Tears and Middle-Class Decorum in the Iconotext of the First Italian Edition of David Copperfield

This essay examines the role of the iconotext of the first Italian edition of David Copperfield by Charles Dickens, published in the magazine Il Romanziere contemporaneo illustrato in 1868-1869. After a consideration of the complementarity of typescript and images in the original edition, Le memorie di Davide Copperfield is placed in the context of the Milanese publishing world in the decade following the Italian Unification before proceeding to a contrastive analysis of how the illustrations of the Treves edition differ from those of the original. The impression of greater respectability given by the Italian edition is mainly due to the different treatment of the female characters, who are never shown as ‘fallen women’. With undignified themes and irony entirely eliminated, the novel is drained of its tragicomic vitality and reduced to a one-dimensional romantic sentimentalism typical of Italian versions of foreign novels in this period.