A Sketch at the Carnival
Townley Green, artist
Edward Dalziel, engraver
1880
composite woodblock engraving
Framed, 7.5 cm high by 5.1 cm wide
The section on Rome in Dickens's
Scanned image and text by Philip V. Allingham.
Bibliographical Note
Although the 1908 anthology of Household Edition illustrations in the Chapman and Hall series of the 1870s, Scenes and Characters from the Works of Charles Dickens, indicates that Gordon Thomson rather than Towneley Green was responsible for this composite woodblock illustration executed by Edward Dalziel, the original 1880 volume illustrated by Thomson contains seven full-page illustrations, but does not include this particular engraving, which the Collier edition ascribes to Green. As F. G. Kitton notes, Townley Green made his mark in the 1868 Chapman and Hall Library Edition of the Christmas Stories reprinted from All the Year Round and Household Words with fresh illustrations by such Sixties artists as F. A. Fraser, H. French, E. G. Dalziel, J. Mahoney, and Henry Townley Green's brother, Charles — "fourteen wood-cuts in all" (221).
Passage Illustrated: Rome at Carnival
Still, carriages on carriages, dresses on dresses, colours on colours, crowds upon crowds, without end. Men and boys clinging to the wheels of coaches, and holding on behind, and following in their wake, and diving in among the horses’ feet to pick up scattered flowers to sell again; maskers on foot (the drollest generally) in fantastic exaggerations of court-dresses, surveying the throng through enormous eye-glasses, and always transported with an ecstasy of love, on the discovery of any particularly old lady at a window; long strings of Policinelli, laying about them with blown bladders at the ends of sticks; a waggon-full of madmen, screaming and tearing to the life; a coach-full of grave mamelukes, with their horse-tail standard set up in the midst; a party of gipsy-women engaged in terrific conflict with a shipful of sailors; a man-monkey on a pole, surrounded by strange animals with pigs’ faces, and lions’ tails, carried under their arms, or worn gracefully over their shoulders; carriages on carriages, dresses on dresses, colours on colours, crowds upon crowds, without end. Not many actual characters sustained, or represented, perhaps, considering the number dressed, but the main pleasure of the scene consisting in its perfect good temper; in its bright, and infinite, and flashing variety; and in its entire abandonment to the mad humor of the time — an abandonment so perfect, so contagious, so irresistible, that the steadiest foreigner fights up to his middle in flowers and sugar-plums, like the wildest Roman of them all, and thinks of nothing else till half-past four o’clock, when he is suddenly reminded (to his great regret) that this is not the whole business of his existence, by hearing the trumpets sound, and seeing the dragoons begin to clear the street. [Chapter Eleven, "Rome," pp. 119-120]
Commentary
This illustration from the P. F. Collier re-printing of the Chapman and Hall Household Edition of Pictures from Italy, published in a single volume with Dickens's other travelogue, American Notes for General Circulation, is intended to complement the author's impressions of the last two days of the carnival that he witnessed at Rome's Piazza del Popolo and the Corso just prior to Lent. Dickens finds the controlled anarchy both seductive and ridiculous: "an abandonment so perfect, so contagious, so irresistible, that the steadiest foreigner fights up to his middle in flowers and sugar-plums" (120). The artist undoubtedly chose the scene for its strong visual appeal and verve, and offered it as a sharp rebuke of the Picturesque "Grand Tour" architectural scenes of illustrators such as Samuel Palmer.
Thomson's Illustrations for Dickens's Pictures from Italy (1880)
- The Malle Post [frontispiece]
- Playing at Mora
- The Church and the World
- An Italian Dream
- Artists' Models
- Priests and Monks
- Pictures from Italy
Related Material, including Italy in Other Editions, 1850-1910
- Samuel Palmer — The Colosseum [sic] of Rome
- Marcus Stone — Italian peasants
- Marcus Stone — In the Catacombs
- Harry Furniss — The Guide in the Catacombs
- Charles Dickens, the traveler — places he visited
- Charles Dickens, 1843 daguerrotype by Unbek in America; the earliest known photographic portrait of the author
Nast's Scenes of Rome from The American Household Edition (1878)
Above: Thomas Nast's realistic sketch of religious tourists and genuine pilgrims visiting the site so many Christian executions, The Cross in he Centre of the Coliseum. [Click on image to enlarge it.]
Above: Thomas Nast's Leaving Rome is a realistic sketch of the Dickenses in their modern carriage, suggestive of foreign affluence. The American cartoonist contrasts the stasis of foregrounded ruins of the classical city and the modern-day beggars, with the Renaissance dome of St. Peter's looming in the background and the speeding Victorian equipage, right. [Click on image to enlarge it.]
References
Dickens, Charles. Pictures from Italy and American Notes. Illustrated by A. B. Frost and Gordon Thomson. London: Chapman and Hall, 1880. Pp. 1-381.
Dickens, Charles. Works."Collier's Unabridged Edition." New York: P. F. Collier, 1880, Vol. III, p. 236. (These illustrations originally appeared in the British Household Edition of 1880.)
Dickens, Charles. Pictures from Italy and American Notes. Illustrated by A. B. Frost and Gordon Thomson. London: Chapman and Hall, 1880. Pp. 1-381.
Kitton, Frederic G. "Appendix I: Illustrators of the Cheap Editions." Dickens and His Illustrators: : Cruikshank, Seymour, Buss, "Phiz", Cattermole, Leech, Doyle, Stanfield, Maclise, Tenniel, Frank Stone, Landseer, Palmer, Topham, Marcus Stone, and Luke Fildes; with twenty-two portraits and facsimiles of seventy original drawings now reproduced for the first time. London: George Redway, 1899. Pp. 219-226.
Pictures from Italy. Scenes and Characters from the Works of Charles Dickens; being eight hundred and sixty-six drawings, by Fred Barnard, Hablot Knight Browne (Phiz); J. Mahoney; Charles Green; A. B. Frost; Gordon Thomson; J. McL. Ralston; H. French; E. G. Dalziel; F. A. Fraser, and Sir Luke Fildes; printed from the original woodblocks engraved for "The Household Edition." London: Chapman and Hall, 1908.
Last modified 10 May 2019