Dickens on France

CHARLES DICKENS, Franais naturalis, et Citoyen de Paris. This is how Dickens signed a letter from France to his friend John Forster in 1847. Behind the joke lay a fascination for French life and culture and a sense of affinity with the country that would take him back often and that would find expression in some of his finest work. Dickens on France brings together short stories, extracts from novels and travel writing. Among its journalistic highlights are accounts of a train journey from London to Paris, a rough Channel crossing, the pleasures of Boulogne, and Parisian life in the 1850s and 1860s.