The Oxford Edition of Charles Dickens: The Uncommercial Traveller

Book excerpt: The Uncommercial Traveller is a remarkable display of creative journalism from Dickens's final decade, balancing Sketches by Boz at the beginning of his career. The 37 short papers, which first appeared in his weekly journal All The Year Round, offer sensitive and penetrating perspectives on London, Britain, and France in the 1860s. In the company of the Traveller, readers undertake a series of journeys. We visit the scene of a disastrous shipwreck on Anglesey, the docklands at Liverpool, and the Chatham dockyard. We accompany the Traveller as he returns to the scene of his early childhood in 'Dullborough'. We cross the Channel in atrocious conditions, and we explore 'the French-Flemish country'. Twice, we join the local crowds for the gruesome entertainment offered by the Paris morgue. Nearer to Dickens's Covent Garden base we attend a popular theatre for a performance and a Sunday sermon. We visit a children's hospital, a lead factory, and a naval school. We tramp the city by night. We have repeated problems with restaurants. We hear weird stories, meet odd characters, and much more. Full of humour, sentiment, quirkiness; supremely assured in their command of style; astonishingly varied: these papers take a worthy place alongside the Dickens's late fictional masterpieces Great Expectations and Our Mutual Friend. This is the first fully critical edition of The Uncommercial Traveller, based on detailed study of the surviving densely worked manuscripts and the early printed texts. The edition includes a full analytical essay, textual notes, and detailed explanatory notes, as well as a glossary of unusual terms and words used in senses likely to be unfamiliar to modern readers.