Past bridges, where there were idlers too, loitering and looking over

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Maurice Greiffenhagen, R.A. (1862-1931)

1898

Photogravure

9.1 cm wide 13.8 cm high

Volume XX, 84, in Dickens's Pictures from Italy in the Co-operative Publication Society Edition

Terry-Lynn Johnson Collection

Image scan and text by Philip V. Allingham

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Passage Illustrated

"At sunset, when I was walking on alone, while the horses rested, I arrived upon a little scene, which, by one of those singular mental operations of which we are all conscious, seemed perfectly familiar to me, and which I see distinctly now. There was not much in it. In the blood red light, there was a mournful sheet of water, just stirred by the evening wind; upon its margin a few trees. [Chapter VI, "Bologna by Night"]

In the foreground was a group of silent peasant girls leaning over the parapet of a little bridge, and looking, now up at the sky, now down into the water; in the distance, a deep bell; the shade of approaching night on everything. If I had been murdered there, in some former life, I could not have seemed to remember the place more thoroughly, or with a more emphatic chilling of the blood; and the mere remembrance of it acquired in that minute, is so strengthened by the imaginary recollection, that I hardly think I could forget it.

More solitary, more depopulated, more deserted, old Ferrara, than any city of the solemn brotherhood! The grass so grows up in the silent streets, that any one might make hay there, literally, while the sun shines. But the sun shines with diminished cheerfulness in grim Ferrara; and the people are so few who pass and re-pass through the places, that the flesh of its inhabitants might be grass indeed, and growing in the squares. [Chapter VI, "Through Bologna and Ferrara"]

Bibliography

Dickens, Charles. American Notes and Pictures from Italy. Edited by Andrew Lang. Illustrated by Maurice Greiffenhagen. The Gadshill Edition. 32 vols. London: Chapman and Hall; New York: Charles Scribner's, 1898. Volume 28.

Dickens, Charles. Works. Photogravure-Illustrated Edition. New York and London: Co-operative Publication Society, [n. d., 1912?].

Created 12 August 2012

Last modified last modified 28 January 2025