The Uncommercial Traveller

by Charles Dickens

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Genres: Classics, Fiction, Literature, Travel, Essays, Collections, Short Stories

368 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 1, 1869

About the author

Charles John Huffam Dickens (1812-1870) was a writer and social critic who created some of the world's best-known fictional characters and is regarded as the greatest novelist of the Victorian era. His works enjoyed unprecedented popularity during his lifetime, and by the twentieth century critics and scholars had recognised him as a literary genius. His novels and short stories enjoy lasting popularity.

Dickens left school to work in a factory when his father was incarcerated in a debtors' prison. Despite his lack of formal education, he edited a weekly journal for 20 years, wrote 15 novels, five novellas, hundreds of short stories and non-fiction articles, lectured and performed extensively, was an indefatigable letter writer, and campaigned vigorously for children's rights, education, and other social reforms.

Dickens was regarded as the literary colossus of his age. His 1843 novella, A Christmas Carol, remains popular and continues to inspire adaptations in every artistic genre. Oliver Twist and Great Expectations are also frequently adapted, and, like many of his novels, evoke images of early Victorian London. His 1859 novel, A Tale of Two Cities, set in London and Paris, is his best-known work of historical fiction. Dickens's creative genius has been praised by fellow writers—from Leo Tolstoy to George Orwell and G. K. Chesterton—for its realism, comedy, prose style, unique characterisations, and social criticism. On the other hand, Oscar Wilde, Henry James, and Virginia Woolf complained of a lack of psychological depth, loose writing, and a vein of saccharine sentimentalism. The term Dickensian is used to describe something that is reminiscent of Dickens and his writings, such as poor social conditions or comically repulsive characters.

On 8 June 1870, Dickens suffered another stroke at his home after a full day's work on Edwin Drood. He never regained consciousness, and the next day he died at Gad's Hill Place. Contrary to his wish to be buried at Rochester Cathedral "in an inexpensive, unostentatious, and strictly private manner," he was laid to rest in the Poets' Corner of Westminster Abbey. A printed epitaph circulated at the time of the funeral reads: "To the Memory of Charles Dickens (England's most popular author) who died at his residence, Higham, near Rochester, Kent, 9 June 1870, aged 58 years. He was a sympathiser with the poor, the suffering, and the oppressed; and by his death, one of England's greatest writers is lost to the world." His last words were: "On the ground", in response to his sister-in-law Georgina's request that he lie down.

(from Wikipedia)

Reviews

[Katie Lumsden · Rating 3 out of 5]

I don't think Dickens's non-fiction ages as well as his fiction. I enjoyed this, but a lot if it went over my head and wasn't completely engaging.

[Heather · Rating 3 out of 5]

The 37 pieces in this book were written in the 1860s, published in a weekly magazine/journal that Dickens ran, and later collected and printed in book form. They range fairly widely in theme and tone, but as Daniel Tyler argues in his introduction to the edition I read, they can be seen to make up "a volume-length consideration of how far (and to whom) sympathy can be extended" (xix). (In one essay I liked a lot, Dickens visits a boat about to depart England with hundreds of emigrating Mormons on board: he clearly isn't expecting to be particularly charmed by them, but clearly is.) Some pieces were moving, some interesting, some funny, others kind of a slog—I wonder if I might have liked this more if I'd taken breaks from it, but it was a library book, so I didn't.

Not surprisingly, I really liked the essays/parts of essays featuring descriptive passages about London, like this, from "Wapping Workhouse":

Pleasantly wallowing in the abundant mud of that thoroughfare, and greatly enjoying the huge piles of building belonging to the sugar refiners, the little masts and vanes in small back gardens in back streets, the neighbouring canals and docks, the India-vans lumbering along their stone tramway, and the pawnbrokers' shops where hard-up Mates had pawned so many sextants and quadrants, that I should have bought a few cheap if I had the least notion how to use them, I at last began to file off to the right, towards Wapping. (19)

Or this, from "City of London Churches":

Whether I think of the church where the sails of the oyster-boats in the river almost flapped against the windows, or of the church where the railroad made the bells hum as the train rushed by above the roof, I recal a curious experience. (92)

Other high points included a really good outraged essay about the poor treatment of soldiers ("The Great Tasmania's Cargo"), a piece about being very seasick crossing to Calais ("The Calais Night Mail"), a piece about stories remembered from childhood, including stories that were terrifying at the time ("Nurse's Stories"), and a piece about walking in normally busy parts of London that become quiet on summer weekends ("The City of the Absent").

