Dickens, Charles – The Uncommercial Traveller
Dickens, Charles – The Uncommercial Traveller
THE UNCOMMERCIAL TRAVELLER
CHAPTER 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.
CHAPTER II – THE SHIPWRECK
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Dickens, Charles – The Uncommercial Traveller
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 work, all slowly and regularly
heaving up and down with the breathing of the sea, all seemed as
much a part of the nature of the place as the tide itself. The
tide was on the flow, and had been for some two hours and a half;
there was a slight obstruction in the sea within a few yards of my
feet: as if the stump of a tree, with earth enough about it to
keep it from lying horizontally on the water, had slipped a little
from the land – and as I stood upon the beach and observed it
dimpling the light swell that was coming in, I cast a stone over
it.
So orderly, so quiet, so regular – the rising and falling of the
Tug-steamer, the Lighter, and the boat – the turning of the
windlass – the coming in of the tide – that I myself seemed, to my
own thinking, anything but new to the spot. Yet, I had never seen
it in my life, a minute before, and had traversed two hundred miles
to get at it. That very morning I had come bowling down, and
struggling up, hill-country roads; looking back at snowy summits;
meeting courteous peasants well to do, driving fat pigs and cattle
to market: noting the neat and thrifty dwellings, with their
unusual quantity of clean white linen, drying on the bushes; having