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.

The Uncommercial Traveller is a collection of literary sketches and reminiscences written by Charles Dickens, published in 1860to1861. In 1859 Dickens founded a new journal called All the Year Round and the Uncommercial Traveller articles would be among his main contributions. He seems to have chosen the title and persona of the Uncommercial Traveller as a result of a speech he gave on 22 December 1859 to the Commercial Travellers' School London in his role as honorary chairman and treasurer. The persona sits well with a writer who liked to travel, not only as a tourist, but also to research and report what he found visiting Europe, America and giving book readings throughout Britain. He did not seem content to rest late in his career when he had attained wealth and comfort and continued travelling locally, walking the streets of London in the mould of the flâneur, a 'gentleman stroller of city streets'. He often suffered from insomnia and his night-time wanderings gave him an insight into some of the hidden aspects of Victorian London, details of which he also incorporated into his novels.

At the height of his career, around the time he was working on Great Expectations and Our Mutual Friend, Charles Dickens wrote a series of sketches, mostly set in London, which he collected as The Uncommercial Traveller. In the persona of the Uncommercial, Dickens wanders the city streets and brings London, its inhabitants, commerce, and entertainment vividly to life. Sometimes autobiographical, as childhood experiences are interwoven with adult memories, the sketches include visits to the Paris Morgue, the Liverpool docks, a workhouse, a school for poor children, and the theater. They also describe the perils of travel, including seasickness, shipwreck, the coming of the railways, and the wretchedness of dining in English hotels and restaurants. The work is quintessential Dickens, with each piece showcasing his imaginative writing style, his keen observational powers, and his characteristic wit. In this edition Daniel Tyler explores Dickens's fascination with the city and the book's connections with concerns evident in his fiction: social injustice, human mortality, a fascination with death and the passing of time. Often funny, sometimes indignant, always exuberant, The Uncommercial Traveller is a revelatory encounter with Dickens and the Victorian city he knew so well.

Charles Dickens, generally regarded as the greatest novelist of the Victorian age, was known as 'The Inimitable', not least for his distinctive style of writing. This collection of twelve essays addresses the essential but often overlooked subject of Dickens's style, with each essay discussing a particular feature of his writing. All the essays consider Dickens's style conceptually, and they read it closely, demonstrating the ways it works on particular occasions. They show that style is not simply an aesthetic quality isolated from the deepest meanings of Dickens's fiction, but that it is inextricably involved with all kinds of historical, political and ideological concerns. Written in a lively and accessible manner by leading Dickens scholars, the collection ranges across all Dickens's writing, including the novels, journalism and letters.

This anniversary edition of the Oxford Companion to Charles Dickens celebrates 200 years since the birth of one of Britain's most popular authors. Covering his life, his works, his reputation, and his cultural context in over 500 A-Z articles, this is the most reliable and accessible reference work on Dickens available

Charles Dickens's 200th birthday will be celebrated in 2012. Though his writings are now more than 100 years old, many remain in print and are avidly read and studied. Often overlooked--or unknown--are the considerable Christian convictions Dickens held and displayed in his work. This book fills that vacuum by examining Dickens the Christian and showing how Christian beliefs and practices permeate his work. This historical work is written for pastors, students, and laity alike. Chapters look at Dickens's life and work topically, arguing that Christian faith was front and center in some of what Dickens wrote (such as his children's work The Life of Our Lord) and saliently implicit throughout various other characters and plots. Since Dickens's Christian side is rarely considered, Gary Colledge illuminates a fresh angle of Dickens, and the 200th birthday makes it especially timely.

Dickens and Switzerland brings to light the many surprising connections between the country, which Dickens visited on several occasions, and the author's life and work. The close links between Dickens's biography, his writing and Switzerland have never before been examined so thoroughly. Rather than offering a mere chronology of travel, this volume explores Dickens's deep personal investment in the country and its people, which manifests itself in numerous and often the most unexpected places in his fictional and personal texts. It looks both at and beyond the period of the author's journeys to Switzerland during the 1840s and early 50s and considers both earlier and later references as well. The tome renders visible how Dickens's experience of Switzerland was more than merely episodic and is deeply connected to the rest of his life and literary work. As a significant and integral part of his imagination and his identity, Switzerland deserves a prominent pla ce in Dickensian scholarship.

Scholarly, ambitious and scrupulous'. This is how the TLS recently described the Oxford Reader's Companion Series. In September 2000, the book which pioneered the series, The Oxford Reader's Companion to Dickens came out in paperback. Now the Oxford Reader's Companions to Hardy, Trollope, Conrad, and George Eliot will follow on from that success. In this format these books are designed specifically to appeal to students of literature. Each contains a more comprehensive and accessiblerange of information than any other reference work on these writers. Jozef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski had an astonishing life. 'Pole, Catholic, and nobleman' is how he described himself as at the age of 5. He was born in the Ukraine of Polish parents and spent his childhood in exile. It was only after fifteen years at sea that he began writing in English, his third language and the one whose genius had, as he put it, 'adopted' him. Owen Knowles and Gene M. Moore, together with their teamof distinguished Advisers and Contributors, have created a unique and authoritative reference work on all things Conradian. Over 400 entries cover Conrad's novels, stories, essays, and reviews; his friends, family, and associates; films and adaptations; ships and voyages; places associated with his life and works; his influences and sources; his reputation and critical approaches to his work; historical contexts to his life. Entries include: Conrad's life: health, Polish inheritance,the sea, ships and voyages People: Borys Conrad, Apollo and Ewa Korzeniowski, J. M. Barrie, Stephen Crane, Stefan Zeromski Places: America, Bangkok, Berdyczow, Congo, Cracow, Marseilles Novels: Almayer's Folly, Lord Jim, Nostromo Stories, essays, and reviews: 'An Anarchist', 'Typhoon', 'Autocracy and War', 'Legends', 'Tales of the Sea' Influences and Sources: James Brooke, Alighieri Dante, Charles Dickens, Napoleon Bonaparte, Emile Zola Characters: Almayer family, Mr Jones, Jim, Captain Mitchell, Nostromo, the Professor, Edith Travers Reputation: biographies, films, influences on other writers, portraits and other images, translations Historical context: First World War, Polish question, women's suffrage movement In addition to the A-Z entries the Companion offers extra material: a classified contents list with headwords grouped in thematic batches, Conrad's family tree, a useful chronology spanning Conrad's life, maps showing Conrad's travels, an index ofreferences to Conrad's works, and an alphabetical list of frequently cited texts.