On Travel E-Book

Charles Dickens.

• Herausgeber: Hesperus Press Ltd.
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Serie: On Series
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024

Seitenzahl: 158

Beschreibung

As a popular author, Dickens sought to acquaint his readers with extraordinary and alien topics, be they of human interaction or foreign climes. His travels took him to Italy, France, Switzerland and America. This volume presents a variety of key excerpts and essays written by Dickens on the virtues and follies of travelling. Recalling an age when travel meant greater investment, both of time and emotion, and spanning widely varied modes of transport, Dickens' writings place emphasis on the experience of the journey, the people encountered and the sights absorbed. As a writer who strongly believed in tangible locations, and whose writings are so marked by descriptions reliant upon thorough knowledge of the surroundings, Dickens' thoughts on travel provide an insight into the landscape of his novels.

Leseprobe

On Travel

Charles Dickens

‘on’

Published by Hesperus Press Limited

4 Rickett Street, London SW6 1RU

www.hesperuspress.com

Introduction © Pete Orford, 2009

This collection first published by Hesperus Press Limited, 2009

Designed and typeset by Fraser Muggeridge studio Printed in Jordan by Jordan National Press

ISBN: 978-1-84391-612-3

eBook ISBN: 978-1-84391-995-7

All rights reserved. This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not be resold, lent, hired out or otherwise circulated without the express prior consent of the publisher.

Contents

Introduction

The Last Cab Driver and the First Omnibus Cad

The Passage Out

By Verona, Mantua and Milan, Across the Pass of the Simplon into Switzerland

A Flight

The Calais Night Mail

Some Account of an Extraordinary Traveller

Notes

Bibliographical note

Introduction

As a writer Dickens wanted his efforts to not only entertain his readers, but educate and benefit them as well. In the preface to The Pickwick Papers he concludes that ‘if any of his imperfect descriptions, while they afford amusements in the perusal, should induce only one reader to think better of his fellow men, and to look upon the brighter and more kindly side of human nature, he would indeed be proud and happy to have led to such a result.’ The champion of the masses, Dickens’ novels and articles encouraged the reader to journey alongside the narrator and characters, broadening their own horizons as they did so, and this last aspect was an idea taken up literally in Dickens’ own travels and subsequent accounts of such adventures. His talent of observation, of both people and places, lends an immediate advantage to his travel writing as he reports on the sights and sounds around him.

This is evident in Dickens’ earliest writing, Sketches by Boz, from which is taken the first article collected here, ‘The Last Cab Driver and the First Omnibus Cad’ (1836). As a young man his experience was still limited to his home country, but the sketches are an encouragement to look again at the sights around us and see the stories that are otherwise taken for granted. After all, the everyday and exotic are defined by where we originate from, and just as the Tower of Pisa might prove otherworldly to an Englishman, so the Hackney cabs of London can be just as worthy of attention to those unfamiliar with them. Dickens faithfully conveys the experience of transport in the nineteenth-century metropolis with trademark humour and admiration for the rogues he identifies, fleshing out the past with the sordid reality of the characters who inhabited it, and the legacy of the piece is that, whilst redefining the everyday for his contemporaries, to the modern reader it provides a detailed snapshot of travel in a past age.

Another detailed account of yesterday’s transport is provided in the second article ‘The Passage Out’, taken from American Notes (1842), where Dickens gives a very subjective, intimate and truthful account of travelling by steamer. Though Dickens’ travels to both America and Italy would result in published works, the reader is left with no doubt that both these journeys were decidedly for pleasure rather than business: American Notes and Pictures from Italy have a very personal, individual feel about them. After all, Dickens was aware that there were already a number of travel guides available, and did not try to compete with this ‘stock of information’, as he called it, by producing definitive guides of where to go. Instead he delighted in seeing the places he wanted to see, often going off the beaten track; his visit to America involved tours around prisons and asylums. His writing has as much to say about human nature as it does about the new world he visited, and the pace of the transatlantic journey in ‘The Passage Out’ is underlined and enhanced by the dynamics of himself, the crew and his fellow passengers.

