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CHARLES DICKENS was born in 1812, the second of eight children. He received little formal education, but after a slow start, became a publishing phenomenon, and an instant success. Public grief at his death in 1870 was considerable: he was buried in the Poets' Corner of Westminster Abbey. Kate Flint is Professor of English at Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey. She is author of The Woman Reader, 1837-1914 (1993) and The Victorians and the Visual Imagination (2000), and has published widely on nineteenth and twentieth century literary and cultural history. She is currently completing The Transatlantic Indian 1776-1930.
After finishing Martin Chuzzlewit, Dickens holidayed in Italy for a year. But, of course, he wrote about his travels and here is 'a chaotic magic-lantern show' of 19th-century Genoa, Parma, Verona, Rome, Pisa, Naples, Pompeii, Herculaneum... The only drawback about this wonderful book is the 25 pages of largely superfluous notes. Ignore them, and enjoy what must certainly have been the best travel book of 1846. (Kirkus UK)
