Remembering Dickens: David Copperfield on Italian Television

David Copperfield (1850-51) is a novel about memory, and about its power not only to evoke and stimulate a reflection on the past, but also to meditate upon it through the ability that memory has to construct a series of strikingly visual images of bygone times. As many scholars have noticed, David’s childhood and adult life are recollected by the narrator as “moving” scenes and “shots”, according to a pre-filmic technique. David repeatedly admits that his (cinematic) memory is the only thing he has to “recollect” images from the past and to organize them in a coherent tale that recalls not only his personal bildung from suffering child to successful writer (and happy husband) but also the story of all England in a specific phase of its evolution as a nation. Furthermore, Dickens’s decision to use a first-person narration – a strategy that he will adopt also in Great Expectations, another partially autobiographic novel – enhances the power of the (male) gaze to offer, at the same time, a narration of the past and a depiction of the past by means of a “point of view shot”, or a “subjective camera”. This is the reason why this “memorial” novel has attracted the interest of various directors working for television and cinema, coming from different countries. As foreseeable, the BBC has made David Copperfield a constant presence in its show schedule, since Dickens’s text – reputed as THE quintessential Dickensian (and Victorian) novel – may be seen as an occasion to meditate in nostalgic terms on the past history of his characters, and of the whole nation as well. Despite the obvious cultural, linguistic and historical differences, the Italian black and white TV version of David Copperfield, directed by Anton Giulio Majano and broadcast on the Italian Public Italian Broadcasting Company R.A.I. in 1966, stimulates similar reflections on the issue of (national) memory. Many Italian television historians have remarked that the “Reithian” style of the BBC (from the name of its first Director-General, Sir John Reith) had an enormous impact in the television schedule of post-war European televisions, which alternated educational pieces (on history, art, culture etc.) and television adaptations from the classics. As far as Italy is concerned, a great part of its post-war unification and education in the second half of the twentieth century was determined and influenced by the “communicative normalisation” of the R.A.I. television programs, as Italian linguist Tullio De Mauro calls it, which allowed no local dialects, no sensational or immoral tales, and aimed at conveying politically and ideologically reassuring messages, in particular during a phase of cultural, economical and ideological changes in Italian society. Majano’s version of David Copperfield thus offered its Italian viewers an idealised image of the past based on memory, adopted to face the challenges of the present.