Dickens and Switzerland

[mme_hardy]

 I just read in rapid succession two Dickens novels with extended Swiss scenes: Little Dorrit and Dickens's collaboration with Wilkie Collins, The Frozen Deep).   Both have dramatic scenes set in Switzerland.

I was struck by how different the mid-Victorian clichés about Switzerland were from the modern clichés.  Instead of "craftsmen,  beautiful mountains, orderliness",  Dickens has "peasants, terrifying mountains, iodine deficiency."   In The Frozen Deep, the villain's family has one utter idiot, one adult woman who is developing a goiter --even though she has lived in England for some years-- and the villain himself.   The overall conclusion is that Swiss people tend toward stupidity, and this is just a horrible feature of the country.   (Iodine deficiency had not been recognized as a thing, so my labelling the problem as such is modern.)  Almost all the Swiss people mentioned, including the heroine, are peasants and thus lower in class than any English person.

The big divergence from a modern POV is the attitude toward the Alps in winter.    One vacationed in Switzerland in the summer; one fled it before winter came.   Both novels feature terrifying trips through the mountains during a storm; in both journeys, the scene is dark and foreboding.   The narrator does not admire the terrifying beauty of the mountains and the storm; instead he is concerned only with the threats that cliffs, avalanches, and freezing pose to the narrators.   The mountains are dark, and only the valleys are pleasant.  By 1856, terrifying-and-glorious Nature, as instanced by rocky crags and fathomless valleys, had been around for close to 100 years. (I'm starting from 1764,  the date of The Castle of Otranto.)   Dickens seems to have preferred terrifying-and-glorious people.

In conclusion, thank God for iodine supplements, mountaineering, and winter sports.

Comments

[oursin]

I think this would have been just before the development of Alpinism (had a fascinating conversation recently with a woman who is researching Victorian women mountaineers. of whom there were more than one might imagine) and also probably the sanatorium industry and sending people to Switzerland for their consumption.

Heidi I see was not published until 1880.

[caulkhead]

http://clarearoche.wordpress.com/2013/02/12/women-mont-blanc-recognition/

[mme_hardy]

How nifty! Thank you.

[caulkhead]

The next blog entry after that's got a fabulous picture of a group of women mountaineers on a snowfield, too.

[kore]

That is FANTASTIC.

[mme_hardy]

It interests me that Dickens lived in Lausanne from June-November 1846, loved the country, and wrote the first chunk of Dombey and Sons there. But the mountains were horrible things, so described. "In another letter to Forster, Dickens’s description of the monastery revealed his terror and reverence of the Alps. “A great hollow on top of a range of dreadful mountains, and in the midst, a black lake, with phantom clouds perpetually stalking over it. The air so fine, it is difficult to breathe ... the cold so exquisitely thin and sharp that it is not to be described.”"

(New York Times travel article, paywalled: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/08/travel/following-dickens-through-switzerland.html)

[movingfinger]

I too thought of Heidi and sanitarianism immediately: there must have been some resistance surely to sending ill people to a Godforsaken wilderness. By the time of Heidi's writing, though, the transformation would seem to be complete. Or Spyri was consciously writing against assumptions---it's years since I looked at that book.

I would love to read more about women mountaineers; I've seen paintings and the alpenstocks used then look dangerously heavy...it seems that that style of gear went straight into use in the original Nordic single-pole skiing.

[skygiants]

I am stuck on 'Dickens and Wilkie Collins co-wrote a novel!' Is it any good?

[mme_hardy]

It is a Gothick Melodrama. I wouldn't have been shocked to find out it was written decades earlier. It is a vivid adventure with stock characters. Think about playing with it in a http://www.pollocks-coventgarden.co.uk/index.php/toy-theatres.html and you'll have it in its right place. (It was originally a stage play, by the way.)

I had a Pollock's Toy Theatre when I was a child. It was awesome. I even ordered a wooden doll from Pollock's and had to work out how to convert L.S.d to American.

[houseboatonstyx.livejournal.com]

Hm, there was a Peter Wimsey story about a woman apparently mentally deficient in the Basques, iirc, who was restored by a supplement.

[mme-hardy.livejournal.com]

I remember that one! I was disappointed to read, some years later, that it doesn't work that way: cretinism is a developmental disease, and stopping your iodide supplements as an adult makes you hypothyroid, not a cretin.

[houseboatonstyx.livejournal.com]

I think she was an Englishwoman. Apparently when home, the English diet had supplied enough of whatever it was. All those coasts and fish, vs all those mountains?

[shezan.livejournal.com]

The idiots were known in France as "les crétins des Alpes" and they're in Balzac's "Un médecin de campagne". It has to do with consanguinity because the high mountains and deep valleys made it difficult to court outside one's village; everyone was too closely related.

[shezan.livejournal.com]

Thanks to your post I've now ordered a book I've long had my eye on, Jim Ring's How The English Made The Alps. Delighted you reminded me!

... also, set in the Tirol but also in the Alps, my favourite Trollope short story, which has the unlikely theme of inflation (I think it's unique): "Why Frau Frohmann Raised Her Prices" (1850): STRONGLY recommended, it's LOVELY, about an innkeeper trying not to, etc.

[resonant.livejournal.com]

Interesting.