Pictures from Italy

Abstract

Dickens’ second travel book aroused less interest than his first, and it is not a work that many who have once read it will be impatient to re-read. It was the outcome of his sojourn and his extensive travels in Italy in 1844–5 — experiences that were to be drawn upon more memorably in the next decade in the Italian scenes of Little Dorrit. Before leaving Genoa in June 1945 Dickens was already entertaining the notion of another travel book. American Notes had been partly based on the journal-letters written to Forster, and during his time in Italy Dickens had been sending to England material of the same kind; but he was puzzled as to how best they could be shaped into a book — as he told Forster on 7 June 1845, ‘I cannot for the life of me devise any plan of using them to my own satisfaction, and yet think entirely with you that in some form I ought to use them.’