FRANCESCA ORESTANO

THE MAGIC LANTERN AND THE CRYSTAL PALACE: DICKENS AND THE LANDSCAPE OF FICTION

Critics who assessed Dickens’s work in his times gave clear hints as

to the visual quality of his fiction. Nicknamed the “Soul of Hogarth”, “the Cruikshank of writers”, “the literary Teniers of the metropolis”, Dickens was consistently seen as the equivalent of contemporary paint-ers such as Prout, Wilkie, Landseer, Maclise and Frank Stone. According to his reviewers, he was either “the Constable of fiction” or a follower of the Dutch landscape school; his art was associated with that of the Pre-Raphaelite school of painting, but he was likened as well to a “taker of daguerreotypes”, of “sun-pictures” and photographs1. As indications of the strong visual appeal and quality of Dickens’s fiction, these critical evaluations demand a specific assessment of the pictorial techniques and the visual media which interact with the conventions of literary realism. Within the broader cultural area, there was a fund of mutually shared experience which not only rendered this kind of critical response possible, but may also have guided the author towards particular tex-tual choices within the fabric of his fiction. The fund referred to, already explored in some major studies conflating visual and verbal textuality2, belongs to the tradition of eighteenth-century landscape painting, structured by picturesque aesthetics: the fashion for optical entertain-ments and devices, such as the panorama and the diorama, or the daguerreotype and the stereoscope, increasingly popular in Victorian

1 Collins (1971: 5-6) pointed out that the effect of the visual media on Victorian fic-

tion was an aspect of criticism whose “aesthetic bearings […] have still […] to be adequately explored.” The 1980s and 1990s have promoted a lively debate on the subject, to which the following notes bear evidence.

2 Between Peter Conrad (1973) and Carol T. Christ and John O.Jordan (1995), a re-orientation in the critical approach to Victorian studies has been argued by Jonathan Crary (1990), by problematizing the act of seeing as part of a cultural construction related to literary production as well as to the visual arts. Before Crary, Meisel (1983) has extensively covered the area of Victorian visuality, exploring paintings, theatricals and illustrated novels, arguing for the interaction of pictorialism and narrative.

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mass culture, takes hold of the collective imagination by exploiting the already-existing literary capital:

The Phantasmagoria, (as now exhibiting in London with universal ap-

plause), including a variety of Astonishing Appearances, by the power of […] optical and mechanical illusions […] has engaged the attention of the first people of distinction in the Metropolis, and is become the subject of admiration for the most learned […]. The optical part of the exhibition will introduce the Phantoms or Apparitions of the Dead or Absent, […] such as Imagination alone has hitherto painted them, occasionally assuming the Figure and most perfect Resemblance of the Heroes and other distin-guished Characters of past and present times.3

One of the many posters advertising an optical exhibition, here indi-

cates the increasing presence and hold over the popular imagination of “Figures”, “Heroes” and “Characters” whose stories are equally im-planted in the visual and the verbal tradition. The narrative quality provided by the magic lanterns, or by the more sophisticated presenta-tion offered by the dissolving view with a double-lens machine, is obviously determined by the cultural resonance of the literary plots these slide sequences illustrate. The Bible, nursery tales, Shakespeare, Bunyan’s Pilgrim Progress, Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, Sir Walter Scott, the brothers Grimm’s fables, and indeed Dickens, are just a few out of a long list of literary authors whose names appear in the catalogues of painted glass plates and slides, issued throughout the nineteenth century by English firms such as Carpenter & Westley, W.C.Hughes in London, Bamforth in Yorkshire, or commissioned by the Royal Poly-technic Insitution of London, between 1838 and 1881.4 Yet the list of literary works translated from the verbal into the visual text makes it impossible to disregard, conversely, the amount of inspiration Victorian writers derive from the presence of these “magic” competitors. Critical studies in this specific area point out that “This consistent interest in visuality makes a great deal of Victorian prose “modernist” well before the visual arts”5.

3 Carlo Alberto Zotti Minici (1998). Plate 43. Poster for a phantasmagoria exhibition,

London, 1802. 4 In the 1850s photographic glass slides superseded the old hand- painted glass

slide. See Steve Humphries (1989: 24-25), Carlo Alberto Zotti Minici (1988) and Richard Altick (1978).

5 A statement specifically related to the fact that “Dickens’s novels are also perspec-tival reflections on the problematics of empirical vision far more complicated than the woodcuts and engravings meant to illustrate them”. See Susan R. Horton, (1995: 1-26). Also Asa Briggs (1990: 116-123) in ch. 3, “The Philosophy of the Eye: Spectacles, Cam-eras, and the New Vision”, pp.116-123, discusses the impact of the new optical instru-ments on Victorian writers, and particularly on Dickens’s fiction.

