Travelling to Venice in 1844, Dickens wrote effusively to John Forster (1812–78), recording his first impressions of the city:

Although Ruskin had noted in The Stones of Venice the ways in which Venice invited a reading through the Arabian Nights (CW 10: 76), Dickens wrote this letter before Ruskin's version of the city came to dominate the Victorian imaginary and its aesthetics of space. Dickens's Venice is instead closer to Byron’s, but transcends both his poetry and Turner's ‘noble’ painting, operating ‘beyond all pen or pencil’ (LCD 4: 217). As Dickens recalls in Pictures from Italy (1846), sitting in an Italian church in the evening ‘is like a mild dose of opium’ (2003i: 5.46), recalling Marx on religion as the ‘opium of the masses’ (1992: 244). In this first encounter with Venice, the city emerges as a space of dream, inverting reality. ‘Plashing through the silent and deserted streets’, Dickens ‘felt as if the houses were reality – the water, fever-madness’ (LCD 4: 217). Both city and ‘reality’ are precarious. Dickens remarks on the pleasure of moving between these two worlds, ‘diving down […] into its wickedness and gloom – its awful prisons, deep below the water; its judgment chambers, secret doors, deadly nooks’, against which Venice's surface-level charms amounted to ‘insubstantial Magic’ (LCD 4: 217). This imagery is repeated in Pictures from Italy, there displaced onto St Peter’s in Rome, ‘so silent and so close, and tomb-like’, its hidden dungeon ‘so black, and stealthy, and stagnant, and naked’ (2003i: 11.137). In Lefebvrean terms, Dickens sees the ways in which Christian Rome, as opposed to the ancient city, came to identify absolute space with subterranean space (PS 254). For Dickens, ‘this little dark spot becomes a dream within a dream’ (2003i: 11.137), a phrase which echoes from Martin Chuzzlewit (1999: 17.287), with the vision of the palatial surface vaulted over an unconscious violence in the depths that threatens to ‘undermine the city’ (2003i: 11.137).