Dickens and Travel

How Charles Dickens’s global travels across Europe, America, and Canada influenced his literary works—from his travelogues to chapters in his novels.

From childhood, Charles Dickens was fascinated by tales from other countries and other cultures, and he longed to see the world. In Dickens and Travel, Lucinda Hawksley looks at the journeys made by the author—who is also her great-great-great grandfather.

Although Dickens is usually perceived as a London author, in the 1840s he whisked his family away to live in Italy for year and spent several months in Switzerland. Some years later he took up residence in Paris and Boulogne (where he lived in secret with his lover). In addition to travelling widely in Europe, he also toured America twice, performed onstage in Canada and, before his untimely death, was planning a tour of Australia.

Dickens and Travel enters into the world of the Victorian traveller and looks at how Charles Dickens’s journeys influenced his writing and enriched his life.

“Hawksley explores the novelist’s almost compulsive fascination with the need to be elsewhere in . . . a book that ranges from domestic jaunts to international voyages.”The Times Literary Supplement

“All in all, Dickens and Travel offers a rich and entertaining overview of Dickens as a traveler and travel writer . . . And we get a real feel of what it was like to travel and sojourn in Britain and abroad in the Victorian period.” —Dickens Quarterly