Dickens, Charles – The Uncommercial Traveller

game and guava jelly, is still made special to me by the noble

conduct of Bully Globson. Letters from home had mysteriously

inquired whether I should be much surprised and disappointed if

among the treasures in the coming hamper I discovered potted game,

and guava jelly from the Western Indies. I had mentioned those

hints in confidence to a few friends, and had promised to give

away, as I now see reason to believe, a handsome covey of

partridges potted, and about a hundredweight of guava jelly. It

was now that Globson, Bully no more, sought me out in the

playground. He was a big fat boy, with a big fat head and a big

fat fist, and at the beginning of that Half had raised such a bump

on my forehead that I couldn’t get my hat of state on, to go to

church. He said that after an interval of cool reflection (four

months) he now felt this blow to have been an error of judgment,

and that he wished to apologise for the same. Not only that, but

holding down his big head between his two big hands in order that I

might reach it conveniently, he requested me, as an act of justice

which would appease his awakened conscience, to raise a retributive

bump upon it, in the presence of witnesses. This handsome proposal

I modestly declined, and he then embraced me, and we walked away

conversing. We conversed respecting the West India Islands, and,

in the pursuit of knowledge he asked me with much interest whether

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Dickens, Charles – The Uncommercial Traveller

in the course of my reading I had met with any reliable description

of the mode of manufacturing guava jelly; or whether I had ever

happened to taste that conserve, which he had been given to

understand was of rare excellence.

Seventeen, eighteen, nineteen, twenty; and then with the waning

months came an ever augmenting sense of the dignity of twenty-one.

Heaven knows I had nothing to ‘come into,’ save the bare birthday,

and yet I esteemed it as a great possession. I now and then paved

the way to my state of dignity, by beginning a proposition with the

casual words, ‘say that a man of twenty-one,’ or by the incidental

assumption of a fact that could not sanely be disputed, as, ‘for

when a fellow comes to be a man of twenty-one.’ I gave a party on

the occasion. She was there. It is unnecessary to name Her, more

particularly; She was older than I, and had pervaded every chink

and crevice of my mind for three or four years. I had held volumes

of Imaginary Conversations with her mother on the subject of our

union, and I had written letters more in number than Horace

Walpole’s, to that discreet woman, soliciting her daughter’s hand

in marriage. I had never had the remotest intention of sending any

of those letters; but to write them, and after a few days tear them

up, had been a sublime occupation. Sometimes, I had begun

‘Honoured Madam. I think that a lady gifted with those powers of

observation which I know you to possess, and endowed with those

womanly sympathies with the young and ardent which it were more

than heresy to doubt, can scarcely have failed to discover that I

love your adorable daughter, deeply, devotedly.’ In less buoyant

states of mind I had begun, ‘Bear with me, Dear Madam, bear with a

daring wretch who is about to make a surprising confession to you,

wholly unanticipated by yourself, and which he beseeches you to

commit to the flames as soon as you have become aware to what a

towering height his mad ambition soars.’ At other times – periods

of profound mental depression, when She had gone out to balls where

I was not – the draft took the affecting form of a paper to be left

on my table after my departure to the confines of the globe. As

thus: ‘For Mrs. Onowenever, these lines when the hand that traces

them shall be far away. I could not bear the daily torture of

hopelessly loving the dear one whom I will not name. Broiling on

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