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My starting point is the scenes painted onto glass slides and the images that magic lanterns were made to project: the simplest series being made of a sequence of three slides showing the same landscape in a morning-day-night time-shift illusion, or presenting a picturesque scenario — a country cottage — caught in the atmospheric changes of the four seasons. There is no doubt that the existing rules of landscape painting were transferred to the glass slides: every landscape descrip-tion was in fact

[…] composed of four grand parts; the area […] the two side-screens, which […] mark the perspective; and the front-screen […]. They are varied, first, by the contrast of the screens, […] by the folding of the screens over each other; and […] under the name of ornaments […] (by) ground — wood — rocks — buildings. (Gilpin 1991: 8-10). The ornaments of landscape depend on principles of contrast and

variety; but perspective, connected with landscape since its “rise” as a distinct genre in the Renaissance (Gombrich 1966: 107-121), structures it as a Cartesian representation of natural space, affecting both the visual text and the verbal, as the essential syntax wherein location, distance, importance of all intervening objects have to be negotiated. But perspective does not only shape the descriptive passages in painted or written representations: as a scientific formula, it applies as well to the whole symbolic plan of the novel, where the realistic narra-tive unfolds under the eye of the author, whose monocular perception is like the vantage point of pictorial constructions; where plots unfold like vistas; where screens are determined by the sequence of contrast-ing events, and objects offered to the view are meant to engender repulsion and desire; where ornaments increase variety. Indeed, both landscapes — the enclosed scenery framed within description, as well as the inclusive panorama of a complex, vastly-spreading narration — depended on picturesque aesthetics for compositional rules, mainly consisting of a simplified application of perspective within three dis-tances and of a keen phenomenological observation of the ability of the eye to negotiate with light and the atmospheric agents. These rules, owing to the challenge deriving from popular visual culture and as the outcome of Dickens’s own attitude, underwent in Victorian times a profound critique, and reassessment, which are the object of this analy-sis. Side by side with a culture favouring conventional representation in the realistic code, new modes of perception conveyed visual informa-tion in ways which defied traditional description (the picturesque eye) and even the epistemological value of empirical vision. The impact of visual culture over Victorian literary texts has already been discussed and extensively explored; my first point here is that Dickens rejects

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picturesque conventions for ethical reasons, to avoid the charge of moral insensitivity attached to the aesthetics governing the picturesque eye. The second point is that the visual experience of the magic lantern weakens the whole Cartesian structure of representation by suggesting the possibility of trespassing beyond the compositional boundary of realism. Indeed, both Dickens’s notion that visual codes can operate within the realm of literature, and his strategy for overcoming pictur-esque description, seem to originate within the magic box of the lan-tern and in the perceptual possibilities offered by the “biunial” and the “dissolving views,” which threatened conventions once firmly secured between the author’s point of view and the vanishing point empirically staged as horizon.

a) Landscape with ruins: architectural, and social The pictorial principles which simplify Renaissance perspective into

the rule of the three distances and landscape aesthetics within the general prescription of contrast and variety are indicated by William Gilpin in Observations on the River Wye (1782) and in his following essays and pamphlets Relative Chiefly to Picturesque Beauty sought in various parts of England and Scotland. A ruin is the first object that Gilpin, as early as 1748, acknowledges as “vastly picturesque”, albeit artificially built in a landscape-garden (Gilpin 1976); all the more so, real architectural ruins, such as Tintern Abbey, behove any landscape composition for the rich contrast and variety they add to the view; while the poverty and wretchedness of the inhabitants of the ruined monastery are valued for the visual interest of their attitude, their rags and palsy limbs, and the intricacy they bring into the scene (Gilpin 1991: 31-37). For Gilpin “Moral and picturesque ideas do not always coincide”:

In a moral view the industrious mechanic is a more pleasing object than

the loitering peasant. But in a picturesque light, it is otherwise. The arts of industry are rejected; […] thus the lazy cowherd resting on his pole; or the peasant lolling on the rock, may be allowed in the grandest scenes; while the laborious mechanic, with his implements of labour, would be repulsed (Gilpin 1786)6. So while Uvedale Price maintains the picturesque to be an aesthetic

category by itself, like the Beautiful and the Sublime7, and thus not

6 The passage taken from William Gilpin Observations, relative chiefly to Picturesque Beauty,

Made in the year 1772, on several parts of England: particularly the Mountains and Lakes of Cumber-land and Westmoreland (1786) is cited Carl Paul Barbier (1963: 144).

7 Uvedale Price, An Essay on the Picturesque, As Compared with the Sublime and the Beautiful; and, on the Use of Studying Pictures, for the Purpose of Improving Real Landscape. London, 1794;

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exclusively residing in the area of landscape painting, William Combe’s and Thomas Rowlandson’s Tour of Doctor Syntax in Search of the Picturesque (1812) makes fun of the moral callousness of the picturesque eye: “It is surprising to see how suddenly and how powerfully the conception of the picturesque comes into fashion” (Wheeler Manwaring 1965: 169). Not only do contemporary novels amply rely on picturesque aesthetics for verbal descriptions of landscape, but also its dogmatic controversies were used as fictional themes by Thomas Love Peackock, Jane Austen, Maria Edgeworth8. Walter Scott exploited picturesque rules, all the more knowingly as there was virtually no corner of the British land-scape—Wales, the Lake District, Scotland — which had not been as-sessed by Gilpin in picturesque terms, in the previous century. The Picturesque was the inescapable dimension of successful description: Richard Payne Knight in his Analytical Inquiry into the Principles of Taste (1805) indicated the physiological and psychological effect obtained by intricacy of design and by an entire text which, whether visual or verbal, lends itself to digressive curiosity rather than to open perusal. Follow-ing the line traced by Alison, Price and Knight, Walter Scott makes use of picturesque aesthetics steeped in moral associations, not only as the firm guidelines to his landscape descriptions but as the symbolic perspective through which the entire virtual plan of the story has to be ordered — or “landscaped”. Within the topos of a Scottish setting, with colours heightened by Border contrasts, landscape has more to do with his idea of fictionalised history9 than with the imitation of nature.