But occasionally his fellow men did not warm to being part of Dickens’ writings. Though dubbed ‘Mr Popular Sentimentality’ by Trollope, Dickens’ observations were also interpreted as caustic or hostile, especially when writing of abroad. But Dickens was simply applying the same skills of observation he used in his own country, and his willingness to poke fun at foreigners merely reflected his same willingness to poke fun at his own countrymen,

As I have never, in writing fiction, had any disposition to soften what is ridiculous or wrong at home, I hope (and believe) that the good-humoured people of the United States are not generally disposed to quarrel with me for carrying the same usage abroad.

Dickens’ naivety of international relations was revealed when the ‘good-humoured people’ of pre-civil war America were disposed to quarrel with Dickens’ account of his travels abroad; little wonder given his horror at the slave trade and his mocking of the New World’s sense of self-importance. The subsequent furore influenced Dickens to affirm his disinterestedness when writing his next travel fiction, Pictures from Italy (1843). He took especial care in the introduction to further distance himself from the authoritative style of other travel guides, making it clear that these were only his own impressions, ‘a series of faint reflections – mere shadows in the water’, which he invited the reader to share. Though he marvelled at what he perceived as the gaudiness of Roman Catholic rituals, on the whole he abstained from criticism of the country and the result is a work which is very much focused on the narrator’s personal experience and interests. The extract here, ‘By Verona, Mantua and Milan’, shows the author’s own preoccupations, with his love of Shakespeare dominating his trip to Verona, his encounter with a cicerone occupying his impressions of Mantua, and his trip to Milan giving way to discussions of art. The narrative style is very conversational, Dickens’ triumph as a travel writer being to invite us in as a friend to listen to his holiday tales.

Indeed, the travel writing and non-fiction work which Dickens produced, freed from the necessity to focus on fictional characters and plots, is as close as he got to a published autobiography. Given the way in which Dickens foregrounds himself in these accounts, it is therefore important for the modern reader to remind themselves of exactly who is telling the story. The popular image of Dickens to the modern reader is the fatherly figure with the beard and moustache, yet this is a direct result of the publicity photographs distributed during his second tour of America in 1867–9. For readers of Sketches by Boz, American Notes, Pictures from Italy, and his journals, the enduring image during this time was the 1838 portrait by Daniel Maclise that appeared in Nicholas Nickleby, when Dickens was a young man in his late twenties. Though less familiar now than the bearded Dickens, nonetheless the image of the younger Dickens is far more appropriate to his travel writing, as his first voyages to America and Italy were undertaken while he was in his early thirties: we are therefore dealing with the writings of a young man out to see the world, with all the enthusiasm and naivety we might expect of such a traveller.

It is interesting therefore to compare the two articles A Flight (1851) and The Calais Night Mail (1863), which recount the same journey to France but as told by two different people; the first experienced by Charles Dickens, thirty-nine year old author of comic fiction who had just completed his middle novel, David Copperfield, and the second written by Charles Dickens, fifty-one year old literary celebrity, engaged on reading tours across the United Kingdom. Consequently, while each journey is similar, both referring to the train across, the ferry, the customs office, and those first moments in France, the two accounts contrast in tone. The first author is both excited and excitable, wondering at the marvel of modern transport and the speed with which he can travel to Paris, while the second author regards his earlier self as ‘a maundering young wretch’ and now travels with both familiarity and weariness; he is inherently tired of travelling, beginning his journey with a wish to stay put in the comfortable surroundings of Dover, then ending with a sense of relief to be in the comfortable surroundings of Paris.

