DANTE'S ROLE IN THE GENESIS OF DICKENS'S "A CHRISTMAS CAROL"

[...]Satan was sentenced to the Ninth Circle, the deepest part of Hell. Influenced by his friend's high regard for Dante's artistry and morality, Dickens may have been induced to read Dante's work, had he not already done so, especially since it was available in Cary's "modern" English translation, one that had been warmly recommended in a lecture by Coleridge at the Royal Institution. 7 As a literary man curious about the human condition and one committed to the cause of social reform, Dickens might have been particularly fascinated by the Inferno's depiction of man's inhumanity to man and its theme of crime and punishment. 10 The second record of books includes the following suggestive entry: "Flaxman (John), Compositions from the Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise of Dante, 110 plates, finely engraved in outline by Piroli; with Quotations from the Italian, and Translations, oblong folio, very beautifully bound in full Morocco extra, the sides completely covered in gold tooling, inside joints, watered silk linings, and fly-leaves, ... 12 The 1870 catalogue of property at Gadshill Place lists under plaster casts "Night and Morning, a pair of reliefs after Thorwaldsen-in gilt frames." Because of a similarity in sculptural style between Flaxman and his Danish contemporary Thorwaldsen, the objets d'art referred to in the 1870 catalogue may be the same reliefs originally cited in the earlier inventory of 1844.