Unpacking Dickens’ Pictures from Italy seminar, October 30th 2019

Wednesday 30th October, 5.00-7.00 pm
Room 152-153 (Cayley Room), University of Westminster, 309 Regent Street, London W1B 2HW

A Thousand Words: Unpacking Dickens’ Pictures From Italy
Peter Orford (Buckingham)

In July 1844 Charles Dickens travelled with his family to Italy, basing himself in Genoa for a year. His adventures abroad were captured in his letters home, subsequently transformed into a newspaper series ‘Travelling Letters’ in 1846, and ultimately collected and bound into Pictures From Italy later that year. The final travel narrative, as it now exists, is therefore removed several times from Dickens’ initial experience up to two years earlier. In exploring the legitimacy of Pictures and its earlier incarnations to determine what constitutes the ‘true’ version of this text, the seminar will pose wider questions about authorial intention, editorial intervention and the elusiveness of creating a definitive edition.

Dr Peter Orford is Course Director for the MA by Research in Charles Dickens Studies at the University of Buckingham. He is the author of The Mystery of Edwin Drood: Charles Dickens’ unfinished novel and our endless attempts to end it (2018) and has been commissioned by Oxford University Press to prepare a new edition of Pictures From Italy.

All welcome, but guests from outside Westminster should RSVP Frankie Hines: frankie.hines@my.westminster.ac.uk OR Baptiste Danel: baptiste.danel@my.westminster.ac.uk