems to me to be a significant theme within it – and conclude with an example from Thackeray which emphasises Dickens’s place in this world of ‘professional’ versus ‘classical’ tourism.

I want to begin with a brief exploration of the shifting face of British travel in the years leading up to Little Dorrit’s publication. From the perspective of the twenty-first century, when holidays in Thailand, Australia or the Pacific Islands are a routine part of teenagers’ gap-year travels, and the only reason why ‘Americans [aren’t] coming to Margate for the summer’ (to paraphrase a wild suggestion made by William Thackeray in 1851 [p.44]) is that they are spending their time in more exotic destinations instead, it is hard to comprehend the revolution that the travel industry underwent over the first fifty years of the nineteenth century. As war with France came to an end, the Channel lost its significance as a barrier between Britain and the outside world. Instead, the Continental tours that had historically been the preserve of the moneyed aristocracy became accessible to the lowest ranks of the British middle classes: ‘it has become no longer a dream of romance, but a matter of reasonable calculation, with our young women, even in the humble ranks of life, that they should some time or other go abroad’, wrote Sarah Ellis in 1842 (p.67). Indeed, by the time that Ellis was writing, much of the infrastructure of modern day mass tourism had already begun to appear. John Murray’s Handbook for Travellers on the Continent, the beginning of what was to become a ubiquitous series of holiday guides, was published in 1836; Thomas Cook, the first and most famous of the Victorian ‘holiday-makers’, ran his first excursion (a railway trip to a Temperance gathering at Leicester) in 1841. It was the beginning of a business that would extend rapidly out across Europe and the world, from trips through France and Switzerland to journeys to the Holy Land and even, in 1871-72, a round the world tour.

Amidst the surprise that we might feel – that I, certainly, felt – in learning the distances that middle- class Victorians were routinely travelling in pursuit of pleasure or enlightenment, it is particularly

81 difficult to appreciate the fine distinctions that might be drawn between different holiday destinations. However, I would suggest that when Dickens was writing Little Dorrit in 1857, the most important crossing in European tourism had become the Alpine border that divided Switzerland from Italy, and not the Channel. Frances Power Cobbe, writing in 1864 on Italy and the Italians, comments that ‘once over the Alps, the genus “Tourist”, with its proper female accompaniment, becomes rare… Italy is not to be “done” in a month’s holiday’ (Cobbe, pp.375-76). Her emphasis on practicalities disguises the fact that the division separating Italy and its historic cities from the Rhineland countries was as much ideological as geographical. John Pemble, in his book The Mediterranean Passion, describes Switzerland as ‘a parting of the ways’: ‘the group identified by Ruskin as “the noblest born, the best taught, the richest in time and money” continued further south, to the shores and cities of the Mediterranean’ (p.2).

The emotions felt by this trebly exclusive group – well born, well educated and well-heeled – for Italy, generally, and Rome, particularly, are summed up in the attitudes expressed in George Augustus Sala’s account of his own travels through Italy. To reiterate the quotation with which I began: ‘There is no place in Europe where a travelling Englishman can make himself more thoroughly at home than at Rome.’ (Sala, p.353) In its immediate context, this observation is intended as a reflection of the burgeoning Italian tourist industry; Sala is commenting on the availability of British branded goods in the ‘Little England’ that had formed around the Piazza di Spagna. But the sentiment bears an implicit double weight: though the shops of the Spagna in the 1860s might bear striking resemblance to those found on any British high street, Rome’s status as ‘home from home’ (Pemble, p.2) for the ‘travelling Englishman’ was traditionally a cultural, not a commercial, claim.

Thirty pages before his more prosaic engagement with the practicalities of where Mappins’ razors or Crosse and Blackwell’s pickles are to be obtained when out of London, we find Sala in full lyrical flight declaring that ‘The love for Rome [is] intuitive, indomitable, and inextinguishable’ (p.309). It is a sentiment that echoes through nineteenth-century accounts of the city, a common theme validated by the fact that Rome was popularly seen as the model for British government and empire, providing the Victorians with the same kind of authenticating heritage that the Middle Ages found (or located) in Troy. John Chetwode Eustace, whose Classical Tour Through Italy was published in 1813, makes the comparison explicit: ‘England rose before us… England, invested like Rome with empire and with renown, because like Rome governed by its senate and by its people.’ (Eustace, 4.127)

82 Eustace’s Classical Tour might lack the notoriety of Murray’s little red guide books, but it is ‘the celebrated Mr Eustace, the classical tourist’, who Mrs General chooses to adopt as her guide on the Dorrits’ Italian tour (Dickens 1857/1998, p.498). That Dickens should refer to this particular work is partly a function of historical accuracy; Little Dorrit might have been written in 1857, when Murray was already dominating the market for this kind of literature, but the novel is set in 1826, a full ten years before his first handbook was published. In the absence of Murray to act as a target – and the books were ubiquitous as the subject of satire on the lazy, conformist behaviour of English tourists across the globe – Dickens could be seen to have substituted the nearest equivalent, in the expectation that his audience would recognise his genuine mark. However, I would suggest that there is more to Dickens’s inclusion of this particular intertext than simply an ahistorical joke. It would have been just as easy and effective to have left Mrs General’s guidebook anonymous, or to have invented a fictional work to stand in for the anachronistic Murray. Instead, Dickens placed in the hand of this deeply unpleasant character – and Mrs General does, I think, stand for most of the values that Little Dorrit as a novel is most emphatically concerned to condemn – a real book, one that his readers could have read and considered for themselves, along with all the various values borne in and associated with it. It is worth, therefore, devoting some time to exploring what those values might be.

As the title of Eustace’s guide suggests, the book is aimed at the kind of voyager traditionally associated with an eighteenth-century model of travel – the Grand Tour undertaken by young men and their tutors in the hope of bestowing an international polish on their education. Eustace is explicit about his audience, opening with the assertion that ‘these pages are addressed solely to persons of a liberal education’ and moving on to suggest that it is therefore

almost needless to recommend the Latin poets and historians. Virgil and Horace, Cicero and Livy, ought to be the inseparable companions of all travellers… Familiar acquaintance or rather bosom intimacy with the ancients is evidently the first and most essential accomplishment of a classical traveller. (p.5)

The beginning of Eustace’s first volume (the guide comes in at a hefty four, in total) is devoted to illuminating the kind of background knowledge that he thinks necessary for this liberally educated traveller, if he is to derive true benefit from his proposed Italian tour: not only a conversance with classical poetry and history, but ‘a general knowledge of the principles of Architecture, Sculpture and Painting’ (p.14) and even, if possible, a basic understanding of anatomy. This is a daunting course of preparation, with Eustace’s expectation that his readers will recognise the classical

83 languages from which he quotes, as well as his reference to their impending ‘departure from… University’ (p.18), amplifying the sense of cultural exclusivity established by that first declaration of address. This eighteenth-century model of travelling, the model adopted by Eustace and piggybacked onto by the upwardly aspiring Mrs General, defined itself through a set of criteria that definitively excluded not only the Dorrits, whose newfound wealth signally fails to bring with it the advantages of a history of privilege and education, but also the writer who created them.

It is worth at this point returning to John Pemble’s quotation from Ruskin, his description of the group who headed for the Med in the nineteenth century as ‘the noblest born, the best taught, the richest in time and money’. The Dorrits are rich – as was Dickens himself, reaching the peak of his literary success around the time that Little Dorrit was published – but they are deficient in the education that Eustace understands as necessary for a proper appreciation of Italy and its glories. To quote again from the Classical Tour:

The degree of preparation necessary for travelling depends upon the motives which induce us to travel. He who goes from home merely to change the scene and seek for novelty; who makes amusement his sole object… has no need of mental preparation for his excursion… But he who believes with Cicero, that it becomes a man of a liberal and active mind to visit countries ennobled by the birth and residence of the Great; who, with the same Roman, finds himself disposed by the contemplation of such scenes to virtuous and honourable pursuits… such a traveller will easily comprehend the necessity [of such preparation] (pp.1-2).

I have gone into detail on the kinds of assertions made by Eustace in his Classical Tour, not because I think that the work provides a particularly invidious example of the cultural exclusivity that becomes, in the nineteenth century, a hallmark of attitudes to Roman tourism, but because it provides an example of the genuine enthusiasms from which these later attitudes derive. When Eustace was writing, in 1813, the infrastructure for popular continental travel just didn’t exist in the way that it did by the 1850s. He was addressing a young, male, liberally educated audience because that was the relevant market for his work; his own travels, which formed the basis of the book, were made in the capacity of tutor to John Cust, later Lord Brownlow, and two of Cust’s equally wealthy peers. The Grand Tour was itself notorious for encouraging bad behaviour on the part of the young men who undertook it; and in their proper context, Eustace’s admonitions can be read as a genuine attempt to encourage this kind of traveller to prioritise opportunities for education over those for dissipation over the course of his Continental travels.

84 However, the consequence of works like the Classical Tour was to establish a set of expectations that said classical Italy could only be appreciated by those with a certain level of education. ‘Without doubt the name of Rome echoes in our ears from our infancy’, writes Eustace, ‘our first and most delightful years are passed among her orators, poets, and historians.’ (1.342) A sense of how intimidating this kind of claim might be to the less-educated, to those uncertain in their own cultural standing, can be garnered from the comparison of two further accounts of visits to classical cities; Charles Kingsley, on Rome, and William Thackeray on Athens. Kingsley’s account of arrival in Rome fits closely with what we have already heard, from Sala and from Eustace: ‘the first sight of it should inspire reverence and delight, as of coming home – home to a rich inheritance’ (cited in Pemble, p.22). This kind of delighted recognition is evidently a function of Kingsley’s classical learning, his education at Cambridge providing the kind of background that Eustace expects from his readers.

William Thackeray, another Cambridge graduate, describes a visit to Rome’s classical cousin, Athens, in terms which expose such attitudes’ inherent exclusivity. ‘I was made so miserable by a classical education, that all connected with it is disagreeable in my eyes… This is an improper frame of mind for a person visiting the land of Aeschylus and Euripides.’ (Titmarsh 1846, pp.67-68) Thackeray’s imperfect and tainted recollection of his youthful education is enough to spoil the Athenian experience; but it nonetheless prompts him to the Eustacian conclusion that ‘you who would be inspired by [Athens] must undergo a long preparation of reading’ (p.76). Even an unhappy memory of his studies is enough to disrupt the sentiments that proper preparation for travel should have sowed in Thackeray’s breast. For Charles Dickens and for Amy Dorrit, out earning money over the formative years that Eustace spent luxuriating in Latin and Greek, there would seem to be even less likelihood of identification with their Italian destination. It is a suggestion recognised by George Dekker, in his book on The Fictions of Romantic Tourism. ‘Dickens’s schooling had not given him the compensating sense of cultural “homeness” and delighted recognition that is evident in so many earlier tour books thanks to their authors’ assured knowledge of Roman history, literature and art’ (p.251).

This state of affairs – those less confident in their education feeling alienated by their failure to share in the feelings for Rome that popular expectation dictated – can only have been aggravated by beliefs of the kind voiced by Sala in another extract from Rome and Venice. The book was published, remember, in 1869 – long after the innovations that had shifted the travelling population away from the wealthy young noblemen who were the object of Eustace’s address – and yet we find

85 Sala asserting within it that: ‘The beauties of Swiss scenery can be appreciated by travellers of a very low intellectual calibre… You have no need to have read Payne Knight, or Louis Viandot, or John Ruskin, to be able to understand Mont Blanc’ (p.42). To a modern ear, there is something deeply unpleasant in the idea that a lack of education, expressed in the failure to have read particular books of criticism, equates with ‘a very low intellectual calibre’. Sala’s claim, comfortable in its apparent rationality, effectively legitimises attempts to exclude lower-class tourists from elite destinations like Rome. Unable to derive any pleasure from its dusty complexities, they might as well save their money and restrict themselves to the more straightforward beauties of Switzerland and the Alps.

It is an attitude that finds clear expression in the London Journal’s anonymous review of Dickens’s Pictures from Italy.

We cannot say much for the work. Mr Dickens lacks the depth of thought, the solidity of judgment, and the refined mental cultivation necessary to constitute a good “traveller”. (Anonymous 1846, p.246)

It is a damning judgement, calculated to reduce the successfully upstart Dickens to a suitably ‘umble sensibility. A comparison with American Notes, Dickens’s first volume of travel journalism, published five years earlier in 1841, is instructive. Notes had found the theoretically democratic Dickens somewhat disconcerted by American assumptions of class equality; writing Pictures from Italy, it was he who was exposed to accusations of impertinence. The Journal’s conflation of ‘traveller’ and ‘travel writer’ is particularly damning; it has Dickens’s averred lack of observational refinement disqualify him not only as author, but also as tourist.

Indeed, the choice of phrasing reflects another popular truth about the growing influx of middle- and lower-middle class Continental tourists: their fondness for recording their travels. Modern critics writing on Victorian travel literature feel compelled to stress the volume of material it has been necessary for them to tackle: ‘In an atmosphere so saturated with association, suggestion, and quixotism, books were liable to crystallise around even the most slender talents,’ John Pemble concludes (p.11); and Lynne Withey, in Grand Tours and Cook’s Tours, is still more direct in her declaration that ‘At times it has seemed as if everyone who left home in the nineteenth century wrote a book about it.’ (p.xi) Withey and Pemble are careful to leave implicit the suggestion that some of these plentiful reminiscences might better have been left unwritten: an anonymous contributor to Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, writing in 1848, is less circumspect.

86 The merits of the railroad and the steamboat have been prodigiously vaunted… But they have afflicted our generation with one desperate evil: they have covered Europe with Tourists, all pen in hand… all “getting up a Journal” and all pouring their busy nothings on the reading public, without compassion or conscience… it does general mischief; it spoils all rational travel… it repels the student, the philosopher, and the manly investigator, from subjects which have thus been trampled into the mire… our horror is the professional tourist; the woman who runs abroad to forage for publication; reimports her baggage, bursting with a periodical gathering of nonsense; and with a freight of folly, at once as empty as air and as heavy as lead, discharges the whole at the heads of a suffering people. (p.185)

The writer’s indignation at the quantity of dross to which the current vogue for travel literature has exposed him is sufficiently energetic as to initially camouflage the series of assumptions and value- judgements that underpin his attack. However, bound up in the bluster is a recognisably ‘classical’ model of travel, and travel literature. A traveller is properly a ‘student’, a ‘philosopher’, even a ‘manly investigator’; the new kind of ‘professional tourist’ personified as a woman with an unfeminine bent for commercial gain. The writer’s complaint against the literature consequent on the new accessibility of travel disguises what is in fact a concern to preserve the privilege and tradition of a rapidly changing class system.

It is this attitude which Dickens deliberately set out to challenge in writing Little Dorrit. Given the lukewarm reception afforded to Pictures from Italy (though the London Journal’s review is particularly vitriolic), Dickens’s decision to return to Italy with the publication of his novel, ten years later, can certainly be seen as significant, and arguably as deliberately provocative. This last suggestion is given particular weight by the scene with which Dickens begins the second book of his novel. ‘Riches’, as the book is entitled, opens with Amy Dorrit and her family traversing the Swiss Alps into Italy. Focusing on his heroine as she crosses this significant frontier, Dickens deliberately situates these central characters on the border between the rapidly developing new, bourgeois tourism and the haunts still sacred to the students, philosophers and manly investigators of the upper classes.

The absolute significance afforded to the Alps as a border between different kinds of destination lends an emblematic quality to Dickens’s novel which is underscored by the Dorrits’ position as exemplars of the volatile Victorian middle-class. Evidence of the category’s instability can be

87 found in The Women of England, Sarah Ellis’s 1842 advice manual for middle-class women. Ellis is careful to specify the span of her audience, her index of social status the possession of between one and eight household servants; but she is also quick to point out the limitations of her own approach:

It is… impossible but that many deviations from these lines of demarcation must occur, in consequence of the great change in their pecuniary circumstances, which many families during a short period experience… [in contemporary England] the acquisition of wealth… is all that is necessary for advancement to aristocratic dignity; while, on the other hand… it is no uncommon thing to see individuals lately ranked among the aristocracy, suddenly driven, by the failure of some bank or mercantile speculation, into the lowest walks of life… (pp.27-28)

In such a context the Dorrits’ apparently fantastical accession to wealth and rapid declension back into poverty takes on rather an allegorical than a fairytale flavour: their condition could stand for the financial experience of the mid-nineteenth century middle class in its entirety.

This interpretation attributes an ideological weight to Dickens’s novel that the fact of its genre might seem to belie. The Dorrits’ outrageous invasion into the territory of their betters is aggravated by their choice to travel as a family. I have already cited Frances Power Cobbe’s description of ‘the genus Tourist, with its proper female accompaniment’ (Cobbe, p.375); we might also look to Thomas Cook’s assertion, recorded in Jill Hamilton’s biography, that ‘of the thousands of tourists who have travelled with us, the majority have been ladies’ (p.152), or WD Howell’s observation that ‘one learnt to recognise the English by their habit of travelling en famille’ (Pemble, p.77). The family on tour was recognisably part of the new British tourism, spawning a series of mid-century novels – prominent examples of which include Frances Trollope’s The Robertses on their Travels (1860), Charles Lever’s The Dodd Family Abroad (1854), and Thackeray’s The Kickleburys on the Rhine (1851). All three novels share certain characteristics with Dickens’s work, suggesting that Little Dorrit was conceived in part as an example of this particular sub-genre of travel literature; but as my reading of the Dorrits’ Alpine crossing seeks to demonstrate, Dickens’s treatment of the subject is more complex than that of his contemporaries, weighted with greater significance than Thackeray’s throwaway Christmas book and more politically thoughtful than Trollope and Lever’s snobbish, reactionary texts.

88 Paul Fussell, writing in 1980 on ‘British literary travelling between the wars’, provides a definition of tourism that fits precisely with that expressed in the ‘family abroad’ novels of my previous paragraph.

What distinguishes the tourist is the motives… to raise social status at home and to allay social anxiety; to realise fantasies of erotic freedom; and most important, to derive secret pleasure from posing momentarily as a member of a social class superior to one’s own… (p.42)

Trollope’s Robertses, Lever’s Doddses, Thackeray’s Kickleburys, and Dickens’s Dorrits, all travel with precisely the intentions that Fussell’s definition describes. Lynne Withey reports that in the mid-nineteenth century, ‘Britain was the only country in Europe prosperous enough to have a substantial population of tradesmen and professionals who could afford to travel abroad’ (p.93). The opportunity for travel was traditionally a privilege of the wealthy and – or so the popular imagination suggested – any British family with means sufficient to make it over the seas to Paris or Brussels would find themselves welcome amongst the cream of Continental society. It was a state of affairs that saw the Briton overseas habitually credited with expectations above his status.

Trollope, Thackeray, Lever and Dickens all portray their travelling families as motivated by precisely the kind of belief that Withey’s assertion might justify – Robertses, Kickleburys, Dorrits and Dodds, all busy themselves, as they arrive on the Continent, with the business of gaining acceptance into the best society that their destination can afford. Suggestively, this social ambition is aligned with a hypocritical emphasis on privacy, or exclusivity, closely associated with the snobbishness of an upwardly aspiring middle class. Thus Mr Dorrit’s rage at finding Mrs Merdle and son in the Martigny rooms he has reserved for his family; Thackeray’s Lady Kicklebury’s irritable insistence, on a German train, that ‘There must be some distinction of classes. They ought not to be allowed to go everywhere’ (p.47), and Trollope’s matron Mrs Roberts’s suggestion that ‘Now that all sorts and kinds of people go abroad, there really ought to be some means of dividing them a little into classes.’ (p.7) The joke in all three cases is that the complaint is made as a result of mistaken class identification: Mrs Kicklebury’s embarrassed outburst is the consequence of a piece of mistaken identity in which she takes a Parisian milliner for a French princess; Mrs Roberts and Mr Dorrit both complain at the impertinent presence of those who turn out to be socially superior. The exaggerated emphasis placed by Dorrit, Roberts and Kicklebury alike on the social signs that they are themselves conveying to others blinds them to the reality of their surroundings.

89 Frances Trollope, more socially conservative than Dickens, presents the Roberts’s faux pas as a consequence of their social vulgarity, as the genuinely aristocratic heiress who accompanies them becomes increasingly embarrassed by their behaviour. In an authorial aside, Trollope laments the availability of travel for its effect on ‘the unlucky third-class Englishman and his family… rendering them utterly and forever unfit for the station in life in which they were born and bred’ (p.190). In contrast, Dickens repeatedly echoes Dorrit’s behaviour in that of his social superiors. Mrs Merdle, encountering Fanny Dorrit in the midst of her riches, is forced to rescind her initial disapproval and welcome her into the family, the pedigree on which Fanny has placed such emphasis proving rather more distinguished than her opponent had anticipated. The parallel provides a neat, Dickensian demonstration that the vaunted exclusivity of the upper classes, the mentality which calls for the elite preservation of its cultural and social sites, is in fact founded on a respect for nothing more than money. As Sarah Ellis had noted, ‘the acquisition of wealth… [was] all that [was] necessary for advancement to aristocratic dignity’ (Ellis 1848, p.28). In the context of a discourse that condemned the ‘professional tourist’ for her unseemly desire to earn a living, Dickens’s novel begins to look like an indictment of those whose social status hides their very ordinary concern with cash. It is significant that Mrs General’s learning has nothing of the depth that Eustace’s original guide book assumes; ‘looking everywhere for Mr Eustace and company’, she is able to see ‘nothing else’ (p.639). Like Our Mutual Friend’s tellingly named Veneerings, her very essence is show.

The series of ‘genteel fictions’ by which Society (and its imitators) attempt to disguise their lack of concern for anything but money are a key focus for Dickens’s scorn throughout Little Dorrit. The narrator’s contempt for Mr Dorrit is never so strongly felt as it is in describing his attitude to his daughters’ going out to work.

[T]he more dependent he became on the contributions of his changing family, the greater stand he made by his forlorn gentility. With the same hand that had pocketed a collegian’s half-crown half an hour ago, he would wipe away the tears that streamed over his cheeks if any reference were made to his daughters’ earning their bread. So… the Child of the Marshalsea had always upon her, the care of preserving the genteel fiction that they were all idle beggars together. (pp.88-89)

Arthur Clennam invites our admiration as the only character within the novel to express a similar disapproval: for more impressible characters like Matthew Plornish, Mr Dorrit’s determined ignorance is further evidence of his much-vaunted gentility. And Plornish’s confusion is more than

90 understandable; again, Dickens deliberately parallels Dorrit’s behaviour with that practised by Mrs Merdle, who warns her husband that ‘There is a positive vulgarity in carrying your business affairs about with you as you do’ (p.419).

Mr Merdle, the great financial swindler, can be read, like the travelling Dorrits, as essentially emblematic of his age. The 1850s, in which Dickens was writing his novel, and the 1820s, when he set it, saw the worst commercial crises of the nineteenth century. Indeed, Dickens based the character (and his fate) on the banker John Sadleir, who killed himself in 1856 after swindling an unsuspecting public out of £200,000 (Russell 1986, p.135). Norman Russell, writing on the role of money in the Victorian novel, emphasises

how absolutely essential it was for the Victorian banker to seem above reproach, impeccable in his public and private life, and aloof from any breath of scandal… In a highly hierarchic society, the maintenance of high social standing was essential to a sound public character. (p.75)

Personal credibility was the key to success for a banker like Merdle. ‘Name up, everywhere… great position – high connection – government influence’ (Dickens, 1857/1998, p.612): these elements of the Merdle image manage to blind even the business-like Pancks. The critic Christina Crosby suggests that ‘[M]oney is odour-free, without the smell of the factory or mine…’ (p.235); Mrs Merdle, more discerning, recognises that it is not money, but its exchange, which carries the ability to taint. Despite the fact that his business preoccupations are the talk, not only of London, but of the entire English nation, for a large part of Little Dorrit, Mr Merdle must beware of ‘carrying the Shop… on his back’ (p.421). A place at the pinnacle of Society is prohibited to those engaging in anything so vulgar as trade. Mr Dorrit’s behaviour might be abhorrent, but it is based on that practised within the social sphere to which he so doggedly aspires.

Dickens’s anger at the snobbish disdain associated with the idea of earning one’s money is at the root of his dissatisfaction with old models of leisure and of travel, the contention at the heart of Little Dorrit’s discourse on tourism. It is a model handily elucidated by Judith Flanders, in her book Consuming Passions:

The old social system stood firmly on the notion that the upper classes were defined by their lack of employment: the upper classes were the leisured classes. By contrast, a leisured working man was an oxymoron: a leisured working man was merely

91 unemployed, idle. The leisure time of the cultivated was well used; the working classes when idle were probably fomenting disorder, or even crime. (pp.206-07)

The question of leisure for the working classes had been brought to popular attention in the nineteenth century not only by the increase in Continental tourism but also by the Great Exhibition of 1851. Whilst travel on the Continent was largely restricted to the middle classes (notoriously broad as that classification was), the Great Exhibition was supposed to be within the reach of every industrial labourer and his family. It even earned its own ‘family tourism’ novel, in the shape of Henry Mayhew and George Cruikshank’s comprehensively titled 1851: or, the Adventures of Mr and Mrs Sandboys and Family, who came up to London to enjoy themselves, and to see the Great Exhibition.

Unsurprisingly, the idea that (to quote Mayhew’s novel) ‘Every city was arranging some “monster train” to shoot… its inhabitants, at a halfpenny per ton, into the lodging houses of London,’ (p.3) was a focus for conservative anxieties. In the run-up to the Exhibition’s opening, London’s wealthy inhabitants pictured the streets overwhelmed with the rioting, drunkenness and debauchery habitually associated with the idle poor. In fact, as Mayhew observes, the anticipated problems never materialised. ‘Those who are now to be found there… have come to look at the Exhibition, and not to make an exhibition of themselves. There is no air of display about them – no social falsity.’ (p.160) For Mayhew, who sees the Exhibition primarily as a ‘public national expression… as to the dignity and artistic quality of labour’ (p.129), there can be no audience more fit than those men whose daily work involves them in the very mechanical processes that the Exhibition was concerned to display and to commend; and for Dickens, too, the tourists as Mayhew describes them might serve as models for travel as it ought to be.

