The Lazy Tour of Two Idle Apprentices E-Book

Wilkie Collins

• Herausgeber: Hesperus Press Ltd.
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2011

Seitenzahl: 236

Beschreibung

A delightful meditation on the pleasures of bachelor bonding and an example of collaborative journalism at its best _x000D_ _x000D_In autumn 1857, Charles Dickens embarked on a sightseeing trip to Cumberland with his friend, the rising star of literature Wilkie Collins. Writing together, they reported their adventures for Dickens' periodical Household Words, producing a showcase of both long-cherished and entirely novel sides of these well-loved men of letters. Boasting two ghost stories from undisputed masters of the genre, it also uniquely demonstrates their glee in caricaturing themselves and one another—Collins assumes the identity of Thomas Idle (a born-and-bred idler) and Dickens that of Francis Goodchild (laboriously idle). Through their fictional counterparts, the men relentlessly satirize Dickens' maniacal energy and Collins' idleness. The result is an exuberant diary of a journey and a rare insight into one of literature's most famed and intriguing friendships.

Leseprobe

The Lazy Tour of Two Idle Apprentices

Hesperus Classics

Published by Hesperus Press Limited

19 Bulstrode Street, London W1U 2JN

www.hesperuspress.com

First published in Household Words in 1857

First published by Hesperus Press Limited, 2011

This edition edited by Melissa Valiska Gregory and Melisa Klimaszewski

Introduction and notes © Melissa Valiska Gregory and Melisa Klimaszewski, 2011

Designed and typeset by Fraser Muggeridge studio

Printed in Jordan byJordan National Press

ISBN: 978-1-84391-205-7

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 by Melissa Valiska Gregory and Melisa Klimaszewski

Note on the text

The Lazy Tour of Two Idle Apprentices by Wilkie Collins and Charles Dickens

Chapter the First

Chapter the Second

Chapter the Third

Chapter the Fourth

Chapter the Fifth

Notes

Biographical note

INTRODUCTION

Originally published in five instalments in Charles Dickens’ weekly periodical, Household Words, The Lazy Tour of Two Idle Apprentices is the collaboratively written and comically exaggerated chronicle of a trip that Dickens and Wilkie Collins took together in September of 1857. Seeking a holiday ‘escape’ as two apprentices of ‘Lady Literature’, the two men travelled from London to Doncaster to see the races, writing about their trip on the way. Dickens and Collins assign themselves the identities of Francis Goodchild and Thomas Idle, adopted from a series of engravings by William Hogarth that features the contrasting lives of two apprentice weavers: one industrious (Goodchild) and one dissipated (Idle). Much of the text’s humour stems from the satirical juxtaposition of these types, which often reflect each writer’s personal foibles and insecurities, but The Lazy Tour is more than a comic send-up of Goodchild’s and Idle’s temperamental differences. An expansive text, one part travelogue and one part showy literary spectacle, it bounces from slapstick comedy to horror and everything in between.

The Lazy Tour revels in the art of the running gag with recurring characters such as the braying drunk called the ‘Gong Donkey’ at Doncaster. Verbal tics also abound, including Goodchild’s feeble effort to cheer a bedridden Idle with the silly refrain, ‘There is the sea, and here are the shrimps – let us eat ’em.’ Its neurotic lead characters gleefully satirise respectable English pastimes, evident in Idle’s traumatic account of an adolescent game of cricket that results in a potentially catastrophic state of perspiration. But when The Lazy Tour plunges into gothic nightmare, it pulls out all the stops. A man returns from the dead during a dark and stormy night, and a ghost who has terrified his young bride to death holds listeners hostage while recounting his frightful tale. Along the way, Dickens and Collins do not fail to touch upon important Victorian social issues, including the fear of technological progress, the desolation of the mentally ill, or the suffering of human slaves, who appear suddenly in a description of dark, varnished mahogany that recalls ‘in the depth of its grain, through all its polish, the hue of the wretched slaves who groaned long ago under old Lancaster merchants’. In short, The Lazy Tour of Two Idle Apprentices is ambitious in scope and stubbornly un-idle.