The art of […] Scott and Dickens, is strictly “picturesque” in achieving

social inclusiveness by means of discontinuous perspectives. Social pano-ramas, if they are to include more than one level of society, must exploit techniques of juxtaposition and discontinuity. So what the Elizabethan drama achieved by the device of the double plot, the novel and poetry achieved by taking over the method of the landscape painters (McLuhan 1951: 168-181)10.

1795; 1810. Price’s publication was the opening note of the Price-Repton-Knight contro-versy: see Walter John Hipple, jr. (1957). Ch.16 “The Price-Repton Controversy”, Ch.18, “The Price-Knight Controversy”, pp.238-246; pp.278-283.

8 Particularly Ann Radcliffe is a follower of the picturesque in description of scenery. But “it was in the fiction of Scott and those who came after him that we find landscape described, not as set pieces, but particularized and integrated fully into the fabric of the novel”. See Alexander M. Ross (1986: 24 ff).

9 As Anne Janowitz has aptly remarked (1990: 56), the effect of the picturesque on ruins influences the presentation of the ruined castle, which is no longer a site of historical event but a piece of nature: the process of alteration “conforms to a desire to master the content of the past while unfettering its form”.

10 On Walter Scott and the Picturesque see Peter Garside (1994: 145-174).

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Discontinuous perspective plans, the conventional three distances, provide the stage where the novel unfolds as a middleground filled with events and incidents, stretching between the author and history. When the moral impregnability of the aesthetic object — ruins, the rural poor (Barrell 1980)11 — capitulates to Archibald Alison’s Essays on the Nature and Principles of Taste (790), investing the whole process of perception and representation of nature with the added effectiveness of moral associa-tions, then Gilpin’s dry recipes for the correct means of achieving visual pleasure are by no means swept away, or forgotten. On the contrary, owing to Victorian mass production and consumption, his idle loiterers, gypsies, vagrants and banditti swell and multiply into the “above 1000 subjects” described by W.H. Pyne in his Picturesque Groups for the Embel-lishment of Landscape. An Encyclopaedia of Illustration (1845):

Army, Banditti, Brickmakers, Butchers, Camp Scenes, Carts, Ferry Boats,

Fire Engines, Games, Gypsies, Gleaners, Gravel Diggers, Grinders, Postcha-ises, Racing, Ropemakers, Rustics, Smugglers, Statuary, Threshing, Timber Waggons, Toll-gates, Travellers reposing, Trucks, Wheelwrights, and Wood-men.12

This is the visual répertoire of landscape ornaments which recognizably

belong to the province of the novel and, through the mediation of painters, to landscapes represented in panoramas and dioramas, painted glass slides and transparent screens. Artists such as Philip Jacob de Loutherbourg and John Gainsborough frequently switch from the traditional canvas to the Eidophusikon, a machine in which specta-tors, within a slowly rotating cylindrical room, are confronted with the vast aerial perspective of the metropolis, and the revealing effects of thunder and lightning.

If Samuel Prout is the painter who naturalises picturesque conven-tions formerly applied to wild, distant and rural settings to the urban reality of London, then Dickens deserves to be called the Prout of writers. Before Prout no picturesque cityscape existed, and “to seek it in a city would have been deemed an extravagance, to raise it to the height of a cathedral an heresy”: John Ruskin credits Prout with the “ability to present the effects of age and human life upon his subjects”; the painter has translated into intelligible signs “the writings upon the pages of ancient walls of the confused hieroglyphics of human his-tory”13. It is thus that in The Old Curiosity Shop (1840) Dickens validates

11 Picturesque conventions still govern the representation of rural landscape in mid-

century photography: See Jennifer M.Green (1995: 88-110). 12 Quoted in Christopher Hussey (1927: 118). 13 From an anonymous essay entitled “Samuel Prout” (1849), in George P. Landow

(1971: pp.228-229). Ruskin will object to the moral insensitivity implied by picturesque

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the naturalisation of the picturesque into the city, not only by depicting his characters in a setting of picturesque decay, but by plotting their progress towards the rural grounds of eighteenth-century landscape, thus exposing the happy beggars’ pastoral fallacy together with the aesthetics of poverty. In The Old Curiosity Shop conventional “incidents” of poverty and decay belong to the rural as well as the urban setting, and descriptions follow the rules of composition indicated by William Gilpin.

Not only is the variegated London scene contrived so as to give contrast, variety, irregularity to the setting: urban landscape, the stage or “middle-ground” where the story develops14, is foregrounded by an observer, an eye-witness, a compulsive walker who brings the authorial eye in unison with the narrator’s voice to the very brink of the events that are about to unfold. Subsequently unfolding episodes are set in mutual exclusion and contrast. The whole construction is still domi-nated by the atmospheric illusion of history, morally compensating for individual loss and death.

Yet the novel implies a significant shift in the writer’s attitude to ru-ins and the effect of visual interest they are wont to produce as orna-ments in landscape. Although Dickens’s descriptions, pictorially speak-ing, compare well with the metropolitan picturesque originated by Samuel Prout, as far as poverty equates with the correct incidents convenient to picturesque scenery, his attitude is one of pungent criti-cism15. The process is announced in The Old Curiosity Shop by staging a plot that runs counter to the existing conventions of rural happiness, while subverting the quaint city-picturesque scene into grotesque clusters of heterogeneous objects. His unconventional response to the tradition of landscape description already shows that in The Old Curiosity Shop landscape dissolution is at work, within a process that both recalls and displaces its familiar elements. If the archetypal medieval ruin and picturesque landscape icon is Tintern Abbey, a repository of débris at

aesthetics in several passages of Modern Painters but especially with Fors Clavigera, where he exposes not the moral or aesthetic implications of the picturesque but the political and economic ones. See Landow, pp.232-236. On Ruskin’s picturesque see my “Pictur-esque Landscape vs. Modern Space: An Agony, in Three Fits”, forthcoming in Toni Cerutti (ed.), Ruskin and the Twentieth Century.