Mayhew’s approving attitude towards the industrial ingenuity on which he understands the British economy to be founded is resoundingly echoed in Little Dorrit. Daniel Doyce, ‘The honest, self- helpful, indefatigable old man,’ (744) is one of the novel’s moral touchstones. Despite Mr Meagles’s reservations (which spring from the same narrow-mindedness that affords him genuine comfort in Gowan’s aristocratic connections), Doyce not only combines creative powers with practical knowledge, but adds to them both the vital further element of human tact and sympathy. The scene in which Doyce explains to Clennam the workings of his invention, ‘with the direct force and distinctness [of]… his own mind’ (540), is presented in powerful contrast to the prevarications, obscurantism and outright deceit encountered in Little Dorrit’s other workplaces: most memorably, of course, the upper-class preserve of the Circumlocution Office. The partnership

92 established between Doyce and Clennam is presented in glowing contrast to the novel’s other business relationships, straining under the weight of mutual dislike. Jeremiah Flintwinch sets half of the novel’s plot in motion out of nothing more than a desire to get one over on the woman whose business he shares; Pancks and Casby’s alliance is terminated in the tug-boat’s unexpected explosion; even Mr and Mrs Merdle, a pairing as businesslike as any the novel presents, are presented in their only moment of privacy as irredeemably at odds with one another. Doyce has no time for the falsity demanded of those who would get on in Society; he is not worried about the way in which he is perceived by others; and his lack of concern for propriety enables him to obtain in Clennam a partner whose loyalty – if not his financial nous – is entirely to be relied upon.

Doyce’s open attitude to knowledge aligns him with the professional tourists, not only of Mayhew’s 1851, but of Dickens’s 1837 article ‘Sunday Under Three Heads’. In the piece, composed in opposition to the Sabbath Bill which had appeared before the Commons that May, Dickens paints a picture of

The museums, and repositories of scientific and useful inventions… crowded with ingenious mechanics and industrious artisans, all anxious for information… practical men: humble in appearance, but destined, perhaps, to become the greatest inventors and philosophers of their age. (p.129)

The Bill sought to outlaw almost all Sunday occupation that was not exclusively religious in nature; and Dickens is cutting as regards the upper-class surfeit of leisure that makes such a proposition conceivable. The labourer’s determinedly constructive enjoyment of his limited leisure is contrasted with the jaundiced attitude of ‘The pampered aristocrat, whose life is one continued round of… sensual gratifications’ (p.111); and one thinks, here, of Fanny Sparkler, stifling in the ‘little mansion’ that her marriage has bought her (Dickens 1857/1998, p.724). Mrs Sparkler’s marriage, founded on her determination to out-dazzle her mother-in-law, has little to sustain it when her father’s death necessitates a certain period of sartorial obscurity. Fanny is amply repaid for her too-anxious concern with where others’ eyes are looking.

Doyce and Fanny are not the only characters in Little Dorrit who recall the contentions made in ‘Sunday’. The question of the Sabbath had resurfaced in Parliament in 1854, and the novel contains several references to the question, which can go unnoticed against the modern expectation of business as usual, seven days a week. As Arthur Clennam sits miserably in the window of a London coffee shop, contemplating the poverty spreading out around him in every direction,

93 Dickens wonders of the city’s inhabitants ‘what secular want could they possibly have upon their seventh day? Clearly… nothing but a stringent policeman.’ (p.44) It is on ‘alternate Sunday afternoons’ that the younger Little Dorrit and the turnkey Bob embark on their adventures to the open fields (p.85); and it is unlikely to be on any other day that Matthew Plornish makes the excursions ‘to Hampton Court in a Wan’ that earn him some mean-spirited criticism for improvidence (p.157). In every instance, Dickens’s allegiance is clear, as he offers an emphatic defence of the working man’s right to leisure.

There is some significance in Plornish naming Hampton Court as his holiday destination of choice. The palace was made popular not only by its affordability but by a mid-century trend for visiting the country houses where British history was still supposed to reside. The mentality is perpetuated today in the hundreds of visitors who trek round National Trust and English Heritage properties; even the title of the latter attesting the source of their interest and value. A motivation so grounded in the past might be seen to contradict the forward-looking value system that Dickens advocates in Little Dorrit; but the crucial distinction between the history of Rome and that of Hampton Court Palace was that the English locations epitomised in the latter were understood as universally accessible. Haddon Hall is described in an 1874 guide as ‘a revelation of the facts of human history… recorded in characters so plain that the simple may decipher them with ease’ (cited in Mandler, p.140). Such a sentiment could not be further from the cool exclusivity of tone maintained by the advocates of classical tourism. Hampton Court Palace, rendered accessible by the abolition of its entrance fee in 1839, was, like the Great Exhibition, a source of education for the masses; and Plornish’s innocent desire for a little educational amusement at the site is opposed to the siege mentality of the bourgeois bohemians who inhabit its quarters. ‘Some of these Bohemians were… constantly soured and vexed by… the consciousness that the public were admitted into the building.’ (p.331). Plornish is extremely inoffensive as a representative sample of the mob; but Mrs Gowan and her companions, all vigorously tutting and pretending together, stand in nicely for the critics and travellers doing their best to preserve the exclusivity of a realm no longer theirs to control.

This attitude, the target of Dickens’s anger and frustration throughout Little Dorrit as he exposes the mean-spirited machinations that preserve an aristocratic exclusivity calculated to promote a kind of shallow vacuity above anything approaching individuality, is of course closely related to his own experiences as a writer. It is a truth that finds an unexpected but beautifully apposite exemplar in Thackeray’s introduction to his tourist novel, The Kickleburys on the Rhine.

94 Thackeray, who unlike Dickens obviously did read his reviews, opens the novel’s second edition with a deconstruction of the notice that appeared in the Times on its original publication. Though the generic object of the reviewer’s scorn is in this instance the Christmas book – rather than the travel novel – both the reviewer’s tone and Thackeray’s response are indicative of the conflict between leisured and professional classes. This is taken from the review:

Oh! that any muse should be set upon a high stool to cast up accounts and balance a ledger!... bearing the stamp of their origin in the writer’s exchequer rather than in the fullness of his genius, they suggest by their feeble flavour the rinsings of a void brain after the more important concoctions of the expired year. (Titmarsh 1851, p.iv)

This goes on for some time but Thackeray’s response to it is simply to remind the reviewer that he, too, is being paid for his words.

Why twit me with my poverty; and what can the Times critic know about the vacuity of my exchequer?... Does not he himself write for money? (and who would grudge it to such a polite and generous and learned author?) (p.xi)

The sanctimonious authority adopted by the Times’ critic is a function of the value that certain conservative elements in nineteenth century culture afforded to leisure, and to the amateur status that marked one out as genteel. Thomas Cook, whose doctrine of ‘travel for the millions’ was the root of so many conservative anxieties, echoes Thackeray’s acerbity in a comment on Charles Lever, whose Dodds Abroad is a staidly conservative mockery of the socially aspiring.

Mr Lever is an Irish gentleman of the precise class to which the English clergymen, physicians, bankers, civil engineers and merchants, who honoured me by accepting my escort to Italy last year, indisputably belong. By what right, then, does he constitute himself their censor? (Hamilton, p.161)

The contempt for professionalism, for those who worked to earn their living, manifested by Lever and by the anonymous reviewers I have cited in my paper was a continual source of frustration for Dickens. Angry at its obvious inequality, he was also conscious of his own vulnerability to this kind of criticism: Robert Newsom provides a fittingly ironic example in his description of the lawyer James Fitzjames Stephen’s outraged response to the publication of this very Little Dorrit.

95 [James Fitzjames] Stephen charged Dickens with not just technical ignorance of the government and the civil service, but with ignorance of the upper classes and a corresponding lack of gentlemanliness that, he strongly implied, was the result of a lack of breeding. He portrayed Dickens as unmanly, moreover, possessed of “a feminine, irritable, noisy mind”. (p.219)

The link that this kind of conservative thinking seems to have made between femininity and vulgarity is interesting, if difficult to pursue; the Blackwood’s article on modern tourism, we remember, characterised its professional tourist as a woman. There is not time in this presentation to explore the role of the female traveller in the Victorian tourist discourse, but it is surely interesting that Amy Dorrit, Dickens’s heroine, is not only a female traveller but a female travel writer; the correspondence she sends back to Arthur Clennam is the novel’s clearest example of the kind of travel journalism in which Dickens himself engaged.

The link between Amy’s journalism and Dickens’s own writing directly aligns the writer with his heroine, just as the afterword (what becomes, in modern editions, the foreword) to his novel emphasises the spatial identity between their childhoods. Like Amy, the young Dickens found a kind of home in the Marshalsea walls. Her writing, like his own, derives its value and interest from the person who writes it, lacking the classical ‘breadth of allusion’ which Poovey suggests was still seen as an essential requirement for ‘access to the world of… letters’ (p.107). It is a correspondence that emphasises Dickens’s empathy with the professional tourists that his novel defends, the workers who, in the persons not only of Amy herself but of the wholly admirable Daniel Doyce, provide an alternative model of travel to the carefully exclusive, self-indulgent behaviour of Mrs General and her would-be ‘classical’ ilk and with which both Thackeray, and Dickens himself, are proud to declare their fellowship.

96 List of Works Cited

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ARMSTRONG, F. (1990) Dickens and the Concept of Home, Ann Arbor, MI, UMI Research Press.

BAILEY, P. (1978) Leisure and Class in Victorian England: Rational Recreation and the Contest for Control, 1830-1885, London, Routledge and Kegan Paul.

BRADBURY, N. (2000) Dickens and James: "Watching with my eyes closed": the Dream Abroad. Dickens Quarterly, 17, 77-87.

BROWN, J. M. (1982) Dickens: Novelist in the Market-Place, London and Basingstoke, Macmillan.

BUZARD, J. (1993) The Beaten Track: European Tourism, Literature, and the Ways to Culture, 1800-1918, Oxford, Clarendon Press.

BUZARD, J. (1999) "On the Shore of the Wide World": the Victorian nation and its others. IN TUCKER, H. F. (Ed.) A Companion to Victorian Literature and Culture. Oxford, Blackwell Publishing.

CHASE, K. & LEVENSON, M. (2000) The Spectacle of Intimacy: A Public Life for the Victorian Family, Princeton, NJ, Princeton University Press.

COBBE, F. P. (1864) Italics: Brief Notes on Politics, People and Places in Italy, London, Trubner and Co.

CROSBY, C. (1999) Financial. IN TUCKER, H. F. (Ed.) A Companion to Victorian Literature and Culture. Oxford, Blackwell Publishing.

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DAVIDOFF, L. (1995) Worlds Between: Historical Perspectives on Gender and Class, Oxford and Cambridge, Polity Press.

DAVIDOFF, L. & HALL, C. (1987) Family Fortunes: Men and Women of the English Middle Class, 1780-1850, London, Hutchinson.

DEKKER, G. G. (2005) The Fictions of Romantic Tourism, Stanford, CA, Stanford University Press.

DICKENS, C. (1837/1931) Sunday Under Three Heads. Reprinted Pieces. London, JM Dent and Sons.

97 DICKENS, C. (1857/1998) Little Dorrit, London, Penguin Classics.

DICKENS, C. (1846/2003) Pictures from Italy, USA, Quiet Vision.

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ELLIS, S. S. (1842) The Daughters of England: their Position in Society, Character and Responsibilities, London, Fisher, Son and Co.

ELLIS, S. S. (1845) The Women of England: their social duties, and domestic habits, London, Fisher, Son and Co.

EUSTACE, J. C. (1813) A Classical Tour Through Italy, London, J Mawman.

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FUSSELL, P. (1980) Abroad: British Literary Traveling Between the Wars, New York, NY, Oxford University Press.

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PEMBLE, J. (1988) The Mediterranean Passion: Victorians and Edwardians in the South, Oxford, Oxford University Press. POOVEY, M. (1988) Uneven Developments: The Ideological Work of Gender in Mid-Victorian England, London, University of Chicago Press.

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98 Tinsley Brothers.

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99 A “sort of superior vagabond” Travel as a process of detachment in the context of Dickens’s visits to France

John Edmondson IP Publishing Ltd, 258 Belsize Road, London NW6 4BT, UK. [email protected]; [email protected]

ABSTRACT This paper concentrates on Dickens’s writings on France in Household Words, All the Year Round and Pictures from Italy. It sets them in the context of changes in the tourism market and the expanding Continental tourism economy. Specifically, it discusses the attractions of Second Empire Paris; the impact of the railways; the streamlining of the tourism supply chain; and the growth in guidebook publishing. Changes in travel and attitudes to travel led to an unprecedented flow of British visitors to the Continent. Dickens, however, distances himself from broad trends in tourism and stereotypical tourists. His overriding interests are in the experience of travel itself, in people he encounters and in the spirit of place.

Against this background, the paper examines how Dickens positions himself in his travel writing, beginning with Pictures from Italy and its critical review in The Times, which unintentionally evokes the notion of a vagabond narrative. In correspondence Dickens describes himself as a “sort of superior vagabond” and the idea recurs in his writing, implicitly and explicitly. His adoption of the “Uncommercial Traveller” persona extends and refines this narrative position, which brings to his travel journalism a distinctively impressionistic and unpredictable quality. Ultimately, Dickens’s version of literary vagabondage is a crafting of the detachment or self-marginalization of the artist to delineate the narrative personality that best suits his approach to his art and his way of perceiving the world around him.

An Appendix lists the essays, short fiction and novels that include references to France.

Keywords: Dickens’s journalism; Uncommercial Traveller; Victorian tourism; Second Empire; flâneur; travel writing

100 A “sort of superior vagabond” Travel as a process of detachment in the context of Dickens’s visits to France “He had a very strong love of his country, though he himself used to say, laughingly, that his sympathies were so much with the French that he ought to have been born a Frenchman.” (Sir Henry Fielding Dickens, 1928)

Dickens’s instinctive affinity for French life and culture took him back to France many times, and, as he became more familiar with the country and its people, and increasingly disillusioned with the state of his own nation, his attraction to it persisted and deepened.1 It became a significant influence in his journalism, providing him with settings and a source of inspiration, and it found its way into his novels and shorter fiction, sometimes making only a brief appearance, sometimes playing a major role (see the Appendix for a list of relevant fiction and non-fiction).

We can see from the published correspondence that Dickens visited France at least twenty times. On six occasions he took up residence there. He stayed in Boulogne for three to four months in 1853, 1854 and 1856, and in Paris for two to three months in 1846–47 and 1862 and for six months in 1855–56. Although he first crossed the Channel in 1837 when he was 25,2 he did not return to the Continent until 1844, when he travelled through France on his way to Italy (it was on this trip that he first saw Paris, then in its pre-Haussmann days). He went back for his first long stay in Paris in 1846. Then, as far as we know, he did not revisit the country until 1850.

Second Empire France So, the great majority of Dickens’s trips to France were made in the 1850s and 1860s – the time of Napoléon III and the Second Empire, a period characterized by radical urban development, startlingly rapid progress in transport and communications, and dramatic financial and industrial expansion. The Second Empire was also associated with a particularly intense pursuit of wealth and pleasure, fuelled by the glittering example set by the Empress Eugénie and the Imperial Court. Paris, at once the hub and symbol of the Empire’s modernizing energy and assertive splendour, was transformed under Haussmann from the crumbling medieval city Dickens had seen in the 1840s into a spacious and elegant representation of the modern world. Dickens marvelled at the process of Haussmannisation as it took place before his eyes, characteristically greeting change with fascination and excitement: “High upon the Boulevard, the old groupe of Theatres that used to be so characteristic, is knocked to pieces, and some preparations for some amazing new street are in rapid

101 progress,” he wrote to W.H. Wills in 1862. “I couldn’t find my way yesterday to the Poste Restante, without looking at a map! – I suppose I have been there, at least 50 times before. Wherever I turn, I see some astounding new work, doing or done.” (Pilgrim, Vol 10, p 151.)

In “Some Recollections of Mortality” (All the Year Round, 16 May 1863), he stands in front of what had become a “large open space” in front of Notre-Dame:

“A very little while gone, I had left that space covered with buildings densely crowded; and now it was cleared for some new wonder in the way of public Street, Place, Garden, Fountain, or all four.”

By 1864, Murray’s Handbook for Visitors to Paris 3 is describing the Grands Boulevards, then the centre of Parisian nightlife and crammed with famous cafés, fashionable shops and popular theatres, almost in terms of a culture shock for the English visitor:

“… the hosts of people sitting outside cafés, the throng of loungers along the pavement, the lofty houses, the splendid shops, the brilliantly lighted cafés, and the numerous theatres form a scene which will be quite new to an Englishman.”

Transport and tourism services The ever-increasing attractions of the new city of light and of Second Empire France more generally were made more accessible by another type of radical transformation – the transformation of travel. In Britain in the 1840s some 6,000 miles of railway were opened. Dickens’s first trip to Paris in 1844 was by coach. In the early 1840s the coach journey from London to Dover alone took around ten hours and in “A Flight” (Household Words, 30 August 1851), Dickens remembers the “two-and-twenty hours of long long day and night journey” on the other side of the Channel. By 1847 this three-day trip had been reduced to about 18 hours, of which six were spent travelling by coach from Boulogne to Abbeville station to catch the Paris train (Hand-Book for Travellers in France, 1847). By 1850 the rail link was complete and on 29 April 1851 The Times included an announcement of a new fast time from London to Paris:

“LONDON TO PARIS IN 11 HOURS – SEA PASSAGE TWO HOURS ONLY. Important Special Express Service, via Dover and Calais, and Folkestone and Boulogne, alternately – on and after the 1st

May, a SPECIAL EXPRESS TRAIN, first and second class, will leave the South Eastern Railway

102 Terminus, London-bridge, every morning, reaching Paris in the evening; changing the hours of departure from London so as to suit the tide and prevent all delay.”

This is the 11-hour journey that Dickens celebrates in his high-energy impressionistic paper “A Flight”, contrasting the unbelievable ease and speed of the new journey with the tedium and discomfort of the old (“Where are the pains in my bones, where are the fidgets in my legs, where is the Frenchman with the nightcap who never would have the little coupé-window down, and who always fell upon me when he went to sleep, and always slept all night snoring onions?”).

The rail revolution fuelled an already expanding tourism economy on the Continent. According to Murray’s Handbook for Travellers in France, 1856, and Brunet’s New Guide to Boulogne-sur-Mer and its Environs, 1862, for example, Boulogne alone had an annual inflow of around 100,000 passengers. Regional historians estimate that cross-Channel passengers travelling via Boulogne increased from 86,000 a year in 1850 to 153,000 in 1867 (Oustric, 1983, p 227). The supply chain for this shifting and expanding market was becoming more streamlined and homogenized. The old posting inns on the dusty French country roads were giving way to railway buffets and restaurants. The new Terminus at Calais was on the Railway Station Quay, as close as possible to where the ferry passengers disembarked, and, says Murray’s 1856 Handbook for Travellers in France, “includes the Custom-house, Passport-office and Refreshment-room (Buffet–hotel) all under its roof”. And the 1864 Handbook for Visitors to Paris recommends the “very good refreshment room at Boulogne station, where persons proceeding to London or Paris will be able to dine without going to the hotels in the town”. The speed, ease and convenience of Continental travel and tourism were on a steep upward curve and the market for travel-related services was expanding rapidly in depth and breadth. Thomas Cook began his Continental tours in 1862, with France as a major destination, taking care of all travel arrangements from London, offering accommodation in “first- class establishments” and ensuring appropriate food for the “thorough roast-beef-and-pudding- eating Englishman”.4 By September 1863, according to the Dictionary of National Biography, Cook had taken 2000 tourists to France.

The growth of the guidebook Publishers were not slow to notice this growing and changing market. The travel guide was becoming big business. Some publishers had begun to specialize in foreign travel guides in the eighteenth century, even though the numbers of English travellers abroad were then much smaller.5 In the early years of the 19th century, with the post-Waterloo Continental travel boom, the travel guide became an increasingly marketable product.6

103 The first recorded use of the word “tourism” in the Oxford English Dictionary is dated 1811 – indicating a dawning recognition of a distinct economic sector and a sign that travel for pleasure had moved beyond the confines of the rich and leisurely and the adventurous, and was becoming a viable option for a much larger and very different set of consumers. A little later, the travel guide came into its own. Murray in England and Baedeker in Germany launched their first guides in the 1830s (although the Baedekers did not appear in English until the 1860s). Murray’s guides became bibles for the English traveller and proliferated in the following decades. They included pre-planned routes, hotel recommendations, and survival-kit style travel advice as well as extensive cultural and historical information and statistics on populations, local industries, and so on. They were updated frequently. Inspired by “the difficulty of obtaining the kind of information he needed” on his own Continental travels (Dictionary of National Biography), John Murray III started out with multi- country guides in 1836 (the first was Hand-Book for Travellers on the Continent) but quickly narrowed the focus and by the early 1840s was producing, among others, the highly successful Hand-Book for Travellers in France. And in 1864 he published Murray’s first dedicated guide to Paris. Paris was well served – Galignani had long been publishing the New Paris Guide, which was updated more or less annually.

The market for this kind of guide expanded with extraordinary speed, and it was not confined to the English. The French publisher Hachette published at least 120 travel guides between 1855 and 1870 (Masson, 2005).

These latest incarnations of the travel guide, like our modern versions, followed a series formula. Readers of different Murray guides would find the same ordering of information in each book, would be able to use each in the same way and would recognize a common approach and tone. Hotel information, for example, is always at the beginning of a place entry, population and other statistics are next, then come the historical and cultural details and finally information about travel options. The guides were regularly updated and the aim was to be comprehensive – both in geographical coverage and in the range of practical and cultural detail – and unerringly reliable.

The narrative stance of the mid-19th century guidebook is that of a seasoned fellow traveller, with encyclopaedic knowledge and an authoritative point of view. While the concentration on travel facts, local statistics and historical information gave Murray’s guides an air of objective practicality, they are far from short of personal opinion. The Handbook for Travellers in France of 1856, for example, is somewhat dismissive of Calais:

104 “After an hour or so it becomes tiresome, and a traveller will do well to quit it as soon as he has cleared his baggage from the custom-house…”.

And Lyon gets even worse treatment, with its inner city described as:

“…one stack of lofty houses, penetrated by lanes so excessively narrow and nasty as not to be traversed without disgust”.

This is a travelling companion who brooks no nonsense, offers opinions that he no doubt thinks the reader would do well to adopt as his or her own and, without being exactly bossy, is at least a little schoolmasterly as he leads his disciples through the minefield that is Continental travel:

“Excellent fast steamboats cross the Channel between France and England; still they are often overcrowded to inconvenience, and in rough weather passengers are liable to be wetted by the rain or spray. The passengers, especially ladies, should therefore take with them a small change of raiment in a hand bag…” (A Handbook for Travellers in France, 1864.)

The significance of the difference between this persona and the one Dickens adopts for his travel writing will become clear in the following sections.

Dickens as tourist Thus tourism was becoming, or arguably had already become, a large and interconnected industry. Changes in travel and attitudes to travel, driven or catalysed by developments such as those described above – the glamour and innovations of Second Empire France, the transport revolution, the improvement in services such as catering and accommodation, the ready availability of comprehensive and reassuring tourist information and advice from John Murray and others – combined with social and demographic changes to produce a flow of British visitors to the Continent on an unprecedented scale.

Dickens, however, shows little inclination in his public or private writing to have much to do with the British abroad. In his paper “Our French Watering-Place” (Household Words, 1854) written in praise of Boulogne – described in the 1856 Handbook for Travellers in France as “one of the chief British colonies abroad” – he welcomes the positive effects of the coming together of the two cultures:

105 “But, to us, it is not the least pleasant feature of our French watering-place that a long and constant fusion of the two great nations there, has taught each to like the other, and to learn from the other, and to rise superior to the absurd prejudices that have lingered among the weak and ignorant of both countries equally.”

On the other hand, he is not much impressed by the English he sees there:

“As to the boarding-houses of our French watering-place, they are Legion, and would require a distinct treatise. It is not without a sentiment of national pride that we believe them to contain more bores from the shores of Albion than all the clubs in London. As you walk timidly in their neighbourhood, the very neckcloths and hats of your elderly compatriots cry to you from the stones of the street, ‘We are Bores – avoid us!’”

And some of the younger tourists or residents in Boulogne were even worse. Writing to John Forster in June 1856 he describes an evening visit to the pier:

“The said pier at evening is a phase of the place we never see, and which I hardly knew. But I never did behold such specimens of the youth of my country, male and female, as pervade that place. They are really, in their vulgarity and insolence, quite disheartening. One is so fearfully ashamed of them, and they contrast so very unfavourably with the natives.” (Forster, 1876, Book Seventh, ch 4; Pilgrim, Vol 8, pp 136–137.)

Dickens also distanced himself from the travel snobs – the kinds of tourists who felt that nowhere was worth visiting unless it took a long time to get there and it were sufficiently exotic. “If this were but 300 miles farther off,” he said of Boulogne, “how the English would rave about it!” (Forster, 1876, Book Seventh, ch 4; Pilgrim, Vol 7, p 97.) This type of tourism was driven by fashion, and followers of the fashion romanticized squalor and poverty in such “must-see” places as Naples – which had been a key component of the 18th century Grand Tour and was still very much in vogue as a romantic and exotic destination. In “Our French Watering-Place”, Dickens satirizes the travel writers who encouraged this approach to tourism, bestowing on them the representative name of “Bilkins”:

“And though we are aware that at the bidding of Bilkins it is our duty to fall down and worship the Neapolitans, we make bold very much to prefer the fishing people of our French

106 watering-place – especially since our last visit to Naples within these twelve months, when we found only four conditions of men remaining in the whole city: to wit, lazzaroni, priests, spies, and soldiers, and all of them beggars; the paternal government having banished all its subjects except the rascals.”

He had made a similar point earlier in the “A Rapid Diorama” chapter of Pictures from Italy, 1846, pointing up the contrast between the romance and beauty of Naples and its squalor, poverty and corruption, the latter set of characteristics often ignored by tourists and their travel writer mentors of the Bilkins persuasion:

“But, lovers and hunters of the picturesque, let us not keep too studiously out of view the miserable depravity, degradation, and wretchedness, with which this gay Neapolitan life is inseparably associated! It is not well to find St Giles’s so repulsive, and the Porta Capuana so attractive.”

Dickens consciously rejected this kind of tourism in his praise of Boulogne – a place too easy to get to and too familiar to be of interest to the fashionable British traveller. Writing to Hablot Knight Browne in June 1853, he described Boulogne as “a very capital place, with quite as much that is quaint and picturesque among the fishing-people and their quarter of the Town, as is to be found (if you’ll believe me in a whisper) at Naples” (Pilgrim, Vol 7, p 107).

Here and in other writing, Dickens is distancing himself from broad trends in tourism and types of tourist. Other typical behaviour of the English abroad comes in for sharp satire. We have, for example, the blinkered nationalistic bigotry of “Monied Interest” in “A Flight” and the “compatriot” in “The Calais Night Mail” (All the Year Round, 2 May 1863) and “Some Recollections of Mortality”; and the bumbling incompetence in the face of the unfamiliar of the “Demented Traveller” in “The Calais Night Mail” and the British arrivals in Boulogne typified by “Johnson” in “Our French Watering-Place”.

Where, then, does Dickens situate himself as a traveller? What was the point, for him, of spending so much of his time travelling abroad, especially in France? Certainly, sight-seeing was not a major motivator. For Dickens it is rarely more than a tedious obligation,

“… there were the cathedrals that I got out to see, as under some cruel bondage, in no wise desiring to see them…” (“Travelling Abroad”, All the Year Round, 7 April 1860.)

