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Pictures From Italy: Dickens’s selfie and Victorian baroque

ABSTRACT By analysing the history, conventions, and status of the travel book as a genre, this article highlights Dickens’s inimitable departures from its acknowledged form in Pictures from Italy (1846). This text purports to be an exception among travel books, to the extent that in today’s parlance Dickens is at once keen on visual impressions enhanced by the codes of optical technology; his viewpoint, similes, analogies, send the reader constantly back to England and himself. Such a strategy of displaced topicality affects Dickens’s portrayal of Italy, as it is likely to produce a belated shock of recognition when the condition of England, in later years, suggests similarities with Italy and with the rule of Baroque exceptions occurring in Italy as well as in England.