My thanks to Pen & Sword for a review copy of this book via NetGalley.

Perhaps the most famous of Victorian writers, Charles John Huffam Dickens (1812–1870) was known for not only for the novels he wrote but also for the many wonderful, whimsical, inimitable and memorable characters he created, the love for Christmas he reinvigorated among the general public, and the many social issues he gave voice to through his writings. But his fiction was only one part of his work. Besides the magazines he edited and wrote in, short story collections, and plays he also wrote of his travels, most famously American Notes for General Circulation (1842), and Pictures from Italy (1846).

Dickens and Travel: The Start of Modern Travel Writing (2022) by Lucinda Hawksley, author, art historian, and a great great great (I hope I got that right) granddaughter of Dickens explores Dickens’ relationship with travel as well as the various forms in which the author gave expression to his experiences travelling, whether through letters written to friends and acquaintances, or more formal volumes (including indeed some such letters in collected form).

Before he took to writing full time, Dickens began his career as a journalist, and after a childhood where money was tight and circumstances often very difficult, it was with this work that he got a chance to actually travel. This mostly involved trips within the country, but once he became a writer and his financial circumstances were better, his travels took him abroad as well, whether pleasure trips or journeys taken to give his famed reading tours.

Dickens seemed to have a love–hate relationship with travel, or more so with London perhaps, for while he enjoyed travelling and getting away from grey, dreary, smoggy London, he also found himself less inspired to write when away. Yet, he enjoyed exploring the places he visited, and with his journalistic background always made it a point to visit institutions like prisons and mental asylums, recording his impressions of these as also looking into health, education and social welfare in the places he visited.

The book is organised by place, and starting with England and the fast paced and hectic journeys for his journalistic work, we get glimpses of the holidays the family took and seaside places they visited; before moving onto Wales, Scotland and Ireland. His first American tour, taken when he has just turned thirty is covered extensively as is the year he and his family spent in Italy; experiences travelling and living in Switzerland and France, his second American tour where his health became of great concern, and unrealised plans to visit Australia to which two of his sons had emigrated.

With excerpts from his letters and books, we get to see in his own words how he felt about the different experiences he had, whether simply disappointing (or sometimes wonderful) weather to some more poignant experiences like the burial by two priest brothers of the victims of a ship that sank just off the coat of Wales, from beautiful landscapes and homes to more unsettling ones like public executions (still common at the time). While much of the time it was Dickens’ words that painted the pictures enabling readers to experience the places or events being described, he did at times also travel with some of his illustrators who went on to enrich his works with their impressions. Friends too, particularly Wilkie Collins, were invited to visit or even take a journey with him as Collins and he did which resulted in The Lazy Tour of Two Idle Apprentices (1857). And it was not only in travel writings and letters that these trips reflected, many of these experiences are echoed in Dickens’ fiction as well for instance, the Dorritt family journeying in Italy. Alongside Hawksley also brings up other travellers’ writings from the time or earlier enabling her to explore the development of travel writing, and how Dickens contributed to it.

And of course, in reading of these journeys at various times in his life, we also discover much about his life as well—the close bonds shared with his family, especially his children; happier times with Catherine earlier on and then cracks and the breakdown of his marriage, his career and the impact his writings had on people across the world.

In Dickens and Travel, Hawksley gives us a comprehensive picture of Dickens’ relationship with travel which any fan of his is sure to enjoy as I did. As I haven’t yet read any of his non-fiction travel writings, some aspects like the fact that he did have favourable impressions of several things in America were interesting to learn (since Martin Chuzzlewit had mostly the negatives). Perhaps for those who have read his travel writings, the larger excerpts might not appeal as much but I loved the flavour of his writing and impressions that these gave me. Also included are some illustrations and pictures (at the end in the Kindle edition I had).

A lovely volume which I certainly recommend to Dickens fans and also to those interested in travel writing in his time (or even indeed its evolution)!

This was a very interesting book which I thoroughly enjoyed reading. Everyone knows Dickens book but do you know the lengths he went to to get research and inspiration? Well this book definitely has that and more. The book has great detail about his travels. And I Learnt so many interesting things about him. I especially loved the extent he would go to to get inspiration including trying to visit an orphanage without being recognised. Which was increasingly difficult as he became more well known. I especially loved reading about his trip to a volcano. This book was obviously extremely well researched and flowed brilliantly. Which ment I easily became engrossed in this book and finished it in one day. If you are a fan of classic writing or history of dickens time then this book is definitely for you. I really do recommend reading it. I don't even think any stone was left unturned when the author wrote this book. 

So much praise goes out to the author and publishers for creating this brilliant biography of such a fascinating man that certainly held my attention throughout. 

The above review has already been placed on goodreads, waterstones, Google books, Barnes&noble, kobo, amazon UK where found and my blog today https://ladyreading365.wixsite.com/website/post/dickens-and-travel-by-lucinda-hawsley-pen-sword-4-stars either under my name or ladyreading365

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.