107 “If you would know all about the architecture of this church, or any other, its dates, dimensions, endowments, and history, is it not written in Mr Murray’s Guide-Book, and may you not read it there, with thanks to him, as I did?” (“Lyons, the Rhone and the Goblin of Avignon”, Pictures from Italy.)

“After seeing the churches (I will not trouble you with churches just now), we left Avignon that afternoon.” (“Avignon to Genoa”, Pictures from Italy.)

For Dickens, the fascination of travel lies elsewhere. When he crosses the Channel by steamer (“The Calais Night Mail”) or travels through France by train or coach (“A Flight”, “Travelling Abroad”, Pictures from Italy), it is the sensation and experience of travel that engage him as he constantly reflects on his own psychology as a traveller and on the behaviour of his fellow passengers. In his travels through northern France (“In the French-Flemish Country”, All the Year Round, 12 September 1863) and in his visits to Boulogne and Paris (“Our French Watering-Place”, “Travelling Abroad”, “Railway Dreaming”, “Some Recollections of Mortality”), his real interest is not in monuments, museums and churches but in the nature of the people he encounters and the spirit of the places he visits.

The vagabond perspective The approach Dickens adopted in his early travelogue Pictures from Italy is revealing. Published in 1846, the book was based on letters that Dickens had written to John Forster and other friends while on his travels. The text therefore has the quality of immediacy, as if the traveller-writer is jotting down what he sees and feels in the freshness of the experience. This quality of immediacy was quite deliberate. Earlier versions of the first few chapters of Pictures had appeared in the newly launched Daily News in January–March 1846 as a series of articles tagged “Travelling Letters. Written on the Road.” (emphasis added). And in the foreword to the book, entitled “The Reader’s Passport”, Dickens explains the origin of the text, proposing it as a certificate of authenticity:

“The greater part of the descriptions were written on the spot, and sent home, from time to time, in private letters. I do not mention the circumstance as an excuse for any defects they may present, for it would be none; but as a guarantee to the Reader that they were at least penned in the fulness of the subject, and with the liveliest impressions of novelty and freshness.”

108 In other words, the book is offered as a kind of travel diary written on the move – a collection of subjective, sometimes whimsical accounts of people and places, and incidents connected with them, infused with the traveller’s personal perceptions and responses. Dickens is interested in communicating the experience of the journey and the reflections it engenders – and he sees it as no part of his business to be bothering with factual detail that that does not relate directly to this purpose. This did not accord with certain conventional expectations of travel writing. The review of Pictures from Italy in The Times on 1June 1846 was severe. The reviewer, looking for such content as authoritative information and analysis of the “national character”, is unable to make anything of the book and is at pains to highlight what he considers Dickens’s limitations: “Italy is not his ground; travels and grave essays on men and manners are not his vocation.” The reviewer cannot come to terms with a narrative that, he says, “has no purpose and attempts to work out no definite idea”. This is an interesting, and unintentionally perceptive choice of words – a book with no purpose and no clear idea of where it is going is a vagabond book.

Later in his career, in 1860, Dickens invented the persona of the Uncommercial Traveller for several series of “occasional papers” that were to appear in All the Year Round. The persona is introduced in the 28 January 1860 issue in a short preamble to the first of the papers. As his name suggests, this narrator is the opposite of the commercial or business traveller – he travels anonymously, without material motive or influence:

“No landlord is my friend and brother, no chambermaid loves me, no boots admires and envies me. No beef or tongue or ham is expressly cooked for me … When I go upon my journeys, I am not usually rated at a low figure in the bill; when I come home from my journeys, I never get any commission.”

Various explanations have been put forward for the choice of the name “Uncommercial Traveller” (see, for example, Slater and Drew, 2000, pp xv–xvi; Drew, 2003, pp 152–154; Edmondson, 2006, pp 17–18), but it seems most likely that it owes something to Sterne’s A Sentimental Journey, with its comic list of travelling types (“Sentimental Traveller”, “Inquisitive Traveller”, “Vain Traveller”, etc) and its similarly idiosyncratic narrator (Sterne, 1768, pp 34–35).

The links between the travel narrations of Sterne and Dickens merit considerable attention and are worth a very brief detour here as they relate to our theme. Both take a highly subjective and impressionistic approach, using the experience of travel as a springboard for reflections on human nature and on their own relationships with and responses to the world. Dickens was to some extent

109 influenced by Sterne – in “Travelling Abroad” he pays homage to A Sentimental Journey in the whimsical and episodic style of the essay and by framing its narrative in an incident that deliberately recalls the “Preface in the Desobligeant” section of Sterne’s novel. And Sterne, like Dickens, is not much interested in touristic facts and figures. He satirizes conventional travel writing in Tristram Shandy:

“‘Now before I quit Calais,’ a travel writer would say, ‘it would not be amiss to give some account of it.’ Now I think it very much amiss – that a man cannot go quietly through a town, and let it alone, when it does not meddle with him, but that he must be turning about and drawing his pen at every kennel he crosses over…” (Sterne, 1759–67, Vol VII, ch IV, p 462.)7

The Uncommercial Traveller might well have agreed. His “uncommercialness” is his “otherness”, the quality that places him outside the routine and systematic life that bustles around him as he travels. His travelling often has no defined purpose; and often he has no set destination. Travelling for him is a series of impressions, filtered though his own world view and coloured by his own imagination:

“I am both a town traveller and a country traveller, and am always on the road. Figuratively speaking, I travel for the great house of Human Interest Brothers, and have a rather large connexion in the fancy goods way. Literally speaking, I am always wandering here and there … seeing many little things, and some great things, which, because they interest me, I think may interest others.” (All the Year Round, 28 January 1860.)

Here again we have a description of a kind of vagabond – “a town traveller and a country traveller”, “always on the road”, “always wandering here and there”. In the 19th century, as now, the word “vagabond”, in its less pejorative sense, had overtones of aimlessness and wandering – “one who has no fixed abode or home, and who wanders about from place to place,” is the OED’s definition. In the paper “Shy Neighbourhoods” (All the Year Round, 26 May 1860), the Uncommercial Traveller explicitly defines himself in this way:

“My walking is of two kinds; one, straight on end to a definite goal at a round pace; one, objectless, loitering, and purely vagabond. In the latter state, no gipsy on earth is a greater vagabond than myself; it is so natural to me and strong with me, that I think I must be the descendant, at no great distance, of some irreclaimable tramp.”

110 His creator had earlier described himself in similar terms. Writing to W.H. Wills from Paris in February 1855, Dickens said:

“Paris is finer than ever, and I go wandering about it all day. We dine at all manner of places, and go to two or three Theatres in the evening … I seem to be rather a free and easy sort of superior Vagabond.” (Pilgrim, Vol 7, p 542.)

The word is important, because it goes to how Dickens perceived himself as a traveller, how he positioned himself and how he approached his travel encounters with people and culture. As a benevolent vagabond he is interested in, often captivated by, what he observes around him but at the same time he is bestowed with an otherness that allows him to contemplate it from the perspective of an outsider – he can be, in other words, simultaneously engaged and disengaged. Seen in this light, Dickens’s “superior vagabond” persona is his particular version of the flâneur. Nead (2000, p 68), discussing Baudelaire’s definition of the flâneur, notes: “The flâneur is the man of the crowd; he can merge with the crowd, he can be anonymous and unobserved, but he also understands and draws life from it.”

The twentieth century novelist and diarist Julian Green, who lived in Paris almost all his long life, explained,

“Until you have wasted time in a city, you cannot pretend to know it well. The soul of a big city is not to be grasped so easily; in order to make contact with it, you have to have been bored, you have to have suffered a bit in those places that contain it. Anyone can get hold of a guide and tick off all the monuments, but within the very confines of Paris there is another city as difficult of access as Timbuktu once was. I call it a secret city because foreigners never enter it…” (Green, 1991, p 49.)

Dickens, writing to the Count D’Orsay in 1844, around 150 years earlier, also saw the need to look beneath the surface:

“I cannot conceive any place so perfectly and wonderfully expressive of its own character; its secret character no less than that which is on its surface; as Paris is.” (Pilgrim, Vol 4, p 166.)

And, like Green, he knew how to do it. On his first visit to Paris, he “walked about the streets” for the two days he was there, feeling as if each person he saw were another page in the “enormous

111 book” of the city. He was, then, a natural flâneur – he knew that it was in the streets, the cafés, the theatres that he would find the “real” city. It was the spirit of the place, and the way people lived in it, that engaged him. To discover those aspects of Paris, he had to disengage himself from the distractions of tourism, social obligations and other daily routines. This disengagement is expressed in his portrayal of himself, and of his fictional narrator, as a likeable vagabond-cum-flâneur – a seductive and gently comic characterization that implies a free spirit and an independent mind and carries with it undertones of vulnerability, fallibility and exclusion.

Constructive detachment In Paris and elsewhere in France, Dickens thus combines the natural distance of the tourist or visitor with a lack of engagement with the process of tourism. As a “sort of superior vagabond”, he can participate anonymously in the life of the places he visits and yet remain an outsider. This positioning is a key characteristic of Dickens’s travel-related writing. In the first paragraph of “In the French-Flemish Country”, for example, he makes it explicit:

“‘It is neither a bold nor a diversified country,’ I said to myself, ‘this country which is three- quarters Flemish, and a quarter French; yet it has its attractions too … Then I don’t know it, and that is a good reason for being here; and I can’t pronounce half the long queer names I see inscribed over the shops, and that is another good reason for being here, since I surely ought to learn how.’ In short, I was ‘here,’ and I wanted an excuse for not going away from here, and I made it to my satisfaction, and stayed here.”

His travel essays, although in reality of course carefully structured to communicate particular ideas, positions or experiences, typically reflect this vagabond stance, apparently straying from impression to impression, from observation to observation, unbound by the need for linear narrative, factual detail or coherent exposition. His readers are unsure as to what to expect – they are not, now, in the company of a seasoned travel companion of the John Murray kind, who will guide them comfortably and informatively along a planned route, nor are they in the company of the kind of travel writer favoured by the Times reviewer of Pictures from Italy, who will provide them with authoritative artistic judgements and a logical, sequential narrative leading to overarching culturally, politically or socially significant conclusions. Their companion is a wanderer, idiosyncratic, apparently aimless, whimsical, a receiver of impressions, mercurial, affective. Even in a paper like “A Monument of French Folly” (Household Words, 8 March 1851), which has the set purpose of reporting on an investigation into the French cattle market and slaughter house system, it is the impressionistic, apparently random and unnecessary detail that makes the paper

112 memorable and gives it its power, with the meandering syntax itself reflecting the narrator’s vagabond tendencies:

“It was as sharp a February morning as you would desire to feel at your fingers’ ends when I turned out – tumbling over a chiffonier with his little basket and rake, who was picking up the bits of coloured paper that had been swept out, overnight, from a Bon-Bon shop – to take the Butchers’ Train to Poissy.”

It is because of these vagabond qualities too that we follow Dickens around the streets of Second Empire Paris, sitting in cafés, venturing in and out of theatres on the Grands Boulevards, eating alone in a restaurant, while catching only a glimpse of such key attractions as Notre Dame and the Place Vendôme. Instead, we visit and revisit the Paris Morgue, that gruesome and always crowded little building on the Île de la Cité in which unidentified bodies were displayed (it gets, incidentally, a substantial entry in Murray’s 1864 Handbook for Visitors to Paris which, despite the deprecating tone, inevitably arouses curiosity). The Morgue is described in detail in “Travelling Abroad”, “Railway Dreaming” and “Some Recollections of Mortality”. “Whenever I am in Paris,” says the Uncommercial Traveller in “Travelling Abroad”, “I am dragged by invisible force into the Morgue.” Perhaps for Dickens it symbolized the dark underbelly of the city of light, with its display of death in the midst of a Paris throbbing with energy and life. Certainly, it gave the Uncommercial Traveller plenty of opportunity to observe people’s behaviour when they were confronted with its stark exhibition of mortality and to analyse his own responses to it. In “Travelling Abroad” he is struck by one particular cadaver:

“It was very hot weather, and he was none the better for that, and I was much the worse. Indeed, a very neat and pleasant little woman, with the key of her lodging on her forefinger, who had been showing him to her little girl while she and the child ate sweetmeats, observed monsieur looking poorly as we came out together, and asked monsieur, with her wondering little eyebrows prettily raised, if there were anything the matter?”

In “Railway Dreaming” (Household Words, 10 May 1856), he marvels at the variety of visitors to the Morgue and again at their apparent ability to divorce what they see from their own humanity and mortality:

“It is wonderful to see the people at this place. Cheery married women, basket in hand, strolling in, on their way to or from the buying of the day’s dinner; children in arms with little

113 pointing fingers; young girls; prowling boys; comrades in working, soldiering, or what not. Ninety-nine times in a hundred, nobody about to cross the threshold, looking in the faces coming out, could form the least idea, from anything in their expression, of the nature of the sight. I have studied them attentively, and have reason for saying so.”

Travel by its nature caters to the need of the writer to stand apart and to absorb impressions and experiences and Dickens takes full advantage of that opportunity, working with it to create a distinctively impressionistic and unpredictable narrative. He describes the physical process of travelling as a psychological process of detachment. In “Travelling Abroad” he refers to “that delicious traveller’s-trance which knows no cares, no yesterdays, no tomorrows, nothing but the passing objects and the passing events and sounds”. In “Railway Dreaming”, published in May 1856 and written shortly after Dickens’s six-month residence in Paris, he uses the travel-induced suspended sense of reality and dreamy isolation to reflect on various aspects of Parisian life, visualizing the city as another world from the cocoon of his railway carriage as he travels home to England. At the beginning of the paper, he describes what is in effect the vagabond state of mind that rail travel induces in him:

“I am never sure of time or place upon a Railroad. I can’t read. I can’t think, I can’t sleep – I can only dream. Rattling along in this railway carriage in a state of luxurious confusion, I take it for granted I am coming from somewhere, and going somewhere else. I seek to know no more. Why things come into my head and fly out again, whence they come and why they come, where they go and why they go, I am incapable of considering.”

Conclusion Ultimately, while Dickens wholeheartedly embraces progress in transport and the streamlining of travel and services for travellers – see, for example, “A Flight” and “The Boy at Mugby” (All the Year Round, Christmas Number, 10 December 1866) – and while he is a willing participant in the burgeoning of the travel industry, his travel writing consistently subverts conventional notions of the purposes of travel and the increasing homogenization of tourism. His positioning of himself as a “sort of superior vagabond” creates a distinctive narrative position out of the natural otherness of the tourist that rejects any kind of formal tourism or shaping of the journey. The journey then becomes a series of impressions and random insights through which Dickens can convey whatever he wishes to convey about the places he visits or, by way of comparison and contrast, about the state of his own nation.

114 In this context, Dickens’s particular type of literary vagabondage has, paradoxically, a clear purpose. A carefully crafted version of artistic detachment or self-marginalization,8 it enables him to develop for his journalism and travel writing the narrative personality and narrative stance that best suit his approach to his art and his way of perceiving the world around him. In fictional representations, the sympathetic vagabond is often characterized by a strong sense of individuality and a stubborn refusal or a constitutional inability to be seduced into or absorbed by social norms. H.G. Wells’s Mr Polly does not discover his true personality and fully engage with life until he sheds his bourgeois existence and becomes a tramp. Charlie Chaplin’s innocent and well- intentioned vagrant illuminates, through people’s responses to him, the good and bad in the social system he is incapable of joining. In Bleak House the socially unsophisticated but instinctively honourable and strong-minded George Rouncewell is given to describing himself as “in the vagabond way”. And in Hard Times, Gradgrind dismissively describes social outsiders Sleary and his circus people as “vagabonds”. At the end of that novel, Sleary himself, spokesman for the power of the imagination and the importance of compassion and generosity, famously cautions, “Don’t be croth with uth poor vagabonth. People mutht be amuthed.”

Notes 1 For further discussion of this point, see the general introduction and chapter introductions in Edmondson (2006). 2 See letter to John Forster of 2 July 1837 in House et al (1965–2002); hereinafter “Pilgrim”, Vol 1, pp 280–281. 3 The inconsistency in this paper between “Hand-Book” and “Handbook” is deliberate – the hyphen disappears in the titles of the later guides. 4 Cook’s Excursionist, 28 August 1863, cited in the Dictionary of National Biography. 5 For example, The Gentleman’s Guide, published in the 1760s and 1770s, was a considerable success and went through several editions. Its full title says something of its target readership and approach: The Gentleman’s guide in his tour through France. Wrote by an officer in the Royal Navy, who lately travelled on a principle which he most sincerely recommends to his countrymen, viz. Not to spend more money in the country of our natural enemy, than is requisite to support, with Decency, the character of an English Man. 6 In the early nineteenth century, for example, there were many translations of foreign guides to cater for the booming market, while Marianna Starke’s Information and directions for travellers on the Continent was first published in 1820 and subsequently appeared, according to Barber (1999, p 101), “in at least eight London editions”. Barber (1999) provides a useful overview of the development of the travel guide in England from the 16th century to 1870.

115 7 In the subsequent chapter, Sterne parodies the fact-obsessed and highly opinionated travel writing that was rife at the time. 8 Nord (1995), for example, provides a detailed discussion of the developing convention of this narrative positioning in nineteenth century writing.

116 REFERENCES –––– (1847). A Hand-Book for Travellers in France. London: John Murray. –––– (1856). A Handbook for Travellers in France. London: John Murray. –––– (1864). A Handbook for Travellers in France. London: John Murray. –––– (1864). A Handbook for Visitors to Paris. London: John Murray.

Barber, G. (1999). “The English-language guide book to Europe up to 1870”. In: Myers, R., and Harris, M., eds (1999). Journeys through the Market: Travel, Travellers and the Book Trade. New Castle, DE, and London: Oak Knoll Press and St Paul’s Bibliographies, pp 93– 106.

Brunet, J. (1862). New Guide to Boulogne-sur-Mer and its Environs. 6th edition. Boulogne-sur- Mer: C. Watel.

Dickens, H.F. (1928). Memories of My Father. London: Victor Gollancz.

Drew, J.M.L. (2003). Dickens the Journalist. London: Palgrave Macmillan.

Edmondson, J., ed (2006). Dickens on France. Oxford: Signal Books.

Forster, J. (1876). The Life of Charles Dickens. Revised edition, 2 vols. London: Chapman and Hall.

Green, J. (1983), Paris. Bilingual edition (1991). English translation by J.A. Underwood. London and New York: Marion Boyars.

House, M., Storey, G., Tillotson, K., et al, eds (1965–2002). The Letters of Charles Dickens. Oxford: British Academy Pilgrim Edition, Clarendon Press. Cited as “Pilgrim”.

Masson, J.-R. (2005). “Guide”. In: Dictionnaire encyclopédique du Livre, E–M. Paris: Éditions du Circle de la Librairie, pp 437–441.

Nead, L. (2000). Victorian Babylon: People, Streets and Images in Nineteenth-Century London. New Haven, CT, and London: Yale University Press.

117 Nord, D.E. (1995). Walking the Victorian Streets: Women, Representation and the City. Ithaca, NY, and London: Cornell University Press.

Oustric, G. (1983). “Un siècle de croissance économique (1815–1914)”. In: Lottin, A., ed (1983). Histoire de Boulogne-sur-Mer. Lille: Presses Universitaires de Lille, pp 197–232.

Slater, M., and Drew, J., eds (2000). Dickens’ Journalism, Volume 4: “The Uncommercial Traveller” and Other Papers 1859–70. London: J.M. Dent.

Sterne, L. (1759–67). The Life & Opinions of Tristram Shandy. Ricks, C., and Petrie, G., eds (1967). London: Penguin.

Sterne, L. (1768). A Sentimental Journey through France and Italy. Alvarez, A., ed (1967). London: Penguin.

118 APPENDIX France and references to France in Dickens’s fiction and non-fiction

Novels Bleak House: Sir Leicester and Lady Dedlock returning from Paris (ch12); Hortense (ch 12 (southern origins), ch 18, 22, 23 (southern origins), 42, 54). David Copperfield: Mr Peggotty in search of Emily in France (ch 45); Emily works at a French port (ch 51). Dombey and Son: Dombey on Paris (ch 35); Towlinson’s attitude to the French (ch 35); Carker and Edith in Dijon/Carker’s flight from Dijon through France by coach (ch 54, 55). Great Expectations: Orlick’s room compared to a Parisian gate-porter’s dwelling (ch 29). Little Dorrit: Rigaud in Marseille (Book 1, ch 1); Clennam and fellow travellers in Marseille (Book 1, ch 2); Rigaud in Châlon-sur-Saône (Book 1, ch 11); Mr Dorrit in Paris (Book 2, ch 18); Clennam in Calais (Book 2, ch 20, 21). Nicholas Nickleby: Nicholas teaches French (ch 19). Our Mutual Friend: Mr Venus’s “French gentleman” and Wegg’s bigotry (Book 1, ch 7); Podsnap’s French dinner guest (Book 1, ch 11); Litter in London and Paris (Book 1, ch12). The Old Curiosity Shop: Frederick Trent’s body found in the Paris Morgue (“Chapter the Last”) – Dickens wrote the novel before he had visited Paris. A Tale of Two Cities.

Shorter fiction “The Boy at Mugby”, in Mugby Junction, All the Year Round, Christmas Number, 10 December 1866 (French railway catering). “The Guest” in The Holly-Tree Inn, Household Words, Christmas Number, 15 December 1855 (brief passage on the inns of France). “His Boots” in Somebody’s Luggage, All the Year Round, Christmas Number, 4 December 1862 (set in fortified town, northern France). Mrs Lirriper’s Legacy, All the Year Round, Christmas Number, 1 December 1864 (Mrs Lirriper’s trip to Sens). “The Story of Richard Doubledick”, in The Seven Poor Travellers, Household Words, Christmas Number, 14 December 1854 (final scenes set in Aix-en-Provence).

Travel writing Pictures from Italy: “Going Through France”; “Lyons, The Rhone and the Goblin of Avignon”; “Avignon to Genoa”.

Journalism The following papers are wholly or partially concerned with France and/or French life (note – the Uncommercial Traveller papers first appeared in All the Year Round under the series heading ‘The Uncommercial Traveller’ and were not given individual titles until they were published in volume

119 form): “The Calais Night Mail”, All the Year Round, 2 May 1863 (in The Uncommercial Traveller). “A Flight”, Household Words, 30 August 1851 (in Reprinted Pieces). “In the French-Flemish Country”, All the Year Round, 12 September 1863 (in The Uncommercial Traveller). “Insularities”, Household Words, 19 January 1856. “Judicial Special Pleading”, The Examiner, 23 December 1848. “A Monument of French Folly”, Household Words, 8 March 1851(in Reprinted Pieces). “New Year’s Day”, Household Words, 1 January 1859. “Our French Watering-Place”, Household Words, 4 November 1854 (in Reprinted Pieces). “Railway Dreaming”, Household Words, 10 May 1856. “Some Recollections of Mortality”, All the Year Round, 16 May 1863 (in The Uncommercial Traveller). “Travelling Abroad”, All the Year Round, 7 April 1860 (in The Uncommercial Traveller). There are also brief but interesting references to France and the French in: “The Boiled Beef of New England”, All the Year Round, 15 August 1863 (in The Uncommercial Traveller); and “On Mr Fechter’s Acting”, The Atlantic Monthly, August 1869.

120 Architectural Anxieties: Pictures from Italy

Mark Eslick University of York [email protected]

ABSTRACT Pictures from Italy is arguably Dickens’s most anti-Catholic work. Yet his Italian travelogue manifests a strange attraction to Catholicism: the gloomy magnetism of Catholic churches fascinates him. Words loaded with theological implications such as ‘solemn’ and ‘mysterious’ are central to Dickens’s conception of these Catholic places of worship. Written at a time when the authority of the Church of England was being degraded by internal disputes, I suggest that his use of these terms betrays a deep-rooted belief that Catholic churches are sanctified spaces which heighten religious adherence and assurance. Italian Catholic churches, however, also affect Dickens in a more cryptic sense. These edifices weirdly disorientate and eerily disturb him and he is often subject to feelings of ‘uncanniness’ among the buildings and relics of this alien, foreign, unfamiliar religion. Why, though, does this sense of the uncanny arise? This paper argues that, for Dickens, to be confronted with the merging of Paganism and Christianity in Italian churches is to be confronted by the historical ‘illegitimacy’ of the Protestant Church as Protestantism’s Catholic past uncannily haunts the Church of England, especially in its use of medieval churches. And, moreover, in his uncanny fear of being buried alive in the catacombs of Rome it is possible to detect a longing for a return to the womb that is symbolic of a return to the ‘Mother Church’.

121 Let me tell you of a curious dream I had ... I was visited by a Spirit ... It wore blue drapery, as the Madonna might in a picture by Raphael ... Anyway, I knew it was poor Mary’s spirit. I was not at all afraid, but in a great delight, so that I wept very much, and stretching out my arms to it called it “Dear.” At this I thought it recoiled ... “answer me one ... question!” I said, in an agony of entreaty lest it should leave me. “What is the true religion?” As it paused a moment without replying, I said – Good God, in such an agony of haste, lest it should go away! – “You think, as I do, that the Form of religion does not so greatly matter, if we try to do good? – or,” I said, observing that it still hesitated, and was moved with the greatest compassion for me, “perhaps the Roman Catholic is the best? perhaps it makes one think of God oftener, and believe in him more steadily?” “For you,” said the Spirit, full of such heavenly tenderness for me, that I felt as if my heart would break; “for you, it is the best!” Letter from Charles Dickens to John Forster, 30th September, 184413 I

Charles Dickens’s vision of his beloved sister-in-law, Mary Hogarth, who died in his arms on the 7th of May 1837, offers a fascinating insight into his troubled religious character. As Forster puts it, the dream strengthens other evidences of the author ‘not having escaped those trying regions of reflection which most men of thought, and all men of genius have at some time to pass through’.14 Of course, Dickens, who throughout his life routinely voiced a dislike and distaste for Roman Catholicism, never did embrace the Catholic faith; but in his dream of Mary Hogarth he explicitly entertains the idea that Catholicism may heighten religious adherence and assurance. Pictures from Italy, a work generally deemed vehemently anti-Catholic, embodies a similar paradox: namely, to borrow an oft-used phrase of Dickens himself, the ‘attraction of repulsion’ of Roman Catholic churches. Undoubtedly the profusion of ornate churches and Catholic ceremonies were a peculiar sight for Victorian travellers to Italy. Dickens’s response to these churches and forms of worship, however, transcends their mere peculiarity. An unresolved narrative tension permeates Pictures from Italy: a conflict between the magnetic allure and attraction of the religion of Italy and a fear and repulsion of what he called that ‘monstrous institution’,15 the Roman Catholic Church.

