In October 1844 Charles Dickens was in Genoa working on his second Christmas book, The Chimes: A Goblin Story of Some Bells That Rang an Old Year Out and a New Year In (1845). Hoping that a long foreign residence would refresh his powers of description and invention, he had come to Italy that July, but after only three months he was again ready for a change. He hatched a plan to dash off to England late in the fall after completing The Chimes, and on 6 November that is exactly what he did.

Dickens began the journey in a small, crowded coach that could manage only four miles an hour on the muddy roads to Piacenza, and he continued in various conveyances to Parma, Modena, Bologna, Ferrara, Venice, Verona, Mantua, Milan, and thence to Switzerland. From Strasbourg he went on to Paris, enduring a fifty-hour marathon ride through seas of...