Dinis (Júlio)

Joaquim Guilherme Gomes Coelho, the eminent novelist who adopted the pseudonym Júlio Dinis in all his writings, has a life bound up with the history of this island, for he visited it several times and wrote one of his best-known and most exquisite books here.

Stricken by a stubborn lung disease, he came to seek from the kindness of our climate some relief for his sufferings, and to look here for that ideal called health, in his own already disheartened words.

He first arrived in Funchal on 8 February 1869 and returned in 1870 and 1871. According to some notes published in the former magazine Serões, which we consider reliable, Júlio Dinis lived, if only briefly, in a house at the Ilhéus (islets), where the distinguished lawyer Nuno Ferreira Jardim once resided, and for longer in a building on Rua da Carreira (‘track’) belonging to the family of the late merchant António Pinto Correia. A pharmacy is now installed on its ground floor, and it stands almost opposite Rua de São Francisco (St Francis). The Funchal Council would perform an act that all its citizens would regard with grateful praise if it had a simple metal plaque placed on that house, if nothing more could be done, commemorating the stay in our land of one of the greatest figures of our contemporary literature.

It was in this city that Júlio Dinis wrote his remarkable novel Os Fidalgos da Casa Mourisca, which some consider superior to, and many place on the same level as, As Pupilas do Senhor Reitor and A Morgadinha dos Cannaviaes. For thirty-odd years a long letter he wrote from Madeira remained unpublished. In it he describes the island’s incomparable beauties in broad strokes, sharing with a friend the personal impressions he received on arriving at the lovely island that rises from the foam of the sea like the mythological Cytherea... to borrow a phrase of the great writer. It is a passage of fine, evocative prose, first published in the aforementioned review Serões and reproduced in the book of Júlio Dinis’s unpublished writings entitled Ineditos e Esparsos. This work published 17 letters by Júlio Dinis written in Funchal, the last dated 20 February 1870. The 1919 edition of this work includes 31 letters written in Funchal, omitting 7 from the earlier edition, making a total of 38. The Diário da Madeira (‘Madeira Daily’) of 24 August 1919 published two further unpublished letters by the great novelist, also dated from Madeira.

The great novelist stayed on this island from March to May 1869, from October 1869 to May 1870 and from October 1870 to May 1871. During his time in Funchal he was on the closest terms with his fellow countryman and friend, Canon Dr Custódio de Morais e Brito, a man of uncommon talent and rare learning.

The following words, in his own hand, were found in a manuscript book belonging to the illustrious writer: ‘I began writing Os Fidalgos da Casa Mourisca in Funchal in March 1869. I was in the middle of chapter 8 when I returned to Porto in May of the same year. I worked in Porto and wrote up to the beginning of chapter 17, from June to October, when I went back to Madeira. I finished it in Funchal on 11 April 1870’.

Júlio Dinis died in Porto on 12 September 1871, four months after leaving Madeira, aged only 31.