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203 pages

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First published between 1860-1861, “The Uncommercial Traveller” is a collection of literary sketches and reminiscences written by Charles Dickens. They represent his main contributions to the journal “All the Year Round”, which Dickens founded in 1859. Contents include: “His General Line Of Business”, “The Shipwreck”, “Wapping Workhouse”, “Two Views Of A Cheap Theatre”, “Poor Mercantile Jack”, “Refreshments For Travellers”, “Travelling Abroad”, “The Great Tasmania’s Cargo”, “City Of London Churches”, “Shy Neighbourhoods”, etc. Charles John Huffam Dickens (1812–1870) was an English writer and social critic famous for having created some of the world's most well-known fictional characters. His works became unprecedentedly popular during his life, and today he is commonly regarded as the greatest Victorian-era novelist. Although perhaps better known for such works as “Great Expectations” or “A Christmas Carol”, Dickens first gained success with the 1836 serial publication of “The Pickwick Papers”, which turned him almost overnight into an international literary celebrity thanks to his humour, satire, and astute observations concerning society and character. This classic work is being republished now in a new edition complete with a specially-commissioned new biography of the author.

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Publié par	Read Books Ltd.
Date de parution	03 décembre 2014
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781447496427
Langue	English
Poids de l'ouvrage	1 Mo

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THE UNCOMMERCIAL TRAVELLER
By
CHARLES DICKENS
WITH APPRECIATIONS AND CRITICISMS BY G. K. CHESTERTON

First published in 1859

Copyright © 2020 Read & Co. Books
This edition is published by Read & Co. Books, an imprint of Read & Co.
This book is copyright and may not be reproduced or copied in any way without the express permission of the publisher in writing.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Read & Co. is part of Read Books Ltd. For more information visit www.readandcobooks.co.uk

Contents
THE UNCOMMERCIAL TRAVELLER By G. K. Chesterton
I HIS GENERAL LINE OF BUSINESS
II THE SHIPWRECK
III WAPPING WORKHOUSE
IV TWO VIEWS OF A CHEAP THEATRE
V POOR MERCANTILE JACK
VI REFRESHMENTS FOR TRAVELLERS
VII TRAVELLING ABROAD
VIII THE GREAT TASMANIA’S CARGO
IX CITY OF LONDON CHURCHES
X SHY NEIGHBOURHOODS
XI TRAMPS
XII DULLBOROUGH TOWN
XIII NIGHT WALKS
XIV CHAMBERS
XV NURSE’S STORIES
XVI ARCADIAN LONDON
XVII THE ITALIAN PRISONER
XVIII THE CALAIS NIGHT MAIL
XIX SOME RECOLLECTIONS OF MORTALITY
XX BIRTHDAY CELEBRATIONS
XXI THE SHORT-TIMERS
XXII BOUND FOR THE GREAT SALT LAKE
XXIII THE CITY OF THE ABSENT
XXIV AN OLD STAGE-COACHING HOUSE
XXV THE BOILED BEEF OF NEW ENGLAND
XXVI CHATHAM DOCKYARD
XXVII IN THE FRENCH-FLEMISH COUNTRY
XXVIII MEDICINE MEN OF CIVILISATION
XXIX TITBULL’S ALMS-HOUSES
XXX THE RUFFIAN
XXXI ABOARD SHIP
XXXII A SMALL STAR IN THE EAST
XXXIII A LITTLE DINNER IN AN HOUR
XXXIV MR. BARLOW
XXXV ON AN AMATEUR BEAT
XXXVI A FLY-LEAF IN A LIFE
XXXVII A PLEA FOR TOTAL ABSTINENCE

