The Traveler - The Life and Works of Charles Dickens

Also available as an e-book. Can, for example, be purchased here

“JOURNEYING INTO ALL CORNERS OF THE FLATTERING LIFE OF CHARLES DICKENS.
Charles Dickens was much more than a global jolly uncle with Christmas adventures. After several years of study, literary scholar Vibeke Schrøder publishes a comprehensive Danish monograph that is a must for all Dickens lovers (...) knowledgeable and well written (...) answers everything you want to know about him ".
♥♥♥♥♥ Bo Tao Michaëlis, Politiken

The Traveler is a monograph on the life and work of Charles Dickens. The description of his life is based, among other things, on the many letters from his own hand, where you can follow him roughly from day to day. There are a number of travel letters and two traditional travel books from America and Italy.
On both the concrete and the more abstract level, Dickens was a traveller. Through his work, he moved from the bottom of society to its top, thus becoming a symbol of his time, a kind of incarnation of the Victorian era.
Dickens became wealthy early on and enjoyed the high life, especially in Paris. But his heart was with prostitutes, pickpockets and street children in the slums of London. When he gave voice to them and the lower bourgeoisie, he made readers sob with laughter or compassion and influenced his contemporaries and thus indirectly helped bring about reforms.
The traveler is carried by both an impressive knowledge of his subject and a palpable joy in imparting this knowledge. It appears that what readers today would most like to hear about is Dickens' relationship with women and children as well as his controversies with the outside world, i.e. the kind of material which in the earliest biographies has been toned down or omitted. This biography makes up for this – to which the journey is added as a pervasive motif – both in life and in the work.
The Traveler provides a nuanced, enlightening and often poignant picture of Dickens – of what Dickens did to what life did to him.