At the height of his career, around the time he was working on Great Expectations and Our Mutual Friend, Charles Dickens wrote a series of sketches, mostly set in London, which he collected as The Uncommercial Traveller. In the persona of the Uncommercial, Dickens wanders the city streets and brings London, its inhabitants, commerce, and entertainment vividly to life. Sometimes autobiographical, as childhood experiences are interwoven with adult memories, the sketches include visits to the Paris Morgue, the Liverpool docks, a workhouse, a school for poor children, and the theater. They also describe the perils of travel, including seasickness, shipwreck, the coming of the railways, and the wretchedness of dining in English hotels and restaurants. The work is quintessential Dickens, with each piece showcasing his imaginative writing style, his keen observational powers, and his characteristic wit. In this edition Daniel Tyler explores Dickens's fascination with the city and the book's connections with concerns evident in his fiction: social injustice, human mortality, a fascination with death and the passing of time. Often funny, sometimes indignant, always exuberant, The Uncommercial Traveller is a revelatory encounter with Dickens and the Victorian city he knew so well.

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.