This year marks the bicentenary of Charles Dickens's birth, and the novelist and journalist lived through several major technological changes - but what did he make of them? IN AN article written for Household Words, a magazine that he edited in the 1850s, Charles Dickens describes a trip by express train and Channel ferry from London to Paris. The title, 'A Flight', gives an indication of his feelings -houses, stations, fields flashing by. After paying his fare at London Bridge he had been, he wrote, "discharged ... of all responsibility apart from the preservation of a voucher, ruled into three divisions". The article ends: "No hurry, ladies and gentlemen, going to Paris in eleven hours. It is so well done, that there really is no hurry!"
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