The Oxford Edition of Charles Dickens – serie

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 Oxford Dickens edition of Pictures from Italy puts the spotlight on Dickens's 'little book' describing his travels through Italy in 1844 and 1845. Throughout, Dickens offers his withering reviews of Italian masterpieces, his staunch criticism of Catholicism in Rome, tempered with a genuine love and admiration for the people of Italy and the country's rich cultural heritage. This is the first full critical edition of the work, with detailed research outlining its composition and form, and comparisons made between all editions produced during Dickens's lifetime. First written as personal letters, then printed as newspaper correspondence, then reshaped once more into a single book, the evolution of Pictures from Italy provides a fascinating insight into Dickens's creative and editorial process. Pete Orford's introduction puts the work under the microscope to track the changes made across these several iterations and uncover the story of its genesis and development. Analysis of the few remaining manuscript pages and Orford's own travels through Italy help to unpick several mysteries of the text. Previous editions of the work have been for general readership with critical essays that focus on the time Dickens spent in Italy (1844-5). This edition offers a different approach, supplementing this familiar story with the lesser discussed period of 1846 when Dickens, back in London, first turns his various letters into newspaper correspondence, then a monograph, whilst battling the pressures of launching a daily newspaper and planning a new novel. Dickens's time in Italy defines the content of the book, but it is his subsequent time in London which defines its shape and structure.This edition reproduces in situ the original illustrations provided by Samuel Palmer for the first edition of 1846, with further illustrations provided for subsequent editions contained in the appendices.