"God Be Thanked: A Ruin!" the Rejection of Nostalgia in Pictures from Italy ("Pictures from Italy" by Charles Dickens) (Critical Essay‪)‬

Dickens's letter to Count D'Orsay, written shortly after his family's arrival in Genoa in the summer of 1844, and which he would borrow from in Pictures from Italy, is a striking articulation of those aspects of Italian cultural life that Dickens most recoiled from: "lagging" and "halting," according to him; apparently unable to embrace "progress, motion" or "advancement"; trapped in a kind of stasis, a country in which time had "stopped centuries ago." This is not to say that Dickens was not awed by the Roman past: it has been well documented that, like Byron before him, he was deeply moved by the Coliseum in Rome, overwhelmed by "Its solitude, its awful beauty, and its utter desolation" (Pictures from Italy 117). Less often reported, though, is his subsequent reflection on the Coliseum: "GOD be thanked: a ruin" (118). A sense of awe at Rome's magnificent, bloody past, "the old butchery of Rome" (118), is sharply tempered by a determination to embrace modern Italy. Already, in Pictures from Italy, Dickens firmly aligned himself with modernity and modernization. Pictures from Italy needs to be understood alongside Dickens's other writings of the early 1840s. It was published, for example, five years after a series of radical squibs that he had written for the Examiner, the most memorable of them being his new version of "The Fine Old English Gentleman," "to be said or sung at all Conservative dinners." In this lampoon--and I think it is worth our while to take a glance at it--his demeanor towards the past is uncomplicatedly satirical: