PICTURES FROM ITALY 📚: with Pete Orford

In the July of 1844 Dickens, his wife Catherine, their five children, his sister-in-law Georgina - plus three servants and their dog Timber - left London for Italy. What followed was an extraordinary adventure for them all.

Returning to the series to talk to Dominic about his new Oxford University Press edition of Pictures From Italy is the inimitable Dr. Pete Orford also returning to read excerpts from the book is the brilliant actor Tom Andrews ...

The recording Vivaldi's Four Seasons has been granted under license from Epidemic Sound

Original cover headshot of Dominic Gerrard © Jane Lloyd / Original cover headshot of Pete Orford c/o University of Buckingham / Background detail of The Interior of the Colosseum, Rome (1832) by Thomas Cole via Wikimedia Commons

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SPEAKER_02 0:21

In the July of 1844, Dickens, his wife Catherine, their five children, his sister-in-law Georgina, plus three servants and their dog Timber left London for the continent. What followed was an extraordinary adventure for them all and a dramatic change of scene. Over the course of the year that followed, Dickens would grow incredibly attached to Italy and would miss it forever afterwards. His account is by turns hilarious, dreamy, angry, enchanted, and occasionally disappointed, depending on his mood. He is far out of his comfort zone, and has to learn to let things go. Not something that comes naturally to him. On first arriving in Genoa, for example, he says, I was set down in a rank, dull, weedy courtyard attached to a kind of pink jail, and was told I lived there. How many of us have had that sinking feeling of arriving at a destination on holiday and finding it not what we had hoped it would be at first? Only then to fall in love with it. This and countless other examples seem to bring Dickens as a person closer to us, I think. And as he gradually becomes intoxicated by his surroundings, we see Dickens restore himself both emotionally and creatively. Although, don't imagine for one second that he's idle the whole time. As you're about to hear. Returning to the series to talk to us about his new Oxford University Press edition of Pictures from Italy is the inimitable Dr. Pete Orford. Also returning to read excerpts from the book is the brilliant actor Tom Andrews. Pete, hello again, and welcome back to Charles Dickens' Brain on Fire. Hello, Dominic. Thank you. Happy to be here. I'm so thrilled to have you here because we're going to be looking at the stunning pictures from Italy. Um I have to say that when I picked this up, I thought, oh, this is going to be quite an easy one, really. It's not very long, is it? But actually, there are so many episodes and reflections and images and events in this book packed down into so few pages that it feels like we could be talking about a huge novel.

SPEAKER_03 2:37

It's remarkable, yeah. I mean, Dickens went to Italy for a year and had to travel around Italy and write up what he himself called a little book. But what you have here, of course, is Dickens the tourist, Dickens the observer, moving around Italy at an extraordinary time because I mean, politically, this is just in the build towards the Resorgamento when they unified Italy into one country. So you're seeing kind of the last few days, last few years rather, of Italy as a series of independent states. For Dickens, he is treading the ground of his heroes. He's seeing all these remarkable sites. You know, he's he's done America already a few years beforehand. He's done American Notes, and that was going to the new world. This is the old world. This is going back and getting in touch with classical literature, the Italian artists. For himself, as a writer, he wants to kind of enlarge his stock of experiences, he wants to kind of get that broader awareness.

SPEAKER_02 3:33

What I find fascinating about this book, though, is how much Dickens is often in the backseat of everything. He's not driving everything. And very early on, he makes this reference. He talks about uh this book is a series of faint reflections, mere shadows in water. And he says the shadows in water twice, I think, within a few sentences of each other. So it's almost sort of Dickens the Impressionist. It's almost like he's, I don't know, lost himself in this place. And it's fascinating to see that side of him.