First published in 1846, Pictures from Italy appeared at a time of widespread debate and changing attitudes toward the way ecclesiastical architecture and forms of worship embodied religious

13 Quoted in John Forster, The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. II (London: Chapman and Hall, 1873) 122-4. 14 Ibid 125. 15 Charles Dickens, Pictures from Italy edited by Kate Flint (London: Penguin, 1998) 24. All subsequent citations will be from this edition and placed in the text. 122 meaning. Augustus Pugin, a militant Roman Catholic and the most prominent figure of the Gothic Revival, had greatly affected church-building in England. 16 In the highly influential Contrasts (1836) he had determined to show that the rise of Protestantism, or the ‘destructive principle’17 as he termed it, began a moral decline which in turn led to a decline in religious architecture. Pugin, therefore, who believed medieval Gothic architecture itself to be a religious text in which he found ‘the faith of Christianity embodied, and its practices illustrated’, 18 aggressively promoted the building of medieval religious structures in an attempt to recover the lost but idyllic piety of Roman Catholicism in England. In doing so, he advocated that churches must possess certain Catholic- flavoured requisites - ornate decor, stained glass windows, a chancel set apart for sacrifice, a sacrarium sedilia for officiating priests, chapels for penance and prayer, and a sacristy to contain the sacred vessels - for ‘true ... Christianity’19 to be restored, a phrase echoed by Dickens in his appeal to the spirit of Mary Hogarth as to ‘What is the true religion?’.20

Pugin’s doctrine was widely disseminated; but anything remotely associated with Roman Catholicism continued to be anathema to the majority of English society. Yet these architectural theories were conducted to the Anglican community. By 1844, the year in which Dickens travelled to Italy, the Oxford Movement’s emphasis upon sacramentalism and liturgical formalism was beginning to find expression in the gradual restoration of more ritualistic religious ceremonies being performed by some Church of England clergy. And although the primary concern of the Oxford Movement was always with doctrinal matters, a sermon given by Newman in 1839, entitled ‘The Visible Church an Encouragement to Faith’, suggests that its leaders accepted the architectural principles informing the ideas of Pugin. Newman stated that ‘the ordinances which we behold, force the unseen truth upon the senses. The very disposition of the building, the subdued light of the isles, the Altar, with its pious adornments, are figures of things unseen, and stimulate out fainting faith’.21 However, as Chris Brooks has shown, it was the Cambridge Camden Society that ‘brought the architectural dogmatic theology of the Oxford Movement and the equally dogmatic architectural theory of Pugin to the design of Anglican churches’. 22 Passionately committed to the Oxford

16 For the influence of Pugin see Rosemary Hill, God’s Architect: Pugin and the Building of Romantic Britain (London: Penguin, 2007). 17 A. W. N. Pugin, Contrasts and The True Principles of Pointed or Christian Architecture (Reading: Spire Books Ltd, 2003) 21. 18 Ibid 3. 19 Ibid 58. 20 John Forster, The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. II 125. 21 John Henry Newman, ‘The Visible Church an Encouragement to Faith’ in Parochial and Plain Sermons, Vol. III (Westminster, Maryland: Christian Classics, 1966) 251. 22 Chris Brooks, ‘Introduction’ in The Victorian Church: Architecture and Society edited by Chris Brooks and Andrew Saint (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995) 7. 123 Movement, the Cambridge Camden Society was an exclusively Anglican group of highly influential undergraduates who sought to restore the concept of the church as a sacred site. Yet while privately admiring Pugin they wanted to purge the Gothic Revival of its Roman Catholic associations by resurrecting the Gothic’s affiliation with English nationalism. During the early 1840s The Ecclesiologist, the society’s monthly publication, successfully crusaded for the building of Anglican churches in the Gothic style. And the vast majority of these churches were designed and built with many of the decidedly Catholic interior features that Pugin had deemed essential and which placed a greater emphasis upon the sacraments as opposed to sermonizing.

Victorians who travelled to the continent during the late 1830s and early 1840s were therefore abroad at a time when architectural debates, especially the influence of Catholicism on ecclesiastical architecture and religious worship in England, occupied their minds.

III Dickens’s descriptions of churches and cathedrals in Pictures from Italy are often typical of Victorian Protestant writers who portrayed these edifices as sites of a religion that is exhausted, stagnant, and dangerously reliant upon superstition and mummery. 23 In every Roman Catholic church, he writes, there is ‘the same monotonous, heartless, drowsy chaunting, ... the same lamps dimly burning; the self-same people kneeling here and there; ... the same preposterous crowns of silver stuck upon the painted heads of single saints and Virgins ... [and] the same favourite shrine or figure’ (135). Yet on occasion Dickens contradicts such a portrait of Catholic places of worship: there are moments in Pictures from Italy where he is awestruck by Roman Catholic churches and which attest to a deep attraction for Catholic expressions of faith.

Of all the Roman Catholic churches that Dickens visits whilst in Italy, it is Saint Mark’s Cathedral in Venice that is the most alluring and magical:

A grand and dreamy structure, of immense proportions; golden with old mosaics; redolent of perfumes; dim with the smoke of incense; costly in treasure of precious stones and metals, glittering through iron bars; holy with the bodies of deceased saints; rainbow-hued with windows of stained glass; dark with carved woods and coloured marbles; obscure in its vast heights, and lengthened distances; shining with silver lamps and winking lights; unreal, fantastic, solemn, inconceivable throughout (80).

Undoubtedly, the sublimity of the architecture and the antiquity of the art and relics in the cathedral deeply attract him. Indeed, he conveys the magnetic allure of Saint Mark’s by infusing the passage with a luscious, poetic quality. The adjectives used, when grouped together, are alliterative: the

23 See Kenneth Churchill, Italy and English Literature, 1764-1930 (London: Macmillan, 1980). 124 edifice is ‘grand ... golden ... glittering’ and ‘dreamy ... dim ... dark’ (80). And the whole passage has a wonderful assonance: it is a structure of immense ‘proportions; golden with old mosaics; ... costly ... precious stones ... holy with the bodies of deceased saints ... woods and coloured marbles; obscure ..., inconceivable throughout’ (80, emphasis added).

But the language Dickens uses suggests an attraction that goes beyond the mere aesthetic beauty of the church. He speaks of feeling ‘a great sense of mystery and wonder’ (117) in Saint Mark’s. His choice of words is significant. ‘Mysterious’ originates from the noun ‘mystery’ which was first used in theology, and which still carried a deeply religious meaning in the nineteenth century, to describe a ‘mystical presence’ or ‘a religious truth known or understood only by divine revelation’ (OED). And if Dickens’s feeling of ‘mystery’ (117) betrays a sense of heightened religious feeling then his calling the cathedral ‘solemn’ (80) is also highly suggestive. ‘Solemn’ is defined by the OED as meaning something ‘associated or connected with religious rites or observances; performed with due ceremony and reverence; having a religious character; sacred’. Again the implication is that the cathedral has a distinctly religious, as opposed to a merely aesthetic, effect. And the term ‘solemn’ crops up time and again in the descriptions of Roman Catholic churches that fascinate and intrigue Dickens. He tells us that a French cathedral is ‘very solemn and grand’ (13), the beautiful Church of the Campo Santo is a ‘solemn and lovely place’ (108), and the churches of Florence are ‘solemn and serene within’ (186). For Dickens, therefore, Saint Mark’s, and several other Catholic churches in Italy, seem to provide a kind of sanctified space that may perhaps make ‘one think of God oftener, and believe in him more steadily’.24

Dickens had in fact already explored the religious context of the word ‘solemn’ in arguably his most famous fictional portrait of a church up until this point: the death-crypt of Little Nell in The Old Curiosity Shop. ‘Solemn’ is the keynote of this ancient church. The narrator tells us it is a ‘solemn ruin’,25 a ‘solemn building’26 with a ‘solemn garden’,27 which is ‘made more solemn still’28 by the shadows at dusk. But it is the spiritual comfort the solemnity of the church provides for Little Nell herself that is most telling. The old building gives her a ‘solemn feeling’;29 she senses ‘the solemn presence, within’;30 she listens to the bells of the church with ‘solemn pleasure’;31 and even in death

24 John Forster, The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. II 124. 25 Charles Dickens, The Old Curiosity Shop edited by Elizabeth M. Brennan (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997) 405. 26 Ibid 412. 27 Ibid 425. 28 Ibid 414. 29 Ibid 400. 30 Ibid 403. 125 it affords her a ‘solemn stillness’.32 As the illustrations for The Old Curiosity Shop clearly show, the church where Little Nell dies, which the narrator tells us ‘had been built many hundreds of years ago, and had once had a convent or monastery attached’, 33 is replete with the vestiges of Catholicism. It is a medieval Gothic building with ornate interiors, stained glass windows, and on the headboard of Nell’s deathbed a carving of the Madonna and child is prominently displayed.34 (It is surprising how similar the description of the church in The Old Curiosity Shop is to that of Saint Mark’s Cathedral in Pictures from Italy. Nell is told of the time when the church was resplendent with ‘swinging censers exhaling scented odours, and habits glittering with gold and silver, and pictures, and precious stuffs, and jewels all flashing and glistening through the low arches’35). Dickens, then, seems to have already considered the possibilities of the sensuousness of Catholicism, especially in relation to death.36 For Little Nell, the solemnity of an ancient medieval church brimming with Catholic iconography ‘fill[s] her with deep and thoughtful feelings ... [and gives her] ... a purified and altered mind’.37 As Malcolm Andrews notes, amidst this Catholic- inspired scene ‘the physical realities of death seem to disappear for Nell’.38 Therefore, Dickens’s experience in Saint Mark’s Cathedral, reminiscent of the fictional church he had imagined in The Old Curiosity Shop, not only allows him to consider that the sensual influence of Catholicism may make it the best religion for assuaging any religious misgivings he may have had, but also that it may be a remedy to the grief he continued to feel for the sudden death of Mary Hogarth.

In Genoa too, Dickens figures the architecture and ornamentation of Catholicism as deeply attractive and alluring. Of his visit to the Genoa Cathedral he writes: Gold-embroidered festoons of different colours, hang from the arches ... even the lofty pillars are swathed from top to bottom in tight-fitting draperies ... Although these decorations are usually in very indifferent taste, the effect, just then, was very superb indeed. For the whole building was dressed in red; and the sinking sun, streaming in, through a great red curtain in the chief doorway, made all the gorgeousness its own. When the sun went down, and

31 Ibid 561. 32 Ibid 557. 33 Ibid 363. 34 See the following plates: ‘The vaulted chamber’ (401), ‘Nell among the tombs’ (413), ‘Nell dead’ (558), and ’The Old Man among the tombs’ (565). The illustration in Chapter the First entitled ‘Nell in Bed’ (18), anticipates the Catholic surroundings in which Nell will die by including two figures of nuns and a crucifix. 35 Charles Dickens, The Old Curiosity Shop 416. 36 Michael E. Schiefelbein convincingly argues that the Catholic symbolism surrounding Little Nell’s death allowed Dickens to explore ‘the Catholic context for suffering’. Michael E. Schiefelbein, The Lure of Babylon: Seven Protestant Novelists and Britain’s Roman Catholic Revival (Macon, Georgia: Mercer University Press, 2001) 85-100. 37 Charles Dickens, The Old Curiosity Shop 403. 38 Malcolm Andrews, ‘Introduction’ in Charles Dickens, The Old Curiosity Shop edited by Malcolm Andrews (London: Penguin, 1972) 29. 126 it gradually grew quite dark inside, except for a few twinkling tapers on the principal altar, and some dangling silver, it was very mysterious and effective (46).

Church decorations, frequently censured throughout Pictures from Italy as gaudy and self- aggrandizing, here produce a ‘superb ... effect’ (46). But as his account of the Genoa Cathedral unfolds it is not simply the architectural beauty or the lavish decorations that captivate Dickens. Having remained in the cathedral for the duration of sunset, his tone evokes the soothing and lulling effects that the scene has upon the senses. Again Dickens’s use of language and alliteration - ‘the sinking sun streaming in’; ‘it gradually grew quite dark’; ‘a few twinkling tapers’ (46) - gives a poetic feel to the passage. And, like Saint Mark’s, his attraction to the Genoa Cathedral extends beyond its aesthetic beauty: the scene is ‘very mysterious’ (46).

But what are we to make of Dickens’s apparent apprehension of the effects of the Genoa Cathedral when he concludes that ‘sitting in any of the churches towards evening, is like a mild dose of opium’ (46)? To the modern reader the comparison of the effects of Catholic churches to taking a dose of opium may seem entirely negative, especially one who is aware of the detrimental effects of the drug as shown in The Mystery of Edwin Drood. Elizabeth Bridgham, for example, argues that the reference to opium suggests that Dickens believes being seduced by the extravagant ornamentation and decor of these churches is ‘as dangerous as to be drugged’.39 Bridgham does make a relevant point: by qualifying his illustration of the mystical effects of the cathedral with a comparison to opiates Dickens may be guarding against the allure of what were commonly considered by English Protestants to be the superstitious trappings of Roman Catholicism. 40 However, such a wholly negative analysis is perhaps not quite accurate. After all, the figurative meaning of the taking of ‘a mild dose of opium’ (46) in the 1840s is vastly different from its present meaning, or even the meaning the phrase assumed a mere decade later. As David Paroissien notes, until the early 1850s the prevailing view of opium use was widely associated with the benefits of its anaesthetic properties, and the linguistic connotations of opium were also often used to evoke the exotic associations of the drug.41 And Dickens’s comments in a letter written during his stay in Italy, in which he says that the ‘gorgeous and wonderful reality of Venice is beyond the fancy of the

39 Elizabeth A. Bridgham, Spaces of the Sacred and Profane: Dickens, Trollope, and the Victorian Cathedral Town (Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge, 2008) 34. 40 Ruskin, for example, lambasted those who were ‘lured into the Romanist Church by the glitter of it’. John Ruskin, The Works of John Ruskin, Vol. IX edited by E. T. Cook & Alexander Wedderburn (London: George Allen, 1903) 437. 41 See David Paroissien, ‘Opium use in Nineteenth-Century England’ in Dickens, Charles, The Mystery of Edwin Drood edited by David Paroissien (London: Penguin, 2002) 309-320. 127 wildest dreamer. Opium couldn’t build such a place’,42 suggests that his juxtaposition of the effects of Roman Catholic churches and ‘a mild dose of opium’ (46) is perhaps neither disapproving nor cynical.

Yet this semantic confusion epitomises the ambiguity surrounding the moments in which Roman Catholic churches and ceremonies appeal to Dickens. Always lurking behind his attraction, it seems, is an anxiety or fear of the spectre of the Roman Catholic Church, which in the Victorian Protestant imagination was a corrupting, unnatural, sinister institution. In Venice, for example, the water close by to Saint Mark’s Cathedral is an ominous presence. The simile Dickens employs is that it creeps and coils round the city ‘noiseless and watchful ... like an old serpent’ (85), a phrase that immediately brings to mind Satan who is referred to in the Bible as ‘that old serpent’ (Gen 3:1). And this Satanic figure returns in the Sistine Chapel when the curtain in the doorway ‘seemed to wind itself about the unwary, like a Serpent’ (152).43

One such ambiguity of Dickens’s attitude to Italian Catholicism that has been overwhelmingly interpreted as evidence of trenchant anti-Catholicism is his response to the theatricality of the Catholic religion.44 Pictures from Italy swarms with theatrical allusions and metaphors, especially in the descriptions of Roman Catholic iconography and ceremonies. A figure of the Virgin Mary is a ‘puppet’ (17); a wax saint is compared to a Madame Tussaud’s model; a statue of Mary and Joseph resembles ‘two delectable figures, such as you would see at any English fair’ (133); and a supposedly miraculous figure of the baby Jesus is ‘very like General Tom Thumb’ (133), an American midget who had been exhibited in England by P. T. Barnum. But it is Saint Peter’s in Rome that the most notable allusions to the theatricality of Catholicism can be found. Saint Peter’s is ‘swathed in some impertinent frippery of red and yellow ... [and looks like] ... the opening scenes of a very lavish pantomime’ (117); the spaces behind the altar resemble ‘boxes, shaped like those at the Italian Opera in England’ (119); the Swiss Guard are ‘theatrical supernumeraries, who never can get off the stage fast enough’ (119). And the ceremonies of Holy Week in Saint Peter’s are ‘shows’

42 Charles Dickens, The Letters of Charles Dickens, Vol. IV 1844-1846 edited by Kathleen Tillotson (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977) 217. 43 This sense of unease about the Catholic Church present throughout Pictures from Italy is often wholly unambiguous. The Inquisition especially troubles Dickens’s imagination. While visiting the Palace of the Popes in Avignon he luridly dwells upon the atrocities that have been carried out by the Catholic Church and paints a graphic picture of a ‘heretic’ being subjected to water torture. It is, he writes, ‘as if the Inquisition were there still’ (21). 44 A comment by Peter Ackroyd exemplifies this critical stance. Ackroyd argues that Catholicism was a ‘pet hate’ of Dickens, and that a central aspect of this hatred was that Catholic ceremonies were ‘little more than a parade of mummers’. Peter Ackroyd, Dickens (London: Sinclair-Stevenson, 1990) 491. 128 (151), an ‘eccentric entertainment’ (152) during which ‘the Cardinals, and other attendants, smiled to each other ... as if the thing were a great farce’ (156).

Such a figuration of Catholic theatricality is a familiar complaint among Victorian Protestants who visited Rome. Lord Shaftesbury wrote that Catholic Mass is ‘precisely like an opera. In such rites as these the soul has no share’. 45 Thackeray found the churches of Rome to be like ‘shabby theatre[s]’.46 Even John Henry Newman, on a visit to the Vatican in 1831, thought the Papal Mass to be an ‘unedifying dumbshow’.47

Paradoxically, however, for Dickens, his profound love of the theatrical moderates his critique. The sketches of the statues, shrines, and staginess of Catholicism are neither malevolent nor malicious. Indeed, given his love of popular forms of entertainment and the theatre, these comparisons are generally used for gentle comedic effect to entertain the reader. And, although it cannot be denied he is at times uneasy with and critical of religious ceremonies, some of which he condemns as a ‘dangerous reliance on outward observances’ (156), he is often very appreciative of Catholic theatricality. During the raising of the Host in the Papal Mass, he writes: ‘when every man in the guard dropped on one knee instantly, and dashed his naked sword on the ground, ... [it] had a fine effect’ (121). And when the Pope bears the sacraments in his hands and is surrounded by cardinals and canons it makes for a ‘brilliant’ (153) sight.

Dickens, then, appears to be a less severe critic of Catholic theatricality than many of his contemporaries. Indeed, at times he actually validates and approves of the theatrical nature of Roman Catholicism. Italian churches and cathedrals are often likened in Pictures from Italy to theatrical sets and as being vibrant communal spaces. A cathedral in France, for example, forms the backdrop to a glorious market scene. It ‘looks as if it were the stage of some great theatre, and the curtain had just run up, for a picturesque ballet’ (15). And as it hosts the market that is full of colour, bustling with people, and brimming with energy, it is a focal point of the community that unifies and entertains.

45 Quoted in Edwin Hodder, The Life and Work of the Seventh Earl of Shaftesbury, K. G., Vol. I (London: Cassell, 1887) 184. 46 William Makepeace Thackeray, ‘Notes of a Journey from Cornhill to Grand Cairo’ in The Works of William Makepeace Thackeray, Vol. XIV (London: Smith, Elder, & Co., 1869) 467. 47 John Henry Newman, The Letters and Diaries of John Henry Newman, Vol. III edited by Ian Ker & Thomas Gornall (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979) 268. 129 Also significant is Dickens’s elaborate and enthusiastic description of the carnival in Rome. He is intoxicated by the energy, absurdity, and wild abandon of the carnival spirit. The ‘gay madness’ (127) of the Roman Carnival, although in stark contrast to the officiousness of religious ceremonies, is an integral part of the Holy Week celebrations and is sanctioned by the Catholic Church. If, therefore, we recall Juliet John’s argument that ‘a belief in “popular” culture was Dickens’s most firmly held political view’, 48 then this licensed release is a wholly positive aspect of Roman Catholicism, especially in contrast to Protestant England, where the growing influence of evangelical Christianity had led to increased sabbatarian legislation and the suppression of carnivals such as Bartholomew Fair.49

However, even in the moments when the Catholic Church functions as a focal point of the community or as a provider of the amusements of the people, a sense of anxiety is palpable. The French cathedral eerily looms over the bustling marketplace: it is ‘grim, and swarthy, and mouldering, and cold’ (15). And we are made aware that the autocratic authority of the Church is ever-present behind the scenes of the carnival: the Pope’s dragoons ‘vigilantly’ (122) keep watch over the festivities and ‘in the wildest enthusiasm of the cry, and fullest ecstasy of the sport, the Ave Maria rings from the church steeples, and the Carnival is over in an instant – put out like a taper, with a breath’ (128).

IV Pictures from Italy, therefore, manifests a surprising attraction for Roman Catholic architecture and expressions of faith; but, at the same time, a strange, troubling undercurrent, a sense of unease regarding the oppressiveness and bloody history of the Catholic Church is ever-present. However, the religion of Italy also affects Dickens in a more cryptic sense: it provokes in him strange feelings of uncanniness. In The Mediterranean Passion John Pemble argues that for Victorian tourists to Italy the allure of Catholicism often ‘disturbed the subconscious mind with secret yearnings and strange fantasies’.50 Dickens’s dream of Mary Hogarth is an obvious example of this uncanny phenomenon. Yet he is by no means the only Victorian to have experienced such a curious vision whilst visiting Italy. John Ruskin dreamed of becoming a Franciscan monk; the historian and

48 Juliet John, Dickens’s Villains: Melodrama, Character, Popular Culture (Oxford: OUP, 2001) 3. See also Paul Schlicke, Dickens and Popular Entertainment (London: Allen & Unwin, 1985). 49 Dickens had vigorously attacked sabbatarianism in an 1836 pamphlet, ‘Sunday Under Three Heads’. See Charles Dickens, ‘Sunday Under Three Heads’ in The Dent Uniform Edition of Dickens’ Journalism: Sketches by Boz and Other Early Papers, 1833-39 edited by Michael Slater (London: J. M. Dent, 1994) 475-99. 50 John Pemble, The Mediterranean Passion: Victorians and Edwardians in the South (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988) 225. 130 Anglican clergyman Dean Arthur Penrhyn Stanley that he was elected Pope; and the sculptor Lord Ronald Gower envisaged himself as a cardinal.51

‘Strange’ and ‘strangest’ are words that appear frequently in Pictures from Italy, especially when images of churches are being drawn. In Rome, whilst meditating upon the effects of Catholicism, Dickens writes that ‘the scene in every church is the strangest possible’ (135). And on leaving a cathedral in Modena he thinks ‘how strange it [i]s, to find, in every stagnant town, this same Heart beating with the same monotonous pulsation, the centre of the same torpid, listless system’ (68). But Dickens does not merely contemplate the strangeness of Roman Catholicism. He also experiences a kind of estrangement among the buildings and relics of this foreign, alien, unfamiliar religion. He speaks of ‘a feverish and bewildering vision of saints’ and virgins’ shrines’ (29); complains that ‘the bells of the churches ring incessantly ... which is maddening’ (45); of being lost amidst ‘a vast wilderness of consecrated buildings of all shapes and fancies’ (139); and of Roman Catholic ceremonies being ‘oppressive; the noise, hubbub, and confusion, quite distracting’ (151). Saint Peter’s in Rome is particularly dislocating: it is ‘an immense edifice, with no one point for the mind to rest upon; and it tires itself with wandering round and round’ (119). Kate Flint notes that the spectacle of Italy led Dickens to compare his experience to a ‘derangement of the senses’.52 However, it is in the Roman Catholic churches of Italy that this disruption of the psyche is most pronounced. 53 Words such as ‘bewildering’, ‘confounding’, ‘confusion’, ‘drowsy’, ‘dreamy’, ‘incoherent’, ‘intoxicated’, and ‘perplexed’ are used time and again to impart the queer effect these religious sites have upon the intellect.

What, then, becomes apparent is the uncanny effect of Catholicism upon Dickens. Catholic churches are almost always invested with strange qualities. Cathedrals are invariably anthropomorphic or animistic. They have ‘frowning’ (25) towers, ‘jealous’ (22) walls, and ‘winking’ (80) lanterns. And they are haunted by ‘ghost[s]’ (14), ‘ghoules [and] demons’ (50), or crowds of ‘phantom-looking men and women’ (67). But the uncanny is not a property of

51 Joan Evans, John Ruskin (London: Jonathan Cape, 1954) 350; Roland E. Prothero, The Life and Correspondence of Arthur Penrhyn Stanley, Vol. II (London: John Murray, 1894) 359; Lord Ronald Gower, My Reminiscences (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, & Co, 1883) 272. 52 Kate Flint, ‘Introduction’ in Charles Dickens, Pictures from Italy viii. 53 John Schad had made a similar point that ‘Amongst the churches of Italy Dickens is sick, it seems, in the sense that they disrupt his very ability to think’. John Schad, Queer Fish: Christian Unreason from Darwin to Derrida (Brighton: Sussex Academic Press, 2004) 82. 131 architecture or people. It is, according to Freud, the representation of the psychic state that elides the boundaries of the real and unreal to arouse a disturbing ambiguity.54

Dickens, as we have seen, is subject to such uncanny mental disturbances. And it is telling that many of his descriptions of Catholic churches, most notably the chapter on Venice and Saint Mark’s Cathedral, are written as dreams. Especially important, however, is his ‘great dream of Roman churches’ (136). He is captivated by the frescoes on the walls of Saint Stefano Rotundo which depict ‘a panorama of horror and butchery’ (136). The church, he says, ‘will always struggle uppermost in my mind’ (136). And the chapel of the Mamertime prisons, where according to Christian tradition Saint Peter and Saint Paul were imprisoned, fills him with horror. ‘It is very small and low-roofed; and the dread and gloom of the ponderous, obdurate old prison are on it, as if they had come up in a dark mist through the floor’ (137). Given Dickens’s fascination with the macabre it is perhaps not surprising that he dwells upon this gruesome site. But it deeply disturbs his mind: the chamber becomes a ‘dream within a dream’ in his ‘vision of great churches’ (137). And, indeed, his remarks that the chilling instruments of torture hanging upon the walls are ‘strangely in keeping, and strangely at variance with the place’ (137), suggest that it is a most unheimlich place: a former home to Peter and Paul that is now a haunted house adorned with ‘instruments of violence and murder ... hung up to propitiate offended Heaven’ (137).

Yet there are two particularly striking moments in Dickens’s ‘great dream of Roman churches’ (136) when the uncanny arises that may afford a wider understanding of the psychic confusion which the Roman Catholic churches of Italy provoked not only in the author himself but amongst many Victorian Protestants: first, the strange sense of disquietude he feels when confronted with the merging of Pagan and Christian architecture and, secondly, his pronounced fear of being buried alive in the catacombs of Rome.