Indeed, The Lazy Tour is in many ways a hyper-stimulated text, one that meditates on the hectic, exciting and sometimes frantic quality of ever more modern urban life. As the train carries Goodchild and Idle across a dreary industrialised landscape, the two men repeatedly try to make their holiday a restorative experience. Goodchild seeks out the reinvigorating effects of the countryside, hoping to find a sublime experience in the ‘mountains’ of Cumberland, while Idle takes the leisure spa approach, trying his best to luxuriate in doing nothing at all in a series of hotels. Both men fail miserably to achieve any kind of rest, and today’s readers will no doubt recognise the syndrome of the vacation becoming more work than work itself. Of course, many Victorian novels are anxiously preoccupied with the accelerated feeling of the modern world, but, as a humorous travel piece contained within the pages of a periodical, The Lazy Tour experiments with capturing modernity’s rhythms in an especially freewheeling way. It uses the episodic digressions of the travelogue to comment on the enormous changes that were propelling Victorians through stages of technological advancement (and their own landscape) at an alarmingly swift pace.

From the very beginning, The Lazy Tour spotlights the tension between the stated purpose of the trip – a lazy holiday from urban professional life – and its less than lazy reality. Goodchild and Idle have planned their holiday idealistically, imagining the journey as a relaxed walking tour and themselves as rugged travellers capable of roughing it in the open air. They send their luggage on ahead and carry only light packs. But by the end of the first day, they are antsy, bored and craving the convenience of the train. ‘[W]hat was the use of walking, when you could ride at such a pace as that’, wonders Idle. Longing for the trappings of the city life they had intended to leave behind, the men decide to take the express train, a ‘thundering meteor’ that hurtles through the countryside. The Lazy Tour’s description of the train, ‘[t]he greatest power in nature and art combined’, celebrates its speed and strength, and the passage depicting what the landscape looks like from the window reproduces the cadence of the engine as well as the abrupt breaks in the rapidly changing scenery: ‘The pastoral country darkened, became coaly, became smoky, became infernal, got better, got worse, improved again, grew rugged, turned romantic…’. For all their efforts to unwind, the idle apprentices find themselves stimulated by and more in sync with the formidable energy of the express.

The Lazy Tour also attends to the troubling side effects of this powerful technology, describing, for instance, the way the train aggressively takes over the environment. Whole stations are ‘swallowed up’ by the train’s presence, and the express bears down on towns like a military attack, complete with ‘a volley of cannonballs’. In other words, despite its convenience, the railway also has the potential to make its passengers feel disempowered. Once the men opt to ride instead of walk, the express keeps them on its schedule and deposits them at a series of unpleasant backwater stops. Perhaps finding themselves at the mercy of the train explains their comparison of it to an overwrought female hysteric in need of domination:

Now, the engine shrieked in hysterics of such intensity, that it seemed desirable that the men who had her in charge should hold her feet, slap her hands, and bring her to; now, burrowed into tunnels with a stubborn and undemonstrative energy so confusing that the train seemed to be flying back into leagues of darkness.

This startlingly violent moment begins with the restraining and striking of a woman yet ends with a classic phallic image of the train penetrating tunnels at an astonishing speed. Such a portrayal redirects the reader’s attention away from the experience of being a passenger and toward the masculine prowess of the train operators who control it, suggesting an equivocal response to the railway and, potentially, a need to reassert control over a central mid-Victorian technology that required surrender. Although train travel is sometimes milked for comedy in The Lazy Tour, as when Goodchild sprints around the platform pretending he is in a hurry to be somewhere simply because haste is the most appropriate sentiment for a train station, the text also suggests that trains and especially railway stations can be depressing, dehumanising places. In the junction station at Allonby, for instance, people are transformed into ‘human locomotives’, less emotionally sensitive than the poor beasts torturously trapped in the livestock cars. Throughout, The Lazy Tour depicts the train and the train station with compelling ambivalence.

