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 painters 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 PreRaphaelite school of painting, but he was likened as well to a “taker of
daguerreotypes”, of “sun-pictures” and photographs 1 . 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 textual choices within the fabric of his fiction. The fund referred to, already
explored in some major studies conflating visual and verbal textuality 2 ,
belongs to the tradition of eighteenth-century landscape painting,
structured by picturesque aesthetics: the fashion for optical entertainments 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 fiction 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 reorientation 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.
250
F. ORESTANO
mass culture, takes hold of the collective imagination by exploiting the
already-existing literary capital:
The Phantasmagoria, (as now exhibiting in London with universal applause), 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 distinguished Characters of past and present times. 3
One of the many posters advertising an optical exhibition, here indicates the increasing presence and hold over the popular imagination of
“Figures”, “Heroes” and “Characters” whose stories are equally implanted in the visual and the verbal tradition. The narrative quality
provided by the magic lanterns, or by the more sophisticated presentation 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 Polytechnic 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 perspectival 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, Cameras, and the New Vision”, pp.116-123, discusses the impact of the new optical instruments on Victorian writers, and particularly on Dickens’s fiction.
The Magic Lantern and the Crystal Palace
251
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 description 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 narrative 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 contrasting 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 distances 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 analysis. Side by side with a culture favouring conventional representation in
the realistic code, new modes of perception conveyed visual information 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
252
F. ORESTANO
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 picturesque description, seem to originate within the magic box of the lantern 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 Sublime 7 , 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 Cumberland 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;
The Magic Lantern and the Crystal Palace
253
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 Edgeworth 8 . Walter Scott exploited picturesque rules, all the
more knowingly as there was virtually no corner of the British landscape—Wales, the Lake District, Scotland — which had not been assessed 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. Following 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 history 9 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 panoramas, 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 controversy: 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).
254
F. ORESTANO
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 associations, 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 Embellishment of Landscape. An Encyclopaedia of Illustration (1845):
Army, Banditti, Brickmakers, Butchers, Camp Scenes, Carts, Ferry Boats,
Fire Engines, Games, Gypsies, Gleaners, Gravel Diggers, Grinders, Postchaises, Racing, Ropemakers, Rustics, Smugglers, Statuary, Threshing, Timber
Waggons, Toll-gates, Travellers reposing, Trucks, Wheelwrights, and Woodmen. 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 spectators, 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 conventions 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 history” 13 . It is thus that in The Old Curiosity Shop (1840) Dickens validates
11
Picturesque conventions still govern the representation of rural landscape in midcentury 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
The Magic Lantern and the Crystal Palace
255
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 develops 14 , 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 dominated 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 ruins and the effect of visual interest they are wont to produce as ornaments in landscape. Although Dickens’s descriptions, pictorially speaking, 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 criticism 15 . 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 “Picturesque 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 Chialant (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).
F. ORESTANO
256
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 middleground 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 landscape into the realm of the grotesque where man and nature are juxtaposed, and frighteningly joined. Similarly, receding from the chronologically 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 Scott 16 ; a flotsam that
heaped together, instead of indicating a taste for antiquity and historical 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 appropriate 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 under 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).
The Magic Lantern and the Crystal Palace
257
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 — looking 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).
258
F. ORESTANO
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, vagrants, 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 pantomimes 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 picturesque 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 essentially 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 vapour, 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, announced the termination of their journey (Old Curiosity Shop: 336).
Here Dickens accomplishes a twofold task: that of showing the fallacy of rural idleness, the ugly condition of the homeless and of picturesque 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 manufacturing 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
The Magic Lantern and the Crystal Palace
259
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”, “maddened 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 wellknown: 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 studiously out of the view, the miserable depravity, degradation, and wretchedness, 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 decorative 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).
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).
19
260
F. ORESTANO
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 coexist with modern optical wonders, Victorian culture treasured traditional 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 atmosphere 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 intrinsically 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 images 21 . 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 machines, 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).
The Magic Lantern and the Crystal Palace
261
construction of the novel is functionally based upon the social and
aesthetic organicism of the Romantic humanist tradition: 22 both integrate aesthetically, formally, the conflicting forces they contain. Whatever 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 Cartesian perspective. In the 1840s, in order to explain the working of ideology, 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 physical 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 Williams (1988: 154-155).
262
F. ORESTANO
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 “‘overviewing’ eye of classical realism” (Eagleton 1996: 154). This happens as
long as a Weltanschauung structured around the “over-viewing” eye balances 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, dismisses 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 nature, which seldom becomes landscape, and, significantly, with a society that escapes traditional class divisions. “The clear cardboard colonnades 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 hunchback 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 evocative and visually unsettling notion of the magic lantern:
The Magic Lantern and the Crystal Palace
263
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
experience 24 , 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).
264
F. ORESTANO
“entertainment” — which permits realism no priviledged status. The later
“realism” of Dickens is […] a question of “totalising” forms englobing nonrealist 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 particulars” 26 .
