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Household Edition: Uncaptioned Frontispiece
Thomas Nast
1877
composite woodblock engraving
vignette, 18.5 cm high by 13.3 cm wide; page, 17.5 cm wide by 24.5 cm high
The Works of Charles Dickens, "Household Edition": Pictures from Italy, Sketches, and American Notes. New York. Harper & Brothers, Franklin Square.
Scanned image and text by Philip V. Allingham.
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. . . 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! ["A Rapid Diorama," page 82]
Perhaps because the Household Edition of Pictures from Italy appeared as an intact volume rather than in serial instalments, Thomas Nast utilizes his opening wood-engraving as a visual overture to the work rather than as a realisation of an early moment in the text. In fact, it seems to prepare readers for Dickens's summing up of his experiences in Italy as within the frame Nast has included all of the peninsula's iconic images, all of which readers (even those who had never visited Italy) would have recognised: a Venetian gondola and pier in the foreground (although this was the last major city Dickens visited); the leaning tower of Pisa, Rome's Column of Marcus Aurelius, the Duomo of Florence, the Coliseum, the Pantheon (in the very centre of the composition), the triumphal arch of Constantine, sundry obelisks, towers, monumental entrance-ways, and bridges. The impression is at once surrealistic and overwhelming as readers struggle to identify and codify each component, almost missing the shadowy figure of Mount Vesuvius in the very background. For an American tourist used to the modern grid pattern of major American cities, the vicos, lanes, and byways of Italian cities must have been confusing and even daunting.
Dickens, Charles. Chapter I, "The Reader's Passport." Pictures from Italy, Sketches by Boz, and American Notes. Illustrated by A. B. Frost and Thomas Nast. The Household Edition. New York: Harper and Brothers, 1877. Pp. 9-10.
Dickens, Charles. Pictures from Italy and American Notes. Illustrated by A. B. Frost and Gordon Thomson. London: Chapman and Hall, 1880. Pp. 1-381.
Last modified 5 May 2019