[Dave · Rating 2 out of 5]

2021: Started again and remembered why not--these essays have the apostrophizing and the sentimentality of the novels, but they don't have the drive or the mystery. They're social commentary, for the most part, and though Dickens can do that, that's not why I like Dickens. But I encourage you to read "Night Walks," which has the raw material of Great Expectations and Bleak House in it.

2013: Less essays, more magazine articles from the nineteenth century--nice but not life-changing

[Sarah83 sbookshelf · Rating 5 out of 5]

Until I bought this book, I didn't know that Dickens wasn't only a novelist but also a journalist. I really liked that book with its sarcasm and it's truth within it.

[Fiona · Rating 3 out of 5]

I know some will be appalled that I can give Dickens only 3 stars. I wanted to read these pieces as I believed them to be semi-autobiographical journalism. I was interested to read about workhouses, almshouses, the life of the 19th century London poor in general. All you have to do is Google up a couple of the places mentioned to find that they don't exist but that Dickens 'probably' based them on some other place. Journalism then becomes fiction because what do fiction writers often do but write fictionalised accounts of familiar places? I found some of them quite self indulgent but then he was printing them in his own publication so could produce what he wanted. They were also written in competition with Thackeray's contributions to his own publication so there was literally a war of words going on. I didn't read every article but dare say I might dip in again occasionally. Overall, I'm quite disappointed though.

[Lara Malik · Rating 5 out of 5]

No tengo palabras para explicar cuanto adoro la técnica narrativa de este autor.

Lo primero que deben saber al encarar este libro es que probablemente sea una lectura pesada, pero muy profunda. La forma de describir el ambiente y sus pensamientos es casi poetica, increíble es saber que realmente es una narración de un viaje realizado por él.

Si me preguntan, esta clase de escritura me recordo al existencialismo, ¿Por qué? Por su visión de la realidad en las calles de Londres, por sus detallistas observaciones y su crítica hacia la sociedad victoriana.

Un libro que deberia ser más tomado en cuenta y hasta incluido en la curricula escolar.

[Tom · Rating 4 out of 5]

Another grand work of Dickens's. This time a collection of separately published pieces formed as part of his own journal "All the Year Round". The character of the Uncommercial Traveller takes readers along a journey from Great Britain, through Europe and to America. As ever, the tone is delicately brightened by Dickens's humorous approach though there are some truly poignant moments when we are taken on a tour of the Workhouses, the docks of both Liverpool and London and those people struggling to make ends meet in the darkness of the mid 19th century.
A collection well worth reading with a consistent quality throughout the vast majority of these diverse snippets of Victorian life.

[Richard Clay · Rating 4 out of 5]

A compilation of magazine articles from the last decade or so of Dickens' life. Some magnificent descriptions of the London of its day - in all its horror; there's no way the 1860s could ever be described as 'swinging.' Some of the material here is too much 'of its time' to be easily penetrable to any but the hardcore Victorian specialist but there's still plenty of interest. Okay, it's one to try if you've read MOST other Dickens, but it's still good.

[Kate · Rating 2 out of 5]

"Reprinted Pieces" was the better of two uninspiring volumes, because it included some fiction. The non-fiction was, for the most part, dull and/or overwrought.

[Nathan Casebolt · Rating 3 out of 5]

Dickens enjoys far more popularity as an author of fiction than of non-fiction, and rightly so. Although his first foray into publication as a young writer, “Sketches by Boz,” was indeed a collection of “slice of life” observations from his jaunts around London; his non-fiction prose never quite rises to the heights of insight and wit that mark his great works of fiction. For whatever reason, he’s just better at the latter.

That said, a middling Dickens is still better than most anything else. In the guise of the Uncommercial Traveler, he turns his remarkably detailed gaze on the passing scenes of a peripatetic life. This is essentially a travelogue; but a travelogue aimed not at great and mighty tourist attractions, but at the small dramas of small lives.