Collins and Dickens depict other aspects of their trip uneasily as well. Both of the ghost stories occur in country inns, which might be interpreted as comic homage to the unpleasantness of travelling or a more heartfelt expression of dislocation and disorientation, augmented by the speed at which one could now traverse the country. The scenery along the way is often grim, featuring depressed town markets and the pinched faces of the poor. Doncaster comes across as unpleasantly seedy, and the text dwells upon the worst elements of the long-standing revelry that accompany the sporting event. Portraying the drunk and disorderly mob as alternately pathetic and vicious, Goodchild compares the grotesque crowd to the lunatic inmates he has just visited, and Idle determines that he will not leave his room at all. When the races are over, two ‘inconceivably drunk’ men, the ‘Gong donkey’ and the ‘Jackall’, tear into each other until they are separated and dragged away by police. The story then concludes with the melancholy image of the day after the Battle of Waterloo. These images and others undermine the text’s cheerful tone and deprive the reader of comedy’s usual affirmation.

Perhaps The Lazy Tour is a conflicted piece of writing in part because it arose out of an emotionally charged, messy and conflicted situation. First, the relationship between the two writers was enormously complex. The men first met in the spring of 1851 when Collins was twenty-seven and Dickens thirty-nine. Dickens was an internationally celebrated author famous for bestsellers such as Oliver Twist (1837–9), A Christmas Carol (1843) and David Copperfield (1850–1). He was also the founder and editor of Household Words, a journal that established him as a weekly presence in the lives of many middle-class readers. Wilkie Collins’ fame did not approach the scale of Dickens’ until two years later, when Collins published the phenomenally popular The Woman in White, but he was no naive protégé. His early novels, including Basil: A Story of Modern Life (1852) and Hide and Seek (1854), were crucial in establishing sensation fiction as a recognisable, popular type of Victorian novel with lurid plotlines and shocking family secrets. Collins had also found early success publishing a biography of his father, a well-respected landscape painter, as well as a charming travel narrative, Rambles Beyond Railways (1851). Rambles Beyond Railways, which depicts a foot tour of Cornwall taken by Collins and the book’s illustrator, Henry Brandling, shows that Collins had already mastered the kind of collaborative picturesque travel mode on which The Lazy Tour depends. Collins and Dickens started working together when Dickens asked a mutual acquaintance, Augustus Egg, to invite Collins to perform in an amateur theatrical Dickens was producing, and the three quickly became intimate friends, visiting Europe together in 1853. At this point in his life, Dickens had begun to appreciate the company of energetic younger men as an alternative to a domestic situation with which he was increasingly bored, and he had accumulated several such bachelor companions, but Collins’ indulgent and spontaneous personality complemented his the best. The two men explored the late-night offerings of London and Paris, with Dickens regularly requesting the company of Collins, whom he called in a letter a pleasantly ‘vicious associate’ (12th July 1854).

The Collins/Dickens friendship also helped to provide a screen story for the trip to Cumberland, which was motivated primarily by Dickens’ desire to visit Ellen Ternan, the eighteen-year-old actress with whom the author had fallen in love despite their twenty-seven year age difference and his marriage. When Collins’ and Dickens’ longtime friend Douglas Jerrold died unexpectedly in May of 1857, Dickens decided to assist Jerrold’s widow by putting on a benefit performance of The Frozen Deep, a theatrical melodrama that he and Collins wrote together and had produced on a smaller scale with Dickens’ family earlier that year. Dickens reserved the Free Trade Hall in Manchester for the performance and engaged a family of professional actresses – the Ternans – to play the female roles. The cast change ironically foreshadowed the romantic change that would disrupt the entire Dickens family; as the Ternans replaced Dickens’ daughters and sister-in-law on stage, Ellen would replace Catherine, Dickens’ wife of over twenty years, as the object of Dickens’ affection. After the performances in Manchester concluded, Dickens wrote letters to his friends proclaiming his misery, and when Dickens asked Collins to accompany him on a trip to Doncaster, evidence suggests that the trip was also an excuse for Dickens to follow Ternan, who was performing at the Theatre Royal there. Hence, Goodchild’s suggestive rhapsody about a pair of ‘little lilac gloves!’ and a ‘winning little bonnet’ and Idle’s reference to marriage as a ‘ridiculous dilemma’. We may never know exactly what occurred between Dickens and Ternan on the trip, but we do know that upon Dickens’ return, he ordered his servants to build a wall that separated his and Catherine’s bedroom into separate chambers, a dramatic gesture that captures Dickens’ unilateral approach to the protracted marital separation he initiated.

