A Vineyard Scene
Samuel Palmer, RWS (1805-1881)
Wood-engraving
13.3 cm by 7.4 cm (5 ¼ by 3 ⅞ inches), vignetted.
Charles Dickens's Pictures from Italy (1846), page 270.
[Click on image to enlarge it.]
Scanned image and text by Philip V. Allingham.
[You may use this image without prior permission for any scholarly or educational purpose as long as you (1) credit the photographer and (2) link your document to this URL in a web document or cite the Victorian Web in a print one.]
Passage Illustrated: A Vineyard outside Florence
Let us look back on Florence while we may, and when its shining Dome is seen no more, go travelling through cheerful Tuscany, with a bright remembrance of it; for Italy will be the fairer for the recollection. The summer-time being come: and Genoa, and Milan, and the Lake of Como lying far behind us: and we resting at Faido, a Swiss village, near the awful rocks and mountains, the everlasting snows and roaring cataracts, of the Great Saint Gothard: hearing the Italian tongue for the last time on this journey: let us part from Italy, with all its miseries and wrongs, affectionately, in our admiration of the beauties, natural and artificial, of which it is full to overflowing, and in our tenderness towards a people, naturally well-disposed, and patient, and sweet-tempered. Years of neglect, oppression, and misrule, have been at work, to change their nature and reduce their spirit; miserable jealousies, fomented by petty Princes to whom union was destruction, and division strength, have been a canker at their root of nationality, and have barbarized their language; but the good that was in them ever, is in them yet, and a noble people may be, one day, raised up from these ashes. Let us entertain that hope! And let us not remember Italy the less regardfully, because, in every fragment of her fallen Temples, and every stone of her deserted palaces and prisons, she helps to inculcate the lesson that the wheel of Time is rolling for an end, and that the world is, in all great essentials, better, gentler, more forbearing, and more hopeful, as it rolls! [Chapter XII, "Florence," pp. 268-269]
Related Material
Bibliography
Dickens, Charles. "Rome." Pictures from Italy. The Vignette Illustrations on Wood, by Samuel Palmer. London: Bradbury and Evans, 1846. Pp. 165-232.
Dickens, Charles. Pictures from Italy and American Notes for General Circulation. Illustrated by Marcus Stone. The Illustrated Library Edition. London: Chapman and Hall, 1874.
Victorian
Web
Illus-
tration
Samuel
Palmer
Next
Created 5 February 2009 Last modified 4 July 2023