The simultaneity of the past and present is constantly evoked in Pictures from Italy, but the blending of Paganism and Christianity is especially pronounced. Dickens tells us of a driver who curiously swears both in Christian and Pagan oaths. And he notes that votive offerings ‘not unknown in Pagan Temples, ... are among the many compromises made between the false religion and the true’ (20). In Italy, writes Dickens, ‘Christianity ... merges into Paganism’ (64). It is, though, the architectural assimilation of Paganism into Christianity that most intrigues him.

54 See Sigmund Freud, ‘The Uncanny’ in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Vol. XVII translated by James Strachey (London: The Hogarth Press, 1962) 219-52. 132 Christianity’s appropriation of Pagan temples and practices had, in fact, long been a common complaint of English Protestants. Conyers Middleton’s A Letter from Rome (1729) famously dissected the pagan elements in Catholicism in an attempt to show that the architecture and ritualistic ceremonies of the Church of Rome were spiritually moribund vanities inherited from heathens.55 And many nineteenth-century anti-Catholic tracts also invoked this anomaly to discredit the Catholic religion.56 Pictures from Italy, however, speaks not of the corrupting influence of the merging of Pagan and Christian architecture, but of the ‘strange’ (151) feeling that occurs when confronted by these edifices. At one point Dickens recollects his sense of confusion at seeing ‘consecrated buildings of all shapes and fancies, blending one with another; ... battered pillars of old Pagan temples, dug up from the ground, and forced, like giant captives, to support the roofs of Christian churches’ (139). But it is when he is travelling through Rome by moonlight that this strange psychological disorientation is most pronounced. He concludes his expedition by contemplating the sense of strangeness that occurs when one is confronted with the ubiquitous merging of Pagan and Christian architecture in the city:

Whether ... you pass by obelisks, or columns: ancient temples, theatres, houses, porticos, or forums: it is strange to see how every fragment, whenever it is possible, has been blended into some modern structure, and made to serve some modern purpose ... some use for which it was never designed, and associated with which it cannot otherwise than lamely assort. It is stranger still, to see how many ruins of the old mythology: how many fragments of obsolete legend and observance: have been incorporated into the worship of Christian altars here; and how, in numberless respects, the false faith and the true are fused into a monstrous union (151).

The topography of Rome, the blending together of ancient and modern architecture, instils a sense of unease. The past does not simply haunt the present; the past is constantly written into the present. What is most significant again here is the sense of strangeness, or rather uncanniness, Dickens is subject to at the sight of these edifices. Susan M. Griffin argues in Anti-Catholicism and Nineteenth- Century Fiction that Catholicism is ‘so uncannily threatening to [nineteenth-century] Protestants ... [because of] the historical relationships of the two churches. Protestantism’s legitimacy depends upon tracing its origins to, and differentiating itself from, Roman Catholicism’.57 Architecture is central to this thesis. If Freud is correct and the uncanny arises from the transformation of something that once seemed homely into something unhomely, it is possible that for Dickens and other

55 Conyers Middleton, A Letter from Rome, shewing an exact conformity between Popery and Paganism (London: printed for W. Innys, 1729). 56 For examples of this anti-Catholic theme in the nineteenth-century see Reverend J. J. Blunt, Vestiges of Ancient Manners and Customs, discoverable in Modern Italy and Sicily (London, 1823) and Reverend M. Hobart Seymour, A Pilgrimage to Rome (London: Seeleys, 1849). 57 Susan M. Griffin, Anti-Catholicism and Nineteenth-Century Fiction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004) 8. 133 Victorian Protestants to be confronted by this merging of paganism and Christianity is to be confronted by the realisation that Protestantism’s Catholic past uncannily haunts the Church of England, especially in its use of medieval churches. Seeing the Catholic churches of Italy that are founded upon pagan buildings brings to light this secretly familiar but repressed fact and, consequently, causes an uncanny disturbance as it threatens the ‘legitimacy’58, as Griffin puts it, of Protestantism.

On a tour of the catacombs beneath the Church of San Sebastiano in Rome, the burial site of the early Christian martyrs, another significant moment of uncanniness occurs. Dickens is suddenly gripped by a terrifying thought: A gaunt Franciscan friar, with a wild bright eye, was our only guide, down in this profound and dreadful place. The narrow ways and openings hither and thither, coupled with the dead and heavy air, soon blotted out, in all of us, any recollection of the track by which we had come: and I could not help thinking “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!” (138).

For Freud, the dread of being buried alive is a familiar trope of the uncanny. He writes:

To some people the idea of being buried alive by mistake is the most uncanny thing of all. And yet psychoanalysis has taught us that this terrifying phantasy is only a translation of another phantasy which had originally nothing terrifying about it at all, but was qualified by a certain lasciviousness – the phantasy, I mean, of intra-uterine existence.59

If we are willing to follow Freud’s hypothesis, the passage detailing Dickens’s expedition to the catacombs is highly suggestive. The description of the dark, damp caverns is indeed symbolic of a return to the womb: ‘the narrow ways and openings ... the dead and heavy air’ (138) blots out the memory of ‘the track by which we had come’ (138). Freud argues that experiences which arouse this kind of uncanny feeling occur ‘when infantile complexes, which have been repressed are once more revived by some impression’. 60 Thus, Dickens’s fear of being buried alive in this most unheimlich of places is, perhaps, a displaced fear of a desire for a return to the most heimlich place of all: the mother’s womb.

Images of the womb permeate Dickens’s ‘great dream of Roman churches’ (136). Prior to his tour of the catacombs he dwells upon the crypts and subterranean chapels that lie beneath Rome. The descriptions of these ‘secret chambers’ (137) are most definitely womb-like. They are black, wet

58 Ibid 8. 59 Sigmund Freud, ‘The Uncanny’ 244. 60 Ibid 249. 134 spaces, ‘tremendous darknesses of vast extent, half-buried in the earth’ (137); ‘unexplorable’ (137) and unable to be fully penetrated; and have ‘jaws’ (137) which, recalling Freud’s theory of the vagina dentata, conjures a mental picture of teeth that threaten castration. And these images recur in the legend of the catacombs that Dickens relates, a legend, he says, that is ‘most appalling to the fancy’ (138). We are told that the Early Christians were held in the catacombs before being thrust forth from ‘the night and solitude of their captivity ... [into the] noon and life of the vast theatre’ (138) of the Coliseum. These caves are ‘prisons’ (138) where one is held in ‘captivity’ (138), but are also a safe haven, a refuge from the world outside where one may be devoured. At once, all of these subterranean places are both heimlich and unheimlich. And an anxiety emerges between a desire for a return to the womb and a deep-rooted fear of the female genitalia. Dickens’s language compounds this uncertainty. It is, he writes, ‘awful’ ... to think’ (137) of these places. ‘Awful’, though, can be interpreted as either ‘frightening, very ugly, monstrous’, ‘worthy of ... reverential fear’, ‘sublimely majestic’ or ‘worthy of ... profound respect’ (OED).

Once again architectural origins are of paramount importance. Dickens’s uncanny desire for a return to the mother’s womb may also be equated with a return to ‘the Mother Church’, which the caverns and crypts of Rome represent. In the Catholic lexicon the word ‘mother’ denoted the Catholic Church itself. And nineteenth-century Catholic writers regularly employed this usage of ‘mother’, one notable example being at the conclusion of Newman’s 1848 novel Loss and Gain when the Roman Catholic peer Willis refers to ‘the Holy Roman Church, the Mother of us all’.61 Thus, it is possible that in these subterranean temples the Catholic origins of Protestantism are being revived and revealed to the Victorian Protestant. V Victorian anti-Catholics may have disputed the authenticity of Catholicism by attacking its forms and superstitions. Yet the history of Protestantism was rooted in Catholicism. In a sense, therefore, Protestants, if they looked back, were forced to recognise the Catholic Church as the original church. For nineteenth-century travellers to Italy such as Charles Dickens the sensuousness of Catholic churches held a great appeal, especially compared to the austerity of churches in Victorian England. But the archaic authority of the Catholic Church, symbolized by its architecture, also induced a psychological anxiety that the Protestant faith itself was a ‘monstrous union’ (151) and was somehow illegitimate. Indeed, the idea of the legitimacy of Protestantism is an appropriate place to conclude because it brings us back to Dickens’s dream in which his dead sister-in-law

61 John Henry Newman, Loss and Gain: The Story of a Convert (New York: Garland Publishing, 1974) 295. 135 appeared to him as the Madonna. If we remember the question he poses to the spirit, it becomes, I think, ever more meaningful: “What”, he asks, “is the true religion?”.62

62 Quoted in John Forster, The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. II 124.

136 BIBLIOGRAPHY Ackroyd, Peter, Dickens (London: Sinclair-Stevenson, 1990)

Blunt, Reverend J. J., Vestiges of Ancient Manners and Customs, discoverable in Modern Italy and Sicily (London, 1823)

Bridgham, Elizabeth A, Spaces of the Sacred and Profane: Dickens, Trollope, and the Victorian Cathedral Town (Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge, 2008)

Brooks, Chris & Saint, Andrew (eds), The Victorian Church: Architecture and Society (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995)

Churchill, Kenneth, Italy and English Literature, 1764-1930 (London: Macmillan, 1980)

Dickens, Charles, The Old Curiosity Shop edited by Malcolm Andrews (London: Penguin, 1972)

Dickens, Charles, The Old Curiosity Shop edited by Elizabeth M. Brennan (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997)

Dickens, Charles, Pictures from Italy edited by Kate Flint (London: Penguin, 1998)

Dickens, Charles, The Mystery of Edwin Drood edited by David Paroissien (London: Penguin, 2002)

Dickens, Charles, The Letters of Charles Dickens, Vol. IV 1844-1846 edited by Kathleen Tillotson (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977)

Dickens, Charles, The Dent Uniform Edition of Dickens’ Journalism, Vol. I, 1833-39 edited by Michael Slater (London: J. M. Dent, 1994)

Evans, Joan, John Ruskin (London: Jonathan Cape, 1954)

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Freud, Sigmund, The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Vol. XVII translated by James Strachey [1919] (London: The Hogarth Press, 1962)

Gower, Lord Ronald, My Reminiscences (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, & Co, 1883)

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Hill, Rosemary, God’s Architect: Pugin and the Building of Romantic Britain (London: Penguin, 2007)

Hodder, Edwin, The Life and Work of the Seventh Earl of Shaftesbury, K. G., Vol. I (London: Cassell, 1887)

John, Juliet, Dickens’s Villains: Melodrama, Character, Popular Culture (Oxford: OUP, 2001) Schlicke, Paul, Dickens and Popular Entertainment (London: Allen & Unwin, 1985).

Middleton, Conyers, A Letter from Rome, shewing an exact conformity between Popery and 137 Paganism (London: printed for W. Innys, 1729)

Newman, John Henry, Parochial and Plain Sermons, Vol. III (Westminster, Maryland: Christian Classics, 1966)

Newman, John Henry, Loss and Gain: The Story of a Convert (New York: Garland Publishing, 1974)

Newman, John Henry, The Letters and Diaries of John Henry Newman, Vol. III edited by Ian Ker & Thomas Gornall (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979)

Pemble, John, The Mediterranean Passion: Victorians and Edwardians in the South (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988)

Prothero, Roland E., The Life and Correspondence of Arthur Penrhyn Stanley, Vol. II (London: John Murray, 1894)

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Ruskin, John, The Works of John Ruskin, Vol. IX edited by E. T. Cook & Alexander Wedderburn (London: George Allen, 1903)

Schad, John, Queer Fish: Christian Unreason from Darwin to Derrida (Brighton: Sussex Academic Press, 2004)

Schiefelbein, Michael E., The Lure of Babylon: Seven Protestant Novelists and Britain’s Roman Catholic Revival (Macon, Georgia: Mercer University Press, 2001)

Schlicke, Paul, Dickens and Popular Entertainment (London: Allen & Unwin, 1985)

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138 Endnotes from Italy: Dickens's pictures illuminating the travel journals of Adlard Welby

Sue Boettcher University of Leicester [email protected]

ABSTRACT Dickens's Pictures from Italy, published in 1846, is here examined alongside the journals of contemporary English traveller, Adlard Welby. The journals, which I am now in the process of editing as part of my PhD research, follow the course of Welby's domestic life and his travels in England and Europe between 1843 and 1856. The two works compliment each other, with accounts of contrasting and like experiences recorded by both writers as they travel to and around Italy. Dickens's vivid descriptions of the scenes they both observe add detail and colour to Welby's often dour and jaded journal entries.

Keywords: Marseilles, Italy, Genoa, Alps, Pisa, Rome.

139 Endnotes from Italy: Dickens's pictures illuminating the travel journals of Adlard Welby

A man who has not been in Italy is always conscious of an inferiority, from his not having seen what it is expected a man should see. James Boswell, Tour to the Hebrides, 1785 (in Wykes, 1973: p.53).

These words, quoted in 1785 by James Boswell, would appear to perfectly describe the thoughts of the many English travellers in the 18th and 19th centuries who felt drawn to the Mediterranean sun, to the work of the great Renaissance artists and the ruins of the Ancient World. They feasted on the detailed historical and geographical facts to be found in the latest guide books and eagerly read the many traveller's tales that were flooding into the bookshops.

The works of James Boswell, Samuel Sharp, James Fenimore Cooper, Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, Mariana Starke, John Murray and his 'team' are familiar to those who have studied the genre; each writer bringing something unique and personal to their vision of 'abroad'.

Charles Dickens was not to be left out of this increasingly large club. His great ability to describe in vivid prose, all that he observed, whether in London, New York or Genoa, made compelling reading and provided material for two notable travel books (American Notes and Pictures from Italy) and added to a great repository of people, places and things that he drew upon and wove into his novels in the years to come.

Dickens spent the best part of 1844 and 1845 touring and living in Italy. His wife Catherine and their five children went with him, although for most of the time they resided in Albero, near Genoa, while Dickens travelled extensively, visiting many cities including Milan, Verona, Pisa, Siena, Rome and Venice. As he moved around the country he would have rubbed shoulders with numerous fellow countrymen and women; some residing there, some touring the famous landmarks and many just travelling through. One such Englishman at large in Italy at the same time as Dickens was Adlard Welby.

Adlard Welby was born in Lincolnshire in 1776, the son of a lawyer and landowner. He was a restless young man who began his wanderings as a nineteen year old, walking and riding the length and breadth of England on what can best be described as Georgian 'Gap Year'. In an early letter, dated 1798, to his sister Catherine, he wrote from Allonby on the west coast of Cumberland, that he intended 'sometime or other' to publish his Journal 'with an Epistle Dedicatory to Lady Catherine

140 Welby' (Yale 76). This early indication of his ultimate ambition to become a writer is born out by the detailed descriptions in his letters of the places he saw and the people he met.

However, it was not until not until 1821 that this ambition was partially realized, when his book Welby's Visit to North America was published. Although this book is now highly regarded by scholars of North American history, it was not particularly well received at the time. The reviewer in The New Monthly Magazine dated March 1822 wrote of the book: It tells us nothing which we are not already acquainted with; and it confirms the picture which some travellers in America, intentionally, and others unconsciously, have drawn of the manners and coarseness of Americans (New Monthly Magazine, 1822: p.126).

It is perhaps worth pointing out here that Dickens's American Notes, published around 20 years later was not initially a great success and sales were poor compared to those of his novels.

In the years between his teenage wanderings and his visit to North America, Welby's life had been filled with troubles 'of a domestic nature'. He had inherited the family estate in 1809 and taken to farming the land and fathering children with great enthusiasm. By 1829 he had fathered nineteen sons and daughters. His wife had bourn eight and his mistress the remaining eleven, these two relationships having overlapped for some years. It is known that he separated from his wife in 1819, but the exact nature of the domestic arrangements up to that time remain undiscovered.

What is known is that, at the end of 1832, Welby let the family home and estate, and with his mistress, Mary Hutchinson, and ten of their children, he set off for Italy. They travelled in two carriages across France, to settle in the Ancona region on the Adriatic coast. His old friend, George Moore, from Sleaford in Lincolnshire, was the British Consul there, but perhaps more importantly, the area could boast a reasonably cheap cost of living. It seems likely that Welby's large family had drained his inherited wealth considerably, leaving him struggling to make ends meet in England. In the September of 1833 he wrote from Porto Fermo, where they had settled, to his sister Selina: We are all well, … a no small number this "We" – includes – ourselves twelve – a boy I took out from England – and Old Cook and his wife – in all fifteen persons … (Yale 92).

In Pictures from Italy Dickens described the journey through France to Genoa. The excitement generated by their arrival at the Hôtel de Ecu d'Or would almost certainly have been similar to that

141 which the large Welby entourage would have experienced from place to place, as they made their way across Europe.

Dickens writes of the moment when the family and servants alight from the carriage:

The door is opened. Breathless expectation. The lady of the family gets out. Ah sweet lady! Beautiful lady! The sister of the lady of the family gets out. Great Heaven, Ma'amselle is charming! First little boy gets out. Ah, what a beautiful little boy! First little girl gets out. Oh, but this is an enchanting child! Second little girl gets out. The landlady, yielding to the finest impulse of our common nature, catches her up in her arms! Second little boy gets out. Oh, the sweet boy! Oh, the tender little family! The baby is handed out. Angelic baby! The baby has topped everything. All the rapture is expended on the baby! Then the two nurses tumble out; and the enthusiasm swelling into madness, the whole family are swept upstairs as on a cloud; while idlers press about the carriage, and look into it, and walk round it, and touch it. For it is something to touch a carriage that has held so many people. It is a legacy to leave one's children (Dickens, 1846: pp12,13).

There were really only two ways for nineteenth-century travellers to reach Italy. They could either follow the Rhone Valley, south to Marseilles and the Mediterranean Sea, then east along the coast road or by steamer to Genoa and onwards to their chosen destination; or, perhaps more adventurously, they could take a route through one of the many mountain passes over the Alps. Over time, Dickens and Welby experienced both of these alternatives.

Much of what is know about Adlard Welby and his travels is to be found in his four journals, which date from 1843 – 1856. In the first journal he records his 1843 journey from Ancona back to England. Mary Hutchinson had died in 1840, his daughters were all married, and with the exception of young Algar, who travelled with him, his sons were all more or less settled in their various professions or vocations. By now a very experienced traveller, Welby appears not to have hesitated in taking his carriage and, using post horses, crossing Italy, and driving over the Alpine pass of Mount Cenis into France. As they climbed higher towards the pass Welby recorded on 29 June:

The wind to-day shook the carriage and the temperature has sunk to 64º - snow very near, and I fancied I saw it falling on two or three points: (Welby 1, 1843).

142 The entry for the next day reads: At S. Michel – We have passed over Mount Cenis …. we were crawling to the top – the descent appeared rather too much inclined – we rolled down so quickly that Lanslebourg (2 posts) was gained in an hour and from that town the whole of the way hither has been descending gently a most agreeable drive (Welby 1, 1843).

The delightful illustration by Richard Doyle from his book The foreign tour of messrs, Brown, Jones, and Robinson: being the history of what they saw, and did in belgium germany, Switzerland & Italy, was published in 1854. Entitled Having taken their places on the outside of the diligence, Brown, Jones and Robinson can the better enjoy the grandeur of the scenery, it perhaps gives some idea of the exhilaration and the dangers of the downhill run (Doyle, 1854: p.43).

But if Welby made light of this adventure, Dickens made much of his Alpine crossing, undertaken in winter, and fraught with icy dangers. Not only did he go over the pass of the Simplon in November, but he set off at night, by moonlight, 'with snow lying four or five feet thick in the beaten road on the summit'. The final part of the ascent was made in a horse drawn sledge, and at the top,

Taking to our wheels again, soon afterward, we began rapidly to descend; … Down, over lofty bridges, and through horrible ravines: a little shifting speck in the vast desolation of ice and snow, and monstrous granite rocks; … (Dickens, 1846: p.99).

If all this sounds alarming, consider for a moment an alternative means of passing over Mount Cenis, described by Samuel Sharp in 1767:

Every person who is carried over Mount Cenis in a chair, is obliged to employ six chairmen, or, if he be lusty, eight; or extremely corpulent, ten; … The pay to each chairman is … two shillings and seven-pence halfpenny (in Wykes, 1973: p.73).

It might seem a pleasanter option to take the steamer to or from Marseilles along the coast, but both Welby and Dickens found that Marseilles, especially in August, was not the pleasantest place to be. In his third journal, in August 1845, Welby wrote of 'the thought of escape from the Plague of Gnats – from the Air loaded with filthy vapour … the offended Nose will this day be relieved from the poisoned and stinking water of the Port and be itself again; surely – surely never again to encounter these Miseries and Trials and

143 Sufferings! Blessed be the power of Money which having been used heedlessly to bring me into this Place of horrors, is yet left me to get away; I do indeed feel grateful for the possession (Welby 3, 1845). Dickens also finds it a 'dirty and disagreeable place', with … a compound of vile smells perpetually arising from a great harbour full of stagnant water, and befouled by the refuse of innumerable ships with all sorts of cargoes: which, in hot weather, is dreadful in the last degree (Dickens, 1846: p.27).

The constant movement of people and cargoes from all over the Mediterranean into and out of the port Marseille, meant that it was inevitably a hot spot for diseases such as cholera and plague, which were rife at the time. Welby writes of his 'well grounded Apprehension of Cholera and Fever' (Welby 3, 1845). Dickens, aware of this aspect of life in Marseilles, uses it in the opening chapters of his 1857 novel Little Dorrit, gathering together some of the main characters, who, having travelled from the east, 'the country of the plague', have been kept in quarantine before being allowed to move on. He creates an opportunity to introduce Mr Clennam, the Meagles family and Miss Wade and to begin to build their characters as they interact with one another. The loquacious Mr Meagles pours out his anxieties to Clennam:

… to suspect me of the plague is to give me the plague. … I have been waking up, night after night, and saying, now I have got it, now it has developed itself, now I am for it, … (Dickens, 1857: p.30).

In Pictures from Italy, Dickens does not only write of the horrors of Marseilles. He paints a vivid picture of bustle and colour, describing … foreign sailors , of all nations, in the streets; with red shirts, blue shirts, buff shirts, tawny shirts, and shirts of orange colour; with red caps, blue caps, green caps, great beards, and no beards; in Turkish turbans, glazed English hats, and Neapolitan head-dresses (Dickens, 1846: pp.27-28). And he delights in 'cargoes of all kinds: fruits, wines, oils, silks, stuffs, velvets, and every manner of merchandise' (Dickens, 1846: p.28). Welby it seems, did not stay long enough to appreciate any of this and took the first possible steamer bound for Genoa.

Welby's and Dickens's steamer experiences were markedly different. Welby is again plunged into misery and writes of coffee which he describes as a 'Devil's broth' and which makes his party 'sick –

144 sick – very bad' (Welby 3, 1845). Dickens, on the other hand, has an enjoyable passage aboard the "Marie Antoinette": The vessel was beautifully clean; the meals were served under an awning on deck; the night was calm and clear; the quiet beauty of the sea and sky unspeakable (Dickens, 1846: pp.28- 29).

But Dickens's first impressions of Genoa, once in the town, were rather of shock; 'I never in my life was so dismayed … the unaccountable filth, … the disorderly jumbling of dirty houses, one upon the roof of another; the passages more squalid and more close than any in St.Giles's or old Paris; … (Dickens, 1846: p.29).

However, in the next paragraph he writes: 'I little thought, that day, that I should ever come to have an attachment for the very stones in the streets of Genoa, and to look back upon the city with affection as connected with many hours of happiness and quiet! (Dickens, 1846: pp.29-30).

On 23rd June 1843, Welby arrived in Genoa on the eve of Natività de S. Giambatista, the feast celebrating the birth of John the Baptist. The town was illuminated and there were fireworks and general festivities; he wryly noted: … it probably never occurred to S. John the Baptist to be the occasion of boat races, crackers, rockets and Serpents – but so it is now-a-days … (Welby 1, 1843). The following day he wrote: 7p.m. The Guns are firing to celebrate S. John the Baptist – in this the government and the Church agree cordially – no searching into Religion or Government; so the attention is turned from both and the people amused (Welby 1, 1843). His contempt for the Roman Church and the State was much the same Dickens's, but it is to be remembered that Dickens was looking to publish his observations and therefore not as free as Welby to show these feelings. He did, however, go far enough in his thinly veiled criticism of the Roman Catholic Church to enrage many Catholics, at home and abroad. Pictures from Italy was originally to be illustrated by Clarkson Stanfield, a great friend of Dickens, who was well known for illustrating travel books and who was a devout Roman Catholic. Once he had read the book, and discovered the underlying criticism of his Church, he withdrew from the agreement and the untested talents of Samuel Palmer were called upon for the few illustrations which appeared in the first edition (Paroissien, 1971: p.87). Stanfield's friendship endured, however, and Dickens dedicated Little Dorrit '… to Clarkson Stanfield, R.A., by his attached friend' (Dickens, 1857).

145 The footnote that Dickens can add to Welby's observations of the Feast of St. John the Baptist is as follows. He wrote: The ruined chapel, on the picturesque and beautiful sea-shore, was dedicated, once upon a time, to Saint John the Baptist. I believe there is a legend that Saint John's bones were received there, with various solemnities, when they were first brought to Genoa; for Genoa possesses them to this day. When there is any uncommon tempest at sea, they are brought out and exhibited to the raging weather, which they never fail to calm. (Dickens, 1846: p.34)

He also notes that 'great numbers of the common people are christened Giovanni Baptista', and that Baptista, when pronounced in the Genoese patois sounds like a sneeze –'Batcheetcha'. (Dickens, 1846: p.34).

The beauty of the Italian countryside was not lost on Welby; a countryman at heart, he comments on the flora and fauna and the crops in the fields. In June 1843 he wrote: … the whole passage from Lucca to Genoa is scarcely to be exceeded for scenery or roads by any part of Italy (Welby 1, 1843).

Dickens is also enchanted by this stretch of road: There is nothing in Italy, more beautiful to me, than the coast-road between Genoa and Spezzia. (Dickens, 1846: p.102). and his detailed description fills out a picture of a beauty that Welby's brief comment cannot possibly convey. Dickens wrote of 'the free blue sea', 'ravines besprinkled with white cottages' and of 'dark olive woods', 'country churches', 'wild cactus and aloe … in exuberant profusion', and of bright villages along the road, … blushing in the summer-time with clusters of the Belladonna, … fragrant in the autumn and winter with golden oranges and lemons. (Dickens, 1846: p.102).

The two men are again united in their observations when they describe their disgust at the dirt and squalor of the living conditions of the poor in the cities. In a letter to his sister Selina in England, written in 1833, Welby records his first impressions of the people. He finds that

… the lower classes are though good natured most filthy and semibarbarous [sic] … (Yale 90).

146 Affirming this observation, Dickens's impressions of the squalid living conditions of the poor give a fuller and more haunting picture. He brings Welby's 'semibarbarians' to life when he writes of

… half-a-dozen wild creatures wrapped in frowsy brown cloaks, who are lying on the church steps with pots and pans for sale.

and … of bad bright eyes glaring at us, out of the darkness of every crazy tenement, like glistening fragments of its filth and putrefaction (Dickens, 1846: p.164).