To date, this biographical context has made The Lazy Tour of some minor interest to literary scholars, but the text deserves much more attention. Remarkably, it appears during the most intense period of collaboration in both writers’ careers. They would come together again in 1867 to write No Thoroughfare, which they conceived of as both a Christmas number and a stage play, but the amount – and multiple modes – of collaborative work that they were producing in the late 1850s is unique. Dickens had invited Collins to become a staff writer for Household Words in October of 1856, and Collins accepted with the condition that when his novel The Dead Secret appeared serially in the journal, it would include an authorial byline. As a result, from January to June of 1857, a name other than Dickens appeared as a credited author in Household Words for the first time. For the regular weekly issues, however, including the ones that featured The Lazy Tour, and for the special Christmas numbers, Collins did not have a byline. These variations suggest that the men were comfortable collaborating in different modes and signalling their collaboration in various ways. They performed together onstage, co-wrote and co-produced a play, wrote the frame story for a Christmas number to which others contributed (The Wreck of the Golden Mary in 1856), and wrote the first Christmas number of Household Words to include only one contributor alongside Dickens (The Perils of Certain English Prisoners in 1857).

As evidence of the complexities that marked the collaboration between Collins and Dickens, as a meditation on modern travel and the hopelessness of escaping one’s own professional existence, and as an example of witty, comic Victorian journalism, The Lazy Tour merits reading alongside Collins’ and Dickens’ other collaborative works as well as their more famous individually authored ones. To find one renowned Victorian author swooping up another in a country inn to carry him down a flight of stairs is itself enough to interest one in the way that Collins and Dickens used their shared writing to imagine endless variations on their personal and professional selves. Working jointly on plays, stories and non-fiction pieces, drinking together, pairing up to explore the streets of London and Paris, and individually penning long, complicated novels, Wilkie Collins and Charles Dickens might be called apprentices of many things, but, by most measures, were anything but lazy.

– Melissa Valiska Gregory and Melisa Klimaszewski, 2011

NOTE ON THE TEXT

The Lazy Tour of Two Idle Apprentices was originally published in five serial instalments in Household Words, a weekly journal that Charles Dickens founded in 1850 and for which he served as chief editor. To retain the flavor of the text’s original serial form, we have chosen to include the dates and chapter headings that accompanied each instalment when it was first published. Chapters appeared on 3rd, 10th, 17th, 24th and 31st October 1857. The Lazy Tour also appeared in Harper’s Weekly from 31st October to 28th November 1857.

Wilkie Collins later republished the story in ‘Chapter the Second’ about Arthur Holliday and Dr Lorn as ‘Brother Morgan’s Story of The Dead Hand’ in his Queen of Hearts (1859) collection. The story in ‘Chapter the Fourth’ about a solitary man terrorising his young bride was never republished during Dickens’ lifetime but later appeared in collections of Dickens’ writing under the title ‘The Bride’s Chamber’.

Attribution is a difficult practice in regard to any collaborative text. For The Lazy Tour, there is no surviving complete manuscript, and it is impossible to determine the level of influence Collins and Dickens had on one another’s prose or how extensively they discussed and agreed upon textual details during the time they spent together. We also do not know the extent to which Dickens revised the entire text at the galley proof stage before it appeared in Household Words, whose pages he edited meticulously each week. Nevertheless, between the surviving correspondence of Collins and Dickens, John Forster’s comments regarding the authorship of The Lazy Tour in Life of Dickens (1872–4), the subsequent reprinting of portions of the text under a single author’s name, and the work of literary scholars such as Harry Stone and Michael Slater, it is possible to note places where one may reasonably call either Collins or Dickens the primary author for a certain part of the text. Dickens was the primary author for the beginning paragraphs of each chapter, and we use endnotes to signal subsequent shifts.

Our editorial practices preserve the text’s original punctuation and capitalisation with a minimum of modernisation. We have retained inconsistent capitalisation because Dickens and his colleagues so often used capitalisation for emphasis or for other intentional reasons. Except in cases of obvious printer errors or instances where an apparent punctuation error obscures meaning, we have retained the text’s original punctuation, which includes more commas than might be used today and semi-colons where today’s practices would call for commas.

