Voices in the Hill Book

[postilla italiana, in fondo]

Early Dickens, already Dickens (in pieces)

«It would require the pencil of Hogarth to illustrate - our feeble pen is inadequate to describe ...»

The first book of Dickens is not a novel nor a collection of short stories (apart from some Tales in the fourth part) but a series of small portraits of people, places and situations of the early 19th-century London, halfway between journalism and essay (the great tradition of 18th- and 19th-century essay…).

To read it all below can thus seem rather boring.
But it is the perfect bus reading, if you have a daily journey of twenty minutes to go, and you can view out the window and around you people, places and situations of a city today, that sometimes rhyme and sometimes contrast with the 19th-century London.

And you can already appreciate Dickens's spiced writing, his good-natured irony, his ability to grasp the grotesque aspects of daily life, or create pathos in describing the most unacceptable living conditions.

The first part is Our Parish: portraits of typical characters and situations of a typical English parish, with mildly satirical descriptions of the world that constitutes («our parish, which, like all other parishes, is a little world of its own ...»).

The second is Scenes, opened by The Streets-Morning and The Streets-Night: plural portraits, with skilled transitions from one to another character or group. Then stores (and their owners), means of transport, entertainments, parliament, the courts and finally a terrible descent into prison (A Visit to Newgate), where we sink in the mind of a condemned, who in the last hours recalls childhood, relives the happy moments of love, falls asleep, dreams, and in the end wakes up: «he is the comdemned felon again, guilty and despairing; and in two hours more will be dead.»

Then we have the Characters, opened by Thoughts About People (also when he says he thinks, Dickens immediately begins to tell, with the deduction of a «whole life» from «manner and appearance»), and, in the end, the Tales.
The most of them are funny, some are more bitter, but again Dickens chooses to close with the most somber note: the last tale (The Drunkard's Death) is horrible: an entire life of drunkenness, poverty and absence of all light.

And in all that, we have a large drinking of brandy-and-water.


Postilla italiana (5 febbraio 2017)

In italiano gli Sketches (compresi quelli dei giovani gentiluomini) sono adesso leggibili in tre volumi editi da Mattioli 1885: I Londinesi; Il grande romanzo di Londra; e Amori londinesi.
Come scrive oggi Ivan Tassi su «Alias Domenica» questi bozzetti rappresentano «la prima occasione in cui Dickens si presenta sulla scena, seppure sotto mentite spoglie, per reclamare a gran voce i diritti e i poteri di un mago incantatore determinato a esibire sortilegi di prodigiosa affabulazione». Un mago capace di evocare «l'incantesimo della vita quotidiana». E che in un certo senso inizia qui a costruirsi il pubblico per i romanzi che verranno.
Sì, direi che sta facendo anche questo.