Dickens’ travels around the British Isles, Europe and America arranged by place and mostly chronologically. Lots of excerpts of his writing from his nonfiction, novels and letters are included making this an enjoyable read for any Dickens fan.

Beloved writer Charles Dickens was passionate about travel and gleaned inspiration from his travels for his books, many of which are mentioned here. He is...and always will be...a favourite author of mine so it was an honour to learn more about his life through his own eyes with many excerpts from letters and his travel books Pictures from Italy, American Notes and Uncommercial Traveler. He was an advocate for the rights of children and abhorred slavery and executions. His firsthand experience as a child living in a debtor's prison and forced to provide for the family by working at the age of twelve contributed greatly to his writing.

Dickens enjoyed traveling with his wife Catherine and their children, with friends and alone. His family even lived in various places in Europe to become immersed in the culture and to learn more about life. As an ex pat, I understand this very well...travel is unlike any other education and I have had the fortune to visit so many of the places Dickens did. He wrote about his love for Paris, kindness of Canadians, disgust for slavery in Richmond in America, extols free education in Cincinnati, pure magic of Venice, his dislike of Naples which he called "dirty", gradually falling in love with Rome, pride of his wife's Scottish heritage, his fondness of Brighton and despair of abusive boarding school such as that at Barnard Castle.

Not only did Dickens write about experiencing different cultures but also the oft harrowing physical journeys themselves including train accidents, horse/carriage travails, seasickness and a ship without beds. He wrote beautifully and with wit and always captured the emotions and feeling of a place in his words. He also traveled to give public talks. I would have been at the edge of my seat in awe! If only he had lived longer than only 58 years.

This magnificent book written by Dickens' great, great, great granddaughter, also a traveler, is an absolute must for fans of Charles Dickens. I learned more about his magnetic character and compassionate personality as well as his childhood, adventures as a journalist, family life and his marriage breakdown.

My sincere thank you to Pen & Sword and NetGalley for the privilege of reading this beguiling, astonishing and engrossing book.

Travel writer and great-great-great-granddaughter of Charles Dickens, Lucinda Hawksley has written about her illustrious ancestor, including Dickens and Christmas. Her newest book explores Dickens as a travel writer. “Almost everywhere I have travelled,” she shares, “I have discovered a connection with my great-great-great grandfather.”

It’s been perhaps forty years since I read a biography on Dicken, and I had no recollection of his extensive travels across Europe. I was aware of his visits to America. I will admit, I have not read ALL of Dickens’ books, although a complete set has been on my shelf for almost fifty years. I was surprised to learn how many of his books reflect his experience abroad.

When depression hit him, his wanderlust inspired him to go abroad, not only on tours but to take up residence for a lengthy time in Italy and Paris. Hawksley draws from Dickens’ letters, articles, and books to provide quotes about his experiences. I loved reading them, enjoying Dickens’ humor and vivid descriptions.

Dickens traveling began in England when he was a journalist seeking to cover stories, “adrenaline-fueled travels,” Hawskely calls them. “Belated on miry by-roads, towards the small hours, forty or fifty miles from Long, in a wheelless carriage, with exhausted horses and drunken postboys,” Dickens wrote, arriving in time to turn in his story to the printers. The roads were muddy and rough, the countryside held robbers. His experiences informs The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club.

What a prodigious walker Dickens was! Day-long walks in all kinds of weather. Consider Dickens’ description of one day in Scotland: “To-day we have had a journey of between 50 and 60 miles, though the bleakest and most desolate part of Scotland, where the hill-tops are still covered with great patches of snow, and the road winds over steep mountain-passes, and on the brink of deep brooks and precipices.” Another day it took four hours to walk sixteen miles in a gale, his wife Catherine’s timely removal from the carriage coming before it was caught up in a flood.

Everywhere he went, Dickens toured the prisons and noted the conditions of the poorest neighborhoods. He was particularly appalled by slavery. Southerners persisted in asking him his feelings about their ‘domestic institution,’ and he told them what he thought. He didn’t finish his American tour, turning back North.

“Party feeling runs high,” he wrote about 1842 America, “the great constitutional feature of this institution being, that directly the acrimony of the last election is over, the acrimony of the next one begins…” (Some things never change!)

One American custom that disgusted him was spitting. He describes floors slick with it, “the stone floor looks as if it were paved with open oysters.”

Dickens met many American writers, including a young Edgar Allan Poe, who was inspired by Dicken’s pet raven Grip when he wrote his famous poem The Raven. Grip ended up in the Philadelphia Free Library! In Washington D. C. he dined with John Quincy Adams, noting that “Adams is a fine old fellow-seventy-six years old, but with most surprising vigor, memory, readiness, and pluck.” He felt sympathy for the Native Americans, reduced to assimilation for survival, and he was appalled by the destruction of the country’s primal forests.