Bleak House and its whole plot show “absolute want of construction”:
So crowded is the canvas which Mr. Dickens has stretched, and so casual 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 accuracy 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 daguerreotype 28 dispense with and discard the judicious conventions 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 “reinvented 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”.
The Magic Lantern and the Crystal Palace
265
of a warped realism governing a composition where all objects, rendered 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 photographic 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 perception 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 perspective in all its symbolic consequences, shown as fallacy, obstination, 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 legitimacy of all fantastic distortions, gothic horrors and psychological phantasmagorias.
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 segment 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) refused 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 photograph on glass, in Carlo Alberto Minici Zotti (1988: 75). Courtesy of Laura Minici Zotti
and the Minici Zotti Collection, Padova. See plate 6.
F. ORESTANO
266
The picturesque artists saw the wider range of experience that could be
managed by discontinuity and planned irregularity, but they kept to the picture-like single perspective. The interior landscape, however, moves naturally towards the principle of multiple perspectives […] 31 .
Writing from Switzerland to John Forster, Dickens made a remarkable comment on his rapid pace of composition, the difficulty of writing
during his tour, “the absence of streets and numbers of figures,” essential 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 realistic 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 perceived 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, instrument 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 reorganization 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.
Works Cited
DICKENS Charles, American Notes. For General Circulation (1842), Harmondsworth,
Penguin, 1972.
31
32
Marshall McLuhan, (1968: 262-282).
Clotilde de Stasio (1995:19-32).
The Magic Lantern and the Crystal Palace
267
DICKENS Charles, The Old Curiosity Shop (1840), London, Nelson, n.d.
DICKENS Charles, Pictures from Italy, London, Bradbury and Evans, 1846.
ALTICK Richard, The Shows of London, Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University
Press, 1978.
ANDREWS Malcolm, “The Metropolitan Picturesque”, in Stephen COPLEY and
Peter GARSIDE (eds.), The Politics of the Picturesque. Literature, Landscape and Aesthetics since 1770, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1994, pp. 282-298.
ANDREWS Malcolm, The Search for the Picturesque. Landscape Aesthetics and Tourism in
Britain, 1760-1800, Aldershot, Scolar Press, 1990.
BAILIN Miriam, “Seeing is Believing in Enoch Arden”, in Carol T. CHRIST and
John O. JORDAN (eds.), Victorian Literature and the Victorian Visual Imagination, cit., pp.
313-326.
BARBIER Carl Paul, William Gilpin. His Drawings, Teaching, and Theory of the Picturesque, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1963.
BARRELL John, The Dark Side of Landscape. The Rural Poor in English Painting, 17301840, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1980.
BAUMGARTEN Murray, “London, Dickens, & the Theatre of Homelessness”, in
Debra N. MANCOFF and D.J. TRELA (eds.), Victorian Urban Settings. Essays on the
Nineteenth-Century City and Its Contexts, New York, Garland, 1996, pp. 74-88.
BAUMGARTEN Murray, “‘Picturesque Tourist’ in the Victorian Industrial City:
Carlyle, the Stereoscope, and the Social Text”, in Carlyle Studies Annual. Special
Issue, Victorians’ Institute Lectures, University of South Carolina, 1995, pp. 61-72.
BONADEI Rossana, Paesaggio con figure. Intorno all’Inghilterra di Charles Dickens,
Milano, Jaca Books, 1996.
BRIGGS Asa, Victorian Things, Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1990.
BRIMLEY George, Unsigned Review, The Spectator, Sept. 1853, in Dickens. The
Critical Heritage, cit., pp. 283-286.
BULGHERONI Marisa, “The Shadow Tree”, in Charles DICKENS and Mirando
HAZ, Un albero di Natale, Milano, Scheiwiller, 1981, pp. 123-124.
CALVINO Italo, Lezioni americane. Sei proposte per il prossimo millennio, Milano,
Garzanti, 1988.
CHRIST Carol T. and JORDAN John O. (eds.), Victorian Literature and the Victorian
Visual Imagination, Berkeley and Los Angeles, University of California Press, 1995.
COLLINS Philip (ed.), Dickens. The Critical Heritage, London, Routledge & Kegan
Paul, 1971.
CONRAD Peter, The Victorian Treasure-House, London, Collins, 1973.
CRARY Jonathan, Techniques of the Observer. On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth
Century, Cambridge, Mass., MIT Press, 1990.
DANIELS Stephen, “The Prince of Wales and the Shadow of St.Paul’s”. In Fields
of Vision. Landscape Imagery and National Identity in England and the United States,
Oxford, Polity Press, 1993, pp. 11-42.
268
F. ORESTANO
de STASIO Clotilde, “The Great Exhibition, un pageant per i tempi moderni”, in
Carlo PAGETTI (ed.), La città senza confini. Studi sull’immaginario urbano nelle letterature di lingua inglese, Roma, Bulzoni, 1995, pp. 19-32.