14 Murray Baumgarten (1996: 74-88). See also Carlo Pagetti and Maria Teresa Chia-lant (1988).

15 Malcolm Andrews (1990: 237). Dickens’s is the complaint that John Ruskin will voice in Modern Painters, (1856), IV, against the heartless “surface-picturesque”. Similarly the scornful allusions to view-hunting signal, in Carlyle’s Past and Present (1843), the demise of a picturesque convention that the writer is seeking to undermine and evade. Baumgarten argues that “the new scene lacked the clear outlines and defining planes of foreground and background that had characterised the picturesque landscape.” See Murray Baumgarten (1995: 61-72).

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once architectural and human, Dickens knowingly places in his old curiosity shop a number of quaint objects which might well have adorned that scene:

... one of those receptacles for old and curious things which seem to crouch in odd corners of this town […]. There were suits of mail standing like ghosts in armour here and there; fantastic carvings brought from monkish cloisters; rusty weapons of various kinds; distorted figures… The haggard aspect of the little old man was wonderfully suited to the place (Old Curiosity Shop: 5). Like the rag-covered figures set by William Gilpin in the middle-

ground of a landscape, Mr. Trent is one who “might have groped among old churches, and tombs, and deserted houses”. Associations, in this case, are responsible for the procedure which charges these objects with the added cogency lent by imagination, unifying them in one irrational yet emotionally powerful cluster.

I had ever before me the old, dark, murky rooms — the gaunt suits of

mail with their ghostly silent air — the faces all awry, grinning from wood and stone — the dust, and rust, and worm that lives in wood: and alone, in the midst of all this lumber and decay and ugly age, the beautiful child... (Old Curiosity Shop: 15). With this vision narrative recedes from the orderly territory of land-

scape into the realm of the grotesque where man and nature are juxta-posed, and frighteningly joined. Similarly, receding from the chrono-logically ordered perspective of the narration and opposing the plot’s gradual unfolding, the passage symbolically announces the death of Little Nell. The shop and the objects it contains are the collected débris of what once might have belonged to Walter Scott16; a flotsam that heaped together, instead of indicating a taste for antiquity and histori-cal ruins, can only suggest unwholesome ideas and delusions. In fact, intimately connected with the picturesque fallacy of these objects, is the idea that regeneration, in the form of a new life in the countryside, might save the impoverished antique dealer. Expressed by innocent Nell at a crucial turning point in their adventure, the idea cannot but prove the ultimate delusion, the cause of her undoing, and the appro-priate ending to their story. “Let us be beggars, and be happy...”.

“Let us be beggars,” said the child [...]“I have no fear but we shall have enough [...] Let us walk through country places, and sleep in fields and un-der trees, and never think of money again [...] but rest at nights, and have the sun and wind upon our faces in the day, and thank God together! Let us […] wander up and down wherever we like to go; and when you are tired,

16 In fact and fiction, as shown by Peter Garside (1994:145-174).

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you shall stop to rest in the pleasantest place that we can find, and I will go and beg for both” (Old Curiosity Shop: 75). Doomed alike by the evil schemes of Quilp and by her rosy pastoral

prospect, Nell fancies “sun and stream, and meadow, and summer days […] and there was no dark tint in all the sparkling picture” (Old Curiosity Shop: 99). Dickens’s ability imparts to the same landscape the bright tints of summer and the blank desolation of a hoary winter night: the effect being that of the seasonal changes imparted by dissolving views. Similarly, a day-and-night shift is applied to descriptions in order to wrap reality in an alternation of fear and hope, equally deceitful.

When Nell and Mr.Trent walk out of London, they trace their way through the suburbs, along streets and areas which, albeit new, bear the picturesque imprint of decay, owing to their poverty:

Damp rotten houses, many to let, many yet building, many half-built

and mouldering away […] brick-fields skirting gardens paled with staves of old casks, or timber pillaged from houses burnt down, and blackened and blistered by the flames — mounds of dockweed, netteles, coarse grass, and oyster-shells, heaped in rank confusion — small dissenting chapels […] plenty of new churches […] streets becoming more and more straggling […] small garden patches […] pert cottages, […] a turnpike […] fields again with trees and haystacks... (Old Curiosity Shop: 120-121). If Cartesian perspective strives to accommodate the increasingly

sparse features of suburbia, humanity mouldering away until nature prevails over man-made buildings, in a progression which by no means implies polarity in picturesque effect, then only aerial perspective can contain the panorama of the huge metropolis, which, caught in the process of uncontainable growth, will soon incorporate the hill, its summit, the spectator’s station and the picturesque eye, preventing his comprehensive gaze and recognition, marked by the well-known feature of Saint Paul’s.17

[…] then a hill; and on the top of that the traveller might stop, and — look-ing back at old Saint Paul’s looming through the smoke, its cross peeping above the cloud […] and casting his eyes upon the Babel out of which it grew, until he traced it down to the farthest outposts of the invading army of bricks and mortar whose station lay for the present nearly at his feet — might feel at last that he was clear of London (Old Curiosity Shop: 121).