Beyond the immediate publication of his travels in non-fiction, Dickens’ experiences abroad also provided fuel for his novels. Dickens consistently used first-hand knowledge of locations in which the adventures took place, hence so many of his novels occurring within London and the surrounding area. Consequently, whenever his characters go abroad, their journeys are limited to those places within Dickens’s own experience. The advantage is an intimate knowledge of setting and scene that Dickens used to complement his adventures and comment upon the emotional journeys of the characters. In trying to escape the realities of the past, the Dorrit family holiday in the

fantastical world of Venice that Dickens had dubbed ‘An Italian Dream’; both they and David Copperfield take solace in the Swiss Alps that Dickens knew first hand to be a place of escape and recluse. Travel could also be relied upon to add spice and interest to the novel; when the sales of Martin Chuzzlewit began to dwindle, Dickens sent his hero to America to win back his audience by trading on the interest aroused in foreign climes.

But moreover, just as travel provided a source of interest in fiction, so too did fiction inspire enthusiasm for travel, not least of all for Dickens. He once wrote that ‘When the wind is blowing and the sleet or rain is driving against the dark windows, I love to sit by the fire, thinking of what I have read in books of voyage and travel.’ He added that ‘such books have had a strong fascination for my mind from my earliest childhood’ and we can see in his travels how his love of fiction and adventure influence his perception of the world around him. For Dickens, Verona is the home of Romeo and Juliet, and Shakespeare’s language is used throughout to comment upon the sights he sees, just as the Arabian Nights are upheld by Dickens throughout his travel writing as a treasure of marvels which the exotic world abroad can only aspire to. Dickens reinforced the relationship between the adventures of the imagination and those we seek out for ourselves through travel. The unimposing nature of Dickens’ travel writing, that he had used to avoid controversy, prompted the reader to engage more by querying the validity of opinions which are expressly defined as not being fact. The reader, carried to foreign shores by their mind’s eye, were encouraged to make their own observations on the sights before them. For Dickens this travelling of the mind was every bit as valuable as actual holidaying. In ‘Some Account of an Extraordinary Traveller’ (1850), concerning Mr Booley, a visitor to panoramas in London that depict famous sights of foreign climes, Dickens’ description ridicules the character with affection, yet ultimately approves of his attempts to widen his experience of the world through the means available. The panoramas were a gateway to a wider world, otherwise unobtainable to Mr Booley. In just such a way, Dickens, ever the champion of the poor, who could not experience the realities of travel as he did, offered the opportunity through his writings for those who would never travel to have a glimpse of the world beyond their own. As Dickens explains, through Booley,

Some of the best results of actual travel are suggested by such means to those whose lot it is to stay at home. New worlds open out to them, beyond their little worlds, and widen their range of reflection, information, sympathy, and interest. The more man knows of man, the better for the common brotherhood among us all.

– Pete Orford, 2009

The Last Cab Driver and the First Omnibus Cad

Of all the cabriolet drivers whom we have ever had the honour and gratification of knowing by sight – and our acquaintance in this way has been most extensive – there is one who made an impression on our mind which can never be effaced, and who awakened in our bosom a feeling of admiration and respect, which we entertain a fatal presentiment will never be called forth again by any human being. He was a man of most simple and prepossessing appearance. He was a brown-whiskered, white-hatted, no-coated cabman; his nose was generally red, and his bright blue eye not unfrequently stood out in bold relief against a black border of artificial workmanship1; his boots were of the Wellington form, pulled up to meet his corduroy knee-smalls, or at least to approach as near them as their dimensions would admit of; and his neck was usually garnished with a bright yellow handkerchief. In summer he carried in his mouth a flower; in winter, a straw – slight, but, to a contemplative mind, certain indications of a love of nature, and a taste for botany.

His cabriolet was gorgeously painted – a bright red; and wherever we went, City or West End, Paddington or Holloway, North, East, West, or South, there was the red cab, bumping up against the posts at the street corners, and turning in and out, among hackney coaches, and drays, and carts, and wagons, and omnibuses, and contriving by some strange means or other, to get out of places which no other vehicle but the red cab could ever by any possibility have contrived to get into at all. Our fondness for that red cab was unbounded. How we should have liked to have seen it in the circle at Astley’s! Our life upon it, that it should have performed such evolutions as would have put the whole company to shame – Indian chiefs, knights, Swiss peasants, and all.