SPEAKER_03 3:59

Absolutely. He doesn't go to Italy to write a book. He needs to escape. He's very much under pressure at home. He's got financial constraints, he's got work constraints. Um, he's been working non-stop since starting as a writer. He's constantly taking on new projects while finishing off old projects too. And he needs to escape and have a break. So he chooses to go to Europe and he goes, where shall I go? Looks at Nice, possibly, looks at Pisa, chooses Genoa. It's more about where he's getting away from than where he's going to. But having gone there, so well, while I'm there, I will write a book about it as well. Now, the problem with that is that there's a lot about Italy that's been written already. And Dickens knows this. And this is the year in which you're starting to get the tourist industry developing, and you've got handbooks being published already. So there are a number of books out there that are much more like we would think of like a rough guide kind of thing, where it's going through, you know, here's where to visit, here's the sights to see. And so he doesn't want to do that. He wants to kind of make it more, as you say, impressionistic. As you say, he's putting himself in the background so often with this, and it comes through in a lot of different ways. Literally, there are times when he edits his name out or edits the name out of his wife, you know, say just the ladies instead. So he's deliberately resisting any kind of biographical uh references there. But also when it comes to actually publishing the book, um, he asks, well, originally he wants his friend Clarkson Stanfield to illustrate it, then he gets Samuel Palmer to do it. And in both cases, the illustrations are landscape illustrations, which is not what we think about with Dickens. We think of Dickens, we think of Fizz, we think these great caricatures, but he wants to have illustrations that capture the landscape, and that's his interest. And so there's a misstep here in what he's doing, how he writes about it, that he's he's trying to kind of say, Well, here's Italy and here's my reflections. But actually, the enduring interest for us is how Dickens reacts to Italy and how he's trying to respond to it.

SPEAKER_02 5:50

Yes, I I find it fascinating, of course, that in the start he talks about how he's not going to really interfere in anything or make comments about practices and stuff. And then, of course, no, of course, he can't help himself. You know, it doesn't last very long at all. He he absolutely gets involved with this this is the system is ridiculous.

SPEAKER_03 6:07

This is, you know. Absolutely. And when he does get back to England in 1845, he doesn't write the book immediately. He instead he ends up writing some of them as travelling letters for the Daily News. And he's gonna do a column in there, a regular column, of his travels through France and Italy. And so some of those kind of controversial opinions, and here we're talking many religion, have already been aired in the public, and there's been a reaction against it. Um, and the most famous reaction here is I mentioned he wanted his friend Clarkson Stanfield to illustrate the work, and Stanfield is a practicing Catholic, and he goes, I cannot be involved with this project. One of the most controversial elements of the book is how much he does lay into Catholicism. Um and the Dublin Review hates him for it because how dare you! Um and it's remarkable to see because when he goes to Rome, of course, and this is where you really get the the knives come out, and talking about the the Pope and comparing him to a Guy Fork's dummy.

SPEAKER_00 7:05

Each carried his candle up to the Pope, laid it across his two knees to be blessed, took it back again, and then the Pope was taken up, chair and all, and carried round the church. I must say that I never saw anything out of November so like the popular English commemoration of the fifth of that month. A bundle of matches and a lantern would have made it perfect. Nor did the Pope himself at all mar the resemblance, though he has a pleasant and venerable face, for, as this part of the ceremony makes him giddy and sick, he shuts his eyes when it is performed, and having his eyes shut and a great mitre on his head, and his head itself wagging to and fro as they shook him in carrying, he looked as if his mask were going to tumble off. There was certainly nothing solemn or effective in it, and certainly very much that was droll and tawdry.

SPEAKER_03 7:50

I mean, Dickens' religion is is uh an interesting point to think about because he he is Christian, but he is very wary of the the hierarchy of the church and the organization of the church. He goes in Rome to see the uh the Scala Santa, which is the holy steps. There's meant to be the steps that um were in Judas Iscariot's house, and there's a ceremony now, and they still do it where you have to climb up them on your knees on Easter, you know. Um I actually went to Rome myself and I thought, you know what? I'll give it a go. I can tell you now that I'm gonna get hurt. Really hurt. It's okay. And so, you know, dick a second, why are people doing this? What is this remarkable, almost um offensive sort of ceremony where they're climbing up and hurting themselves in this way? But of course, you can't say that about any religion and not expect pushback and an offense ultimately.

SPEAKER_02 8:39

He says so early on about I mean, I hope I am not likely to be misunderstood by professors of the Roman Catholic faith by what's about to happen. But then, of course, like you say, he tears into certain practices of the Roman Catholic Church that he finds ridiculous or inhumane. But an episode that does then contradict it is his kind of admiration for the friar, the episode of the friar and the Frenchman.

SPEAKER_00 9:00

The whole party on board were made merry, but none more so than a loquacious little Frenchman who got drunk in five minutes, and a sturdy cappuccino friar who had taken everybody's fancy mightily, and was one of the best friars in the world, I verily believe. He had a free, open countenance and a rich brown, flowing beard, and was a remarkably handsome man of about fifty.

