"In the Catacombs" [Below the church of San Sebastiano] by Marcus Stone for "Pictures from Italy" (1862) (original) (raw)

Passage Realised: In Ghastly Places

Below the church of San Sebastiano, two miles beyond the gate of San Sebastiano, on the Appian Way, is the entrance to the catacombs of Rome — quarries in the old time, but afterwards the hiding-places of the Christians. These ghastly passages have been explored for twenty miles; and form a chain of labyrinths, sixty miles in circumference.

A gaunt Franciscan friar, with a wild bright eye, was our only guide, down into this profound and dreadful place. The narrow ways and openings hither and thither, coupled with the dead and heavy air, soon blotted out, in all of us, any recollection of the track by which we had come: and I could not help thinking "Good Heaven, if, in a sudden fit of madness, he should dash the torches out, or if he should be seized with a fit, what would become of us!" On we wandered, among martyrs' graves: passing great subterranean vaulted roads, diverging in all directions, and choked up with heaps of stones, that thieves and murderers may not take refuge there, and form a population under Rome, even worse than that which lives between it and the sun. Graves, graves, graves; Graves of men, of women, of their little children, who ran crying to the persecutors, "We are Christians! We are Christians!" that they might be murdered with their parents; Graves with the palm of martyrdom roughly cut into their stone boundaries, and little niches, made to hold a vessel of the martyrs’ blood; Graves of some who lived down here, for years together, ministering to the rest, and preaching truth, and hope, and comfort, from the rude altars, that bear witness to their fortitude at this hour; more roomy graves, but far more terrible, where hundreds, being surprised, were hemmed in and walled up: buried before Death, and killed by slow starvation.

"The Triumphs of the Faith are not above ground in our splendid churches," said the friar, looking round upon us, as we stopped to rest in one of the low passages, with bones and dust surrounding us on every side. "They are here! Among the Martyrs' Graves!" He was a gentle, earnest man, and said it from his heart; but when I thought how Christian men have dealt with one another; how, perverting our most merciful religion, they have hunted down and tortured, burnt and beheaded, strangled, slaughtered, and oppressed each other; I pictured to myself an agony surpassing any that this Dust had suffered with the breath of life yet lingering in it, and how these great and constant hearts would have been shaken — how they would have quailed and drooped — if a foreknowledge of the deeds that professing Christians would commit in the Great Name for which they died, could have rent them with its own unutterable anguish, on the cruel wheel, and bitter cross, and in the fearful fire. [Chapter X, "Rome," pp. 450-452]

Commentary

Again, as in the previous character studies for Pictures from Italy, the reader may detect the influence of Laurence Sterne's unconventional travelogue A Sentimental Journey through France and Italy (1768) in Dickens's emphasizing the contrast in the characters of the stern, self-assured tour guide and the apprehensive young tourist with the bushy moustache — in fact, thirty-three-year old Charles Dickens himself. In this culminating plate of the pictorial sequence for the 1846 travelogue Stone focusses on the scene's chief speaker, but also depicts the narrative persona — his only appearance in the series of eight wood-engravings for this volume in the Illustrated Library Series. Whereas Sterne makes the reader constantly aware of the presence and judgments of his less-than-objective observer, the Reverend Mr. Yorick, and dwells on picturesque scenes and local characters instead of the significant sites and notable architectural works that English readers had grown accustomed to in travelogues prior to Sterne's, Dickens does not borrow other picaresque elements, so that the work remains non-fiction. Dickens develops the differences between the gaunt and foreboding expert guide, who delivers his commentary with rhetorical flair, and the young man who fears getting lost in the vast underground network of chambers, tunnels, and graves. The reader's identifying the apprehensive man in the cap as Dickens himself, however, depends upon recognizing him from Dickens's letters and John Forster's biography, both of which indicate that the young author grew a splendid Italian moustache after his arrival in Genoa in 1844. Subsequently, as the illustration suggests, Dickens trimmed it somewhat.

Although Marcus Stone had access in 1866 to neither Dickens's published letters nor the biography by Forster, he likely learned of Dickens's having grown a moustache in Genoa from the author himself in 1866, or from his father, Frank. He may also have seen the portrait painting by the Newcastle artist Stephen Humble, which depicts the writer in his early thirties sporting such a moustache. Dickens wrote to artist Daniel Maclise in the autumn of 1844: "The moustaches are glorious, glorious. I have cut them shorter, and trimmed them a little at the ends to improve their shape. They are charming, charming. Without them, life would be a blank."

The Poesque atmosphere of the ancient Christian burial site seems to have engaged Dickens more than his eccentric guide, as the narrator indulges his fears of getting lost in the underground maze. Dickens seems less impressed with the fact that early Christians, persecuted by various Roman Emperors, conducted their worship in a clandestine manner in these man-made caverns on the outskirts of the Eternal City. Dickens does not indicate whether he visited the other set of catacombs at St. Callixtus, also on the via Appia Antica.

Harry Furniss seems to have based his 1910 illustration of the tour guide directly on Stone's, although significantly he omits the tourist and focusses entirely on the torch-carrying friar. Samuel Palmer, the 1846 publication's initial illustrator, provides scenes featuring traditional tourist sites such as The Street of the Tombs, Pompeii, and the The Colosseum of Rome (1846). Marcus Stone has more effectively captured Dickens's intention to emulate Sterne by bringing places to life for his readers by associating them with interesting characters such as the voluble friar who guides the Dickenses through the sepulchral gloom of the Roman catacombs.

Relevant Illustrations from Other Editions, 1846-1910

Left: Samuel Palmer's ornamented initial page in the 1846 edition, The Reader's Passport (p. 1). Centre: Sol Eytinge, Jr.'s study of another tour guide in the book, The Goblin of Avignon, another quirky character whom the Dickenses encounter at the start of their European tour (1867). Right: Harry Furniss depicts the friar as less sombre and more enthusiastic as he beckons Dickens's party to follow in the frontispiece, The Guide in the Catacombs (1910). [Click on the images to enlarge them.]

References

Dickens, Charles. Pictures from Italy. Illustrated by Samuel Palmer. London: Chapman and Hall, 1846; rpt., 1850.

Dickens, Charles. American Notes for General Circulation and Pictures from Italy in Works. Illustrated by Marcus Stone. Illustrated Library Edition. London: Chapman and Hall: 1862, rpt. 1874.

Dickens, Charles. The Adventures of Oliver Twist, also, Pictures from Italy, American Notes for General Circulation. Illustrated by Sol Eytinge, Junior. Diamond Edition. Boston: Ticknor & Fields, 1867.

Dickens, Charles. A Tale of Two Cities, American Notes, and Pictures from Italy. Illustrated by Harry Furniss. Charles Dickens Library Edition. 18 vols. London: Educational Book, 1910. Vol. 13.

Forster, John. The Life of Charles Dickens. London: Chapman and Hall, n. d. 2 vols. [Originally published in 3 vols., 1872-4.]

House, Madeline, Graham Storey, and Kathleen Tillotson, eds. The Letters of Charles Dickens . Pilgrim edn. Vol. 4 (1844-46). Oxford: Clarendon, 1977.

Last modified 17 January 2019