Dickens On Travel

1. Auflage 2024
ISBN: 978-1-84391-995-7
Verlag: Hesperus Press Ltd.
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, Band 9, 104 Seiten

Reihe: On Series

As a popular author, Dickens sought to acquaint his readers with extraordinary and alien topics, be they of human interaction or foreign climes. His travels took him to Italy, France, Switzerland and America. This volume presents a variety of key excerpts and essays written by Dickens on the virtues and follies of travelling. Recalling an age when travel meant greater investment, both of time and emotion, and spanning widely varied modes of transport, Dickens' writings place emphasis on the experience of the journey, the people encountered and the sights absorbed. As a writer who strongly believed in tangible locations, and whose writings are so marked by descriptions reliant upon thorough knowledge of the surroundings, Dickens' thoughts on travel provide an insight into the landscape of his novels.

Charles Dickens is one of England's most important literary figures. His works enjoyed enormous success in his day?and are still regarded as among the most popular and widely read classics of?all time.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Dickens, Charles

Leseproben

Introduction

As a writer Dickens wanted his efforts to not only entertain his readers, but educate and benefit them as well. In the preface to The Pickwick Papers he concludes that ‘if any of his imperfect descriptions, while they afford amusements in the perusal, should induce only one reader to think better of his fellow men, and to look upon the brighter and more kindly side of human nature, he would indeed be proud and happy to have led to such a result.’ The champion of the masses, Dickens’ novels and articles encouraged the reader to journey alongside the narrator and characters, broadening their own horizons as they did so, and this last aspect was an idea taken up literally in Dickens’ own travels and subsequent accounts of such adventures. His talent of observation, of both people and places, lends an immediate advantage to his travel writing as he reports on the sights and sounds around him.

This is evident in Dickens’ earliest writing, Sketches by Boz, from which is taken the first article collected here, ‘The Last Cab Driver and the First Omnibus Cad’ (1836). As a young man his experience was still limited to his home country, but the sketches are an encouragement to look again at the sights around us and see the stories that are otherwise taken for granted. After all, the everyday and exotic are defined by where we originate from, and just as the Tower of Pisa might prove otherworldly to an Englishman, so the Hackney cabs of London can be just as worthy of attention to those unfamiliar with them. Dickens faithfully conveys the experience of transport in the nineteenth-century metropolis with trademark humour and admiration for the rogues he identifies, fleshing out the past with the sordid reality of the characters who inhabited it, and the legacy of the piece is that, whilst redefining the everyday for his contemporaries, to the modern reader it provides a detailed snapshot of travel in a past age.

Another detailed account of yesterday’s transport is provided in the second article ‘The Passage Out’, taken from American Notes (1842), where Dickens gives a very subjective, intimate and truthful account of travelling by steamer. Though Dickens’ travels to both America and Italy would result in published works, the reader is left with no doubt that both these journeys were decidedly for pleasure rather than business: American Notes and Pictures from Italy have a very personal, individual feel about them. After all, Dickens was aware that there were already a number of travel guides available, and did not try to compete with this ‘stock of information’, as he called it, by producing definitive guides of where to go. Instead he delighted in seeing the places he wanted to see, often going off the beaten track; his visit to America involved tours around prisons and asylums. His writing has as much to say about human nature as it does about the new world he visited, and the pace of the transatlantic journey in ‘The Passage Out’ is underlined and enhanced by the dynamics of himself, the crew and his fellow passengers.

But occasionally his fellow men did not warm to being part of Dickens’ writings. Though dubbed ‘Mr Popular Sentimentality’ by Trollope, Dickens’ observations were also interpreted as caustic or hostile, especially when writing of abroad. But Dickens was simply applying the same skills of observation he used in his own country, and his willingness to poke fun at foreigners merely reflected his same willingness to poke fun at his own countrymen,

As I have never, in writing fiction, had any disposition to soften what is ridiculous or wrong at home, I hope (and believe) that the good-humoured people of the United States are not generally disposed to quarrel with me for carrying the same usage abroad.

