had never seen the town!’
‘You don’t belong to it, Mr. Mellows?’
‘Belong to it!’ repeated Mellows. ‘If I didn’t belong to a better
style of town than this, I’d take and drown myself in a pail.’ It
then occurred to me that Mellows, having so little to do, was
habitually thrown back on his internal resources – by which I mean
the Dolphin’s cellar.
‘What we want,’ said Mellows, pulling off his hat, and making as if
he emptied it of the last load of Disgust that had exuded from his
brain, before he put it on again for another load; ‘what we want,
is a Branch. The Petition for the Branch Bill is in the coffeeroom.
Would you put your name to it? Every little helps.’
I found the document in question stretched out flat on the coffeeroom
table by the aid of certain weights from the kitchen, and I
gave it the additional weight of my uncommercial signature. To the
best of my belief, I bound myself to the modest statement that
universal traffic, happiness, prosperity, and civilisation,
together with unbounded national triumph in competition with the
foreigner, would infallibly flow from the Branch.
Having achieved this constitutional feat, I asked Mr. Mellows if he
could grace my dinner with a pint of good wine? Mr. Mellows thus
replied.
‘If I couldn’t give you a pint of good wine, I’d – there! – I’d
take and drown myself in a pail. But I was deceived when I bought
this business, and the stock was higgledy-piggledy, and I haven’t
yet tasted my way quite through it with a view to sorting it.
Therefore, if you order one kind and get another, change till it
comes right. For what,’ said Mellows, unloading his hat as before,
‘what would you or any gentleman do, if you ordered one kind of
wine and was required to drink another? Why, you’d (and naturally
and properly, having the feelings of a gentleman), you’d take and
drown yourself in a pail!’
CHAPTER XXV – THE BOILED BEEF OF NEW ENGLAND
The shabbiness of our English capital, as compared with Paris,
Bordeaux, Frankfort, Milan, Geneva – almost any important town on
the continent of Europe – I find very striking after an absence of
any duration in foreign parts. London is shabby in contrast with
Edinburgh, with Aberdeen, with Exeter, with Liverpool, with a
bright little town like Bury St. Edmunds. London is shabby in
contrast with New York, with Boston, with Philadelphia. In detail,
one would say it can rarely fail to be a disappointing piece of
shabbiness, to a stranger from any of those places. There is
nothing shabbier than Drury-lane, in Rome itself. The meanness of
Regent-street, set against the great line of Boulevards in Paris,
is as striking as the abortive ugliness of Trafalgar-square, set
against the gallant beauty of the Place de la Concorde. London is
shabby by daylight, and shabbier by gaslight. No Englishman knows
what gaslight is, until he sees the Rue de Rivoli and the Palais
Page 156
Dickens, Charles – The Uncommercial Traveller
Royal after dark.
The mass of London people are shabby. The absence of distinctive
dress has, no doubt, something to do with it. The porters of the
Vintners’ Company, the draymen, and the butchers, are about the
only people who wear distinctive dresses; and even these do not
wear them on holidays. We have nothing which for cheapness,
cleanliness, convenience, or picturesqueness, can compare with the
belted blouse. As to our women; – next Easter or Whitsuntide, look
at the bonnets at the British Museum or the National Gallery, and
think of the pretty white French cap, the Spanish mantilla, or the
Genoese mezzero.
Probably there are not more second-hand clothes sold in London than
in Paris, and yet the mass of the London population have a secondhand
look which is not to be detected on the mass of the Parisian
population. I think this is mainly because a Parisian workman does
not in the least trouble himself about what is worn by a Parisian
idler, but dresses in the way of his own class, and for his own
comfort. In London, on the contrary, the fashions descend; and you