From the priest of a small Welsh parish called suddenly to bury hundreds of shipwrecked dead, to the servants of London on glorious holiday from their masters, to the amusing horrors of the night passage to Calais, to the small coach town withering away now that the railroad has killed the coaches, to Mormons embarking for Zion in the American West, to his own moldering boyhood village euphemistically entitled Dullsborough: no quaint corner of Dickens’s world is exempt from his ironic but sympathetic pen.

I wouldn’t use this collection to start someone on Dickens. His prose is as often overlabored as it is sharp and to the point. Sometimes it feels like he could’ve used an editor with a bigger set of shears. Nevertheless, there are some truly poignant passages in this collection, and more than a few lines of the clever winks and keen insights that rise so often from his fiction. This collection is certainly worth the time of anyone who has come to cherish the great author.

[Amy · Rating 2 out of 5]

Antisemitism in chapter 7 (and a later chapter). Off-handed racism in several of the chapters.

A mixed bag of a book, as it is a collection of unrelated pieces (some of which may have been cut/rejected from other books he wrote). Several of them were very interesting as observational vignettes or small historical windows looking at 19th century daily life. Others were just awful, poor writing.

It was also hard to stomach his swings between interest in humanitarianism, and his pompous rich white male lack of introspection (by this point Dickens had been successful for decades). For example, he sees first hand the illness that lead poisoning created, and the desperate poverty that drives women to seek jobs in the lead factory despite knowing that lead poisoning will kill them. Then he later visits the factory and takes the male owners’ word for it that they’re doing everything they can to protect the women workers and that some women just get sick because they’re unlucky. Dickens doesn’t stop to reflect at this moment why it is that only women work in this factory, and no men (who can get better paying jobs with less dangerous conditions). In another chapter, he makes fun of an old woman who has severe untreated scoliosis. Shameful.

[James · Rating 2 out of 5]

A rather odd eclectic set of short stories based on a travellers experience. Based in Dickens' other novels, I expected a lot more from this. In many parts rather disjointed. Some works though, very vivid. His description of the Lead Mills, rather similar to stories by H G Wells, such as 'The Vone' and 'Lord of the Dynamo's'.

This would be a very good book as a way of introduction to themes, trends and ideas in his other major works such as Little Dorrit and Ncholas Nickelby. Very nice to hear further reference to the Temperance Movement. In part, I feel he tried to do a philosophical satire if what it means to be British, but, unlike George Orwell (England this England) and Bill Bryson (Notes from a small island) he doesn't achieve what he sets out to do.

[Millstone · Rating 4 out of 5]

A collection of magazine articles Dickens wrote over the last 10 years or so of his life, highlighting issues or just describing what he met on his walks or travels. As in previous collections I've read, there are enough glimpses of the novels and occasional verbal pyrotechnics to keep things interesting, besides the opportunity to watch the man meet a deadline with his quota of words.

[LeAnna · Rating 4 out of 5]

Definitely a recommended read for anyone who enjoys Dickens. It’s possible to find many of the images that appear in his novels in these pages as well. Most of these essays are very interesting but a few would benefit from modern editorial prefaces or footnotes.

[Laura Robinson · Rating 2 out of 5]

It pains me to rate it a 2, but even though I love Dickens, I found this a little dull.

[Marcos Maganto · Rating 2 out of 5]

Colección de curiosos relatos, publicados en revista a modo de artículos, relacionados con viajes, caminatas y paseos de Dickens. A modo de sátira en muchas ocasiones, describe las magnificencias de la hostelería inglesa, curiosos viajes al extranjero, paseos en los que describe la "fauna" nocturna de Londres, los barrios periféricos, recuerdos del barrio de su infancia, críticas a la Administración y a las injusticias sociales, etc.

Me gustaron "El cargamento del Gran Tasmania" y, especialmente, "Historias de mi aya" y "El prisionero italiano". Los demás, entretenidos, sin más.

[Janet Roger · Rating 5 out of 5]

When I first started reading Dickens I was overwhelmed by his cast of complex and complexly related characters; plots that made so little sense I had to keep reading just to see how they worked out; and the sheer imagination of it all. I was sold. Hook line and sinker. And still am.

Dickens as a non-fiction author, was new to me. And very exciting. Not least because as a dyed in the wool traveler myself, I identified with so much of what he says when he sets out his stall:

"I am both a town traveller and a country traveller, and am always on the road ... always wandering here and there from my rooms in Covent-garden, London – now about the city streets: now, about the country by-roads – seeing many little things, and some great things, which, because they interest me, I think may interest others."

