American Notes and Pictures from Italy (1893)

American Notes was the result of the author’s five-month trip to America in 1842. Dickens’s travelogue includes the glitter of Boston; a Broadway swarming with hogs; a gruesome penitentiary in Philadelphia; Cincinnati, Louisville, and St Louis; railways and steamboats. Its publication was greeted with dismay: what Dickens described as ‘honest and true’ was regarded in America as ‘a compound of egotism, coxcombry and cockneyism’, the product of ‘the most coarse, vulgar, impudent and superficial’ writer ever to visit the country.

Pictures from Italy is a colourful account of a tour made in 1844.

This collectable series is the most comprehensive illustrated Dickens available. Each volume includes up to seventy-six early engravings, many of which appeared in the first editons of these works. The text is derived from the Charles Dickens Edition, revised by the author in the 1860s.