Dickens wrote, “Canada has held, and always will retain, a foremost place in my remembrance.”

Lengthy quotations from Dickens on Italy describes its beauty and the discomfort: “…but in the day you must keep the lattice-blinds close shut, or the sun would drive you mad; and when the sun goes down you must shut up all the windows or the mosquitoes would tempt you to commit suicide.” He also noted “the fleas, whose size is prodigious, and whose name is Legion, and who populate the coach-house to the extent that I daily expect to see the carriage going off bodily, drawn by myriads of industrious fleas in harness.”

He especially loved Paris, France, “the most extraordinary place in the world.” He met Victor Hugo, Alexander Dumas, and George Sand. He reveled in his fame, while Catherine became more unhappy. They had been happy for many years, but after many children, and becoming stout, she was losing him. Dickens fell in love with actress Ellen Ternan, who was his daughter’s age. Catherine moved out, and Dickens set Ellen up in an apartment with her mother.

He made a second trip to America to raise money, but his health was poor during this time, with a cough and a swollen foot, unable to sleep or eat, dependent on laudanum. His hoped for trip to Australia and New Zealand never happened; Dickens died at age 58.

I so enjoyed this book and I have to wonder why I never read his travel books. It is something to look forward to.

I received a free egalley from Pen & Sword History through NetGalley. My review is fair and unbiased.

Dickens and Travel
The Start of Modern Travel Writing
by Lucinda Hawksley
Pub Date 30 Aug 2022
Pen & Sword, Pen & Sword History
Biographies & Memoirs | History | Nonfiction (Adult)


I am reviewing a copy of Dickens and Travel through Pen &Sword and Netgalley:



From the time he was a child, Charles Dickens was fascinated by tales 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. Lucinda shared the journeys of Dickens who happens to be her great-great grandfather.


Between 1830-1831 Charles Dickens began working as a freelance journalist. Though his overriding ambition was not to be a novelist, or a journalist, what he really wanted to be was a playwright and actor like Shakespeare.




Dickens was often thought of as a London author but in the 1840’s he whisked his family away to live in Italy for year, and spent several months in Switzerland. Years later he would move to 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.



Written by a descendant of Charles Dickens, his Great Great granddaughter Lucinda Hawksley, Dickens and Travels gives us a unique glimpse not only of his travels, but how Dickens helped to shape the modern age of travel writing.



I give Dickens and Travel five out of five stars!



Happy Reading!

Dickens and Travel has the great advantage of relying on one of the greatest writers of all to make up what feels like half (or more) of the book. Charles Dickens excels in the minutiae, which means he is primed for excerption. A passage of David Copperfield or Martin Chuzzlewit, that relates none of the plot of the massive tome, can be evocative and sensory, even devoid of context or external knowledge to parse it.

The format of this book groups Dickens' passages by location--running vaguely chronologically as his travel circle expands from around England to Australia, with his lecture tours of the British Isles, Ireland and the United States, along with tourism around the continent in between. This structure has varying levels of success--the best chapters are ones where his letters, travelogues, journalism and novels all have source material for the location, so namely Great Britain, Italy and France. The book is the strongest when it breaks a chronology and juxtaposes one visit/view of Dickens of one place across multiple time periods or contexts in his life.

In the United States chapter, there is an inconsistent framing that perhaps reveals something about the weight Dickens places on locations, but this is never really explored by Hawksley. New York City and Philadelphia get their own chapters, but I was surprised to realize that the "Washington and Beyond" chapter also included his trips to Baltimore, Cincinnati, Pittsburgh, St. Louis and Canada. As these locations get rattled off, Hawksley struggles to find a unifying theme for the chapter, I am sure one that Dickens is more reticent to provide himself, but the effect is jarring after three hyper focused chapters on place, with expanding views of time. I wonder if these one-off stops, told in chronological order actually serve the question of the book, about the quality of Dickens as a traveler.

The Italy chapters experienced the same plodding chronological retelling, but was bolstered by the pairing of letters home with more contextual anecdotes told from the author' voice and excerpts from Pictures from Italy.

Overall, I enjoyed reading this and I think the format served a reader like me, who has read and enjoyed some Dickens, so I love his voice already, but have not read his non-fiction, letters or travelogues at all. Grouping them together by place and having excerpts made the whole thing move at a clip. But what I mostly enjoyed was Dickens' writing. I think anyone who has read Pictures of Italy could skip those chapters, for example.

Also weirdly, I would highly recommend the Great Britain chapters to fans of Lisa Kleypas. Though primarily associated with Queen Victoria, Dickens was born during the Georgian period and seems to have a constructed nostalgia for the Regency, even though he was a child when Queen Victoria took the throne. His changing relationship to travel around his country during his life time reminded me of the experience of reading The Wallflowers series into the The Ravenels series.