The most standardisation appears in regard to hyphens. We have modernised hyphenated words (such as to-morrow and up-stairs) that are now understood as single words, and we follow Oxford’s guidelines regarding compound words that take hyphens when attributive. So, for instance, we retain the hyphen in ‘first-floor windows’ versus a reference to windows ‘on the first floor of the building’.

These practices are consistent with other collaborative Dickens works, such as his annual Christmas numbers, now in print from Hesperus.

The Lazy Tour of Two Idle Apprentices

HOUSEHOLD WORDS

A WEEKLY JOURNAL

CONDUCTED BY CHARLES DICKENS

IN FIVE CHAPTERS

SATURDAY, OCTOBER 3, 1857CHAPTER THE FIRST

In the autumn month of September, eighteen hundred and fifty-seven, wherein these presents bear date, two idle apprentices, exhausted by the long, hot summer and the long, hot work it had brought with it, ran away from their employer. They were bound to a highly meritorious lady (named Literature), of fair credit and repute, though, it must be acknowledged, not quite so highly esteemed in the City as she might be. This is the more remarkable, as there is nothing against the respectable lady in that quarter, but quite the contrary; her family having rendered eminent service to many famous citizens of London. It may be sufficient to name Sir William Walworth, Lord Mayor under King Richard the Second, at the time of Wat Tyler’s insurrection,1 and Sir Richard Whittington: which latter distinguished man and magistrate was doubtless indebted to the lady’s family for the gift of his celebrated cat.2 There is also strong reason to suppose that they rang the Highgate bells for him with their own hands.

The misguided young men who thus shirked their duty to the mistress from whom they had received many favours, were actuated by the low idea of making a perfectly idle trip, in any direction. They had no intention of going anywhere, in particular; they wanted to see nothing, they wanted to know nothing, they wanted to learn nothing, they wanted to do nothing. They wanted only to be idle. They took to themselves (after HOGARTH), the names of Mr Thomas Idle and Mr Francis Goodchild;3 but, there was not a moral pin to choose between them, and they were both idle in the last degree.

Between Francis and Thomas, however, there was this difference of character: Goodchild was laboriously idle, and would take upon himself any amount of pains and labour to assure himself that he was idle; in short, had no better idea of idleness than that it was useless industry. Thomas Idle, on the other hand, was an idler of the unmixed Irish or Neapolitan type;4 a passive idler, a born-and-bred idler, a consistent idler, who practised what he would have preached if he had not been too idle to preach; a one entire and perfect chrysolite5 of idleness.

The two idle apprentices found themselves, within a few hours of their escape, walking down into the North of England. That is to say, Thomas was lying in a meadow, looking at the railway trains as they passed over a distant viaduct – which was his idea of walking down into the North; while Francis was walking a mile due South against time – which was his idea of walking down into the North. In the meantime the day waned, and the milestones remained unconquered.

‘Tom,’ said Goodchild, ‘the sun is getting low. Up, and let us go forward!’

‘Nay,’ quoth Thomas Idle, ‘I have not done with Annie Laurie6 yet.’ And he proceeded with that idle but popular ballad, to the effect that for the bonnie young person of that name he would ‘lay him doon and dee’ – equivalent, in prose, to lay him down and die.

‘What an ass that fellow was!’ cried Goodchild, with the bitter emphasis of contempt.

‘Which fellow?’ asked Thomas Idle.

‘The fellow in your song. Lay him doon and dee! Finely he’d show off before the girl by doing that. A Sniveller! Why couldn’t he get up, and punch somebody’s head!’

‘Whose?’ asked Thomas Idle.

‘Anybody’s. Everybody’s would be better than nobody’s! If I fell into that state of mind about a girl, do you think I’d lay me doon and dee? No, sir,’ proceeded Goodchild, with a disparaging assumption of the Scottish accent, ‘I’d get me oop and peetch into somebody. Wouldn’t you?’

‘I wouldn’t have anything to do with her,’ yawned Thomas Idle. ‘Why should I take the trouble?’

‘It’s no trouble Tom, to fall in love,’ said Goodchild, shaking his head.

‘It’s trouble enough to fall out of it, once you’re in it,’ retorted Tom. ‘So I keep out of it altogether. It would be better for you, if you did the same.’

