Page 15 - PBCJuly2012

Pickwick Bicycle Club Magazine. Volume 9 No.2 July 2012
15
"the Tower is much aslant"
On his travels around Italy, Charles Dickens stopped over in Pisa. Peter
Lumley finds the hotel room where he stayed and sees the visitors book
he signed

For those who nowadays travel to discover, there is probably too much information to be gleaned
before you buy the tickets or make sure your transport is up to the journey. How much different it
was for that master of words Charles Dickens, he simply upped and went, quill and inkpot in the
portmanteau - well sealed, one hopes. At just four miles an hour he took a pony and trap, or a
carriage that rocked and swayed, all along the roads to . . . well, as it is midsummer time,
mid-1840s, then let's follow him about a bit.

If it's not easy in this century to be a real discoverer as was Charles Dickens, yet that needn't
blunt the wonderment of your first-time experience of gazing on the gravity defying edifice that
offers the "sensation of being in a ship that has heeled over, through the action of an ebb tide."
That is exactly how Charles Dickens wrote of the near riverside Tower that is the must-see
attraction for people visiting Pisa.

When he arrived at the banks of the Arno he was then well into a journey that had carried him
across France several times, a lot of Italy and the terrain through the Alps and back to England.
Charles Dickens was such a wanderlust, searching always for the experience and wanting to meet
people and things anew. He came for a time to live in Albaro, a suburb of Genoa. As he describes
his first experiences there we can sense him stepping with trepidation from room to room, checking
how this new abode will welcome his presence. He'd soon discover the need to shut out the searing
sun in daytime, and then shutter the windows so the mosquitoes wouldn't drive him to commit
suicide after dusk.

That is how he described his time then, so very much like the way every traveller amongst us
checks the nooks and crannies - and just where is the fire escape located! - whenever the door
first closes at a new room in a strange hotel. One thing the modern traveller doesn't find - unless
on a farmhouse holiday stay - is that right outside your window is a cow-house, the cows there to
ensure new milk by the bucketful, as Charles Dickens found at Villa Bagnerello.

The opening words of his "Pictures from Italy" chapters is that here is "..a series of faint reflections
- mere shadows in the water - of places to which the imaginations of most people are attracted in
a greater or lesser degree . ." Charles Dickens reflects that the greater part of his travelogue are
written right there where he stands, on the spot and sent home - from time to time - in private
letters. That is little different to how things are done today, yet so much less the inked or biro
words and more an electronic transmission - for sure that way of communicating won't enjoy the
same durability as those thoughts and observations that helps us breathe the travel atmosphere
described by Charles Dickens.

His experiences, and ours too - that is, you as my reader - link across a great divide of years.
The Chapman & Hall edition I am quoting in this piece was printed in 1891; then Jane F. Gibson
owned this very same "Pictures from Italy" and in June 1893 signed her name on the fly-leaf of
each of seventeen volumes on my Charles Dickens shelf. I had come across this full set at a
Scottish sale in 1985, and acquired them. Then, quite by chance, in 2002 came another link across