While the mind and imagination of Charles Dickens has always fascinated me, conversely, stories of travel and faraway places captivated the world beloved author. 
In her newly released, Dickens and Travel: The Start of Modern Travel Writing, Lucinda Hawksley details her great-great-great-grandfather’s jaunts across the United Kingdom, Europe and North America.

Hawksley describes Dickens as “a writer with the soul of a traveler” and helps us get to know him and his characters better, via his letters, articles and travelogues – American Notes and The Unconventional Traveler – making the beloved classics all the richer for the reader. 

As a young freelance journalist hungry to make a name for himself in the early 1830’s,  he followed the story wherever it led him, no matter the danger of harrowing stagecoach rides, no matter the weather, its horses being willed to continue on ever faster to make his printing deadline. 

The journeys became part of his research. Names and observations of his fellow travelers became fodder for his incredible storytelling, which we see continues as Hawksley sheds light on Dickens’s summer holidays with wife Catherine and their children in Broadstairs, visits to Cornwall, travels to Ireland, Scotland, Paris and Italy, as well as the United States and Canada.

We learn what, in his travels, excited the author –  on Paris, of which he wrote, “My eyes ached and my head grew giddy, as novelty, novelty, novelty; nothing but strange and striking things; came swarming before me.” And what infuriated him – slavery, of which he wrote in American Notes, on leaving Richmond, Virginia, “I went upon my way with a grateful heart that I was not doomed to live where slavery was,” inhumane conditions in prisons, and spitting, nicknaming Washington DC, “the head-quarters of tobacco-tinctured saliva.”

This is not the first time Hawksley has written about her forefather. Previous books include Dickens and Christmas, Charles Dickens: The Man, The Novels, The Victorian Age, as well as Dickens’s Artistic Daughter Katey: Her Life, Loves & Impact. 

Hawksley makes clear in the current installment the correlation of Dickens’s travels inspiring his writing and his writing inspiring his contemporary authors. 

While I knew Dickens had visited my hometown of Philadelphia and met with Edgar Allan Poe at a time when the city was the publishing capital of the country, I was especially delighted to learn more about their 1842 meeting and the influence Dickens and his raven Grip, which had been featured in Barnaby Rudge, had had on Poe. 

I thoroughly enjoyed reading Dickens and Travel: The Start of Modern Travel Writing, much of the time with a smile on my face. Fans of Dickens and all those who travel will too.

While I received a free egalley from Pen & Sword History through NetGalley, I have also purchased a Kindle copy, because there were so many interesting quotes and anecdotes I’d like to reread.