16 h 14 minAudiobook7 minSummaryRead it, hear it, the 15-minute summary, and print and large print at costPaperback · 6 × 9 in · printing soonHardcover · 6 × 9 in · printing soonAbout this book
What does London reveal when a sleepless walker stays on its streets until dawn?
In The Uncommercial Traveller, Charles Dickens becomes a traveller with nothing to sell and every reason to look closely. His imaginary firm, Human Interest Brothers, sends him into the world without samples or orders. These essays and sketches follow him through London at night, into workhouses and aboard ships, with room for both comic scenes and sharp social argument.
Night Walks follows his restless wandering until dawn. A Small Star in the East takes him to a children's hospital and the crowded streets around it. In Bound for the Great Salt Lake, he boards the emigrant ship Amazon. Dullborough Town turns toward boyhood, bringing memory into a collection where humour and pity often sit close together.
What you’ll discover
- London after dark Walk beside a sleepless observer as the city's streets hold his attention until morning.
- Poverty seen up close Enter workhouses and a children's hospital, where Dickens looks directly at lives shaped by poverty.
- Strangers aboard a ship Step aboard the Amazon with a traveller willing to look beyond an emigrant's reputation.
- The pull of childhood Return to Dullborough Town and explore how boyhood memories shape what the traveller sees.
- Humour beside pity Enjoy Dickens's shifts from comedy to sadness, with neither feeling kept apart from the other.
Who will love it
For readers who love city walks, odd characters, travel writing and social history, and who enjoy a narrator whose jokes about bad hotels sit alongside grief for hungry children.
What’s inside
The key ideas, in the 15-minute summary
- A wandering observer finds interest in small things
- Real kindness shows itself after the Royal Charter wrecks
- Neglect of the poor and sick is a public failure
- Sailors face predators and tramps fill the roads
- Theatres and churches must meet people where they are
- Bad service in inns and stations is a national habit
- Childhood memory makes a haunted map of the mind
- Travel abroad shows the strange and the human
- Good schemes work when people are treated as equals
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- Audiobook
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- 15-minute summary
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- Paperback
- 6 × 9 in. Printing soon: leave your email under Paperback or Hardcover above.
- Hardcover
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- Large print paperback
- 8.5 × 11 in. Printing soon: leave your email under Paperback or Hardcover above.
- Large print hardcover
- 8.5 × 11 in. Printing soon: leave your email under Paperback or Hardcover above.
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Il viaggiatore non commerciale
by Charles Dickens · 1860
A wanderer walks London all night, boards a Mormon emigrant ship and meets a clergyman burying shipwreck victims.
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In short
What does a man see when he walks London all night, boards an emigrant ship, or stands on a Welsh beach beside a wrecked treasure ship? Charles Dickens calls himself the Uncommercial Traveller, a wanderer who works for the firm of Human Interest Brothers.
From the 15-minute summary · Key idea 1
A wandering observer finds interest in small things
The book opens with the writer saying what he is not. He is no salesman, and no landlord or waiter cares what he thinks. He is the Uncommercial Traveller, who works for the great firm of Human Interest Brothers.
His beat is Covent Garden, the city streets and the country lanes beyond. He walks by day and by night, sometimes half asleep on a road to breakfast thirty miles away. In one sketch he plays at being a police constable on an amateur beat. In another he walks until dawn because he cannot sleep.
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What is The Uncommercial Traveller about?
It is a series of essays in which Dickens plays a wandering observer. He visits shipwrecks, workhouses, theatres, docks, inns, churches and foreign towns, and writes about the people and problems he meets with humour and sympathy.
What does the title Uncommercial Traveller mean?
Dickens says he is the opposite of a commercial traveller who sells goods. He travels, as he jokes, for the firm of Human Interest Brothers, and only collects scenes and people that interest him.
Is The Uncommercial Traveller a true story?
Yes, the sketches are based on real places, events and visits, such as the wreck of the Royal Charter and a Stepney school. He mixes observation and memory with comic exaggeration and playful inventions.
The author
Charles Dickens
1812–1870 · English novelist
Charles Dickens was an English novelist born in Portsmouth in 1812. He lived in London and later at Gad’s Hill Place in Kent, where he died in 1870. His books include The Pickwick Papers (1836–1837), A Christmas Carol (1843), David Copperfield (1849–1850), and Great Expectations (1860–1861).
More by Charles Dickens
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