Dickens Pictures From Italy: The Politics of the New Picturesque

Abstract

Examines Pictures from Italy as a key text in the formation of a distinctively Victorian understanding of the picturesque. Claims that, throughout his account of his residence in Italy, Dickens highlights his indebtedness to this culturally dominant mode of viewing and undertakes a systematic critique of it, emphasizing its detachment from reality, its inadequacy to the modern condition, and its apparent indifference to human suffering and social stagnation. Argues his critique culminates in the call for a “new picturesque” based on sympathetic engagement rather than detached connoisseurship, a gesture paralleled in the work of a number of Dickens’ contemporaries, most notably John Ruskin and George Eliot. Suggests the radical and humanitarian impulse behind this call for a “new picturesque” is compromised by its mystification of the causes of the social inequality and personal division it appears to deprecate.