EAGLETON Terry. “Ideology and Literary Form”, in Steven CONNOR (ed.),
Charles Dickens, London and New York, Longman, 1996, pp. 152-157.
GARSIDE Peter, “Picturesque Figure and Landscape: Meg Merrilies and the
Gypsies”, in Stephen COPLEY and Peter GARSIDE (eds.), The Politics of the Picturesque. Literature, Landscape and Aesthetics since 1770, Cambridge, Cambridge
University Press, 1994, pp. 145-174.
(GILPIN William), A Dialogue upon the Gardens of the Right Honourable the Lord Viscount Cobham at Stow in Buckinghamshire (1748), The Augustan Reprint Society,
176, Los Angeles, University of California Press, 1976.
GILPIN William, Observations on the River Wye (1782), Oxford, Woodstock, 1991.
GILPIN William, Observations, relative chiefly to Picturesque Beauty, Made in the Year
1772, on Several Parts of England; particularly the Mountains and Lakes of Cumberland
and Westmoreland […], London, Blamire,1786, 2 vols.
GOMBRICH Ernst H., “The Renaissance Theory of Art and the Rise of Landscape”, in Norm and Form. Studies in the Art of the Renaissance, Chicago, The University of Chicago Press, 1966, pp. 107-121.
GREEN Jennifer M., “’The Right Thing in the Right Place’: P.H. Emerson and the
Picturesque Photograph”, in Carol T. CHRIST and John O. Jordan (eds.), Victorian Literature and the Victorian Visual Imagination, cit., pp. 88-110.
HIPPLE Walter John jr., The Beautiful , The Sublime, The Picturesque in EighteenthCentury British Aestethic Theory, Carbondale, Southern Illinois University Press,
1957.
HORTON Susan R., “Were They Having Fun Yet? Victorian Optical Gadgetry,
Modernist Selves”, in Carol T. CHRIST and John O. JORDAN (eds.), Victorian
Literature and the Victorian Visual Imagination, cit., pp. 1-26.
HUMPHRIES Steve, Victorian Britain through the Magic Lantern, London, Sidgwick
and Jackson, 1989.
HUSSEY Christopher, The Picturesque. Studies in a Point of View, London, Putnam,
1927.
JAFFE Audrey, “Spectacular Sympathy. Visuality and Ideology in Dickens’s ‘A
Christmas Carol’”, in Carol T. CHRIST and John O. JORDAN (eds.), Victorian
Literature and the Victorian Visual Imagination, cit., pp. 327-344.
JANOWITZ Anne, England’s Ruins: Poetic Purpose and the National Landscape, Oxford,
Blackwell, 1990.
KRIEGER Murray, Ekphrasis: The Illusion of the Natural Sign, Baltimore, The Johns
Hopkins University Press, 1992.
LANDOW George P., The Aesthetic and Critical Theories of John Ruskin, Princeton,
Princeton University Press, 1971.
MEISEL Martin, Realizations: Narrative, Pictorial, and Theatrical Arts in NineteenthCentury England, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1983.
The Magic Lantern and the Crystal Palace
269
McLUHAN Marshall, “Tennyson and Picturesque Poetry”, in J. JUMP (ed.),
Tennyson Critical Heritage, London, 1968, pp. 262-282.
McLUHAN Marshall, “The Aesthetic Moment in Landscape Poetry”, English
Institute Essays, 1951, pp. 168-181.
ORESTANO Francesca, “Picturesque Landscape vs. Modern Space: An Agony, in
Three Fits”, in Toni CERUTTI (ed.), Ruskin and the Twentieth Century, Vercelli,
Mercurio, 2000.
PAGETTI Carlo and CHIALANT Maria Teresa (eds.), La città e il teatro. Dickens e
l’immaginario vittoriano, Roma, Bulzoni, 1988.
PRICE Uvedale, 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; 1795; 1810.
ROSS Alexander M., The Imprint of the Picturesque on Nineteenth-Century British Fiction,
Waterloo, Ontario, Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 1986.
STOEHR Taylor, Dickens: The Dreamer’s Stance, Ithaca, Cornell University Press,
1965.
TILLOTSON Kathleen and BURGIS Nina (eds.), The Letters of Charles Dickens,
Vol.IV, 1844-1846, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1977.
WHEELER MANWARING Elizabeth, Italian Landscape in Eighteenth-Century England. A Study Chiefly of the Influence of Claude Lorrain and Salvator Rosa on English
Taste, 1700-1800, London, Cass, 1965.
WILLIAMS Raymond, Keywords. A Vocabulary of Culture and Society, London,
Fontana, 1988.
WILSON Angus, The World of Charles Dickens, London, Secker and Warburg, 1970.
ZOTTI MINICI Carlo Alberto (ed.), Prima del cinema. Le lanterne magiche, Venezia,
Marsilio, 1988.
ZOTTI MINICI Carlo Alberto, Dispositivi ottici alle origini del cinema. Immaginario
scientifico e spettacolo nel XVII e XVIII secolo, Bologna, Clueb, 1998.