The entries in Welby's journals cover numerous journeys through Europe and England. He crossed Italy several times, back and forth, visiting family and friends. In October 1846 he moved from Bagni di Lucca to Pisa, for an extended stay, taking lodgings in the Piazza S. Antonio. He had for company his youngest son, Algar, and his young protégé, a girl taken in from the London streets, in what we may hope was an enlightened philanthropic gesture. Relationships were seriously strained at this time and the weather, which he always made a point of recording in the most detailed fashion, was awful: 'Wind and rain', 'Rain and Thunder', '…Rain double – trebble [sic] and quadruple, thunder – I am tired of recording it …'. (Welby 3, 1846). He makes no mention of the famous leaning Tower or any of the other notable landmarks in the town. It is known that he had visited Pisa at least once before and perhaps in order to keep himself and his companions entertained, he needed to seek out new amusements.

The rail link from Pisa to Leghorn, provided regular diversions in the form of shopping expeditions, more popular with the young ones than with Welby himself

23.d October Friday. – Went by rail to Leghorn where in rain pouring down we rode about shopping till I was verily tired … (Welby 3, 1846).

It would appear that there was little in Pisa to interest those intent on spending money. Dickens summed it up:

The beggars seem to embody all the trade and enterprise of Pisa. Nothing else is stirring, but warm air.

Not so Leghorn, … which is a thriving, and business-like, matter-of-fact place, where idleness is shouldered out of the way by commerce. (Dickens, 1846: p.109).

The railway is described by Dickens as 'a good one', which

147 …has already begun to astonish Italy with a precedent of punctuality, order, plain dealing, and improvement – the most dangerous and heretical astonisher of all. There must have been a slight sensation, as of an earthquake, surely, in the Vatican, when the first Italian railroad was thrown open (Dickens, 1846: pp.109-110).

Dickens, of course, could not fail to take a close look at the leaning Tower, and, disappointed, found 'that it was too small', but, that

Nothing can exceed the grace and lightness of the structure; nothing can be more remarkable than its general appearance. In the course of the ascent to the top (which is by an easy staircase), the inclination is not very apparent; but, at the summit, it becomes so, and gives one the sensation of being in a ship that has heeled over, through the action of an ebb-tide (Dickens, 1846: p.108).

Welby and party travelled further afield for entertainment and discovered Gombo on the coast, 'a bathing place for the Inhabitants of Pisa 6 miles distance', and, on the way to it 'the Ducal Farm or Milk or Dairy Establishment called Cascino [sic] about 4 miles off' (Welby 3, 1846). Both these places became favourite destinations to walk or ride to over the following months of their stay. Welby noted that at Cascine,

…are a number of Camels kept which we met on their way back from the field – what labour they are put to I know not – (Welby 3, 1846).

Dicken's appears not to have discovered any camels in the environs of Pisa, and moved on quite quickly to his next destination, Rome. He records that he hired 'a good tempered Vetturino, and his four horses, to take us to Rome' (Dickens, 1846: p.110). Embarking on the same journey some two years later, Welby wrote:

Left Pisa for Rome with an Agreement to be taken there by a rogue of a Vetturino with 4 horses (Welby 3, 1847).

We are not enlightened as to why he thought the Vetturino a rogue for the drive seems to have passed well enough. He wrote that the journey was

… performed in about 4 days and in this manner allows but little chance for observation or reflection – 'tis all jogging on – or eating or sleeping or making ready for the same daily routine; (Welby 3, 1847).

148 Dickens saw the same sights with fresher eyes, characteristically observing and recording, as they passed 'through pleasant Tuscan villages', 'the beautiful old city of Siena' and the bleak and barren country beyond, noting the different wines they encountered en route and the variety of foods in some very indifferent inns. When the city of Rome is finally visible on the horizon he is amused and astonished to find that from a distance Rome looked '… like LONDON !!!'

There it lay, under a thick cloud, with innumerable towers, and steeples, and roofs of houses, rising up into the sky, and high above them all, one Dome (Dickens, 1846: p.115).

Dickens arrived in Rome for the Carnival on the 30th January 1845; Welby was there for Holy Week, arriving on 17th March 1847. The religious festivals of the Roman church caused Welby to show his disgust and contempt. His observations refer to 'pious fraud', 'the trade of the holy knaves' and notes that

… pride stalks along everywhere in black and three corner hat – well clothed and well fed, sucking the bones and marrow of the country and leaving [a] wretched, ignorant, debased and ragged herd to misery and mendicancy (Welby 3, 1847).

He records some of the quirkier aspects of the rule of the Pope.

10th Saturday. Pius 9 has set all the Masons and Tinmen to work to alter the house-Spouts so as to deliver the rain water within instead of pouring it upon the passengers' heads as heretofore – all this seems better but being done at once creates some confusion (Welby 3, 1847).

On the outskirts of Rome Welby notices the local graffiti:

- the house doors of all the Towns and Villages by which we passed are plastered with the words "Viva Pio IX" from which in a few instances the "Vi" has been erased and one read "Va Pio IX" – (Welby 3, 1847).

Welby's little party viewed the sights in daylight, 'Campidoglio – Colosseum – Quirinale etc. etc.' However, as all the best guide books and writers recommend, a week later, he went to see the ruins of the Coliseum at night. Showing himself on this occasion to be particularly down-to-earth and dour, he is unmoved by the sight, and states:

I was not inspired à la Byron to see the 400,000 d. Spectators - … nor can I understand the sort of Mental state of a people who could sit and enjoy to see their fellow Creatures kill each other or torn to pieces by the Savage of the Wilds – (Welby 3, 1847). 149 Perhaps his inability to soak up the atmosphere of the place can be excused, for he also writes

… the walking – talking –smoking and laughing of the various groups which had taken possession of the arena last night murdered all reflection upon the flight of Ages passed (Welby 3, 1847).

The moon lit Coliseum, which had inspired Byron and moved him to describe its powerful presence in Childe Harold's Pilgrimage and Manfred, also had a compelling attraction for Dickens. He revisited it on the eve of his departure from Rome and found that '… its tremendous solitude that night is past all telling' (Dickens, 1846: p.161). Images of the past, 'the dark ghost of its bloody holidays', haunted him and he saw

wringing wild hands of weed, and grass, and bramble; and lamenting to the night in every gap and broken arch – the shadow of its awful self, immovable! (Dickens, 1846: p.161).

Dickens recreates this overwhelming melancholy in Little Dorrit, projecting his own feelings and observations onto Little Dorrit herself.

… Little Dorrit would often ride out in a hired carriage that was left to them, and alight alone and wander among the ruins of old Rome. The ruins of the vast old Amphitheatre, of the old Temples, of the old commemorative Arches, of the old trodden highways, of the old tombs, besides being what they were to her, were the ruins of the old Marshalsea – ruins of her own old life – ruins of the faces and forms that of old peopled it – ruins of its loves, hopes, cares and joys (Dickens, 1857: pp.795-796).

Rome appeared to Dickens as a city of great contrasts. At the beginning of his stay he witnessed the frenzied excitement of the Carnival, which still takes place today in Catholic countries in the days before Lent. He describes the coaches and the crush of the Roman citizens in fancy dress as they thronged the Corso, tossing sugar plums, confetti and nosegays. He saw

... maskers on foot (the drollest generally) in fantastic exaggerations of court dresses, surveying the throng through enormous eye-glasses, … carriages on carriages, dresses on dresses, colours on colours, crowds upon crowds, without end (Dickens, 1846:p.125).

The illustration by Townley Green, A Sketch at the Carnival, was included in the 1870 British Household edition of Pictures from Italy and American Notes, and captures something of the wild excitement of the occasion.

150 Welby's attitude to similar scenes of abandon brought out the sourest side of his nature. He responded to any celebration linked to the Roman church calendar with short, dismissive diary entries such as, on 5th April 1847, the Monday after Easter, 'Fireworks and other idle nonsense'. More passionately, he writes of Carnival in Ancona in 1846,

A Grand Festa, that is nothing but drunkenness – Idleness – gross bigotry and murder of Time – while poverty dirt rags – filth and stinko pervades all their Quarters!! (Welby 3, 1846).

Welby wrote for himself and therefore was able to set down his first impressions and unedited reactions to all that he saw and heard on his travels. By the time he wrote his last four journals he would almost certainly have given up thoughts of publishing his work again. Unlike Dickens he did not have to consider an audience of readers who would analyze and examine his every word. His passion for writing is obvious from the dedication he showed in keeping his journal, so full of anecdotes and domestic details, of facts and firm opinions. He wrote as he thought, as things were happening around him, but he had neither the time nor the ability to fill out the fullest descriptions of what he saw. By matching his journeys with those of Dickens it is possible to add some embellishments, some colour and embroidery to the bare bones of Welby's pictures from Italy.

Dickens, the consummate professional, always wrote with an awareness of his readers. His travel books stand complete in their own right, but may also be considered as working notes for future use, which come to life again in his novels and short stories. He absorbed the real world around him, intensified and highlighted the details, rearranged and reformed them a little and with this material he created some of the world's greatest works of fiction.

In 1845, Welby stayed in Ancona, near his married daughters. The weather was stormy and his rheumaticky knees were causing him great pain. He wrote of the days '… slipping along … eating drinking and sleeping with reading out a good novel of Dickens' (Welby 3, 1845).)

151 References

UNPUBLISHED WORKS

The Journals of Adlard Welby: Journal 1, 1843 – 1844; Journal 3, 1845 – 1847.

Pugin papers in the Yale Centre for British Art, New Haven, Connecticut

BOOKS

Dickens, Charles. Pictures from Italy, first published 1846. (London: Penguin Books, 1998).

Dickens, Charles. Little Dorrit, first published 1857. (London: Penguin Books, 2008).

Doyle, Richard. The Foreign Tour of Messrs Brown Jones and Robinson. (London: Bradbury & Evans, 1854).

Wykes, Alan. Abroad: A Miscellany of English Travel Writing, 1700 – 1914. (London: Macdonald & Jane's, 1973).

JOURNALS

Paroissien, David. 'Pictures from Italy and its Original Illustrator', The Dickensian, 67. (1971).

152 Travelling/Touring with Nicholas Nickleby

A J (Tony) Pointon University of Portsmouth [email protected]

All four of Dickens’s earliest novels, from Pickwick Papers to The Old Curiosity Shop, were concerned with travelling. It may be that, after the almost static nature of Sketches by Boz, his fancy had to be let loose, not just in one dimension but several at the same time. It could be that his 4-year hang up over Barnaby Rudge, which he could not get started, had something to do with its static nature. It did have two settings, 12 miles apart, Chigwell and London, and with some travel between them, but travel was not part of the story. It provided none of its real plot and excitement. It seems travel, and even the thought of travel, contributed to – and were probably necessary for - Dickens’s mental energy. Mens mobila in corpora mobila as the Romans might have said, if they’d known him – a mobile mind in a mobile body.

With those novels it’s almost as if he wanted to relive the excitement of adventurous, picaresque travel he derived from his early reading, from the books of his father he had discovered in the attic when he was young. The Arabian Nights, Don Quixote, Pilgian’s Progiss as Sairey Gamp had it, Roderick Random, Tom Jones. It has to be obvious how he would have derived the adventures of the Pickwick Club from the ancient Persian story of the three Princes of Serendip – the old name for Sri Lanka. Those Princes had the facility for travelling around and making happy discoveries by accident and intelligence – a process for which the novelist Horace Walpole coined the word “serendipity” in about 1754. He thought it was a peculiar, or even a silly way of going on, but we know better. Especially us scientists. Without it we would never have had polythene, or penicillin, or even post-its. [Even Walpole would have enjoyed what was made of serendipity in Pickwick Papers, though Dickens never used the word.] But what else was Samuel Pickwick doing, noting his discoveries with his pencil and notebook, even if, unlike the three Princes, he more often than not seemed to come up with the wrong answer. That’s a long detour, but it’s what you get for allowing a serendipitous scientist to talk about Dickens. [Oh, and another enjoyable bit of serendipity was when I discovered how the Academie Française nearly had a nervous breakdown when they found the best Francification of that word they could come up with was sérendecipité.]

Like Pickwick, The Old Curiosity Shop was based on Dickens’s reading.

153 If both Little Nell and Quilp were morphs of Dickens – think about it – as Grandfather Trent was of John Dickens, Nell’s complex journey through dangers to her death – only 125 miles but packed with menace – were a homage to John Bunyan’s masterpiece of 1678 that was perhaps too overpowering for some Dickens readers to take. They would have probably coped with what Dickens might have made of the story of the pilgrim Christian on his journey through the Slough of Despond and Vanity Fair, along the River of Death, meeting Mr Worldly Wiseman and the hospitable Mr Mason, but they may not have been prepared for his version of the travels and trials of Christiana, she being the first of Bunyon’s pilgrims to die.

If I pass over Oliver Twist somewhat tentatively, it is not because there is no travelling in it. Dickens tells us Oliver travelled from his “home” – or from where he was born, and where he was farmed out, and where, as an apprentice, he slept in a coffin – a distance of 74 miles through Barnet into London, and we can work out that was probably from Northampton. What we lack in the book is any travel of consequence, no fraught journey’s, not like the one David Copperfield made to Dover, and we cannot identify a book among the ones Dickens read which would be the obvious source for Oliver’s adventures. Not Tom Jones, not Smollet’s Roderick Random, not even Bunyan, though the sub-title of Oliver was “The Parish Boy’s Progress”: it seems much more likely that was a clue to it being a follow up – in word pictures - to William Hogarth’s sketch sequences The Harlot’s Progress and The Rake’s Progress. There must be a PhD thesis around somewhere on that.

So, having skimmed cavalierly Dickens’s novels one, four and two, in almost random order, we take ourselves to number three, Nicholas Nickleby, or Nickleby for short, in which the travelling overwhelms anything in the other three, and the hero again is really Dickens. It is not for nothing that his portraits by Samuel Laurence in 1837 and Daniel Maclise in 1839 are referred to as “Nickleby” portraits.

It is well known that, for this novel, Dickens set off up north to investigate the “Yorkshire Schools” which, in spite of what some revisionists have argued, had a reputation that no one had to fabricate. Barnard Castle, which was Dickens’s destination, was 250 miles from London. It was just south of Hadrian’s Wall, which marked the end of civilisation, in an area where Roman troops would be sent for punishment, especially if they were from one of those provinces with decent temperatures like Illyria or Spain. I have stayed with friends near Barnard Castle on my way to Glasgow, and woken to thick snow in May.

154 Dickens arrived there on 1st February 1838 having left the London coach terminal at the Saracen’s Head, on Snow Hill, Holborn on 30th January. He was sure he had a mission to destroy those Schools which had a great attraction for parents and guardians looking to be rid of orphan boys, step sons and the like: the attraction was that they allowed “no vacations”. As his reforming reputation was already well known, he had chosen an alias. He hoped that a letter of introduction to a local solicitor, Richard Barnes, passing him off as representing a London widow wanting a place for a surplus son, would gain him entrée to a selection of those schools. It had been written appropriately by his life-long Yorkshire friend Thomas Mitton, a fellow clerk in his first legal office who was from Malton, 15 miles north-east of York. The alias he chose, oddly, you will say, was Hablot Brown. That must particularly have tickled Dickens’s fancy, because Phiz was actually travelling to Yorkshire with him, though his real name had not been uncovered yet.

Their first stop was Greta Bridge, where three hotels [– the Marriott, the New and the George -] have all claimed Dickens’s patronage, and then west to Barnard Castle and the King’s Head Hotel, which looked out at the market cross and at a shop with the sign “Humphrey’s Clockmakers” which was to be his inspiration for the theme and title of his first magazine, Master Humphrey’s Clock.

Dickens first visited Startforth school, just outside Barnard’s Castle, with a hundred pupils. But the one he used for his novel was that of William Shaw at Bowes, 3 miles further west, 8 miles from Greta Bridge [not next to it, as some appear to think]. Bowes is a beautiful village, proud of the preserved buildings of the school, of its Norman Keep and of it medieval church, with a headstone for a George Taylor who inspired the creation of Smike. There is some debate whether Shaw and his school, which became Dotheboys Hall, were as bad as Dickens made out - the villagers are quite proud of both of them - but there is no doubt all the Yorkshire Schools were closed five years after Nickleby was published. The solicitor, Richard Barnes, out of loyalty, would not at first talk to Dickens about the schools. It seems his alias had been penetrated. However, before they parted, he unburdened himself. This is Dickens’s transcription. “Weel, misther, we’ve been vara pleasant toogather, and ar’ll spak’ my moind tiv ‘ee. Dinnot let the weedur send her lattle boy to yan o’ our schoolmeasthers, while there’s a harse to hold in a’ Lunnon, or a goother to lie asleep in. Ar wouldn’t mak’ ill words amang my neeburs, and ar speak to ‘ee quiet loike. But I’m dom’d if ar can gang to bed and not tell ‘ee, for weedur’s sak’, to keep the lattle boy from a’ sike scoundrels.”

155 Described as a “jovial, ruddy, broad-faced old fellow”, Dickens admitted he used him and his speech as a basis for the stout Bowes farmer John Browdie. This is that man’s greeting when he meets Nicholas on his walk back to Lunnon. “What! Beatten the schoolmeasther. Ho! Ho! Ho! Beatten the schoolmeasther! Whoever heard o’ the loike o’ that noo. Giv’ us thee hond agean, youngster. Beatten a schoolmeasther. I loove thee for it.” Dickens had an ear for accents and dialects, and made good use of it on his travels. And it is no surprise that even a professional man like Barnes would speak with a local accent and dialect, when he had been brought up, educated and articled in his own locality. Nobody bothered then. And what Barnes said of the schools – even if it was in the vernacular - was confirmed by independent, and even court evidence.

Now some writers comment doubtfully on the fact that Dickens arrived in Greta Bridge by Mail Coach, as though that was strange. Yet aristocrats would travel by “The Mail”. In 1838, the British Mail service on the Great North Road – the present A1 - provided the most effective public transport system the world had ever known up to then. Its only rival was its sister service to Bath on the Great West Road. The first of those was important because it connected the English and Scottish capitals. The second was important because of the wealth and wealthy that travelled along it to Bath and Bristol. The man, John Palmer, who had charge of the national mail services - the two routes mentioned being the jewels in his crown - was paid £3000 a year. The coaches would travel through the night, doing over 120 miles in a day, dropping off and picking up the mail at posting points – or sub-post-offices - without stopping. In total, in 1838, there were 18,000 miles of “Mail” service routes around the country. [14 years later, there would be 11,000 miles of the new rail services to challenge and replace them, at five times the speed and a quarter of the cost. And Dickens’s friend Brunel had by then set a land-speed record of 78 miles an hour that would last the next 50 years.]

Dickens and Phiz, not to draw attention to themselves, took a slow coach from London, nicknamed the “Express”, and changed to the Glasgow Mail at Grantham, about halfway on their journey. The remaining 140 miles or so would take them to Scotch Corner, as it is still known, to turn west onto the road across the Pennines to Penrith, now the A66, dropping Dickens and Phiz off [somewhat more gently, one hopes, than it would have dropped the mail] as it arrived at the River Greta, before turning north for Glasgow. Dickens’s journey, as an inside passenger, with the tips (which would have been obligatory) and food (which would have been fairly obligatory) would have cost about £5, the same as the second class rail fare London to Newcastle would cost in 1974, 136 years later. And taking the “Mail” was then a “cheap” way of travelling.

156 In the novel, however, Nicholas went north by stage coach, and had to stay overnight in an Inn when the coach was stopped in the snow. If that delay had happened with a Mail Coach, John Palmer would have had the right to suspend the driver without pay and require him to work in the GPO’s Carriage Work-Shops to learn how to get his vehicle back on the road fast.

That journey had an interesting literary echo to it, given Dickens’s addiction to Shakespeare, and to Hamlet in particular. In the play, Hamlet’s wicked uncle sent his nephew on a journey to England from which he expected he would never return. But he did. And, of course, Ralph Nickleby sent his nephew to the north on what he hoped would be a one way journey; Only to be disappointed. And, of course, both the nephews saw off both the uncles.

Dickens’s return journey is the more interesting for us, for a number of reasons. Reading the accounts one can easily get the impression that he made a detour in order to stop off in York on the way back. Certainly, the Malton Society thought that he did and stayed there with the Mitton family, but I think that happened later. Today, the maps show that the present A1 by-passes York on the west, but that was not so for Dickens. The Romans built the Great North Road as a military route to link Londinium – the lowest crossing point on the Thames - to Eboracum (or York) one of the three Legionary centres for controlling Brittania. From there the road continued to the fort at the lowest crossing point on the river Tyne, Pons Aelius (now Newcastle). So Dickens’s stop in York was perfectly natural, and two bi-products came out of it.

The first, and best known, came from the story the organist told him about the great window in the Minster, known as The Five Sisters of York. In Chapter 6 of Nickleby, Dickens inserted a version of that story as if was told at the Inn when Nicholas’s coach had been stopped by snow. And, in it, the youngest of the five sisters, Alice, was to provide the first and possibly the best of Dickens’s word portraits of his dear sister-in-law Mary, who had died almost exactly a year before. The other product from York, not so well known, occurs in Dombey and Son, when Toots assures Susan Nipper, after he effectively elopes with her, of the good nature of his landlady, whose little boy, he tells her, quite irrelevantly and unnecessarily, attended a Blue Coat school and got blown up by gunpowder. There seems no doubt Dickens had remembered a story from when he stayed at the Black Swan Inn opposite York’s St Andrew’s Hall, that that Hall had only become a Blue Coat School after it had ceased being a Royalist gun-powder mill in the Civil War.

157 And there’s yet another oddity in that Chapter 6 of Nickleby. That is another interpolated story, the last Dickens inserted into his novels, and it gives a clue to his state of mind at the time. It is the otherwise, again, irrelevant tale of Baron Grogzwig.

When this very bitter story came out in May 1838, the Dickenses had got themselves a second child, Mamie, born two months before, and, as with Charlie, Catherine could not nurse her, feed her. About the same time, Dickens began writing unpleasant things about mothers-in-law. He told Forster he had written some lines in a piece he was working on with Cruikshank that he said any man with a mother-in-law would clearly recognise. In his next novel, The Old Curiosity Shop, Quilp’s awful mother-in-law, Mrs Jiniwin, would be confidently identified as Dickens’s. Here, in Nickleby she also appears very clearly. To understand what he was writing in Nickleby, we must remember that when Mrs Hogarth turned up to supervise the birth of Dickens’s first child, Charley, she busily turfed the father out of the house, but then, within 24 hours, she had decamped, leaving him and the 16-year old Mary Hogarth to cope with a depressed Catherine and an unfed baby. Well, around the same time, Dickens must also have been peeved when his father-in-law, George Hogarth, complained in a letter he wrote to a friend that his son-in-law Charles – who was just making his way - had not bailed him out when he got into debt. Baron Grogzwig was the price his parents-in-law paid. “About a year after the Baron of Grogzwig married his Baroness, there came into the world a lusty young baron, in whose honour a great many fireworks were let off. But next year, there came a young baroness, and the next year another young baron, and so on every year another young baron or baroness until the baron found himself the father of a small family of twelve. Upon every one of these anniversaries, his mother-in-law, the Baroness von Swillenhausen was nervously smitten for the wellbeing of her child the Baroness, and, although it was not found that the good lady ever did anything material towards contributing to her child’s recovery, still she made it a point of duty to be as nervous as possible at the castle of Grogzwig, and to divide her time between moral observations on the Baron’s housekeeping, and bewailing the hard lot of her unhappy daughter. And if the Baron of Grogzwig ventured to suggest that his wife was at least no worse off than the wives of other barons, the baroness von Swillenhausen begged all persons to take notice, that nobody but she sympathised with her dear daughter’s sufferings; upon which her relations and friends remarked that, to be sure, she did cry a good deal more than her son- in-law, [but] that, if there were a hard-hearted brute alive, it was the Baron of Grogzwig.

158 The poor Baron bore it all as long as he could. He got into debt. The Swillenhausen family looked on his coffers as inexhaustible. “I don’t see what is to be done,” said the Baron. “I think I’ll kill myself.” Perhaps he thought of that story, twenty years later, when Mrs Hogarth helped break up his family.

There might be another outcome from a Dickens detour. The road west from Barnard Castle towards the Yorkshire Coast, towards Guisborough, passes a sign post with the name of a village, Mickleby, on it. If he used that as he later did the signpost to Blundestone in Norfolk, changing one letter to get the birthplace of David Copperfield, that Yorkshire village, with “M” changed for “N” may have given him “Nickleby”. It seems Dickens had no name for his hero when he set off north, but he had when he got back to London and started writing the novel. If he didn’t get it from there, it’s a mystery.

Well, if we now look at Nicholas’s walk back to London, that had a very interesting start. After beating Squeers to protect Smike, he packed and left Dotheboys Hall to walk the 30 miles to Boroughbridge. And was he to have a surprise? Smike, the trodden down, mentally damaged, partial cripple, finding his only friend had gone, set out into the cold to follow him. And, by some miracle of Dickens’s imagination, he also covered that 30 miles, so that when Nicholas awoke the following morning, he found he had company. “Strange!” cried Nicholas, “Can this be some lingering creation of the visions that have scarcely left me! It cannot be real – and yet I am awake.” What he actually meant to say was “Bugger me!”

Now, it is interesting how, when later he wrote of his first thoughts on the Yorkshire Schools, Dickens said he had also been thinking of Sancho Panza. But I was not surprised when I saw that reference. I had long thought of Nicholas as being Don Quixote, travelling round the country with his trusty companion, tilting at windmills, but somewhat more effectively than the man from La Mancha. Nickleby was a violent book and the travelling Nicholas its most violent character. For example, when he beat Squeers, he also managed to flatten Mrs Squeers. He “flung Squeers from him with all the force he could muster. The violence of his fall precipitated Mrs Squeers completely over an adjacent form against which Squeers struck his head in his descent.” A similar scene occurred in London when, after the death of her father, Nicholas took off with Madeleine Bray, prostrate in her wedding dress, and flattened her ex-prospective bridegroom, Mr Gride, against the wall on his way out. Before that, he had beaten Sir

159 Mulberry Hawke with his own whip, and caused the death of his horse. That embarrassment led Hawke to challenge Lord Verisoft to a duel; in that contest he was victorious in so far as he shot dead the man who had loaded him with gifts, but he was defeated in that he had to flee the country, losing any hope of revenge on the upstart Nicholas who had loaded him with public ignominy. And, before that, at the Portsmouth theatre, Nicholas had been threatened with having his nose pulled by Mr Lenville, the former juvenile lead, for stealing his parts and his thunder; he had himself threatened to kick the bearer of Mr Lenville’s message, the pantomimist Mr Folair, downstairs, and he had then floored Mr Lenville with a single blow. Now, my friends, there is no doubt that Dickens used himself as the model for Nicholas Nickleby, so the psychologists among you must read into that violence what you will.