17 “As London expanded […] so St. Paul’s was used to compose its development

[…]. The cathedral was a visual focus of civic improvements, either in vistas or in panoramas. A 360-degree panorama of London […] was opened in 1829, […] the model for a series of images, in a variety of media, placing the dome at the centre and in orbit the rest of London”: see Stephen Daniels, (1993: 11-42).

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Visual and verbal statements here interact, to provide what Ruskin defines as the “confused hieroglyphics of human history”: landscape, more readable in its visual signifiers than in written terms, unfolds a meaningful progression of cottages, villages, barns, churchyards, tombs; while Nell and Mr. Trent are bound to encounter other travellers, va-grants, gypsies, engaged in various activities related to theatricals and road-shows, which help staging the entire rural landscape as an ephemeral delusion. The characters met “on the road” work in panto-mimes or the Punch and Judy show, live by exhibiting wax figures, conjuring or walking on stilts, performing in the circus and the opera. Tricks abound. At an encampment of gypsies — another typically pictur-esque situation — Nell spies her grandfather’s addiction to gambling (Old Curiosity Shop: 322-327). From this moment onwards, their flight through rural merry England, full of shows and swindling, yet essen-tially healthy, becomes a descent into the inferno of a manufacturing town, where the child and the old man become “but an atom in a mountain-heap of misery” (Old Curiosity Shop: 338). Critics have remarked the apocalyptic, infernal quality of paintings which portray factories and the sites of the Industrial Revolution: Philip de Loutherbourg with his “Coalbrookdale by Night” (1801) sets a model of representation which Dickens follows in his description:

[…] the paths of coal-ash and huts of staring brick marked the vicinity of some great manufacturing town […]. Now, the clustered roofs and piles of buildings trembling with the working of engines, and dimly resounding with their shrieks and throbbings; the tall chimneys vomiting forth a black va-pour, which hung in a dense, ill-favoured cloud above the house-tops and filled the air with gloom; the clank of hammers beating upon iron, the roar of busy streets and noisy crowds, gradually augmenting until all the various sounds blended into one, and none was distinguishable for itself, an-nounced the termination of their journey (Old Curiosity Shop: 336). Here Dickens accomplishes a twofold task: that of showing the fal-

lacy of rural idleness, the ugly condition of the homeless and of pictur-esque decay, while conveying the sublime horror of the modern factory, where “moving like demons among the flame and smoke, dimly and fitfully seen, flushed and tormented by the burning fires […] a number of men laboured like giants.” (Old Curiosity Shop: 341). The great manufactur-ing town, “reeking with lean misery and hungry wretchedness” seems to make escape impossible: to the extent that Dickens describes Nell’s and Mr. Trent’s departure from it as a journey through pandemonium, where even the aesthetics of poverty are denied by the undifferentiated gloom and desolation. Factories erase the difference between day and night, replacing smoke with fire: the scene holds no perspective, no

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definite source of light, no variety, but one homogeneous mass of horror, transforming the irresponsible vagrants and gypsies of the conventional pastoral scene into “bands of unemployed men”, “mad-dened men, armed with sword and firebrand” who “rushed forth on errands of terror and destruction” while “carts came rumbling by, filled with rude coffins (for contagious disease and death had been busy with the living crops)” (Old Curiosity Shop: 347). Predictably, the two wanderers end up by living inside a ruin, a “vaulted chamber” with gothic carvings: “like creatures who had outlived their kind, and mourned their own slow decay” (Old Curiosity Shop: 398); indeed “a place to live and learn to die in!” (Old Curiosity Shop: 399). The final unfolding of the novel is well-known: Dickens allows Nell to die in a suitable setting of venerable decaying ruins, gently spelling the end of her fable.

Elsewhere Dickens cautions his readers about the evils connected with the “aesthetics of poverty”18. With the specific cogency allowed by the circumstantial narrative of a travel-book, Pictures from Italy (1846)19 articulates Dickens’s position regarding picturesque landscape. It is relevant to our point that his objections are directed against its ideological implications.

But, lovers and hunters of the picturesque, let us not keep too studi-

ously out of the view, the miserable depravity, degradation, and wretched-ness, with which this gay Neapolitan life is inseparably associated! It is not well to find Saint Giles’s so repulsive, and the Porta Capuana so attractive […]. Painting and poetising for ever, if you will, the beauties of this most beautiful and lovely spot of earth, let us, as our duty, try to associate a new picturesque with some faint recognition of man’s destiny and capabilities […] (Pictures from Italy: 240). But Dickens does more than undermine the whole concept of deco-

rative poverty and the pictorial role of the happy beggar in his fiction, thus rejecting the politics of the middle-ground. He acknowledges the ideological bias of the picturesque eye, and in search of convenient tools to endow his verbal text with visual capabilities, he makes a cultural choice which corresponds to his growing awareness of the impossibility of “poetising” society as an organic community. In this specific sense, by “dissolving landscape” I indicate not only Dickens’s refusal to comply with descriptive conventions, but the concept that the

18 Malcolm Andrews (1994: 282-298). 19 Charles Dickens, Pictures from Italy. London, Bradbury and Evans, 1846. All quotations

from this edition are given parenthetically in the text. M. Andrews appropriately recalls a letter Dickens wrote from Naples to Forster in 1845, stating that “The condition of the common people here is abject and shocking. I am afraid the conventional idea of the picturesque is associated with such misery and degradation that a new picturesque will have to be established as the world goes onward” (1994: 286).