Dickens’ naivety of international relations was revealed when the ‘good-humoured people’ of pre-civil war America were disposed to quarrel with Dickens’ account of his travels abroad; little wonder given his horror at the slave trade and his mocking of the New World’s sense of self-importance. The subsequent furore influenced Dickens to affirm his disinterestedness when writing his next travel fiction, Pictures from Italy (1843). He took especial care in the introduction to further distance himself from the authoritative style of other travel guides, making it clear that these were only his own impressions, ‘a series of faint reflections – mere shadows in the water’, which he invited the reader to share. Though he marvelled at what he perceived as the gaudiness of Roman Catholic rituals, on the whole he abstained from criticism of the country and the result is a work which is very much focused on the narrator’s personal experience and interests. The extract here, ‘By Verona, Mantua and Milan’, shows the author’s own preoccupations, with his love of Shakespeare dominating his trip to Verona, his encounter with a cicerone occupying his impressions of Mantua, and his trip to Milan giving way to discussions of art. The narrative style is very conversational, Dickens’ triumph as a travel writer being to invite us in as a friend to listen to his holiday tales.

Indeed, the travel writing and non-fiction work which Dickens produced, freed from the necessity to focus on fictional characters and plots, is as close as he got to a published autobiography. Given the way in which Dickens foregrounds himself in these accounts, it is therefore important for the modern reader to remind themselves of exactly who is telling the story. The popular image of Dickens to the modern reader is the fatherly figure with the beard and moustache, yet this is a direct result of the publicity photographs distributed during his second tour of America in 1867–9. For readers of Sketches by Boz, American Notes, Pictures from Italy, and his journals, the enduring image during this time was the 1838 portrait by Daniel Maclise that appeared in Nicholas Nickleby, when Dickens was a young man in his late twenties. Though less familiar now than the bearded Dickens, nonetheless the image of the younger Dickens is far more appropriate to his travel writing, as his first voyages to America and Italy were undertaken while he was in his early thirties: we are therefore dealing with the writings of a young man out to see the world, with all the enthusiasm and naivety we might expect of such a traveller.

It is interesting therefore to compare the two articles A Flight (1851) and The Calais Night Mail (1863), which recount the same journey to France but as told by two different people; the first experienced by Charles Dickens, thirty-nine year old author of comic fiction who had just completed his middle novel, David Copperfield, and the second written by Charles Dickens, fifty-one year old literary celebrity, engaged on reading tours across the United Kingdom. Consequently, while each journey is similar, both referring to the train across, the ferry, the customs office, and those first moments in France, the two accounts contrast in tone. The first author is both excited and excitable, wondering at the marvel of modern transport and the speed with which he can travel to Paris, while the second author regards his earlier self as ‘a maundering young wretch’ and now travels with both familiarity and weariness; he is inherently tired of travelling, beginning his journey with a wish to stay put in the comfortable surroundings of Dover, then ending with a sense of relief to be in the comfortable surroundings of Paris.

Beyond the immediate publication of his travels in non-fiction, Dickens’ experiences abroad also provided fuel for his novels. Dickens consistently used first-hand knowledge of locations in which the adventures took place, hence so many of his novels occurring within London and the surrounding area. Consequently, whenever his characters go abroad, their journeys are limited to those places within Dickens’s own experience. The advantage is an intimate knowledge of setting and scene that Dickens used to complement his adventures and comment upon the emotional journeys of the characters. In trying to escape the realities of the past, the Dorrit family holiday in the

fantastical world of Venice that Dickens had dubbed ‘An Italian Dream’; both they and David Copperfield take solace in the Swiss Alps that Dickens knew first hand to be a place of escape and recluse. Travel could also be relied upon to add spice and interest to the novel; when the sales of Martin Chuzzlewit began to dwindle, Dickens sent his hero to America to win back his audience by trading on the interest aroused in foreign climes.

But moreover, just as travel provided a source of interest in fiction, so too did fiction inspire enthusiasm for travel, not least of all for Dickens. He once wrote that ‘When the wind is blowing and the sleet or rain is driving against the dark windows, I love to sit by the fire, thinking of what I have read in books of voyage and travel.’ He added that ‘such books have had a strong fascination for my mind from my earliest childhood’ and we can see in his travels how his love of fiction and adventure influence his perception of the world around him. For Dickens, Verona is the home of Romeo and Juliet, and Shakespeare’s language is used throughout to comment upon the sights he sees, just as the Arabian Nights are upheld by Dickens throughout his travel writing as a treasure of marvels which the exotic world...