Some people object to the exertion of getting into cabs, and others object to the difficulty of getting out of them; we think both these are objections which take their rise in perverse and ill-conditioned minds. The getting into a cab is a very pretty and graceful process, which, when well performed, is essentially melodramatic. First, there is the expressive pantomime of every one of the eighteen cabmen on the stand, the moment you raise your eyes from the ground. Then there is your own pantomime in reply – quite a little ballet. Four cabs immediately leave the stand, for your especial accommodation; and the evolutions of the animals who draw them, are beautiful in the extreme, as they grate the wheels of the cabs against the kerbstones, and sport playfully in the kennel. You single out a particular cab, and dart swiftly towards it. One bound, and you are on the first step; turn your body lightly round to the right, and you are on the second; bend gracefully beneath the reins, working round to the left at the same time, and you are in the cab. There is no difficulty in finding a seat: the apron knocks you comfortably into it at once, and off you go.

The getting out of a cab is, perhaps, rather more complicated in its theory, and a shade more difficult in its execution. We have studied the subject a great deal, and we think the best way is to throw yourself out and trust to chance for alighting on your feet. If you make the driver alight first, and then throw yourself upon him, you will find that he breaks your fall materially. In the event of your contemplating an offer of eight pence, on no account make the tender, or show the money, until you are safely on the pavement. It is very bad policy attempting to save the four pence. You are very much in the power of a cabman, and he considers it a kind of fee not to do you any wilful damage. Any instruction, however, in the art of getting out of a cab, is wholly unnecessary if you are going any distance, because the probability is, that you will be shot lightly out before you have completed the third mile.

We are not aware of any instance on record in which a cab horse has performed three consecutive miles without going down once. What of that? It is all excitement. And in these days of derangement of the nervous system and universal lassitude, people are content to pay handsomely for excitement; where can it be procured at a cheaper rate?

But to return to the red cab; it was omnipresent. You had but to walk down Holborn, or Fleet Street, or any of the principal thoroughfares in which there is a great deal of traffic, and judge for yourself. You had hardly turned into the street, when you saw a trunk or two, lying on the ground; an uprooted post, a hatbox, a portmanteau, and a carpetbag, strewed about in a very picturesque manner; a horse in a cab standing by, looking about him with great unconcern; and a crowd, shouting and screaming with delight, cooling their flushed faces against the glass windows of a chemist’s shop.

‘What’s the matter here, can you tell me?’

‘O’ny a cab, sir.’

‘Anybody hurt, do you know?’

‘O’ny the fare, sir. I see him a turnin’ the corner, and I ses

to another gen’lm’n “that’s a reg’lar little oss that, and he’s a comin’ along rayther sweet, an’t he?” “He just is,” ses the other gen’lm’n, ven bump they cums agin the post, and out flies the fare like bricks.’

Need we say it was the red cab; or that the gentleman with the straw in his mouth, who emerged so coolly from the chemist’s shop and philosophically climbing into the little dickey, started off at full gallop, was the red cab’s licensed driver?

The ubiquity of this red cab, and the influence it exercised over the risible muscles of justice itself, was perfectly astonishing. You walked into the justice room of the Mansion House; the whole court resounded with merriment. The Lord Mayor threw himself back in his chair, in a state of frantic delight at his own joke; every vein in Mr Hobler’s countenance was swollen with laughter, partly at the Lord Mayor’s facetiousness, but more at his own; the constables and police officers were (as in duty bound) in ecstasies at Mr Hobler and the Lord Mayor combined; and the very paupers, glancing respectfully at the beadle’s countenance, tried to smile, as even he relaxed. A tall, weazen-faced man, with an impediment in his speech, would be endeavouring to state a case of imposition against the red cab’s driver; and the red cab’s driver, and the Lord Mayor, and Mr Hobler, would be having a little fun among themselves, to the inordinate delight of everybody but the complainant. In the end, justice would be so tickled with the red cab driver’s native humour, that the fine would be mitigated, and he would go away full gallop, in the red cab, to impose on somebody else without loss of time.