Outside London, there is no part of Britain that has such intimate and sustained associations with Charles Dickens as Kent. Dickens's life was restless and nomadic, but it was the tranquillity of his Kentish childhood that provided the background for some of his first ventures into fiction and inspiration for parts of his later novels. The county remained a lifelong refuge from the chaos of the capital.


In Dickens's Kent, Peter Clark follows the writer's footsteps from the house he shared with his first wife, Catherine, in Tavistock Square to his home at Gad's Hill Place, near Rochester, where he died in 1870. Clark goes on to explore the areas of Kent most closely associated with Dickens's life and work - the Medway Towns and their surroundings, Thanet and East Kent, and finally Staplehurst, the scene of the railway accident that almost killed him.