Dickens and Travel

"...Hawksley offers lively insights – complete with very precise travel impressions [...] 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 Quarterly

"Hawksley explores the novelist's almost compulsive fascination with the need to be elsewhere... a book that ranges from domestic jaunts to international voyages. Along the way she also maps the connections between traveling and well being for a novelist prone to bouts of melancholic restlessness, and whose imagination required constant stimulation." ~The Times Literary Supplement

"I found this to be a cracking little book... Great book, great writing." ~The History Fella