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 Il Romanziere contemporaneo illustrato in 1868-1869. Starting from some considerations on the complementary relationship between writing and images in the first edition, Le memorie di Davide Copperfield is framed in those areas which still were being defined in the post-unification decade so as to propose a contrastive analysis that will highlight 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’. Having purged indecorous themes and removed irony entirely, the novel is drained of its tragicomic vitality and reduced to a one-dimensional romantic sentimentalism typical of the Italian versions of other foreign novels in this period.