Abstract
Book review of Pictures from Italy by Charles Dickens, Pete Orford (ed.), Oxford University Press, 2025.
Unlike Dickens's trip to America in 1842, his Italian sojourn was not designed to introduce the Inimitable Boz to a new section of his adoring public. He made the trip in a private capacity, with the hope that time away from England, and rest from the relentless grind of serial publication, would be restorative. Pictures from Italy, as Pete Orford notes in his meticulous new edition of the literary product of this trip, is neither travelogue nor guidebook, but an odd generic hybrid. Orford guides the reader through the work's strangeness in his engaging "Essay on the Text", in which he outlines the many factors that combine to make the work atypical.