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Charles Dickens
Gilbert Keith Chesterton
PART TWO
CONTENTS
* CHAPTER VII DICKENS AND CHRISTMAS
* CHAPTER VIII THE TIME OF TRANSITION
* CHAPTER IX LATER LIFE AND WORKS
* CHAPTER X THE GREAT DICKENS CHARACTERS
* CHAPTER XI ON THE ALLEGED OPTIMISM OF DICKENS
* CHAPTER XII A NOTE ON THE FUTURE OF DICKENS
CHAPTER VII
DICKENS AND CHRISTMAS
In the July of 1844 Dickens went on an Italian tour, which he afterwards summarised in the book called "Pictures from Italy." They are, of course, very vivacious, but there is no great need to insist on them considered as Italian sketches; there is no need whatever to worry about them as a phase of the mind of Dickens when he travelled out of England. He never travelled out of England. There is no trace in all these amusing pages that he really felt the great foreign things which lie in wait for us in the south of Europe, the Latin civilisation, the Catholic Church, the art of the centre, the endless end of Rome. His travels are not travels in Italy, but travels in Dickensland. He sees amusing things; he describes them amusingly. But he would have seen things just as good in a street in Pimlico, and described them just as well. Few things were racier, even in his raciest novel, than his description of the marionette play of the death of Napoleon. Nothing could be more perfect than the figure of the doctor, which had something wrong with its wires, and hence "hovered about the couch and delivered medical opinions in the air." Nothing could be better as a catching of the spirit of all popular drama than the colossal depravi