Mr Goodchild, who is always in love with somebody, and not unfrequently with several objects at once, made no reply. He heaved a sigh of the kind which is termed by the lower orders ‘a bellowser,’ and then, heaving Mr Idle on his feet (who was not half so heavy as the sigh), urged him northward.

These two had sent their personal baggage on by train: only retaining, each a knapsack. Idle now applied himself to constantly regretting the train, to tracking it through the intricacies of Bradshaw’s Guide,7 and finding out where it was now – and where now – and where now – and to asking what was the use of walking, when you could ride at such a pace as that. Was it to see the country? If that was the object, look at it out of carriage-windows. There was a great deal more of it to be seen there, than here. Besides, who wanted to see the country? Nobody. And, again, whoever did walk? Nobody. Fellows set off to walk, but they never did it. They came back and said they did, but they didn’t. Then why should he walk? He wouldn’t walk. He swore it by this milestone!

It was the fifth from London, so far had they penetrated into the North. Submitting to the powerful chain of argument, Goodchild proposed a return to the Metropolis, and a falling back upon Euston Square Terminus. Thomas assented with alacrity, and so they walked down into the North by the next morning’s express, and carried their knapsacks in the luggage-van.

It was like all other expresses, as every express is and must be. It bore through the harvested country, a smell like a large washing-day, and a sharp issue of steam as from a huge brazen tea-urn. The greatest power in nature and art combined, it yet glided over dangerous heights in the sight of people looking up from fields and roads, as smoothly and unreally as a light miniature plaything. Now, the engine shrieked in hysterics of such intensity, that it seemed desirable that the men who had her in charge should hold her feet, slap her hands, and bring her to; now, burrowed into tunnels with a stubborn and undemonstrative energy so confusing that the train seemed to be flying back into leagues of darkness. Here, were station after station, swallowed up by the express without stopping; here, stations where it fired itself in like a volley of cannonballs, swooped away four country-people with nosegays, and three men of business with portmanteaus, and fired itself off again, bang, bang, bang! At long intervals were uncomfortable refreshment-rooms, made more uncomfortable by the scorn of Beauty towards Beast, the public (but to whom she never relented, as Beauty did in the story, towards the other Beast), and where sensitive stomachs were fed, with a contemptuous sharpness occasioning indigestion. Here, again, were stations with nothing going but a bell, and wonderful wooden razors8 set aloft on great posts, shaving the air. In these fields, the horses, sheep, and cattle were well used to the thundering meteor, and didn’t mind; in those, they were all set scampering together, and a herd of pigs scoured after them. The pastoral country darkened, became coaly, became smoky, became infernal, got better, got worse, improved again, grew rugged, turned romantic; was a wood, a stream, a chain of hills, a gorge, a moor, a cathedral town, a fortified place, a waste. Now, miserable black dwellings, a black canal, and sick black towers of chimneys; now, a trim garden, where the flowers were bright and fair; now, a wilderness of hideous altars all ablaze; now, the water meadows with their fairy rings; now, the mangy patch of unlet building ground outside the stagnant town, with the larger ring where the Circus was last week. The temperature changed, the dialect changed, the people changed, faces got sharper, manner got shorter, eyes got shrewder and harder; yet all so quickly, that the spruce guard in the London uniform and silver lace, had not yet rumpled his shirt-collar, delivered half the dispatches in his shining little pouch, or read his newspaper.

Carlisle! Idle and Goodchild had got to Carlisle. It looked congenially and delightfully idle. Something in the way of public amusement had happened last month, and something else was going to happen before Christmas; and, in the meantime there was a lecture on India for those who liked it – which Idle and Goodchild did not. Likewise, by those who liked them, there were impressions to be bought of all the vapid prints, going and gone, and of nearly all the vapid books. For those who wanted to put anything in missionary boxes, here were the boxes. For those who wanted the Reverend Mr Podgers (artist’s proofs, thirty shillings), here was Mr Podgers to any amount. Not less gracious and abundant, Mr Codgers, also of the vineyard, but opposed to Mr Podgers, brotherly tooth and nail. Here, were guidebooks to the neighbouring antiquities, and eke the Lake country, in several dry and husky sorts; here, many physically and morally impossible heads of both sexes, for young ladies to copy, in the exercise of the art of drawing; here, further, a large impression of Mr SPURGEON,9