Chapter 3

Listing and impressionism in Charles Dickens’s description of Genoa in Pictures from Italy

This chapter examines a subset of representative list constructions in Dickens’s description of Genoa. Such constructions comprise nearly 20% of the text and those examined in detail are varied in type, long, complex and contain significant deviations from the norm. This linguistic complexity is difficult for readers to process and leads us to infer analogically the mind-set of the first-person narrator-observer behind the text, thus providing a window on how readers interact cognitively with text. In context, the extraordinary character of the lists leads to the impression that Dickens’s description of Genoa is not a standard travelogue description but, rather, an impressionist evocation (parallel to the impressionist movement in visual art) of his initial mental struggle in coming to terms with what, for him, is the overwhelming variety and unusualness of Genoa. The chapter concludes with a brief discussion of the relation between linguistic and cognitive accounts of reader-text interaction.