From the fog-bound coastal marshes of Kent in Great Expectations and the frostbitten streets of London in A Christmas Carol to the austere brutality of the workhouse in Oliver Twist, Charles Dickens left us some of the most enduring portraits of life in Victorian Britain. The vast majority of his best-known characters were born and bred in Britain and lived their lives in backdrops and cityscapes that were unmistakably British.
Yet, for all that, Dickens was not a man whose horizons ended at Britain’s borders. Here was an author who spent a great deal of his
