Intellectual affinities: l'amicizia tra Walter Savage Landor e Charles Dickens

The paper illustrates the close friendship between Walter Savage Landor and Charles Dickens, which lasted several decades and was characterized by reciprocal esteem and affection. Thirty-seven years Dickens’s elder, Landor was a keen reader of his novels and particularly appreciated the infinite range of characters and atmospheres, as well as Dickens’s skill to excite strong emotions in his reading public. On the other hand, Landor was for the young novelist a model of unconditioned uprightness and of vigorous resistance to the hardships of life. The essay also takes into account, for the first time, two poems Landor dedicated to Dickens, together with the latter’s review of Forster’s biography of Landor, published in 1869 in "All the Year Round", in which he provided a personal portrait of his old friend, while unconditionally endorsing Forster’s biographical enterprise.