SPEAKER_03 9:25

There they are in quarantine, and while there they're stuck on this boat waiting to go into the port. They have a few drinks because why not all waiting, and the friars are having a drink as well, and there's little Frenchman having drinks, they're all having great fun together.

SPEAKER_00 9:37

All this had given great delight to the loquacious Frenchman, who gradually patronized the friar very much, and seemed to commiserate him as one who might have been born a Frenchman himself, but for an unfortunate destiny. Although his patronage was such as a mouse might bestow upon a lion, he had a vast opinion of its condescension, and in the warmth of that sentiment occasionally rose on to tiptoe to slap the friar on the back.

SPEAKER_03 10:02

And then quarantine ends, the friar has to go and run a service, and they go, Let's let's have some fun, let's go see the friar. Um and of course now, the friar is there looking fully dignified and just blanks them all.

SPEAKER_00 10:13

There never was anything so perfect as the contemplative way in which the friar allowed his placid gaze to rest on us, his late companions, as if he'd never seen us in his life and didn't see us then. The Frenchman, quite humbled, took off his hat at last, but the friar still passed on, with the same imperturbable serenity, and fading into the crowd was seen no more.

SPEAKER_03 10:37

The other one that that is equally important is when they go again to Rome and the catacombs there, and there's there's another friar there who takes them on a tour around the subterranean graves. And again, you know, he talks with great sincerity about, you know, well, here is the real heart of faith to be found here instead. And so, you know, Dickens is not blind to seeing the dignity in religious figures, even Catholic figures as well. Yeah. Um, but at the same time, when he sees like these widespread ceremonies, he he does kind of draw back and find concerns of it. But Dickens being Dickens, of course, he doesn't say this in a very kind of like a well, it's just my opinion. He he goes for it. Full, you know, full throttle.

SPEAKER_02 11:20

Yeah, I think so. I think, but I do think there is a real risk in his defence that he can be misunderstood, you know, on that. Because yeah, the praise for the friar who blanks them in his kind of surface is so good. Reminds me, Pete, this will be no surprise to you. It reminds me of Henry V. I know thee not, old man, isn't it? You know, you've been kind of joshing around, drinking, having fun, and then suddenly in this moment, you're blanked.

SPEAKER_00 11:42

I know thee not, old man. Fall to thy prayers. Presume not I am the thing I was.

SPEAKER_02 11:48

On the flip side, you know, he talks about some of the monks around, I think, in Rome, being very slovenly and kind of shifty and looking kind of quite idiotic at all the amazing splendour and riches all around them. So there's this strange kind of tension of opposites all the time with him looking at that.

SPEAKER_03 12:07

And the other one as well, I mean, is the Colosseum in Rome, which he adores the Colosseum. I go there every day, he loves it, but also he's aware of the violence there. He says um it's a ruin, God be thanked, a ruin, but a ruin that he goes to every day.

SPEAKER_00 12:21

It's solitude, its awful beauty, and its utter desolation strike upon the stranger like a softened sorrow. To see it crumbling there an inch a year, its walls and arches overgrown with green, its corridors open to the day, the long grass growing in its porches, to see its pit of fight filled up with earth, and the peaceful cross planted in the centre, to climb into its upper halls and look down on ruin, ruin, ruin all about it, the triumphal arches of Constantine, Septimus Severus and Titus, the Roman Forum, the palace of the Caesars, the temples of the old religion fallen down and gone, is to see the ghost of old Rome. Wicked, wonderful old city. It is the most impressive, the most stately, the most solemn, grand, majestic, mournful sight conceivable.

SPEAKER_03 13:16

And it is a strange tension where he's utterly awestruck by it as a building, but conscious of the violence in there too. The glory of the Roman Empire and the horror of the Roman Empire. And in turn, then the gravity and the stretch of the Catholic Church, you know, the both the good and the bad. And he's trying to reconcile these extremes.

SPEAKER_02 13:38

You know, you're mentioning the Colosseum as well, but I f I don't know if you found this, but in the reading of it, I love all the references to landmarks that obviously we still have today. And you have his impression from the 1840s of those landmarks. So for instance, the Colosseum, the ground is kind of earthy, isn't it? I think. And there's a crucifix, I think, isn't it right in the centre? Yeah. Like some sort of acknowledgement of its kind of bloody past or or something.