It’s a treasure chest, a time capsule bursting with Dickens’ own brand of wit and humor, perception and interpretation. And like Washington Irving’s Sketchbook and Samuel Johnson’s Journey to the Western Islands, you learn so much along the way without even knowing it.

Enjoy the sheer fun of it.

[Todd Stockslager · Rating 4 out of 5]

Review Title: Fiction or journalism?

In the second half of his short brilliant career Dickens returned to the short sketch style that made his first fame in the literary world as "Boz". The 37 pieces here were written in three separate periods—1860, 1863, 1868/69—when his personal and professional life had radically changed, and when his pace of writing longer fiction serially had slowed down. The results are good, if uneven, but always recognizably Dickens.

By 1860 Dickens was separated from wife Catharine and his affair with Ellen Ternan was in full swing. He had become a restless and almost obsessive traveler, trying to find a place to settle his mind or at least mask his guilty conscience. He would soon have the idea of the readings from his books which combined that frantic travel with his drive to earn increasing amounts of money to fund his and his large extended family's profligate habits. So here he writes in the guise of the "uncommercial" traveler, who works for no one but the firm of "Human Interest Brothers, " in contrast to the growing community of business travelers (salesmen, professionals, and upper middle class business men) who rode the expanding rail network from place to place.

Published originally in his monthly serial journals before being collected, the pieces are aimed straight at the heart of his target audience: travelogues of London, poignant humor highlighting the plight of the poor, pointed humor driving at the heartlessness of the government. Most pieces are a blend of all three. Editor Daniel Tyler provides footnotes for topical and literary references, and also documents the (mostly very minor) textual differences between the pieces as originally published and as later collected for book publication.

By 1868/69, when the last pieces were written, Dickens's time and energy were consumed by the reading tours that killed him just a year after the last of the pieces was published. I found these last few some of the least successful in the collection. Especially cloying is number XXXII, "A Small Star in the East," when during a ramble through a very poor section of East London he describes knocking on doors of random poor people's flats and writing about their straitened conditions. Yes, he was the famous Charles Dickens, known for his sympathy for and with the working poor, and would have likely been known by them. But at this point of his life one days earnings from his many profitable ventures could have sustained one of these needy families for a year. And he doesn't name names, but surely there was an underlying tension between being visited by the famous Inimitible, and the humiliation of being an exemplar of grinding poverty.

But by this stage in his career Dickens had so refined his craft that he could (seemingly effortlessly, although if you read his letters you learn the toll such effort took on his mental and physical health) turn his keen eye for observation of people, places, and dialogue into a seamless blend of journalism, essay, fiction, and poetic description. Which makes me wonder if he really did so brazenly invite himself in to these poor hovels, or was this an example of the fertile writer at work? Is this journalism or fiction, a question without a verifiable answer, which makes it unquestionably art, and Inimitibly Dickens.

[Timothy Ferguson · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a series of magazine articles, I assume, as they are short pieces and he specialized in that form. They purport to be his reminiscences on minor events he has seen while traveling, although their veracity is impossible to confirm. They tend toward his usual themes, poverty, the suffering of the hidden underclass, the way terrible things happen just out of sight in Victorian England.

I thought that to the Victorian English, rural life was something of an idyll, but Dickens seems to suggest that rural life is basically part of the ”just out of sight”, which is far more dystopian and disturbing that I thought was common in the era. Not to put too much weight on a parallel, I thought the Victorian view was basically like the opening ceremony of the Olympics. They thought the peasants had happy lives playing with apples, and that things were only really grimy and horrible in the cities. Not so, in Dickens. Basically there’s a centre of art and culture and light and everything about it seems to be terribly bleak: indeed the bleakness seems to be the price of the light.

I found its lack of mangled, saintly children refreshing. I found the second chapter, which was about the shipwreck of the Royal Charter, genuinely touching. The chapter which repeats the stories which were told to him by his nurse, and recounts his terror at them, is incredibly personal and genuinely seems like a record of what we would consider his repeated emotional abuse. At the time, of course it would not be considered harmful – Dickens himself seems to see them as the genesis of his career as a writer of Christmas ghost stories.