So what about the distances in the book? Well, with a break in London, Nicholas and Smike actually did the 320 miles from Bowes to Portsmouth on foot, if one ignores the last part of the route which they covered in Crummles’s cart drawn by his donkey who, having spent all its life in the theatre, had the habit of lying down for a rest whenever the mood took him. And there were other long journeys.

In the main story of the book, Nicholas did the 180 miles from London, to Dawlish on the Devon coast, the family home 10 miles south of Exeter, three times. And he was to do it again in the standard Dickens wash up at the end of the book in which he would tie off all the loose ends. The first time he did the journey was after Mr Nickleby’s death, when the family all went to London to test out – rather fruitlessly - the tender mercies of his brother Ralph. Later in the book, when the doctor advised that Smike must go to the country to have a chance of getting better, Nicholas – one might think rather recklessly – set off all the way back to Dawlish taking Smike with him. One gets the impression Dickens must have been fond of that area of the country because it was at Exeter he had Mrs Wittiterly dance with a baronet’s nephew at an election ball. It was to Exeter that he had dispatched his father in 1837 to stop him using his name to get credit in London. And, later, he had Doctor Marigold’s scolding wife considerately drown herself in the river Exe. And after Smike had died, and Nicholas married Madeleine Bray, who had become rich by Dickens’s favourite method - inheritance – he retired with her and her money to live in the family home at Dawlish - if one can call populating the parish with little Nicklebys retiring. Four times Nicholas did that journey, 720 miles, so he must have out travelled almost all his rival Dickens heroes, at least by land. Nicholas’s journeys were not so numerous as those of Pickwick and Co. but they seem easily to exceed them in distance.

160 Now for the journey from London to Portsmouth that appeared in the episode of October 1838. There were 73 mile posts on that road at the time, starting at London Bridge at the top of Borough High Street, which is actually the north end of the Portsmouth Road on which Dickens was born. (Odd, isn’t it, that John Dickens - and Wilkins Micawber - were both put in prison on the Portsmouth Road, one in the Marshalsea, the other in King’s Bench prison; Sam Weller was discovered by Pickwick on the Portsmouth Road at the White Hart Inn, Bob Sawyer and Dickens both lodged in Lant Street just off the Portsmouth Road; Bob Sawyer went to sleep in the Borough Market on the Portsmouth Road; Nancy was overheard to her grave disadvantage down some steps, Little Dorrit was married in a church up some steps, and the fugitives Nicholas and Smike set off on their flight with determined steps, all along the Portsmouth Road.) When Dickens described Nicholas’s journey on that road, he was of course, relating his own experience sometime in 1838. He could hardly have recalled it from the time he left Portsmouth on 15th January 1815, 3 weeks short of his 3rd birthday, when his father was recalled to London: but it’s clear he had now marked it very well in 1838.

Yet there is an interesting dispute over when it was Dickens actually travelled to Portsmouth during that year to see the Theatre Royal where Crummles would be installed. Dickens would have seen it when he was a child; it had been opened 75 years before – with a performance of Hamlet actually – but it’s doubtful Dickens would have remembered it from his childhood.

One view that has been strongly put forward is that he dropped in on Portsmouth on his way to the Isle of Wight in the September of 1838; that would have had to be after he had written rather poetically to the proprietor of Groves’s Hotel at Alum Bay, with its multicoloured sands, and view of the Needles, to reserve it – the hotel, not the bay - wholly for himself and family and friends. That view – of when Dickens stopped in Portsmouth, not of the Needles – requires him to have seen the Theatre en passant, and included it and Crummles on impulse in the very next episode, the October episode, of the novel. But, while Forster did say Dickens was always behind in his writing of Nickleby, that timing seems dangerously tight, and very unlikely.

The September visit to the Island was to be a grand event with guests and family, and he would hardly have thought of both writing the episode that would come out in the October and of getting totally new material for it at the same time. His poem to Mr Groves by way of his hotel booking will show the problem, both with the theory and Dickens’s poetry: [Note that Cowes and Ryde were the two ports for ferries from the mainland.]

161 “For those same twenty heads Because I’ve a wife Who are coming for beds And I swear on my life From Cowes or from Ryde It would out blushes bring Or from some hole beside To have that sort of thing Don’t fit up that tent So – no stranger coves Which in our room is meant If you please Mr Groves.” For some very small child Of years meek and mild,

After all that, Dickens only stayed at Alum Bay for a week, from 3rd to 10th September, and then took off to Ventnor where he made contacts he would use 11 years later when he went there to write David Copperfield. That does not sound like a man starting a whole new sub-plot in his novel under pressure, and grabbing the details he needed for it on the hoof, so to speak.

There actually are hints that Dickens had been to Portsmouth earlier in the year, probably at the end of February, not long after he had started writing the novel on his 26th birthday, the day he got back from up north. It’s more likely it was then he was inspired to put in the Crummles sub-plot that would show off his theatrical expertise. It has been pointed out, in favour of the September date, that the theatre did not figure in Phiz’s design for the green cover for the monthly parts. But, as there isn’t anything else in it that is really specific to the book, that is hardly relevant. And there was, and is, a big hole in Dickens’s diary around then. And, also, he had clearly chosen the name Smike - typical Isle of Wight – before April. There they had the habit of shortening an introduction like “It’s Neville” to “Sneville”. Similarly with “Smuggins”, another Dickens name, and they would introduce a “Mike” as “Smike”. It is unlikely he would have remembered that from 1815.

Visiting in February, he would have had time to get the detail he put in about Portsmouth. He would have had time to find St Thomas’s Street where he lodged the Crummles family at number 78 with Bulph the pilot, [with his flagpole, his green door and his mummified finger on the shelf]. To go down St Mary’s Street from the High Street where the Theatre stood, across St Thomas Street and on to find the tobacconists on the “Common Hard” near the dockyard gate where Nicholas and Smike lodged in a room up two pair of stairs and a ladder. He would have had time to see the Portsmouth Theatre Royal, and pick up the name of Folair he gave the Crummles’s pantomimist, taken from a comic named Foley who was

162 a Portsmouth theatre idol at the time. And, it was long before the September, that he gave the fugitive Nicholas the pseudonym, Mr Johnson, which he would need when posters with his name on them started going up round the area.

Another problem for the “September” theory is the detail Dickens put in about the Portsmouth Road itself, which hardly suggests he found it while travelling en famille with two infants. Kingston-on-Thames was the first place mentioned on the route, and its little racecourse at Hampton was to be the site of the Hawke-Verisoft quarrel already referred to. Dickens noted Godalming as their next stop, where they got beds for the night 4 miles south of Guildford. More interesting, is the detail of the route round the Devil’s Punch Bowl, a great dip in the earth just north of Hindhead. It was there Dickens noted a stone raised on the spot where a sailor was murdered on his way home from Portsmouth to London. Then there is a picturesque description of the journey into the South Downs which took Nicholas and Smike to an Inn – actually the Red Lion at Chalton, exactly twelve miles short of Portsmouth, and still with its separate accommodation for the coach drivers. “Twelve miles,” said Nicholas, leaning on his stick, and looking doubtfully at Smike. “Twelve long miles,” repeated the Landlord. “Is it a good road?” inquired Nicholas. “Very bad,” said the Landlord. As of course, being a Landlord, he would say. “I want to get on,” observed Nicholas. “I scarcely know what to do.” “Don’t let me influence you,” rejoined the Landlord. “I wouldn’t go on if it was me.” “Wouldn’t you?” “Not if I knew when I was well off.” The Landlord looked down the dark road towards Portsmouth with an assumption of great indifference. They were well off, of course, for they got to share Crummles’s supper. [That coaching road past the Inn is no longer the main road; that now takes itself up over what is known as Butser Hill, which would have done coach horses no good, and probably caused Crummles’s donkey to lie down and never get up. It seems probable Dickens would have noted that Inn as ideal for Nicholas’s eventful meeting with the Crummles family on his February journey.]

I would make two digressions here. First, to point out how the Crummles incident forms an important stage in Nicholas’s journey, almost a tour, through unplanned employment. He started out as an untrained teacher – a breed Dickens supposedly despised – then turned into a knight errant, toyed with being secretary to a Member of Parliament before becoming

163 French teacher to the three Kenwigs girls; he was now to become an actor – as an alternative to becoming a sailor – with a side-line as playwright; that would be followed by another spell as knight errant, before settling in as accountant for the Cheerybles, and finally gaining his rightful position in society by becoming a rich husband. One can see why, with this sort of knock-about, and all the violence, Dickens expressed concern to Forster that the book might be compared with a “Tom and Jerry” novel, those being two adventurous characters in the writings of a Peter Egan, not the ones you are thinking of.

Second, I would mention a much later event which was based on that Dickens journey. In June 1984, two Dickensian masochists decided to do a sponsored “Nickleby” run for the Dickens London Museum, starting in Doughty Street and finishing at the Birthplace. Kevin Harris, research librarian in Doughty Street – who had run in the Land’s End to John O’Groats relay race – was one of them. Paul Schlicke, a former US West Coast Mile Champion, later to be President of the Fellowship, was the other. They covered the 73 miles in two days, breaking their journey at Hindhead after the climb round the Devil’s Punch Bowl. Following an enthusiastic reception at the Birthplace Museum, they went, as they said, to a far far better rest than they had ever gone to - at the Holiday Inn.

Now, getting back on our main journey, it is difficult to believe – I just do not believe - Dickens was making that fact finding trek in the September, on his way to a busy holiday on the Isle of Wight, complete with family – including 20 month Charley and 6 month Mamie. It is more likely it was the IOW visit that was prompted by the earlier visit to Portsmouth. The case for him doing his Portsmouth research at the end of the February seems very strong. He might easily, on a whim, have decided to pay a visit to the town of his birth, finding more than he bargained for. It seems certain he had time to learn not just about the Theatre, but about Portsmouth’s John Pounds, the man who, in 1818, had started a school in his cobbler’s shop on the very road which would have taken Dickens from the Theatre, into St Thomas’s Street, and on to the Common Hard. Everybody in Portsmouth knew John Pounds. His makeshift school – with poor pupils feeding off potatoes baked in his small furnace - is known as the first Ragged School. Pounds was also a sides-man in the Unitarian Church, Dickens’s preferred religion, which was opposite the Theatre. Within a relatively short time, Dickens was advising the banking-heiress Angela Burdett Coutts on using her fortune to fund Ragged Schools and, within five years, there were 250 of them in the country, all with Pounds’s baked potatoes as staple diet. And, when Dickens invented his crippled character, Master Humphrey, for his new journal at the start of 1840, both the

164 description and the illustrations were too like John Pounds – who was crippled for life when he fell into a dry dock - to be coincidental, in detail, in appearance and in timing. And, at the end of that February, the name Master Humphrey would have been fresh in his mind from Barnard Castle. It seems many things came together for Dickens in his first visit to Portsmouth after almost exactly 23 years.

If my theory, clearly the most sensible one, is correct, then his visit to Portsmouth completed two journeys for Dickens. He started off in 1838 to destroy the Yorkshire Schools and then moved on to help create the Ragged Schools, which would be formalised through the Ragged Schools Union in 1844; and their founder became the kindly Master Humphrey, whom we meet in The Old Curiosity Shop when he comes to the rescue of Dickens in his role as the lost Little Nell sent out by his, her, dysfunctional guardian. And, of course, as if by accident, he used the visit to introduce into Nickleby a tribute to his first love, theatricals, almost an instruction manual: he had gone from the degradation of the Yorkshire Schools to the elevation of the Theatre, and, in the process, honoured the town of his birth.

It would be nice to think that, as he walked down the Portsmouth High Street from the Theatre, he might have met one of the famous, infamous Portsmouth Magwitches at the Sally Port where the boats to and from Botany Bay would tie up, and where Pip’s Magwitch would land as a returned “transport” in Great Expectations. If Dickens could fancy, so can we.

Well, I am not sure whether that talk has been more of a ramble or a tour d’horizon, covering, with various diversions, the substantial travels in and arising from Nickleby. But I would like to suggest that the next time there’s Nickleby run, possibly in 2012, it should be no jolly. Rather, it should be a Nickleby triathlon, covering the journey from Bowes to Ryde by cycling, running – and, of course, swimming.

Note: The talk was supplemented by a handout with 13 illustrations, including a map.

165 Charles Dickens: The European connection

Tony Williams, Associate Editor of The Dickensian; Honorary Research Fellow in Humanities, University of Buckingham; Honnorary Life Member and Former Joint General Secretary of The International Dickens Fellowship [email protected]

My aim in this talk is to try to give a survey of some of the ways in which Dickens and continental Europe are connected, both in his own time, through his travels and his writing, and subsequently.

My starting point is that making a connection between Dickens and Europe may seem at first glance an unlikely thing to try to do. He is, after all, a deeply English writer. When contemporary critics were trying to account for his rocket-like rise to fame, they identified his “Englishness” as a primary factor. “A truly national author – English to the very backbone” (1839); his “exquisite comprehension of the national character and manners” (1850); an obituary in 1870 rated him highly because “his tastes and modes of thought were essentially middle-class English.” Overseas visitors noted his superlatively English qualities, including, as one American said, “that exceedingly English one, extremely poor taste in the matter of dress”. He was a southerner, born in Portsmouth, later moving to Kent, where he died, and was by adoption a Londoner, never living north of the capital. In our own time, the Bank of England putting Dickens on its former ten-pound note, set his picture alongside an illustration from his first novel, The Pickwick Papers, of a village cricket match. Both the novel, set in a stagecoach world, and the illustration, speak of typically English nostalgia. In the mind of the general public, Dickens is always associated with English customs like Christmas, bowls of punch, ghost stories, and Christmas pudding.

For all these reasons, then, exploring his European qualities might seem unlikely. What I want to try to suggest is that he has some very untypically English European qualities, as well as some typically English prejudices about Europeans; that he has an awareness of and sensitivity to, a wider world across what we arrogantly call the English Channel; that we can still learn a great deal from his European-ness. Let’s begin with some facts.

166 Dickens first visited France in 1837; his last visit was in 1868. His European travelling spans, therefore some 31 years, and includes some long periods of residence abroad, especially in Italy, during the 1840s, and some frequent shorter visits to the northern coast of France later in his life. There were about sixty channel crossings, and it was quite a perilous business. We are all aware, for example, of the way the railway accident at Staplehurst on 9th June 1865 almost terminated Dickens’s European connection as well as his life. Well, Staplehurst was an extreme case, but every journey was perilous, especially if, like Dickens, you were not a very good traveller.

This is how he describes his first experience of crossing the channel in July 1837 in a letter home to his friend John Forster: We arrived here in great state this morning – I very sick, and Missis very well…. We have arranged for a post coach to take us to Ghent, Brussels, Antwerp, and a hundred other places that I cannot recollect now and couldn’t spell if I did. We went this afternoon in a barouche to some gardens where the people dance, and where they were footing it most heartily – especially the women who in their short petticoats and light caps look uncommonly agreeable. A gentleman in a blue surtout (coat) and silken Berlins (gloves) accompanied us from the Hotel, and acted as Curator (guide). He even waltzed with a very smart lady (just to show us, condescendingly, how it ought to be done) and waltzed elegantly too. We rang for slippers after we came back, and it turned out that this gentleman was the ‘Boots’. Isn’t this French?

Like all his letters, it crackles with excitement and immediacy, as the new experiences crowd in on him. One of the places he visited was the site of the battle of Waterloo, some 22 years after the event in 1815.

In February 1847, he is still suffering from the dislocation and upset of travel:

“I never knew anything like the sickness and misery of it. And besides that, I really was alarmed; the waves ran so very high, and the fast boat, going at that speed through the water, shipped such enormous volumes of it.”

But, however, risky and alarming, it didn’t stop him. He was – and it is a theme I want to return to – a man who loved danger and pushing himself to limits.

Travelling took place for various reasons. He took his growing family abroad for holidays, renting accommodation. The long stay in Italy, at the Palazzo Peschiere, near Genoa, illustrated on the sheet, is one case, as is their frequent residence in Boulogne. He simply loaded the family and their required possessions all onto a travelling coach or diligence and off they went for months at a time, “wherever his restless humour carried him”, and “restless” is the keyword for him in many ways, especially in the 1840s. He later stayed in a smaller property in a village called Condette, near Boulogne, owned by his friend and former Boulogne landlord, M. Beaucourt Mutuel.In these 167 frequent shorter trips later in his life he was often accompanied, sometimes secretly, by Ellen Ternan. In this he was certainly following typical social behaviour of the time in conducting the relationship on the continent, which was perceived as a place where English moral standards did not apply, and there was, albeit temporarily, an opportunity to escape from some of the more stifling of Victorian life. Other attractions included the climate, low cost of living, cultural appeal, the lack of industrialisation. Dickens, for so many then and now, embodied Victorian family values, home and hearth, the respectable and successful father of a large family. Sometimes he travelled alone, sometimes with friends and colleagues, sometimes, especially as his career developed, for publicity and performance. When he was abroad for long stretches of time with his family, he would often make frequent trips back to London, for writing and for publishing purposes, most famously when he had completed The Chimes in 1844.He found it very difficult to write whilst away from London streets and city sights (“That magic lantern” he called London). Euro-commuting for business in its early stages!

What it shows us about the social life of the time has to do with the increase in travel opportunities in a post-Napoleonic Europe from 1815 onwards. This is the time of Murray’s Guidebooks to great European cities and their art and architectural treasures; it is the time of Thomas Cook, whose travel agent business started in the1840s, initially in Britain, but was soon to expand into tours of European sites by 1864. The prosperity of the English middle-class enabled them to expand their experience of foreign parts. The Grand Tour was not now limited to the aristocracy. Whether they all took advantage of the chance is a theme to which I want to return.

Whilst in Boulogne in 1854 Dickens saw military manoeuvres of troops to be sent to the Crimea. The Crimean war, between Russia and the western powers from 1854 - 1856 was clearly an event which engaged Dickens’s awareness of international affairs very deeply. In Boulogne, he is able, in the early months, to describe the establishment of a military encampment on the French coast. When the war ends, he describes the soldiers returning, and a fair in Boulogne at which the siege of Sebastopol and taking of the Malakoff Heights has become a sideshow, re-enacted every half hour. He blamed the Emperor of Russia for the decline in the sales of his books, and responded to the privations of the soldiers by arranging to send them supplies of his books at the end of 1854. There is a wonderful sequence of letters in 1855 between Dickens and Angela Burdett-Coutts (of Coutts’s Bank) about the design and construction of a machine to be sent to Scutari to assist the hospital, under Florence Nightingale’s guidance, by drying bandages, sheets and clothing. He helped design it, organise its construction in kit form, sent a man from his staff at Household Words with it to assemble it.

168 But, of course, there is more to it than that. He made speeches on the war, calling the Tsar “a rash and barbarian tyrant”. He wrote, a week after Balaklava, “I am full of mixed feelings about the war –admiration of our valiant men - burning desires to cut the Emperor of Russia’s throat – and something like despair to see how the old cannon-smoke and blood-mist obscure the wrongs and sufferings of the people at home.” He felt increasing despair about the inefficiency of the government in its failure to equip and provision the troops properly in the Crimea.. The pilots selected for the ships going to blockade the Baltic ports came from Deal in Kent and had no idea of how to make their way round the North Sea. He records the reaction to the belief that the siege of Sebastopol had been raised, and the consequent disappointment when it was discovered not to be the case. As always with Dickens, we see a man sharply observing his times and recording them with detail and vividness – always the “special correspondent for posterity”.

There is an interesting consequence to the events of the Crimean War. Once the war had ended Household Words published a series of articles about Russian life and manners. The idea for this came from one of the most talented of Dickens’s staff on the journal, George Augustus Sala. He suggested to Dickens that he should be sent to Russia as a ‘special correspondent’. Public awareness of Russia had inevitably been heightened as a result of the recent conflict and this kind of first-hand investigative journalism was something of a breakthrough, reporting from direct experience rather than reproducing travelogue material from other works. Dickens was enthusiastic and Sala set off. A series of twenty-two articles under the general title of A Journey Due North appeared, beginning as the lead item in the journal on 4th October 1856 and then later relegated to inside pages, ending on 14th March 1857.

There followed some quite bitter disputes between Dickens and Sala about expenses and delays in providing copy but nevertheless the articles captured detailed impressions of the life Sala saw around him, giving the readership a first-hand account of a country of which they knew little. It seems to have been a successful formula because, later in All the Year Round there was a similar series of travellers’ reports from Russia by so far unidentified correspondents, covering topics close to Dickens’s own interests: the dangers of travel, a Russian Foundling Hospital and a Prison, Russian celebrations of Christmas. In all, All the Year Round included some 75 pieces of journalism about Russia, the furthest European extension of Dickens’s interests.

We ought also to remind ourselves that, perhaps untypically for the English, then and even now, Dickens was a skilled linguist. We know he had a sharp ear for language: the highly differentiated

169 speech he gives his characters tells us so, and he was a brilliant mimic. He was fluent in spoken Italian, and in French in both spoken and written forms. When he creates a foreign character, his translations of phraseology into English are accurate – if also at times clumsy and unintentionally comic.’Holy Blue (Sacre bleu!)’, ‘Death of my soul (Mort de ma vie!)’, ‘In a state of desolation (je suis desolée )’, ‘Monsieur demands what is this’, ‘Milady is so very high’ and so on.

He enjoys satirising the English reluctance to learn languages. The attitude will be all too familiar: all foreigners should speak English and if they don’t, just speak it to them, increasingly loudly and slowly. Thus Mr Meagles in Little Dorrit, ‘never by any accident acquired any knowledge whatever of the language of any country into which he travelled’ and speaks scathingly of ‘allonging and marshonging’ as in La Marseillaise.

With no other attendant than Mother, Mr Meagles went upon his pilgrimage, and encountered a number of adventures. Not the least of his difficulties was, that he never knew what was said to him, and that he pursued his inquiries among people who never knew what he said to them. Still, with an unshaken confidence that the English tongue was somehow the mother tongue of the whole world, only the people were too stupid to know it, Mr Meagles harangued innkeepers in the most voluble manner, entered into loud explanations of the most complicated sort, and utterly renounced replies in the native language of the respondents, on the ground that they were 'all bosh.'

This reluctance to learn other languages is one mark of English insularity, something Dickens condemned but of which he could also be guilty. Remember the famous newspaper headline; ‘Fog in Channel, Continent Cut Off’. Perhaps Dickens’s most powerful attack on insularity comes in his last completed work Our Mutual Friend, through the character of Mr Posdnap.

Dickens’s works were translated into other European languages from a very early point in his career, and are still available in all major languages and some minor ones.

Translations of his work began to appear in Germany in 1837, in France in 1838, in Holland in 1838. Partial translations or adaptations in Russian started in 1837, and his social attitudes have ensured a continued high level of popularity there. In 1942 it was recorded in The Dickensian that the Bodleian Library in Oxford has in its collection a ‘stained and battered volume of The Pickwick Papers in Russian’ found in September 1855 by the besiegers of Sebastopol among the ruins of the Redan. Scandinavian translations came into being from 1849-50, and Spanish and Italian in the 20th century. The British Museum catalogue also lists Armenian, Czech, Hungarian, Icelandic, Greek, Estonian, Finnish, Portuguese, Polish, Lithuanian, Welsh and so on.

International popularity and reputation of Dickens’s writing was, therefore, established at a very early stage. In more recent times there have been film adaptations, the earliest being a French Oliver 170 Twist in 1906 and again in 1910, and an Italian version of A Christmas Carol in 1910. Talking pictures brought about a French Cricket on the Hearth in 1933 and a German Little Dorrit in 1934, and a Danish one in 1924. There is an excellent Portuguese Hard Times from1988. There are lots more.

It is worth mentioning that his continuing popularity throughout Europe is very strong. The Dickens Fellowship has branches in Haarlem in the Netherlands, founded in 1956, in Boulogne with its direct Dickensian links, both in Boulogne itself and in nearby Condette. When the foundation of ‘The Friends of Charles Dickens’ in 1978 was announced in The Dickensian a special point was made of the efforts in that direction of Mme Janine Watrin. Announced as the first ‘foreign branch’ to be founded, Copenhagen came into being in 1928, recently (2004) reborn as the Denmark branch. The term ‘foreign branch’ is interesting, presumably meaning outside the UK, USA and parts of the British Empire where there was already a large number of branches by 1928. In addition, there are. According to current membership figures, there are additionally some fifty individual members of the Fellowship in Germany (13), Belgium, Bosnia, Bulgaria, Hungary, Austria, Malta, Georgia, Switzerland, Sweden, Finland, Greece and further subscribers to The Dickensian in Russia, Norway, Poland and Spain.

So we have international reputation, interest in language, restlessness, fascination with other places, a view of Europe as a place where one could behave in a more relaxed, freer way than back at home, direct involvement in international events, and a criticism of his fellow-countrymen for not being more open to Europe.

Dickens’s early writings are very firmly rooted in England, though there are a few European references. For instance, there is a character called Count Smorltork in Pickwick Papers, whose principal function seems to be there as a comic foreigner – someone who speaks with a comic accent. Here Dickens is revealing the typical English prejudices towards non-native speakers: they are not English and are therefore figures of fun, comic stereotypes, who cannot pronounce that notoriously difficult English sound ‘th’ so they say ‘z’. Later in his career he turns this prejudice back on the English by satirising their narrowness of outlook. Novels of his middle and later career, after he has had some experience of travel, start to use European settings much more noticeably. Dombey and Son (1848) has the villain Carker go to France in order to conduct his plan for an adulterous relationship with his employer’s wife. They are tracked down in Dijon, and Carker’s fatal escape back to England has him killed in a railway accident. David Copperfield (1849-50) has scenes in Switzerland. Little Dorrit (1855-7) opens in Marseilles, has French characters (villainous

171 ones), and moves the action to Italy for a large part of its action. At one point in the narrative a character called John Baptist Cavaletto comes to stay with poor characters in Bleeding Heart Yard, near Hatton Garden, in London. Dickens mocks them gently for their xenophobia, and gets some fun from their well-meaning attempts at communication. It was uphill work for a foreigner, lame or sound, to make his way with the Bleeding Hearts. In the first place, they were vaguely persuaded that every foreigner had a knife about him; in the second, they held it to be a sound constitutional national axiom that he ought to go home to his own country. They never thought of inquiring how many of their own countrymen would be returned upon their hands from divers parts of the world, if the principle were generally recognised; they considered it particularly and peculiarly British. In the third place, they had a notion that it was a sort of Divine visitation upon a foreigner that he was not an Englishman, and that all kinds of calamities happened to his country because it did things that England did not, and did not do things that England did. …. However, the Bleeding Hearts were kind hearts; and when they saw the little fellow cheerily limping about with a good-humoured face, doing no harm, drawing no knives, committing no outrageous immoralities, living chiefly on farinaceous and milk diet, and playing with Mrs Plornish's children of an evening, they began to think that although he could never hope to be an Englishman, still it would be hard to visit that affliction on his head. They began to accommodate themselves to his level, calling him 'Mr Baptist,' but treating him like a baby, and laughing immoderately at his lively gestures and his childish English--more, because he didn't mind it, and laughed too. They spoke to him in very loud voices as if he were stone deaf. They constructed sentences, by way of teaching him the language in its purity, such as were addressed by the savages to Captain Cook, or by Friday to Robinson Crusoe. Mrs Plornish was particularly ingenious in this art; and attained so much celebrity for saying 'Me ope you leg well soon,' that it was considered in the Yard but a very short remove indeed from speaking Italian. Even Mrs Plornish herself began to think that she had a natural call towards that language. As he became more popular, household objects were brought into requisition for his instruction in a copious vocabulary; and whenever he appeared in the Yard ladies would fly out at their doors crying 'Mr Baptist--tea-pot!' 'Mr Baptist-- dust-pan!' 'Mr Baptist--flour-dredger!' 'Mr Baptist--coffee-biggin!' At the same time exhibiting those articles, and penetrating him with a sense of the appalling difficulties of the Anglo-Saxon tongue.