SPEAKER_03 14:00

And you can and that's still there today. You can see that. I missed it last time I was there.

SPEAKER_02 14:04

I didn't see that.

SPEAKER_03 14:04

No, no, yeah. So I mean, so while I was working on this book, I was lucky to be able to go to I went to Rome, I went to Genoa, I went to Milan. And you're right, it's it's a pleasure because you can go in and see these same sites that he saw as well. Um the Leaning Tower of Pisa, which he thought was a bit small.

SPEAKER_00 14:20

The moon was shining as we approached Pisa, and for a long time we could see behind the wall the leaning tower, all awry in the uncertain light. The shadowy original of the old pictures in school books setting forth the wonders of the world. But like most things connected in their first associations with schoolbooks and school times, it was too small. I felt it keenly. It was nothing like so high above the wall as I'd hoped. It was another of the many deceptions practised by Mr. Harris bookseller at the corner of St. Paul's Churchyard, London. His tower was a fiction, but this was a reality, and by comparison, a short reality. Still, it looked very well.

SPEAKER_03 15:01

Genoa is great because um I mean I went there, I only had one day there, and I was put in touch with somebody who lives in the local area and said, I'll I'll show you around. Oh, that's kind of you. And we walked around for 10 hours, Dominic, going around Genoa. I was like, I'm that's enough now. That's enough. But we saw all the sites, uh, all the places you live. Um, it's great to see the churches you're writing about and get that real sense of the same Rome that Dickens visited. Because even when he went to see it, it was an old country. It's still that old country, you're seeing that heritage, yeah, you know, so much ancient history there as well. Um, and it is nice to be able to walk in Dickens' footsteps. So when you in Genu, did you get to uh St.

SPEAKER_02 15:42

John the Baptist that church there? Because there's something about the legend of the bones of St. John that can calm tempests and things.

SPEAKER_03 15:49

I just wondered if that had carried on at all. Absolutely. Yeah, I mean the real fun one is actually when I went to Rome and there's the uh the bambino he talks about, the Mirax Bambino, which is a small child uh statue that they they take out as a holy effigy and take around to everyone when they're poor. And again, Dickens mocks this because he says, Can you imagine you're you're feeling sick and suddenly you get like an entire horde of friars coming in with a with a baby on a stick, going, feel better, feel better. So I went to this cathedral to see the bambino. No one else is really looking at it, or whatever. It's like an old such like a oh, it's the bambino. And I was completely fanboying over it, and no one else cared. Um the other kind of the key thing here, of course, is the the art, which again, Dickens says, I'm not an expert in art, I won't comment on art. However, exactly. Exactly. And he does he really twist the knife in a point, you know. Um The Last Supper, rubbish. And in and in fairness, he's not saying The Last Supper is rubbish, he's saying the restoration work is rubbish, it's which at the time it was, the 19th century restorations were not to the standards they are now.

SPEAKER_00 16:55

Apart from the damage, it's sustained from damp decay or neglect. It has been so retouched upon and repainted, and that so clumsily, that many of the heads are now positive deformities, with patches of paint and plaster sticking upon them like wens, and utterly distorting the expression. Where the original artist had set that impress of his genius on a face which separated him from meaner painters and made him what he was, succeeding bunglers filling up or painting across seams and cracks have been quite unable to imitate his hand, and putting in some scowls or frowns or wrinkles of their own have blotched and spoiled the work.

SPEAKER_03 17:32

But also you do see that prejudice coming through. He goes to again in Rome, he goes to see St. Peter's, he goes, It's it's all right, St. Paul's is better, back in London.

SPEAKER_02 17:43

He says at a distance, it looks grand, but as you get closer it kind of shrivels.

