Dickens and Travel: The Start of Modern Travel Writing by Lucinda Hawksley (review)

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• Dickens and Travel: The Start of Modern Travel Writing by Lucinda Hawksley
• Nathalie Vanfasse (bio)

Lucinda Hawksley. Dickens and Travel: The Start of Modern Travel Writing. Pen and Sword History, 2022. Pp. 270. £22.00. ISBN 978-1-52673-563-8 (hb).

Dickens and Travel: the Start of Modern Travel Writing was written by Lucinda Hawksley, descendant from Henry Fielding Dickens, Dickens’s eighth child. The monograph focuses on Dickens as a traveler and on the numerous peregrinations he undertook during his life. It chimes with other monographs touching upon Dickens and travel published in recent years such as Jonathan Grossman’s Dickens’s Networks: Public Transport and the Novel (2013); Ruth Livesey’s Writing the Stagecoach Nation (2016), and the present author’s La Plume et la route, Dickens écrivainvoyageur (2017). These in turn resonated with work conducted on Dickens on France (2007) by John Edmonson, and Dickens in Italy (2009) by Michael Hollington and Francesca Orestano. Dickens and Travel plunges readers into the different trips Dickens made during his career. It also considers how these journeys influenced his fiction. Lucinda Hawksley provides readers with a wealth of details and anecdotes that recreate the spirit and atmosphere of these visits. The book brings together Dickens’s personal life, his writing – and particularly his fiction – in relation to the various trips and stays Dickens made. It retraces his journeys in the British Isles and abroad, as he travelled there alone, or with his wife, family and/or with friends.

The book follows Dickens’s life and career. It tackles for instance Dickens’s first journeys as a journalist or as a newlywed, and his journey of investigation with Phiz for his novel Nicholas Nickleby. It touches upon Dickens’s taste for watering places, as well as his visits to Scotland, Wales and Ireland. In addition to that, a few sections of the book are devoted to Dickens’s tour of North America. Dickens’s journey to Italy also occupies pride of place in the monograph. Another chapter covers Switzerland. Two chapters consider Dickens’s Francophilia and his passion for Paris and Boulogne. Hawksley also alludes to Dickens and Wilkie Collins’s Lazy Tour of Two Idle Apprentices, as well as Dickens’s Uncommercial Traveller. The last few chapters are devoted to the railways, to Dickens’s return to America, and to Dickens’s ideas of Australia.

The book begins with an allusion to stagecoaches which Hawksley relates to Dickens’s childhood memories as well as to the setting of Dickens’s career in motion (2). An amusing anecdote about a fleet of stagecoaches whose sides were emblazoned with the name “Pickwick” weaves together reality and fiction. Through Dickens’s experiences expressed through his fiction, as well as through diverse accounts made by people Dickens was in contact with during his travels, Hawksley offers lively insights – complete with very precise travel impressions – into the different travelling contraptions [End Page 125] Dickens used and the places where he stopped. We thus follow him step by step, so to speak, on some of his reading tours and public readings of his works, with amusing details such as customs officers in Ireland being convinced that he and his team were carrying explosives – in fact just the piping gas for lighting up his writing desk in the stage set. Dickens and Travel centers around Dickens’s travelling experiences, conveying them through his letters, his articles, and his friends’ reminiscences. We get a feel of the journey through Dickens’s own words, and many details in particular about the modes of transport that he used.

The chapters on America provide interesting details about Dickens the traveler, for instance how his character and physical appearance were perceived through the eyes of his American admirers. We learn that Dickens “had brought with him two velvet waistcoats one of vivid green and another of brilliant crimson … further ornamented by a profusion of gold watch-chain” (48). Dickens and Travel expatiates on Dickens’s interest in fashion and clothing in New York City. Anecdotes from Lippincott’s Magazine, Dickens Days in Boston: A Record of Daily Events (1927), and the Worcester Aegis, as well as chosen excerpts...