[Victorian Web Home — Visual Arts —> Illustration —> Marcus Stone —> Next]
Italian Peasants
Marcus Stone
Engraver: E. Dalziel
1862
Wood engraving
8.9 cm wide by 13.3 cm high
"Genoa and its Neighbourhood," Chapter 5 in Dickens's Pictures from Italy in the Illustrated Library Edition, facing 346.
Related Material
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 person who scanned the image and (2) link your document to this URL in a web document or cite the Victorian Web in a print one. ]
With the money collected at a festa, they usually pay for the dressing of the church, and for the hiring of the band, and for the tapers. If there be any left (which seldom happens, I believe), the souls in Purgatory get the benefit of it. They are also supposed to have the benefit of the exertions of certain small boys, who shake money-boxes before some mysterious little buildings like rural turnpikes, which (usually shut up close) fly open on Red-letter days, and disclose an image and some flowers inside.
Just without the city gate, on the Albara Road, is a small house, with an altar in it, and a stationary money-box: also for the benefit of the souls in Purgatory. Still further to stimulate the charitable, there is a monstrous painting on the plaster, on either side of the grated door, representing a select party of souls, frying. One of them has a grey moustache, and an elaborate head of grey hair: as if he had been taken out of a hairdresser's window and cast into the furnace. There he is: a most grotesque and hideously comic old soul: for ever blistering in the real sun, and melting in the mimic fire, for the gratification and improvement (and the contributions) of the poor Genoese.
They are not a very joyous people, and are seldom seen to dance on their holidays: the staple places of entertainment among the women, being the churches and the public walks. They are very good-tempered, obliging, and industrious. Industry has not made them clean, for their habitations are extremely filthy. . . . ["Genoa and Its Neighbourhood," page 346]
Thus, Stone has chosen his subjects not from Dickens's description of an actual elderly and young peasant at the roadside, but rather has combined one of the collection-box boys with the grey-haired "comic old soul," bringing them into the same frame, as if these companions stop to rest on the high road that leads from Albaro (site of the Villa Bagnerello, where the Dickenses first stayed in Genoa), to the main urban centre. However, whereas Dickens describes the Genoese peasants as less than clean, Stone has made both figures look picturesque, albeit (as Dickens suggests) somewhat indolent. This emphasis on actual, working-class people rather than classical ruins and grand Renaissance architecture Francesca Orestano has termed "The New Picturesque":
Dickens's lack of interest in assuring his readers of dutiful groundwork is evident in the fact that Pictures from Italy is singularly poor in references to the Italian travel book palimpsest, apart from twice mentioning Simond's Tour of Italy and Sicily (PI 48, 107) and treating dismissively the relevant Murray guides (PI 17, 189 n.4) as he does in front of Lyons cathedral: "If you would know all about the architecture of this church, or any other, its dates, dimensions, endowments, and history, is it not written in Mr. Murray’s Guide-Book, and may you not read it there, with thanks to him, as I did?" (PI 17). [Orestano, p. 50]
In fact, Dickens, with good commercial sense, in Pictures from Italy was merely responding to trends in travel literature targeting the rising Victorian middle classes, who, like eighteenth-century aristocrats, could afford to undertake Continental Grand Tours. Nineteenth-century travel-guides which such travellers as one sees in Little Dorrit (1855-57) could readily consult for suitable itineraries include Joseph Forsyth's Remarks on the Antiquities of Italy (1802-03), William Rose's Letters from the North of Italy (1819), Saussure's Voyages dans les Alpes (1779), and notably John Murray's Handbooks for Travellers (from 1836). Such handy references for the Victorian traveller on the Continent contained much historical, descriptive, or geological information about foreign sites through first-hand narrative accounts of actual tours. No wonder, then, that Dickens felt he could viably fund a year away from high-priced London by contracting to write a travel-book for Chapman and Hall. As was the case with other such books published in the previous decade, Dickens has deliberately departed from the kind of eighteenth-century narrative format which Laurence Sterne's 1768 novella A Sentimental Journey through France and Italy exemplifies. Although Dickens does not create a "travel fiction" like Sterne's, he does instruct readers on a variety of subjects and includes descriptions of sites which tourists commonly visited, and injects considerable autobiographical material.
Cohen, Jane Rabb. "The Illustrators of Our Mutual Friend and The Mystery of Edwin Drood." Chapter 16, "Marcus Stone." Charles Dickens and His Original Illustrators. Columbus: Ohio Sate U. P., 1980. Pp. 204-209.
Dickens, Charles. Pictures from Italy. Illustrated by Samuel Palmer. London: Chapman and Hall, 1846; rpt., 1850.
Dickens, Charles. American Notes for General Circulation and Pictures from Italy in Works. Illustrated by Marcus Stone. Illustrated Library Edition. London: Chapman and Hall: 1862, rpt. 1874.
Dickens, Charles. The Adventures of Oliver Twist, also, Pictures from Italy, American Notes for General Circulation. Illustrated by Sol Eytinge, Junior. Diamond Edition. Boston: Ticknor & Fields, 1867.
Kitton, Frederic G. "Marcus Stone." Dickens and His Illustrators. London: George Redway, 1899. Amsterdam: S. Emmering, 1972. Rpt. Honolulu: U. Press of the Pacific, 2004. Pp. 192-203.
Orestano, Francesca. "Charles Dickens and Italy: The 'New Picturesque'.” Dickens and Italy: Little Dorrit and Pictures from Italy, ed. Michael Hollington and Francesca Orestano. Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars, 2009. Pp. 49-67.
Paroissien, David, ed. A Companion to Dickens. Hoboken: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011.
Last modified 21 January 2019