For many people, the novel which would immediately spring to mind as an indication of Dickens and Europe is A Tale of Two Cities (1859), his book about the French Revolution. Its opening is justly famous: It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way…

This novel is Dickens’s attempt to confront one of the great terrors of the Victorian consciousness: the fear of Revolution. There had been so much social discontent throughout the 19th century, arising from the massive social change which resulted from the Industrial and Agricultural Revolutions of the late 18th century, for example, and the Chartists’ demands for parliamentary

172 reform not adequately met, that the fear of political revolt was never far from people’s minds. When Dickens was born, in 1812, in Portsmouth, a naval town, later moving to Chatham, another naval town, because his father was an employee of the Nay Pay Office, the French Revolutionary wars , followed by the Napoleonic Wars, were happening, and the French Revolution of 1789 was a close memory. When he wrote this novel, it was seventy years back in history. Think about what the equivalent is for us; the 1930s, the rise of Fascism in Germany and Italy, the Spanish Civil War, Stalin’s purges, the aftermath of the Great Depression, the run-up to WW2: and France was just across the Channel.

A Tale of Two Cities is a novel about the similarities between pre-revolutionary France and 19th- century England. It is a warning to England to avoid the potential revolutionary danger. The French Revolution posed a great problem for Dickens. Given his radical sympathies and desire for social improvement we would expect him to sympathise with the overturn of the old 18th century order, and ally himself with a new world of Liberty, Equality and Fraternity. What he sees, however, is the failure of that ideal, much as his high hopes for the new republic he went to visit across the Atlantic in 1842 were disappointed. He fears the overturning of order, the chaos of revolution, the emergence of worse tyrants.

Dickens first visited Paris in 1844 on his way to Italy and he records those first impressions in a letter to the Count D’Orsay on 7 August 1844:

‘We had a charming journey here. I cannot tell you what an immense impression Paris made upon me. It is the most extraordinary place in the World. I was not prepared for, and really could not have believed in, its perfectly distinct and separate character. My eyes ached and my head grew giddy, as novelty, novelty, novelty; nothing but strange and striking things; came swarming before me. I cannot conceive any place so perfectly and wonderfully expressive of its own character; its secret character no less than that which is on its surface; as Paris is. I walked about the streets--in and out, up and down, backwards and forwards --during the two days we were there; and almost every house, and every person I passed, seemed to be another leaf in the enormous book that stands wide open there. I was perpetually turning over, and never coming any nearer the end. There never was such a place for a description. If I had only a larger sheet of paper (I have ordered some for next time) I am afraid I should plunge, wildly, into such a lengthened account of those two days as would startle you.’

Paris was then a city of some 900,000 people: about half the size of London. It expanded to over 1,800,000 by the late 1860s, but lacked the sprawling and uncontrolled nature of London. The 1850s and 1860s were to see significant changes to the physical appearance of Paris as a result of the reconstruction work undertaken by the Prefect of the Seine, Baron Hausmann, which swept away much of the old city which Dickens reconstructs in his picture of pre-revolutionary and revolutionary Paris in this novel. The narrow streets and tall houses which creating rabbit-warrens 173 of poverty and squalor very like parts of London with which he was familiar, had been replaced by planned urban development, apartment blocks, grand boulevards and parks. At the end of A Tale of Two Cities, for example, he reminds readers of one of the changes to the Parisian landscape, where the Place de la Concorde is constructed on the site of the Bastille, destroyed in 1789-90.

Dickens visited Paris at least fifteen times between 1844 and 1868, at times renting apartments for significantly lengthy stays: November 1846 to February 1847, October 1855 to April 1856 and October to December 1862. He visited in January 1863 when he gave a phenomenally successful series of readings in the British Embassy. His last two recorded visits were in 1865 and 1868. These visits spanned a period of political change as well as change to urban topography. Louis Philippe’s constitutional monarchy of 1844 ended with the1848 Revolution and the Second Republic. In 1852 Louis Napoléon was declared Emperor as Napoleon III and his reign lasted until 1870, the year of Dickens’s death.

Paris was, during Dickens’s lifetime, a vibrant modernizing city, replacing its ancient networks of crowded unstable buildings with planned elegance, open spaces and light. In October 1862 Dickens wrote to W H Wills, his sub-editor on All the Year Round, that ‘… preparations for some amazing new street are in rapid progress… Wherever I turn, I see some astounding new work, doing or done. When you come over here … you shall see sights.’

But, being Dickens, he was also fascinated by the darker side of the city, finding it ‘a wicked and detestable place, though wonderfully attractive’ as he wrote to John Forster during his 1846-7 visit. And he was constantly drawn to visit the Morgue, ‘dragged by invisible force’ as he put it in ‘Travelling Abroad’ (All the Year Round, 7 April 1860). The Morgue was listed as one of the visitor attractions of the city and it clearly appealed to Dickens, always drawn by the ‘attraction of repulsion’, whether at home or abroad.

If I had to identify the most useful places to look for an understanding of Dickens and Europe, I would urge readers to look not so much at the fiction, though it is of help, but at the journalism and the travel book, Pictures from Italy (1846).

Dickens was the editor (or conductor) and eventual owner of two weekly publications, Household Words (1850-59) and All the Year Round (1859-93, with Dickens’s direct involvement ending on his death in 1870). An early article in Household Words called ‘Foreigners’ Portraits of Englishmen’ (21 September 1850) allows him to turn the tables and show how the English could be portrayed on European stages.

174 All Englishmen (of course including the starved Commonalty) possess enormous wealth, which they usually employ in the purchase of ‘Le Titre de Lord’ – an unnecessary outlay, as every person not a tradesman receives the title as a matter of course….Our ladies are a little too much given to fighting, and a little too lightly won. We sell our wives. This is a very common mercantile transaction indeed… Our Queen makes away with many millions a year, and cuts off the heads of any persons to whom she may take a dislike, or hangs them, without the intervention of judge, jury, or other functionary than the executioner, who… is a regular member of the Royal Household. We are, however, for the most part, a harmless and ridiculous race, affording excellent sport to innkeepers and adventurers. We eat prodigiously. Indeed so great is our love for good cheer that we name our children after our favourite dishes. If a person in good society is not called Sir Rosbif, he will probably answer to the name of Lord Bifstek.

In ‘A Monument of French Folly’ (8 March 1851) he uses the ironic technique of apparent criticism of French ways to criticise English abuses. The great London scandal of the 1850s was the open air meat market at Smithfield, and Dickens was a strong – and ultimately successful – campaigner to get it closed and moved out of the centre of the city. In Paris, the main meat markets were away from the city centre, were hygienic and efficiently run, not the brutal bloodbath of Smithfield. Here he turns the tables on the English once more by satirising their prejudices. It was profoundly observed by a witty member of the Court of Common Council, in Council assembled in the City of London, in the year of our Lord one thousand eight hundred and fifty, that the French are a frog-eating people, who wear wooden shoes. We are credibly informed, in reference to the nation whom this choice spirit so happily disposed of, that the caricatures and stage representations which were current in England some half a century ago, exactly depict their present condition. For example, we understand that every Frenchman, without exception, wears a pigtail and curl-papers. That he is extremely sallow, thin, long-faced, and lantern-jawed. That the calves of his legs are invariably undeveloped; that his legs fail at the knees, and that his shoulders are always higher than his ears. We are likewise assured that he rarely tastes any food but soup maigre, and an onion; that he always says. “By Gar! Aha! Vat you tell me, sare?” at the end of every sentence he utters….He is a slave, of course. …The ladies of France (who are also slaves) invariably have their heads tied up in Belcher handkerchiefs (dark blue white spots, Jim Belcher a boxer), wear long earrings, carry tambourines, and beguile the weariness of their yoke by singing in head voices through their noses – principally to barrel organs.

‘A Flight’ (30 August 1851) describes the sensation of fast travelling to France from England. ‘Our French Watering Place’ (4 November 1854) is an affectionate depiction of Boulogne, which he knew very well indeed. He begins with a description of arrival, after a choppy crossing, and going through customs. But our French watering-place, when it is once got into, is a very enjoyable place. It has a varied and beautiful country around it, and many characteristic and agreeable things within it. To be sure, it might have fewer bad smells and less decaying refuse, and it might be better drained, and much cleaner in many parts, and therefore infinitely more healthy. Still, it is a bright, airy, pleasant, cheerful town; and if you were to walk down either of its three well-paved main streets, towards five o’clock in the afternoon, when delicate odours of cookery fill the air, and its hotel windows (it is full of hotels) give glimpses of long tables set out for dinner, and made to look sumptuous by the

175 aid of napkins folded fan-wise, you would rightly judge it to be an uncommonly good town to eat and drink in.

He praises the town for its cheapness and good value, for the quiet pleasures to be found there, and for the temperament of its inhabitants, whom he describes as ‘an industrious people, and a domestic people, and an honest people.’ He delights in the buildings and colours and activity. It creates a touching portrait which can only have come from a writer willing to be open and sensitive to the place. By contrast ‘Insularities’ (19 January 1856) attacks that particular quality in the English.

In All the Year Round one might look at ‘Travelling Abroad’ (7 April 1860), where he visits Paris and especially the Morgue, which had an especial fascination for him, before going on top Strasbourg and the Alps. In the mountain country into which I had now travelled, a yoke of oxen were sometimes hooked on before the post-horses, and I went lumbering up, up, up, through mist and rain, with the roar of falling water for change of music. Of a sudden, mist and rain would clear away, and I would come down into picturesque little towns with gleaming spires and odd towers; and would stroll afoot into market places in steep winding streets, where a hundred women in bodices, sold eggs and honey, butter and fruit, and suckled their children as they sat by their clean baskets, and had such enormous goîtres (or glandular swellings in the throat) that it became a science to know where the nurse ended and the child began. … Here I enjoyed a dozen climates a day; being now… in the region of wind, now in the region of fire, now in the region of unmelting ice and snow. Here, I passed over trembling domes of ice, beneath which the cataract was roaring; and here was received under arches of icicles, of unspeakable beauty; and here the sweet air was so bracing and so light, that at halting-times I rolled in the snow when I saw my mule do it, thinking that he must know best.

‘The Calais Night-Mail’ (2 May 1863) describes travelling to this sea- port and the crowding of impressions which greet him on his train journey from the port. So strangely goes the time, and on the whole so quickly - though still I seem to have been on board a week - that I am bumped, rolled, gurgled, washed and pitched into Calais Harbour before her maiden smile has finally lighted her through the Green Isle, When blest for ever is she who relied, On entering Calais at the top of the tide. For we have not to land to-night down among those slimy timbers - covered with green hair as if it were the mermaids' favourite combing-place - where one crawls to the surface of the jetty, like a stranded shrimp, but we go steaming up the harbour to the Railway Station Quay. And as we go, the sea washes in and out among piles and planks, with dead heavy beats and in quite a furious manner (whereof we are proud), and the lamps shake in the wind, and the bells of Calais striking One seem to send their vibrations struggling against troubled air, as we have come struggling against troubled water. And now, in the sudden relief and wiping of faces, everybody on board seems to have had a prodigious double-tooth out, and to be this very instant free of the Dentist's hands. And now we all know for the first time how wet and cold we are, and how salt we are; and now I love Calais with my heart of hearts! ….

176 I think it is fair to say that what we see in these pieces of journalism is writing revealing fascination with another country, its scenery, its customs, its assault on the senses, and very untypically 19th- century English willingness to see Europe, and especially France, as dong some things better than England does, which is no mean feat of open-mindedness in responding to a country so recently one’s own nation’s sworn enemy. It is the writing of a man who loves the difference of it all, even the suffering and inconvenience of the travel.

Lastly I would like to look at Dickens’s holiday snapshots, his Pictures from Italy (1846). This travel book gives an account of what he saw during his prolonged stay in Italy from July 1844 to June 1845. He records his and his family’s journey and the places they visit, and some of it is based on letters written home to friends during the Italian visit. In this one to the Count d’Orsay on 7th August 1844 he outlines his plans: I have been turning my plans over in my mind; and I think I shall remain quiet until I have done my little Christmas Book--that will be, perhaps, about the middle of October. In November, I think I shall start, with my servant (I have a most admirable and useful fellow--a frenchman) for Verona, Mantua, Milan, Turin, Venice, Florence, Pisa, Leghorn &c. I shall come back here for Christmas, and remain here through January. In February, I think I shall start off again (attended as before) and taking the Steamboat to Civita Vecchia, go to Rome--from Rome to Naples--and from Naples to Mount Ætna, which I very much desire to see. Then I purpose returning to Naples, and coming back here, direct, by Steamer. For Easter Week, I design returning to Rome again; taking Mrs. Dickens and her sister with me, that time; then coming back here, picking up my caravan, starting off to Paris, and remaining there a month or so, before I return to England. What do you think of that?

They reached Genoa on 16th July 1844, went to Albaro and stayed at the Villa di Bagenerello (‘the pink jail’), leaving there in September and moving to the Palazzo Peschiere in Genoa, pictured on your sheet.

He observes other English travellers, representatives of that newly-developing breed of middle- class English tourist. We often encountered, in these expeditions, a company of English Tourists, with whom I had an ardent, but ungratified longing, to establish a speaking acquaintance. They were one Mr. Davis, and a small circle of friends. It was impossible not to know Mrs. Davis's name, from her being always in great request among her party, and her party being everywhere. During the Holy Week, they were in every part of every scene of every ceremony. For a fortnight or three weeks before it, they were in every tomb, and every church, and every ruin, and every Picture Gallery; and I hardly ever observed Mrs. Davis to be silent for a moment. Deep underground, high up in St. Peter's, out on the Campagna, and stifling in the Jews' quarter, Mrs. Davis turned up, all the same. I don't think she ever saw anything, or ever looked at anything; and she had always lost something out of a straw hand-basket, and was trying to find it, with all her might and main, among an immense quantity of English halfpence, which lay, like sands upon the sea-shore, at the bottom of it. There was a professional Cicerone always attached to the party (which had been brought over from London, fifteen or twenty strong, by contract), and if he so much as looked at Mrs. Davis, she invariably cut him short by saying, 'There, God bless the man, don't worrit me! I don't understand a word you say, and shouldn't if you was to talk till you was black in the face!' 177 Mr. Davis always had a snuff-coloured great-coat on, and carried a great green umbrella in his hand, and had a slow curiosity constantly devouring him, which prompted him to do extraordinary things, such as taking the covers off urns in tombs, and looking in at the ashes as if they were pickles - and tracing out inscriptions with the ferrule of his umbrella, and saying, with intense thoughtfulness, 'Here's a B you see, and there's a R, and this is the way we goes on in; is it!' His antiquarian habits occasioned his being frequently in the rear of the rest; and one of the agonies of Mrs. Davis, and the party in general, was an ever-present fear that Davis would be lost. This caused them to scream for him, in the strangest places, and at the most improper seasons. And when he came, slowly emerging out of some sepulchre or other, like a peaceful Ghoule, saying 'Here I am!' Mrs. Davis invariably replied, 'You'll be buried alive in a foreign country, Davis, and it's no use trying to prevent you!' Mr. and Mrs. Davis, and their party, had, probably, been brought from London in about nine or ten days. Eighteen hundred years ago, the Roman legions under Claudius, protested against being led into Mr. and Mrs. Davis's country, urging that it lay beyond the limits of the world.

Dickens sees all the relics of the classical past, ‘a ruined world where the broken hourglass of time is but a heap of idle dust’. This serves to emphasise and reinforce his sense of English superiority in its own modern-day progress, and he isolates one of the principal ways of identifying progress in this modern world, the railway: Hundreds of parrots will declaim to you on the degeneracy of the times in which a railroad is building across the water at Venice; instead of going down on their knees… and thanking Heaven that they live in a time when iron makes roads instead of engines for driving screws into the skulls of innocent men.

His identification of Britain as the centre of the greatest Empire of the present day, the workshop of the world, the modern day Rome, also carries an implied warning. Great empires pass away; here was Rome… The contrast between Past and Present is always placed in front of us. Other English travellers, like Ruskin, drew contrasts in favour of the Italian past, especially the Renaissance, as more attractive than the industrialised English present. Dickens sees other angles: decay, the Catacombs, graveyards. He is also, as an English protestant, highly critical of Roman Catholic practices and the ceremonies of Holy Week in Rome, which he calls just ‘a brilliant show’ and observes the appearance of the Pope on a balcony as a ‘doll (stretching) out its tiny arms’. He wrote to d’Orsay What a sad place Italy is! a country gone to sleep, and without a prospect of waking again! I never shall forget, as long as I live, my first impressions of it, as I drove through the streets of Genoa, after contemplating the splendid View of the town, for a full hour, through a telescope, from the deck of the steamboat. I thought that of all the mouldy, dreary, sleepy, dirty, lagging, halting, Godforgotten towns in the wide world, it surely must be the very uttermost superlative. It seemed as if one had reached the end of all things--as if there were no more progress, motion, advancement, or improvement of any kind beyond; but here the whole scheme had stopped centuries ago, never to move on any more, but just lying down in the sun to bask there, 'till the Day of Judgment.

178 His visit took place during a period of revolutionary ferment which was to culminate in the Risorgimento, but he studiously avoids it, other than to hope for progress, though he does use the journals as a means of arguing for support for the cause of Italian unification. Later, during the first year of the publication of All the Year Round (1859-60) he published over thirty papers on Italian subjects, including one of the Uncommercial Traveller essays called ‘The Italian Prisoner’ on 13th October 1860.

Above all, the book is wonderfully written. In this piece he is describing Venice, in a chapter called ‘An Italian Dream’. Later, in Little Dorrit, he was to return to Venice, calling it a ‘crowning unreality, where all the streets were paved with water’. So we advanced into this ghostly city, continuing to hold our course through narrow streets and lanes, all filled and flowing with water. Some of the corners where our way branched off, were so acute and narrow, that it seemed impossible for the long slender boat to turn them; but the rowers, with a low melodious cry of warning, sent it skimming on without a pause. Sometimes, the rowers of another black boat like our own, echoed the cry, and slackening their speed (as I thought we did ours) would come flitting past us like a dark shadow. Other boats, of the same sombre hue, were lying moored, I thought, to painted pillars, near to dark mysterious doors that opened straight upon the water. Some of these were empty; in some, the rowers lay asleep; towards one, I saw some figures coming down a gloomy archway from the interior of a palace: gaily dressed, and attended by torch-bearers. It was but a glimpse I had of them; for a bridge, so low and close upon the boat that it seemed ready to fall down and crush us: one of the many bridges that perplexed the Dream: blotted them out, instantly. On we went, floating towards the heart of this strange place - with water all about us where never water was elsewhere - clusters of houses, churches, heaps of stately buildings growing out of it - and, everywhere, the same extraordinary silence. Presently, we shot across a broad and open stream; and passing, as I thought, before a spacious paved quay, where the bright lamps with which it was illuminated showed long rows of arches and pillars, of ponderous construction and great strength, but as light to the eye as garlands of hoarfrost or gossamer - and where, for the first time, I saw people walking - arrived at a flight of steps leading from the water to a large mansion, where, having passed through corridors and galleries innumerable, I lay down to rest; listening to the black boats stealing up and down below the window on the rippling water, till I fell asleep.

The Dickenses set of for their Italian expedition on 2nd July 1844 and returned to London a year and a day later. Pictures from Italy was published as a single volume in May 1846 but some of the early chapters had appeared as ‘Travelling Letters Written on the Road’ between January and March 1846 in The Daily News. As had also been the case with his visit to America in 1842, much of the content of what was eventually to be published in book form had been sent to various friends and colleagues as letters as the experiences took place on his journey and I would like to end by sharing one of those with you.

Ultimately Dickens stands or falls as a writer by the way in which he can involve his readers in the experiences, whether fact or fiction, that he wants to communicate. His skills as a writer are wide-

179 ranging: excitement, terror, fascination, energy, risk-taking, human observation, eye for the comic and the nightmare side by side are all Dickensian features. He fires on all these cylinders, I think, in his description of the ascent of Mount Vesuvius, which appears, modified and prepared for publication, in the volume edition, but is here described in a letter to his friend Thomas Mitton, written on 22nd February, the day after the expedition had taken place. It continues a letter he had begun on 17th February. Saturday, February 22nd.--Since I left off as above, I have been away on an excursion of three days. Yesterday, leaving at four o'clock, we began (a small party of six) the ascent of Mount Vesuvius, with six saddle-horses, an armed soldier for a guard, and twenty-two guides. The latter rendered necessary by the severity of the weather, which is greater than has been known for twenty years, and has covered the precipitous part of the mountain with deep snow, the surface of which is glazed with one smooth sheet of ice from the top of the cone to the bottom. By starting at that hour I intended to get the sunset about halfway up, and night at the top, where the fire is raging. It was an inexpressibly lovely night without a cloud; and when the day was quite gone, the moon (within a few hours of the full) came proudly up, showing the sea, and the Bay of Naples, and the whole country, in such majesty as no words can express. We rode to the beginning of the snow and then dismounted. Catherine and Georgina were put into two litters, just chairs with poles, like those in use in England on the 5th of November; and a fat Englishman, who was of the party, was hoisted into a third, borne by eight men. I was accommodated with a tough stick, and we began to plough our way up. The ascent was as steep as this line /--very nearly perpendicular. We were all tumbling at every step; and looking up and seeing the people in advance tumbling over one's very head, and looking down and seeing hundreds of feet of smooth ice below, was, I must confess, anything but agreeable. However, I knew there was little chance of another clear night before I eave this, and gave the word to get up, somehow or other. So on we went, winding a little now and then, or we should not have got on at all. By prodigious exertions we passed the region of snow, and came into that of fire--desolate and awful, you may well suppose. It was like working one's way through a dry waterfall, with every mass of stone burnt and charred into enormous cinders, and smoke and sulphur bursting out of every chink and crevice, so that it was difficult to breathe. High before us, bursting out of a hill at the top of the mountain, shaped like this, the fire was pouring out, reddening the night with flames, blackening it with smoke, and spotting it with red-hot stones and cinders that fell down again in showers. At every step everybody fell, now into a hot chink, now into a bed of ashes, now over a mass of cindered iron; and the confusion in the darkness (for the smoke obscured the moon in this part), and the quarrelling and shouting and roaring of the guides; and the waiting every now and then for somebody who was not to be found, and was supposed to have tumbled into some pit or other, made such a scene of it as I can give you no idea of. My ladies were now on foot, of course; but we dragged them on as well as we could (they were thorough game, and didn't make the least complaint), until we got to the foot of that topmost hill I have drawn so beautifully. Here we all stopped; but the head guide, an English gentleman of the name of Le Gros--who has been here many years, and has been up the mountain a hundred times--and your humble servant, resolved (like jackasses) to climb that hill to the brink, and look down into the crater itself. You may form some notion of what is going on inside it, when I tell you that it is a hundred feet higher than it was six weeks ago. The sensation of struggling up it, choked with the fire and smoke, and feeling at every step as if the crust of ground between one's feet and the gulf of fire would crumble in and swallow one up (which is the real danger), I shall remember for some little time, I think. But we did it. We looked down into the flaming bowels of the mountain and came back again, alight in half-a- dozen places, and burnt from head to foot. You never saw such devils. And I never saw anything so awful and terrible. Roche had been tearing his hair like a madman, and crying that we should all three be killed, which made the rest of the company very comfortable, as you may suppose. But we had some wine

180 in a basket, and all swallowed a little of that and a great deal of sulphur before we began to descend. The usual way, after the fiery part is past--you will understand that to be all the flat top of the mountain, in the centre of which, again, rises the little hill I have drawn--is to slide down the ashes, which, slipping from under you, make a gradually increasing ledge under your feet, and prevent your going too fast. But when we came to this steep place last night, we found nothing there but one smooth solid sheet of ice. The only way to get down was for the guides to make a chain, holding by each other's hands, and beat a narrow track in it into the snow below with their sticks. My two unfortunate ladies were taken out of their litters again, with half-a-dozen men hanging on to each, to prevent their falling forward; and we began to descend this way. It was like a tremendous dream. It was impossible to stand, and the only way to prevent oneself from going sheer down the precipice, every time one fell, was to drive one's stick into one of the holes the guides had made, and hold on by that. Nobody could pick one up, or stop one, or render one the least assistance. Now, conceive my horror, when this Mr. Le Gros I have mentioned, being on one side of Georgina and I on the other, suddenly staggers away from the narrow path on to the smooth ice, gives us a jerk, lets go, and plunges headforemost down the smooth ice into the black night, five hundred feet below! Almost at the same instant, a man far behind, carrying a light basket on his head with some of our spare cloaks in it, misses his footing and rolls down in another place; and after him, rolling over and over like a black bundle, goes a boy, shrieking as nobody but an Italian can shriek, until the breath is tumbled out of him. The Englishman is in bed to-day, terribly bruised but without any broken bones. He was insensible at first and a mere heap of rags; but we got him before the fire, in a little hermitage there is halfway down, and he so far recovered as to be able to take some supper, which was waiting for us there. The boy was brought in with his head tied up in a bloody cloth, about half an hour after the rest of us were assembled. And the man who had had the basket was not found when we left the mountain at midnight. What became of the cloaks (mine was among them) I know as little. My ladies' clothes were so torn off their backs that they would not have been decent, if there could have been any thought of such things at such a time. And when we got down to the guides' house, we found a French surgeon (one of another party who had been up before us) lying on a bed in a stable, with God knows what horrible breakage about him, but suffering acutely and looking like death. A pretty unusual trip for a pleasure expedition, I think. I am rather stiff to-day but am quite unhurt, except a slight scrape on my right hand. My clothes are burnt to pieces. My ladies are the wonder of Naples, and everybody is open-mouthed. Address me as usual. All letters are forwarded. The children well and happy. Best regards. Ever faithfully C.D.

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