Originally reviewed on book coasters

[Ian Russell · Rating 4 out of 5]

A collection of articles, essays and reports, written in the later part of Dickens' life for a publication, a kind of serial magazine he had founded, form a kind of journal which now reads not unlike a blog.

These writings have no theme other than Dickens' observations on contemporary life. There are accounts of a shipwreck and local heroes; his night-walking cures for insomnia; visits to a London workhouse; an emigrant ship transporting Mormons to America; his dull town of birth; lawyers; tramps; nurses; pubs; mortuaries; graveyards; railway food; sea-sickness; travelling abroad; and a view inside London's deserted churches. They range from the serious, profound, and touching to the whimsical, humorous, and anecdotal. He rambles digressively at times and at others, I found him a little incomprehensible, but just as I might following any modern day blogger. I wonder what he would have made of Wordpress etc.

Though I will admit to skimming over a few paragraphs through tedium, I'm glad I read Uncommercial Traveller. On the whole, it's interesting, historically, and entertaining and, obviously, Dickens knew how to write! Btw, it's free to download from various web sources.

[John · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was an easy book to put down again and again. I read it over a period of several weeks. Some articles deserved five stars, others far lower. I knew this before taking it up to read but it was the last of Dickens works I had to read in my set of 30 volumes. Of the 30 volumes, only 5 were given less than 5 stars. Pearl Buck claimed to have read every volume of this set every year of her adult life. OF course she made this claim in her later life when she wrote some of her worst books , so? I do reread GREAT EXPECTATIONS and DAVID COPPERFIELD every few years. I will never reread this one however.

[Marti · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was a book that I bought twice--in paperback at The Brown Dog Bookstore in Hinesburg, VT but then lost on a Delta flight, and then from Amazon--where else. I had gotten a little farther than halfway through it, and was enjoying it more than other Dickens books. He has a subtle sense of humor, and visited interesting places where he either heard, or made up stories. This is not for the average reader, but then, probably none of us consider ourselves average.

[Susan · Rating 4 out of 5]

If anyone has notions of a romantic Victorian England this factual & non-fiction book will put you wise to the terrible conditions & poverty a large number (especially in towns/cities)of the population were forced to live in with next to no help exact from a small minority of the better off.
A queen who allowed her subjects to live in such dire straits should never have been queen.
It took me a while to read it because of the depressive state the book related.

[Julie Unruh · Rating 5 out of 5]

I have finished the book, and the last paragraph was about Charles Dickens, going to a poor apartment building and offering all these couples money who did not have food to eat. The last thing he did was go to a Children's hospital and give them money to take better care of the kids. I didn't read it fast because I had to look up all the words and read and understand old English writing. But, it is a good book and would recommend it to people.

[Ralph Britton]

I think this collection of his journalism is less read now than Dickens's novels, but that's a pity as it shows his talents just as clearly. The essays are a mixture of humour and hard-hitting journalism on the social evils that Dickens tried so hard to eradicate. It is mixed in quality but contains some of his best writing. Sketches by Boz is perhaps more startlingly brilliant but The Uncommercial Traveller is more mature and considered.

[Andrea Engle · Rating 5 out of 5]

Dickens, in his unique authorial voice, transports us to Victorian Britain, introducing us to the age of sail and the steam locomotive ... passionate in his defense of the poverty-stricken and his intolerance of the hypocritical, evocative in his memories of stagecoach England, ghoulish in his description of a Paris morgue, he weaves his magic in a series of thirty-seven essays ... a must-read for the student of the Victorian era ...

[Mark Kaplan · Rating 3 out of 5]

Snapshots of various places. Excellent characters, naturally, but it didn't work for me, predominantly because the story is so episodic. It's much like a travelogue, but one that is focused on a realistic depiction of people and places met. Interesting, but not captivating. Unlike his other works, I found this book easy to put down.

[Ian · Rating 4 out of 5]

Re-reading after many years and confirmed in my mind as the mixed bag of my recollections.

[Tinquerbelle]

Dickens, Charles
A Tale of Two Cities; The Lazy Tour of Two Idle Apprentices; The Uncommercial Traveller; No Thoroughfare

In compilation only.

[Jeremy · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book was ok. Dickens has definitely wrote better.
Sometimes it was really funny or entertaining and sometimes it droned on.