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novel does not have to be consistently realistic in order to provide an effective picture of life.

b) Camera obscura and magic lantern: landscape in a crystal palace At once conservative and innovative as far as traditional images co-

exist with modern optical wonders, Victorian culture treasured tradi-tional landscape paintings yet valued, en-masse, magic lanterns and dissolving views, which, already known in the XVIII century, become available to a vast middle-class audience. Being cheaper than paintings and illustrated books, they soon became a popular entertainment introducing the public to a wealth of visual narratives.20 In its time-shift illusions, the magic lantern emphasizes changes in light and atmos-phere which in traditional painted landscapes could only be fixed within the picturesque syntax of contrast and variety. Critics have already shown to what extent these new optical instruments determine a cultural awareness of the dynamics of visual perception, which intrin-sically differs from the fixed code of monocular space and geometrical perspective, traditionally set with the aid of the camera obscura. The fixed images of the realistic code of representation, which painters transfer on slides, when set into a dynamic sequence by the magic lantern, form grotesque clusters, heterogeneous and meaningless as far as narrative sequence is considered, but charged with significance deriving from the visual logic of the chained images21. The stereoscope, another popular pastime, proves the fallacy of monocularity, showing that depth of field is only acquired through the intersection of different viewpoints. If the eye of the observer is scientifically unreliable, the picturesque eye morally biased, and both are prey to the visual effects of the new ma-chines, whilst neither reason nor imagination throw sufficient light on the changeable scene of reality, then even the novel, composed under the supervising agent of the omniscient eye, is bound to renounce those elements that directly signal the steady gaze of authorial control. This happens all the more easily because, like landscape-painting, the

20 Among the subjects offered by popular slides series are “40 Schriptural Views, 12 from the Pilgrim's Progress, 60 Miscellaneous views with Picturesque scenery”; favourite lachrymose stories of urban homelessness such as Only a Waif, by Mrs. Haycraft; Jessica’s First Prayer by Hesba Stretton; and George Cruikshank's teetotaller story The Bottle, illustrated in 8 slides by W.C.Hughes. See Carlo Alberto Minici Zotti (1988:14; 53; 66).

21 The reminiscences of Mary Weller about the writer’s childhood, indicate that side by side with orality and the written text, stories were already available within the visual domain of the magic lantern. “Sometimes Charles would […] say to me, “Now Mary, […] we are going to have such a game”, and then George Stroughill would come in with his Magic Lantern, and they would sing, recite and perform parts of plays.” Angus Wilson (1970:33-34).

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construction of the novel is functionally based upon the social and aesthetic organicism of the Romantic humanist tradition:22 both inte-grate aesthetically, formally, the conflicting forces they contain. What-ever the conflicts agitating the scene, the omniscient author sets moral values straight with prize or punishment, balances good and evil, brings about, in good time, the necessary light of denouement and horizon of ending. The parallel between landscape painting and the novel can be furthered, in that they both have an element of foreground where an eye-witness is met; a vast middle ground where characters and events occur, clash, decay, perish, and finally a background, history, soaring up into the higher atmosphere where, by a judicious management of light and shade, the course of destiny, prophecy and teleology, become atmospherically intelligible. The omniscient author and the picturesque artist shape perception into representation by following similar rules of composition.

It is likewise apparent that representation supported by an organicist aesthetic proves increasingly inaccurate and misleading when artists admit to a problematic vision of society which no ideological or moral perspective can redeem; and when the scientific awareness of the dynamics of perception operates against the order imposed by Carte-sian perspective. In the 1840s, in order to explain the working of ideol-ogy, Karl Marx resorted to the image of the camera obscura, a tool which painters traditionally used to draw perspective (to establish the eye’s vantage point in its relation to a vanishing point) thereby dominating the incomprehensible extension of nature:

If in all ideology men and their circumstances appear upside down as in

a camera obscura, this phenomenon arises just as much from their historical life process as the inversion of objects on the retina does from their physi-cal life process.23 The scientific notion of the inversion performed by our retina in the

process of perception (and of its correction) was meant to explain the role of history in ideological terms, as consistent with the significant deviation from initial perception, occurring when the inverted image produced by the camera obscura becomes the finished representation. Likewise, the social landscape of the realist novel or painting is the composition of fragmentary circumstances and segments of experience into an “upside-down version of reality” ideologically consistent with

22 “During the second half of the century the initially poetic notion of ‘organic form’ becomes progressively extended to the dominant literary mode of the time, fiction”: Terry Eagleton, “Ideology and Literary Form”, in Steven Connor (1996:152-157).

23 Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, The German Ideology (1845-7), quoted in Raymond Wil-liams (1988: 154-155).

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the culture of the age. Victorian authors (and Dickens at the beginning of his career) compose social discontinuity within the realist novel and correct all perception of conflictuality by the authority of the “‘over-viewing’ eye of classical realism” (Eagleton 1996: 154). This happens as long as a Weltanschauung structured around the “over-viewing” eye bal-ances a radical critique of epistemological doubt and redirection. Scientific discoveries in the field of visual perception foster disbelief in traditional formalized rhetorics of representation and even question the epistemological reliability of the organicist perspective. Marx and Engels view ideology as the camera obscura where social conditions and events precipitate into history: Dickens, in his social awareness, dis-misses camera obscura realism for the visual logic of the magic lantern. Not surprisingly his travel books signal the increasing difficulty of imparting a conventional order to his perceptions. In American Notes (1842) and in Pictures from Italy, the temptation to let agents other than perspective shape representation, becomes evident.