SPEAKER_03 17:47

What's strange is then when he's outside of Rome, so Venice, he adores Venice, you know, and he praises the artwork in Venice. So there's also an element where he deliberately kind of gets his head caught up, goes, I'm not gonna like this when he's in Rome, and and almost closes his mind to seeing the glory of St. Peter's. Um, whereas elsewhere in Italy he can go, actually, that's a really nice, you know, and he can appreciate it. But there is this sort of this chip on his shoulder about Dickens and art, and partly it's down to his own lack of education there. I mean, you know, not getting into the whole Warren's Blacking factory, but even without that, he didn't go to university, he doesn't have a full education like many of his other literary companions would do in later life. So there is this awareness that he doesn't know about art in the same way they do. Um, and a few years later, in 1853, I want to say, I think it is, he goes to Italy again with the painter Augustus Egg and Walkie Collins. Um, and he writes with great annoyance about Collins, about how he keeps talking about the art, like he knows what he's talking about. Dickens' like, oh, whatever, you know, that this young upstart, what does he know? Um, but there is an insecurity there on Dickens' part about artwork in general, that he doesn't know technically how to talk about it. And so rather than just say, I don't know, he comes out the other way to say, I like that, I don't like that, and you can't tell me differently. You know, what do you critics know? I know what I like, and I'm more confident, in my opinion, being unschooled than you are of all your expert knowledge.

SPEAKER_02 19:14

You saying this, it's kind of making me feel like it's the it's a very human experience of traveling, isn't it, as well, that you get in these pages, because I feel like Dickens goes with his mood everywhere he goes. So, you know, on a good day, this piece, this fresco looks fantastic. On a bad day, who did this? You know, and it's that's very interesting and how he's sometimes quite depressed and and a bit down and the weather's gone a bit funny and rubbish. Because if you're staying there that length of time, you're gonna get the full range of the experience of living there, aren't you?

SPEAKER_03 19:41

And he really misses Genoa when he leaves, he's writing back to his friends then. He's saying how much he misses the small details, you know, the the wicker baskets on his walk, you know, and the the old gentleman who's always brushing the the yard and stuff. And he remembers all the little things. He's really keen to emphasize the human experience. And so the whole time he's walking around, he's saying, ignore that major tourist there. What are the people doing? What about the poverty? And so he he points out the poor. What's the suffering here? Why is it more picturesque with the Italian attire than it would be if we're seeing beggars or the poor back in London? That tension between this great historic tourist attraction, picturesque in all its glory, and the realities of the people living there and how they are sometimes struggling as well. Yeah. And I think one of the most haunting moments is when he goes to the cemetery in It's Modena, I think, and he's walking around, and it's the tall guide who's showing him these remarkable statues in the cemetery, works of art. It's a tourist industry. And in the midst of this, the the tour guy goes, Oh, look, over there, that's where my children are buried. And it's a small, unmarked grave, a grassy plot. And so, oh, sorry for that. Anyway, on to the next artwork. And Dickens is really struck by this moment of this this this tour guide who has his own family buried there and is at the same time showing people around the artwork.

SPEAKER_02 21:05

You saying this about the sort of harshness of the reality. He describes at one point experiencing a bewildering phantasmagoria with all the inconsistency of a dream and all the pain and all the pleasure of an extravagant reality. And there is real horror in this book as well, isn't there? I mean, what something that it's very quickly got through, but there's the execution, which I find really comes out of nowhere and is really Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 21:30

So I mean, Dickens, you know, has already been to a public execution in in England, of course. He writes famously about a hanging that he sees of a criminal. But here in Italy, it's going to be a beheading, and he's not seen a beheading before.

SPEAKER_00 21:43

The place of execution was near the church of San Giovanni Decollato, a doubtful compliment to St. John the Baptist, in one of the impassable backstreets without any footway, of which a great part of Rome is composed. A street of rotten houses which do not seem to belong to anybody and do not seem to have ever been inhabited. Opposite to one of these, a white house, the scaffold was built. An untidy, unpainted, uncouth, crazy looking thing, of course, some seven feet high, perhaps, with a tall gallow-shaped frame rising above it, in which was the knife charged with a ponderous mass of iron, all ready to descend and glittering brightly in the morning sun. Sun, whenever it looked out now and then from behind a cloud. After a short delay, some monks were seen approaching to the scaffold from this church, and above their heads coming on slowly and gloomily the effigy Christ upon the cross canopied with black. This was carried round the foot of the scaffold to the front and turned towards the criminal. That he might see it to the last.

SPEAKER_03 23:03

Dickens goes to some strange tourist spots. I mean in America, he's going to prisons, you know, and insane asylums. He wants to know how things work. Yeah, he likes the Paris morgue as well, doesn't he? That's another thing. Absolutely. As a tourist, he he wants to see the darker side. If you want to know what Rome's like, well go to execution. Um, as well as the church and the ceremonies there.

