mme_hardy | Dickens and Switzerland

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.