In the United States the picturesque eye finds itself at war with na-ture, which seldom becomes landscape, and, significantly, with a soci-ety that escapes traditional class divisions. “The clear cardboard colon-nades had no more perspective than a Chinese bridge on a tea-cup” (American Notes: 120); from the train, a rapid sequence of stumps, caught against fleeting glimpses of a prim village, operates like a “dark screen” generating fantastic images as if “by magic” (American Notes: 113). With specific articulation Dickens turns to the magic-lantern to face the whims of memory and the contingent threat of visual perceptions.

These stumps of trees are a curious feature in American travelling. The

varying illusions they present to the unaccustomed eye as it grows dark, are quite astonishing in their number and reality. Now, there is a Grecian urn erected in the centre of a lonely field; now there is a woman weeping at a tomb; now a very commonplace old gentleman in white waistcoat […] now a crouching negro; now, a horse, a dog, a cannon, an armed man; a hunch-back throwing off his cloak and stepping forth into the light. They were often as entertaining to me as so many glasses in a magic lantern, and never took their shapes at my bidding, but seemed to force themselves upon me, whether I would or no; and, strange to say, I sometimes recognised in them counterparts of figures once familiar to me in pictures attached to childish books, forgotten long ago (American Notes: 237-8). Significantly, in Pictures from Italy the descriptive sequence of towns

with famous views (Naples — Pompeii — Herculaneum — Paestum — Vesuvius…) is styled as “A Rapid Diorama”; and the chapter which describes Venice, “An Italian Dream,” starts with the powerfully evoca-tive and visually unsettling notion of the magic lantern:

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The rapid and unbroken succession of novelties that had passed before me, came back like half-formed dreams: and a crowd of objects wandered in the greatest confusion through my mind […] At intervals, some one among them would stop, as it were, in its restless flitting to and fro, and enable me to look at it, quite steadily, and behold it in full distinctness. After a few moments, it would dissolve, like a view in a magic-lantern; and while I saw some part of it quite plainly, and some faintly, and some not at all, would show me another of the many places I had lately seen, lingering behind it, and coming through it. This was no sooner visible than, in turn, it melted into something else (Pictures from Italy: 107). One could not wish for a more precise indication of the fact that the

sentimental yet coolly excursive eye of the picturesque traveller has been superseded and replaced — both in capacity of perception and in intensity of emotion — by the dissolving view of the magic lantern, here the source of a reversal in epistemological values formerly connected with the Cartesian viewpoint of empiricism. What appears as a new syntax of visual description, in which forms affect and ply the discursive quality of the text, is here at work: the picturesque conventional authority of the eye, based on monocularity and perspective, is no more. On the contrary images, being ideal elements of textual visibility, (Calvino 1988) now freely surge out of a mysterious matrix, where dream and perception coalesce and generate their capricious figural order, imposed by a logic of their own, consistent with and qualified by their endless potential for transformation.

The recourse to the magic lantern and its syntax indicates that, for Dickens, the classical procedure of representation (perspective) and its source (monocularity) are delegitimized as the only means to validate description, to visualize reality within the written text. When the panoramic vision of the “over-viewing” eye is cast against the rapidly changing and dissolving chain of images of the magic lantern, traditional representation disintegrates: ekphrasis, the verbal emulation of visual experience24, almost succeeds in translating the spatial quality of the pictorial into a totally simultaneous verbal form. Dickens’s experiments with description rely on the magic lantern technique because its heterogeneous images, dissolving and melting into each other, endow the written text with the paradigmatic cogency of visual forms in their mutually creative relationship. To break up the closure of landscape means to dissolve the encoded order of the written text.

In the case of the earlier Charles Dickens […] each text is a veritable

traffic-jam of competing fictional modes: Gothic, Romance, moral fable, “social problem” novel, popular theatre, “short story”, journalism, episodic

24 Miriam Bailin, (1995: 313-326) see also Murray Krieger (1992).

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“entertainment” — which permits realism no priviledged status. The later “realism” of Dickens is […] a question of “totalising” forms englobing non-realist contents, of dispersed, conflictual discourses which ceaselessly offer to displace the securely “over-viewing” eye of classical realism (Eagleton 1996: 154). Dickens’s eclectic genre excursions, styled as dissolving views, are

particularly noticeable in his Christmas Stories, where “form and no-form, the idyll and the nightmare […] alternate like the changing pictures in a magic lantern.” 25 The visual logic of the dissolving view affects the determinism of plot construction, thereby radically threatening the unifying core of the novel, the authorial eye. Its discontinuous control over narrative matter is indirectly denounced by the literary critics who charge Dickens with borrowing from the photographic style:

Neglecting the effective outline, the charm of harmonious grouping, and

of contrasted light and shade, he […] lavishes as much attention on what is trivial or useless as on the more important part of the picture […] There is no judicious perspective, and withdrawing from view of disagreable particu-lars”26. Bleak House and its whole plot show “absolute want of construction”:

So crowded is the canvas which Mr. Dickens has stretched, and so cas-ual the connexion that gives to his composition whatever unity it has, that a daguerreotype of Fleet Street at noon-day would be the aptest symbol to be found for it; though the daguerreotype would have the advantage in accu-racy of representation […]”27. The comparison with the daguerreotype provides, in fact, no direct

clue to a stylistic modernity, by which fiction would mimic photography and compete with “sun-paintings”. Victorian critics use it rather to identify a negative quality, perceiving that both Dickens’s composition and the daguerreotype28 dispense with and discard the judicious con-ventions which granted perspective in representation. At a time when cameras had a small-aperture lens, giving equal sharpness to the entire plate, the comparison would imply no faithful accuracy, but the anarchy

25 Marisa Bulgheroni, “The Shadow Tree”. In Charles Dickens and Mirando Haz (1981:

123-124). The “haunted generating structure” of modern terror is one that incorporates “the narrated into the visual […] scattering its constituent elements”: sequences are “re-invented as simultaneous events”: showing how the instability of forms “generates monstrosities”. Appropriately Haz’s etchings choose to renounce all descriptivism of illustration. Also see Audrey Jaffe (1995: 327-344) and Rossana Bonadei (1996).