SPEAKER_02 23:24

Yeah. I mean his impression of Rome is so interesting, isn't it? Because I think they arrive at nighttime, don't they? So and of course they see the big dome.

SPEAKER_00 23:33

We began in a perfect fever to strain our eyes for Rome. And when, after another mile or two, the eternal city appeared, at length in the distance, it looked like I'm half afraid to write the word. 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. I swear that keenly, as I felt the seeming absurdity of the comparison, it was so like London at that distance that if you could have shown me it in a glass, I should have taken it for nothing else.

SPEAKER_02 24:09

He says it's basically London. And then he starts seeing the people in the city look kind of more dangerous and shifty, and you think, well, that could be London again.

SPEAKER_03 24:18

So he's kind of lost his kind of It's the same um complaint we have nowadays. We go we go to any place, and it's all the same shops there, all the same brands. Well, it could be anyway. His complaint at Rome for him feels too modern and normal. Um but then the next day he goes to the Colosseum, he walks to the Roman Forum, and that's the Rome of his imagination to see, to walk in the in the steps of the ancient Caesars and so forth. Um, and a lot of his travel around Italy, it is literary tourism. So, of course, when he goes to Verona, Roman Juliet, he loves it, you know, he's walking along, you know, and all about, ah, and that's where the capellets lived, and that's where Juliet was on the balcony, you know. They're fictional characters sticking out. No, no, that's where it was, and in Venice, like that's where Desdemona was up on the bridge. You're like, no, no, that's but I I actually find it quite nice because bearing in mind the amount of Dickensians now, we've all done it, who who tread in Dickens' footsteps, as I've done with Italy. Dickens is doing it too with Shakespeare, you know. So he's got no leg to stand on, you know. If he can do it, we can do it. And again, he's when he's traveling through, I think it's Carraro and he's thinking about the rock from the Arabian Knights. Always you're seeing these literary references. It's an imaginative tour as much as a real tour for Dickens.

SPEAKER_02 25:32

Yeah, and he admits that when he's in Verona, he reads Romeo and Juliet in his room, doesn't he?

SPEAKER_03 25:36

Absolutely.

SPEAKER_02 25:37

And he just works out, he works out that when Romeo's banished, he's only banished 25 miles away. Which is great. It's like, is that it?

SPEAKER_03 25:45

It's Mantra's only twenty one miles away.

SPEAKER_02 25:46

Come on, it takes away from the drama, so I love that he sort of undercuts himself a little bit.

SPEAKER_00 25:51

I read Romeo and Juliet in my own room at the inn that night. Of course, no Englishman had ever read it there before. And set out for Mantua the next day at sunrise. Which reminded me that Romeo was only banished five and twenty miles after all, which rather disturbed my confidence in his energy and boldness.

SPEAKER_02 26:10

But Carrara is a really interesting one. I actually did an episode on that two years ago, but this is where he really gets involved, doesn't he? Because he's absolutely appalled by the 500-year-old practice of kicking oxen down a mountainside with boulders of marble on their backs and whipping them, and then this collapsing in 12 months.

SPEAKER_03 26:29

So again, I was able to go to Carrara, and it's I mean, the it it it be it really does. The marble um mountains they they they surround and dominate the town. So it is very much a town defined by that industry, and even more so in Dickens' time. And again, it's it's that wonderful contradiction of art and violence because this is a place where all the great Renaissance masters went, you know, Michelangelo, Raphael, Leonardo, they would go there to get the marble, to choose the marble, to work with the marble. So it's got this amazing history. But I say at the same time, this violence of the oxen and the dangers and the the labour involved to get this marble.

SPEAKER_02 27:08

Yeah. Um I don't know if you have many favourite episodes from this, but our our conversation with Joanna about your joint work, the plays of Charles Dickens, made me realise, picking this up, how much theatres are everywhere for him on his tour, but he seeks them out and he goes to them. And I think my my favourite is the uh I think it's from Milan, the puppet show that he goes. That talk seems to be some sort of life of Napoleon.