THE UNCOMMERCIAL TRAVELLER
By G. K. Chesterton
The Uncommercial Traveller is a collection of Dickens’s memories rather than of his literary purposes; but it is due to him to say that memory is often more startling in him than prophecy in anybody else. They have the character which belongs to all his vivid incidental writing: that they attach themselves always to some text which is a fact rather than an idea. He was one of those sons of Eve who are fonder of the Tree of Life than of the Tree of Knowledge—even of the knowledge of good and of evil. He was in this profoundest sense a realist. Critics have talked of an artist with his eye on the object. Dickens as an essayist always had his eye on an object before he had the faintest notion of a subject. All these works of his can best be considered as letters; they are notes of personal travel, scribbles in a diary about this or that that really happened. But Dickens was one of the few men who have the two talents that are the whole of literature—and have them both together. First, he could make a thing happen over again; and second, he could make it happen better. He can be called exaggerative; but mere exaggeration conveys nothing of his typical talent. Mere whirlwinds of words, mere melodramas of earth and heaven do not affect us as Dickens affects us, because they are exaggerations of nothing. If asked for an exaggeration of something, their inventors would be entirely dumb. They would not know how to exaggerate a broom-stick; for the life of them they could not exaggerate a tenpenny nail. Dickens always began with the nail or the broom-stick. He always began with a fact even when he was most fanciful; and even when he drew the long bow he was careful to hit the white.
This riotous realism of Dickens has its disadvantage—a disadvantage that comes out more clearly in these casual sketches than in his constructed romances. One grave defect in his greatness is that he was altogether too indifferent to theories. On large matters he went right by the very largeness of his mind; but in small matters he suffered from the lack of any logical test and ready reckoner. Hence his comment upon the details of civilisation or reform are sometimes apt to be jerky and jarring, and even grossly inconsistent. So long as a thing was heroic enough to admire, Dickens admired it; whenever it was absurd enough to laugh at he laughed at it: so far he was on sure ground. But about all the small human projects that lie between the extremes of the sublime and the ridiculous, his criticism was apt to have an accidental quality. As Matthew Arnold said of the remarks of the Young Man from the Country about the perambulator, they are felt not to be at the heart of the situation. On a great many occasions the Uncommercial Traveller seems, like other hasty travellers, to be criticising elements and institutions which he has quite inadequately understood; and once or twice the Uncommercial Traveller might almost as well be a Commercial Traveller for all he knows of the countryside.
An instance of what I mean may be found in the amusing article about the nightmares of the nursery. Superficially read it might almost be taken to mean that Dickens disapproved of ghost stories—disapproved of that old and genial horror which nurses can hardly supply fast enough for the children who want it. Dickens, one would have thought, should have been the last man in the world to object to horrible stories, having himself written some of the most horrible that exist in the world. The author of the Madman’s Manuscript, of the disease of Monk and the death of Krook, cannot be considered fastidious in the matter of revolting realism or of revolting mysticism. If artistic horror is to be kept from the young, it is at least as necessary to keep little boys from reading Pickwick or Bleak House as to refrain from telling them the story of Captain Murderer or the terrible tale of Chips. If there was something appalling in the rhyme of Chips and pips and ships, it was nothing compared to that infernal refrain of “Mudstains, bloodstains” which Dickens himself, in one of his highest moments of hellish art, put into Oliver Twist .
I take this one instance of the excellent article called “Nurse’s Stories” because it is quite typical of all the rest. Dickens (accused of superficiality by those who cannot grasp that there is foam upon deep seas) was really deep about human beings; that is, he was original and creative about them. But about ideas he did tend to be a little superficial. He judged them by whether they hit him, and not by what they were trying to hit. Thus in this book the great wizard of the Christmas ghosts seems almost the enemy of ghost stories; thus the almost melodramatic moralist who created Ralph Nickleby and Jonas Chuzzlewit cannot see the point in original sin; thus the great denouncer of official oppression in England may be found far too indulgent to the basest aspects of the modern police. His theories were less important than his creations, because he was a man of genius. But he himself thought his theories the more important, because he was a man.
A Chapter from Appreciations and Criticisms of the Works of Charles Dickens , 1911

THE UNCOMMERCIAL TRAVELLER
I
HIS GENERAL LINE OF BUSINESS
Allow me to introduce myself—first negatively.
No landlord is my friend and brother, no chambermaid loves me, no waiter worships me, no boots admires and envies me. No round of beef or tongue or ham is expressly cooked for me, no pigeon-pie is especially made for me, no hotel-advertisement is personally addressed to me, no hotel-room tapestried with great-coats and railway wrappers is set apart for me, no house of public entertainment in the United Kingdom greatly cares for my opinion of its brandy or sherry. When I go upon my journeys, I am not usually rated at a low figure in the bill; when I come home from my journeys, I never get any commission. I know nothing about prices, and should have no idea, if I were put to it, how to wheedle a man into ordering something he doesn’t want. As a town traveller, I am never to be seen driving a vehicle externally like a young and volatile pianoforte van, and internally like an oven in which a number of flat boxes are baking in layers. As a country traveller, I am rarely to be found in a gig, and am never to be encountered by a pleasure train, waiting on the platform of a branch station, quite a Druid in the midst of a light Stonehenge of samples.
And yet—proceeding now, to introduce myself positively—I am both a town traveller and a country traveller, and am always on the road. Figuratively speaking, I travel for the great house of Human Interest Brothers, and have rather a large connection in the fancy goods way. Literally speaking, I am always wandering here and there from my rooms in Covent-garden, London—now about the city streets: now, about the country by-roads—seeing many little things, and some great things, which, because they interest me, I think may interest others.
These are my chief credentials as the Uncommercial Traveller.

II
THE SHIPWRECK
Never had I seen a year going out, or going on, under quieter circumstances. Eighteen hundred and fifty-nine had but another day to live, and truly its end was Peace on that sea-shore that morning.
So settled and orderly was everything seaward, in the bright light of the sun and under the transparent shadows of the clouds, that it was hard to imagine the bay otherwise, for years past or to come, than it was that very day. The Tug-steamer lying a little off the shore, the Lighter lying still nearer to the shore, the boat alongside the Lighter, the regularly-turning windlass aboard the Lighter, the methodical figures at wo