This is a book that I discovered in a used bookstore in Boston and it's a gem. Hughes and a friend take a tramp through parts of London and England 20 years after the death of Dickens to visit locations from the author's books as well as places where he lived and worked. Hughes is what would be today regarded as a super fan of Dickens, and you can sense the joy this pilgrimage is bringing to him as he gets close to the author he reveres.

Since this was written so near to the lifetime of Dickens, Hughes is able to actually chat to people that were acquainted with Dickens near where the author worked and lived, and what is more amazing is how many of these people were the inspiration for so many of the characters in his novels.

( )

This book was published in 1891 after the author’s rambles through the areas where Charles Dickens lived throughout his life-time. Along the tramp, he also accumulates many an anecdote from those who knew the author, including accounts of the doctor who attended him at his seizure and death. The author compares personalities, local names, town characteristics, and surrounding countryside to the descriptions found in Dickens‘s books, attempting to match real locations to Dickens’s various stories.

“Charles Dickens was born, at twelve o’clock at night, on Friday, 7th February, 1812. He was the second child and eldest son of a rather numerous family consisting of eight sons and daughters. … About the year 1821 pecuniary embarrassments beset and tormented the Dickens family, which were afterwards to be “ascribed in fiction” in the histories of the Micawbers and the Dorrits, and the family removed to the House on the Brook. … Dickens’s little sister, Harriet Ellen, died, a circumstance that no doubt in after years inspired the Child’s Dream of a Star.”

About Dickens’s will: ‘It states: - “I conjure my friends on no account to make me the subject of any monument, memorial, or testimonial whatever. I rest my claim to the remembrance of my country upon my published works...”

I am not that familiar with Charles Dickens’s books, but nonetheless, found this a sufficiently interesting read. ( )