SPEAKER_00 27:34

I went the other night to see these puppets actor play. It's called St. Helena or the Death of Napoleon. It began by the disclosure of Napoleon, with an immense head, seated on a sofa in his chamber at St. Helena. There was no plot at all, except that a French officer disguised as an Englishman, came to propound a plan of escape and being discovered, was immediately ordered off by Lowe to be hanged. Napoleon was so affected by this catastrophe that he fainted away on the spot, and was carried out by two other puppets. Judging from what followed, it would appear that he never recovered the shock, for the next act showed him in a clean shirt in his bed, where a lady prematurely dressed in mourning brought two little children who kneeled down beside the bedside while he made a decent end, the last word on his lips being Father Lau It was unspeakably ludicrous. Bonaparte's boots were so wonderfully beyond control and did such marvellous things of their own accord, doubling themselves up and getting under tables and dangling in the air, and sometimes skating away with him when he was in full speech. Miss Chances were not rendered the less absurd by a settled melancholy depicted in his face. To put an end to one conference was low, he had to go to a table and read a book, when it was the finest spectacle I ever beheld, to see his body bending over the volume like a boot jack, and his sentimental eyes glaring obstinately into the pit.

SPEAKER_03 28:57

My favourite episode in the whole story, my favourite character in the whole thing, is the goblin of Avignon. That I think that's a remarkable character. Um it's a tour of the the torch chamber of the Inquisition, and there is this swarthy old woman, you know, half woman, half goblin, who tours around and has a real bloodlust as she says, and that's where they mashed the bones, and that's where the hammer hit, you know, and blood on the walls and See, cries Goblin.

SPEAKER_00 29:27

There the furnace was. There they made the irons red hot. Those holes supported the sharp stake on which the tortured persons hung poised dangling with their whole weight from the roof.

SPEAKER_01 29:36

But and Goblin whispers this Monsieur has heard of this tower, yes? Let Monsieur look down then.

SPEAKER_00 29:47

A cold air laden with an earthy smell falls upon the face of Monsieur, for she is opened while speaking a trapdoor in the wall. Monsieur looks in. Downward to the bottom, upward to the top of a steep, dark, lofty tower, very dismal, very dark, very cold. The executioner of the Inquisition, says Goblin, edging in her head to look down also, flung those who were past all further torturing down here.

SPEAKER_01 30:13

But Luque, does Monsieur see the black stains on the wall?

SPEAKER_03 30:18

For all that sense of oh oh she was quite frightful, he writes so much about her and literally hands her the microphone at some point where she's just narrating instead of him and takes over. And it's it's glorious to see this this sort of this um this real life person who so impresses Dickens and almost, well, I think does uh at one point sort of one up him, you know, and take over the narrative and take control of it. She interrupts him at one point. It's utterly remarkable. I could see in their potentially influence with Madame Defarge later on, there's no that that's not um out of the remit. But no, as a character in herself, I adore the goblin. I think she's fantastic.

SPEAKER_02 30:55

Yes, yes, when you think ahead to a tale of two cities and you see that that violence, but you know, that episode of The Goblin and the the Marionette Theatre on the death of Napoleon, it does really illustrate because it crops up quite a lot. Dickens thinks he sees Napoleon's face in various frescoes, doesn't he? What a long shadow the revolution and Napoleonic Wars cast over everywhere he travels there. And it's 30 years later. I find that really fascinating.

SPEAKER_03 31:21

Yeah, and 30 years is not a long time. It's really not a long time, you know. And and he is, he's walking through that Iraq and and yes, seeing the traces of it. Um, I mean, I was just speaking to somebody the other day who'd been to to Vietnam, and they go, Oh, well, of course, you know, because I'm I am a big fan of Apocalypse now. And you think that was that was a long time ago, the Vietnamese War, but people still go with this experience, or you go to Berlin and you go, I want to see Checkpoint Charlie. Napoleon is recent history, you're going to see the echoes of that. Um also, of course, uh Lord Byron. He goes to a hotel where the waiter was very impressed because Lord Byron once went there and tells, well, that's that that's the the bed that Lord Byron used, and that's the wine Lord Byron liked. So again, you've you've always got the sense of what's come before.

SPEAKER_02 32:03

Yeah. I suppose the most striking episode, possibly. I don't know, I make the case for it, see what you think, is the ascent of Vesuvius.

unknown 32:13

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 32:14

I mean, what could you could you set that one up for us a little bit, Pete? What happened? What was he up to? I mean, come on.

SPEAKER_03 32:18

Well, it's Dickens. What is he not up to? Uh opportunity. Yeah, opportunity to to to ascend the volcano, which uh which he does.

