Dickens expanded his horizons and boosted his fanbase by venturing overseas – but global fame came with a cost
WORDS: SPENCER MIZEN
From the fog-bound coastal marshes of Kent in Great Expectationsand the frostbitten streets of London in A Christmas Carol to the austere brutality of the workhouse in Oliver Twist, Charles Dickens left us some of the most enduring portraits of life in Victorian Britain. The vast majority of his best-known characters were born and bred in Britain and lived their lives in backdrops and cityscapes that were unmistakably British.
Yet, for all that, Dickens was not a man whose horizons ended at Britain’s borders. Here was an author who spent a great deal of his adult life engaged in foreign travel. And these travels would not only give Dickens a fresh, international perspective on his homeland, but also inform his novels.
Dickens lived in a period when, thanks to advances in industrialisation, travel was entering the orbit of more and more middle and upper class Victorians. “The world,” he is reported as remarking “was so much smaller than we thought it; we were all so connected... without knowing it; people supposed to be far apart were so constantly elbowing each other.”
And he was determined to explore this “smaller” world for himself. That wanderlust drew him, inevitably, to continental Europe. Dickens crossed the Channel multiple times in the 1840s and 50s, training his sharp eye for the vagaries of the human condition on the residents of France, Italy and Switzerland.
ON THE CONTINENT
Perhaps Dickens’s best-known European escapade was a grand tour of Italy with his family in 1844. His Italian adventures took him to Milan, Rome, Florence, Pisa (where he went up the leaning tower) and Naples, from where he climbed Vesuvius. For the most part, he was entranced by what he saw. He fell in love with “pleasant Verona... with its beautiful old palaces” and was captivated by the vivacious street carnivals and the costumes that he encountered.
However, on a visit to the Santa Maria delle Grazie in Milan, he was less impressed by Leonardo da Vinci’s masterpiece The Last Supper– or, at least, the clumsy attempts to restore it. This, he reported in his 1846 travelogue Pictures from Italy, had evidently been performed by a band of “bunglers”.
Few who’ve read 1859’s A Tale of Two Cities will be surprised to learn that Dickens was so
