Changing Notes Into Pictures: An American Frame for Dickens's Italy (Critical Essay‪)‬

In the early pages of Pictures from Italy, Dickens's account of a year there and in the surrounding area published in volume form in May of 1846, he tells his audience that "these are my first impressions honestly set down; and how they changed, I will set down too" (30). (1) No passage remotely comparable appears in his 1842 American Notes: virtually no emphasis is given in the Notes to anything fleeting or changeable or idiosyncratic about Dickens's account of his journey to the United States. In this essay, I attempt to account for this dramatic shift in presentation and its relation to its subject by reading Pictures from Italy against American Notes, focusing on passages where they treat similar topics, most significantly landscapes, crowds, art (mostly architectural), and public entertainment. I suggest that this change is connected to the new preoccupation in Pictures with always moving on to a "finer scene of desolation" (113) and with the ruin and decay that dominate Dickens's impressions throughout--even to the very last lines --of the later book. In American Notes the stunning difference between what he expects to see and what he thinks when he does see is the occasion for every reaction from horror to a sense of absurdity, but a sense of disappointment and unease is always involved. The very opening line of Notes registers just such a disappointment about the size of his accommodations on board ship: "I shall never forget the one-fourth serious and three-fourths comical astonishment, with which, on the morning of the third of January eighteen-hundred-and-forty-two, I opened the door of, and put my head into, a 'state-room' on board the Britannia steam-packet" (1). The comic-serious proportions would invert before two months had passed. But from the start, Dickens's narrative persona in American Notes never wavers in the confidence of its assessments, even though a dominant theme in the chronicle of Dickens's visit to the United States in 1842 is his failure to find the "Republic of [the] Imagination" he had anticipated. He nevertheless proceeds with utter confidence in the veracity of his on-the-spot observations, interpretations, and generalizations.