SPEAKER_00 32:28

Great sheets of fire are streaming forth, reddening the night with flame, blackening it with smoke, and spotting it with red hot stones and cinders that fly up into the air like feathers and fall down like lead. There is something in the fire and roar that generates an irresistible desire to get nearer to it. We cannot rest long without starting off two of us, on our hands and knees to climb to the brim of the flaming crater and try to look in. Meanwhile the thirty yell as with one voice that it is a dangerous proceeding and call to us to come back, frightening the rest of the party out of their wits, what with their noise and what with the trembling of the thin crust of ground that seems about to open underneath our feet and plunge us in the burning gulf below, which is the real danger if there be any. And what with the flashing of the fire in our faces and the shower of red hot ashes that is raining down and the choking smoke and sulphur, we may well feel giddy and irrational like drunken men, but we contrive to climb to the brim and look down for a moment into the hell of the boiling fire below.

SPEAKER_03 33:26

As others become tired or more fearful, he and a few others go right up to the tip of the crater to look down into it.

SPEAKER_00 33:34

Then we all three come rolling down, blackened and singed and scorched and hot and giddy, and each with his dress alight in half a dozen places.

SPEAKER_03 33:42

Dickens is an endlessly curious person. He wants to see these things. And so he wants to stare into the the the mouth of the volcano.

SPEAKER_02 33:49

But the thing is at this point in 1844, I mean that there's real fire happening and everything because he was in he was down in Pompeii in Herculaneum and he could see smoke coming out of Vesuvius and then, oh let's go up there. Let's go there. Exactly. Apparently, the crater, I think that the summit, I think, is a hundred was a hundred feet higher, had raised a hundred feet in over a month or something because of the recent activity. So it and he comes out, he comes down with his clothes basically singed on on fire and smoking.

SPEAKER_03 34:13

Well, he likes a challenge, yeah. But then as he comes down as well, because they're basically walking down ash, some of the people will then lose their footing, and one guy tumbles all the way down and sort of breaks several limbs and and so forth. He's not afraid to go into unusual places. I mean, either that or again the catacombs under Rome, which again, I mean, I I I was able to go there too, and it is, it's it's a remarkable thing. It's underground labyrinth where the the alleyways are about as wide, if you stretch out your arms from from tip to tip, it's about that wide, at most, sometimes less than that, where all the graves are buried underneath the city. And he says at any point if our guide leaves, we're we're lost here forever. We're not finding a way out again because it's just you know it's it's crisscrossed as well. Um, he's not just content to just have a nice cup of tea, you know, in St. Mark's Square and look around and I you know, he wants to see the real Italy and and the extremes of Italy.

SPEAKER_02 35:02

Yeah. Oh gosh. So so um how what was the experience like for you putting this edition together?

SPEAKER_03 35:10

I really enjoyed it. It's it's a real pleasure to get the opportunity to do such a close focus. What's remarkable is how upset and involved you get about hyphens and commas, you know, like that commas change, what does it mean? You do have to re-evaluate your life sometimes by punctuation.

SPEAKER_02 35:28

What did you do about that? I mean, if you had a newspaper and a letter and the manuscript, or you know, how did you decide which one should stay in the end?

SPEAKER_03 35:35

So this is part of the Oxford Dickens. So with the Oxford Dickens, the general editor has stated that we should be aiming for the first published version, should be the one that has the most authenticity. Now, in the case of the novels, that means the first monthly number or weekly numbers as it came out. That's what we should be honouring as the authoritative version. Now, of Italy, that doesn't work because the first published iteration are these traveling letters, of which there are eight, and then Dickens abandons that and just writes the book. So about two-thirds of the book doesn't appear in the traveling letters. So if we were to honour that as the first edition, you have to do like eight traveling letters and have an appendix twice the size of everything else. So we had to use the Picture from Italy as as the the copy text, the main edition. And the Fry and the Frenchman that you mentioned, that's not in the letters. He adds in later on. So you think, well, that's a glorious thing. And why is it added in? Yeah. Um, I was very keen from the beginning to include maps in this edition. I mean, I I love Italy anyway, so it was really nice to be able to travel Italy with Dickens and have that experience. It's been a really, a really enriching thing to do. Um, and the nature of these works, I mean, they're they're they're academic books. They're not cheap, you know, they're they're intended for research libraries. My hope is that they'll become used for Oxford World classics in years to come. Thank you so much again, Pete. It's been fantastic to talk to you. You're welcome. Thank you.