About this Event
In Dickens’s “An Italian Dream” (1846), one of the chapters in his travelogue titled Pictures from Italy, the restive traveller uses the noun and verb forms of ‘dream’ in a variety of ways, some of which contradict each other. The sensory overload of an “unbroken succession of novelties” is comparable, he says, to the recall of half-formed dreams. In a pattern we see repeated in several works of nineteenth-century fiction and poetry, dreaming is not only related to movement and travel but depicted as dynamic itself: the black boat, which the author boards after the coach ride, marks a “dreamy kind of track” towards the mysteriou lights shining like tapers on the dark waves. This talk uses “the Dream” to examine fugue states, or states between sleep and wakefulness, active aesthetic reception and passive sufferance, as explored in Dickens’s works. The “Italian Dream” is an act of moving closer to “the heart of this strange place”: it is also the strange place itself, Venice, a bulwark of the majesty and magnificence of the European civilisation, which is also, from some angles, “gorgeous in the wild luxuriant fancies of the East.” Venice is described as “this strange Dream upon the water,” a dream of death by drowning. Dickens presciently warns readers against the Anthropocene, when water will eventually subsume the solid realities of the old city.
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Event Venue & Nearby Stays
Room P/L/002, Physics/Electronics Building, York, United Kingdom
GBP 0.00
