About this Event
The Turner Society: 44th Kurt Pantzer Memorial Lecture by Professor Malcolm Andrews
The City "Anchored in the Deep Ocean": Dickens, Turner and Venice
This lecture argues for affinities between Dickens’ prose evocation of Venice and Turner’s oils and watercolours of the city. In 1844, writing from there to a friend, Dickens confided that “I never saw the thing before that I should be afraid to describe. But to tell what Venice is, I feel to be an impossibility”. The same letter also invoked the Venetian paintings of Canaletto, Stanfield and Turner. Accordingly, in composing his Pictures from Italy (1846) Dickens gave a separate chapter to Venice, titled “An Italian Dream”, which shows a radical stylistic rupture from the broadly conventional travel narrative in the rest of the book.
This lecture explores some of the ways in which Dickens’ writing, in trying to represent the “indescribable”, might be seen to resemble Turner’s melting of forms in his Venetian work.
Wine will be served after the lecture.
Speaker bio: Malcolm Andrews is Emeritus Professor of Victorian and Visual Studies, University of Kent, and was for thirty years editor of The Dickensian. His publications in the field of landscape aesthetics and the visual arts include Landscape and Western Art (1999) and A Sweet View: The Making of an English Idyll (2021).
Image credit: 'J.M.W. Turner, 'S. Benedetto looking towards Fusina' (1843, detail: Tate)
Event Venue & Nearby Stays
Paul Mellon Centre and online, 16 Bedford Square, London, United Kingdom
GBP 0.00