The making of a classic: a survey of Italian translations

For a very long time from the Romantic age to the end of World War Two, culturally speaking, Italy was more dependent on France than on any other European nation. However Dickens was to find an early breakthrough into the Italian literary market, especially when compared with other Victorian writers. This is probably due to the ambivalence of Dickens’s texts (Shavit 1980), which would belong to different literary systems at the same time and at different times – the prerogative of a classic. Dickens has been read by both intellectuals and general public, and his hold on the Italian literary scene has proved much longer than that of any other English author excepting Shakespeare (but the bard started earlier). Thus Dickens has found his way both in the highbrow literary market and in the lowbrow ones, including escapist, humoristic, edifying and children literature. Noticeably, the popular reception of Dickens has not changed over the last 170 years, while the highbrow reception is now radically different from what it used to be in the nineteenth century and even from what it used in the 1980s.