26 (Thomas Cleghorn?), from "Writings of Charles Dickens", North British Review, May 1845. In Collins (1971: 186-191).

27 George Brimley, unsigned review, The Spectator, Sept. 1853. In Collins (1971: 283-286). 28 Jonathan Crary (1990: 127) states that “photography preserved an ambivalent (and

superficial) relation to the codes of monocular space and geometrical perspective”.

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of a warped realism governing a composition where all objects, ren-dered without depth, selection, shadowing, or distancing, achieved equal status. Actually their “casual connexion” would hinder unity — of effect, and of perspective.29 This explains why the daguerreotype becomes “the aptest symbol” — symbol not image — for Dickens’s politics of representation. Indirectly then, Dickens’s occasional choice of a photo-graphic style, with its apparent lack of selection, reaches into the tenets of modernism, announcing not only the future demise of conventional representation, but an awareness, a critique of the principles of percep-tion and vision, which set his art well above the contingent conventions of his century. The intersections of two perspectives in Little Dorrit (1857), which Canaletto-like, develops between the foci set within the prison and, opposite across the Thames, in the house of Clennam; and, in the same novel, the author’s awareness of the determinism of per-spective in all its symbolic consequences, shown as fallacy, obstina-tion, obsession, infatuation, love, all of which are exclusive, enduring, terminal, reveals a mastery of epistemological construction in visual terms, well beyond the casualties of plot and character. The challenge to perspective is then formalized in Great Expectations (1861), through the construction of a fictional world which is entirely generated by and under Pip’s monocularity. In this way Dickens abides by a long-standing convention of realistic narrative and, at once, causes its dissolution, by showing that consistency of point-of-view validates, on equal standing with the life-like representation it is supposed to generate, the legiti-macy of all fantastic distortions, gothic horrors and psychological phan-tasmagorias.

Once monocularity and perspective have been renounced, realistic fragments, shapes, forms — by their random intersections occurring in the open fields of memory or in those unbidden chains of visions offered by the “dissolving view” — cluster into disquieting images. As is the case, the slide inspired by Dickens’s A Christmas Carol and entitled “Marley’s Ghost”30, has two different photographic images printed and superimposed, in the same frame. Each one formerly a separate seg-ment of the story, a room, a portrait of a living person, when united they result in the unnatural image of the ghost, all the more disturbing because made out of real life fragments, represented in a grotesque, phantasmatic uncanny compound of space and time.

29 Taylor Stoehr (1965: 254-255), argues that “alienated from his world (Dickens) re-fused to perform the ultimate artistic act of integrating the parts […] less and less able to account for its multiplicity by means of a single set of values” he accepted it “entirely, without distinction or hierarchy”: “Everything is potentially crucial in his world”.

30 “Marley’s Ghost”. From Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol. Hand-painted photo-graph on glass, in Carlo Alberto Minici Zotti (1988: 75). Courtesy of Laura Minici Zotti and the Minici Zotti Collection, Padova. See plate 6.

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The picturesque artists saw the wider range of experience that could be

managed by discontinuity and planned irregularity, but they kept to the pic-ture-like single perspective. The interior landscape, however, moves natu-rally towards the principle of multiple perspectives […] 31. Writing from Switzerland to John Forster, Dickens made a remark-

able comment on his rapid pace of composition, the difficulty of writing during his tour, “the absence of streets and numbers of figures,” essen-tial to his own creative process.

I can’t express how much I want these. It seems as if they supplied

something to my brain, which it cannot bear, when busy, to lose. For a week or a fortnight I can write prodigiously in a retired place […] a day in London sets me up again and starts me. But the toil and labour of writing, day after day, without that magic lantern, is IMMENSE!! (Letters: 612-13). The sequence of images offered by the magic lantern, eschewing re-

alistic chronology and composition; the optical possibility to profit from the absence of genre conventions, resulting in the freedom to assemble grotesque compounds, are the elements of Dickens’s fiction which are going to inspire modernist writers. Appropriately, the magic lantern and its dissolving views may be considered as the agent and symbol of the dissolving forces already at work in Dickens’s world, which albeit aesthetically impaired, and shifting, is nevertheless per-ceived as a contingent structure.

In 1851 the Great Exhibition has its centre and focus in the Crystal Palace: a huge Aladdin’s Cave,32 where every product, machine, instru-ment of the Empire is contained, a Kunstkammer where art-objects, machines, patents and inventions are hierarchically ordered, exhibited, shelved in due perspective. Against this imperial icon and symbol warehouse, functioning like a huge camera obscura, the magic lantern of the writer works like a small treasure box, where, subversively, a reor-ganization of all itemized forms takes place. Former associations break up, displacement occurs, images dissolve, the world’s riches turn into dust mounds, and a different perception provides a very different show.

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