It is hard to imagine anyone less suited to living with any kind of restraint than Charles Dickens. Especially, I think, the hyperactive Dickens of 1857, the year he turned 45. By the last days of the summer, he had already written, staged and starred in his own play in London and Manchester; bought, renovated and moved into the house of his childhood dreams in Gad’s Hill, in the village of Higham, Kent; and taken trips to Brighton and Southampton, where he waved his 16-year-old son on to a troopship bound for India.

In the May he had finished his latest novel, Little Dorritt, and in June had given his first-ever public readings (a crowd of 2,000 turned up to hear him declaim and weep his way through A Christmas Carol). Editing his monthly magazine was also keeping him busy, as was his charity for homeless women. Dozens of letters flowed.

And still he burned and suffocated and paced the London streets, often through the night. On 29 August, he wrote to his friend Wilkie Collins, begging him to come away, it didn’t matter where. I want to “escape from myself”, he scrawled – as if that were ever possible. Collins suggested Norfolk, but Dickens (all of a sudden no longer relaxed about their destination) insisted on going to the Lake District. He wanted “moors and bleak places”, he wrote, but in truth what he wanted was to get to Doncaster, where 18-year-old actress Ellen Ternan was appearing with her mother and sisters at the Theatre Royal.

Dickens and Collins got lost in fog on Carrock Fell, and Collins sprained his ankle, badly, but Dickens dragged him to Doncaster, and stuffed him into a hotel room to recover while he entertained Ellen and her mother at the races. He won large, jumping up and down at the “coming-in” – the last turn behind the brow of the hill – and marvelled at the scale of the grandstand, “rising against the sky with its vast tiers of little white dots of faces, and its last high rows and corners of people, looking like pins stuck into an enormous pin-cushion”.

The image of a packed racetrack seething with spectators has a different resonance today. Our lockdown started late and is ending – or not – in confusion. I doubt Dickens would have coped well with this uncertainty, but who does? We are trapped in the back of a car on a long, dark journey, and the world’s worst parents keep telling us every few miles that we are nearly there. Surely they know that those words, at this stage, are a trigger for rage and despair?

The Dickens of 1857 would have had trouble enduring lockdown. He went home after his trip to Doncaster and set about tearing apart his own life, closing his magazine, selling his London home and divorcing his wife Catherine with shocking vindictiveness. But we can still lose ourselves in his adventures in the Lake District (he wrote that Skiddaw in particular had “vaunted himself a great deal more than his merits deserve”) and the roiling excitement of a day at the races. It’s all there (including his thinly disguised pursuit of Ellen Ternan) in the book he wrote with Collins, The Lazy Tour of Two Idle Apprentices.

Even on that seemingly carefree jaunt to the Lakes and then Doncaster, Dickens was starting to look older than his years; he died 13 years later, on 9 June 1870, aged 58, struck dumb and then dead by a stroke (not his first). He had never stopped writing, of course, but nor had he ever been able to stay still for long. He crisscrossed the country, giving talks and readings, feasting on the rapturous crowds. He toured America. He wrote some of his greatest books even as the darkness spread. His last novel, The Mystery of Edwin Drood, was left half-finished on his desk in the garden chalet at Gad’s Hill.

And on the morning before he finally collapsed, Dickens dropped into the Sir John Falstaff pub in Higham (still there, opposite his former home) and cashed a cheque with the landlord for £22. Most of the money might have been for Ellen Ternan, who by then was living in Peckham, south-east London. Because as far as Dickens was concerned, on that sunny June morning 150 years ago, life was going on just as it always had.

• Peter Fiennes’ latest book is Footnotes: A Journey Round Britain in the Company of Great Writers (Oneworld, £10.99)