Dickens the Restless Writer of Home

Charles Dickens was always on the move. A restless traveller, he toured Italy, France, Switzerland and America in his lifetime and had plans to go much further. Dickens however was also a writer of home and cosy fireside values. In this video, Professor John explores Dickens’s ‘doubleness’ in these contradictions, and his use of a portable writing desk.

This video is the third in a series of three videos celebrating our special exhibition, Global Dickens: For Every Nation Upon Earth. The first video can be found here and the second here.

Professor Juliet John is Head of the School of Humanities and Hildred Carlile Chair of English Literature at Royal Holloway, University of London. Her work has focused predominantly on the relationship between Dickens's work and the popular cultural contexts of the Victorian and post-Victorian periods and her books include 'Dickens and Mass Culture' (Oxford University Press 2010), and 'Dickens and Modernity' (English Association, 2012). Her article on ‘Dickens’s Global Art’ (E-rea, 13.2 (2016) was formative in the co-curation of the Global Dickens exhibition.