Dickens, Charles – The Uncommercial Traveller

up with this spectacle of virtue in distress, Mrs. Anderson rises,

and with a decent curtsey presents for your consideration a

certificate from a Doctor of Divinity, the reverend the Vicar of

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Dickens, Charles – The Uncommercial Traveller

Upper Dodgington, who informs his Christian friends and all whom it

may concern that the bearers, John Anderson and lawful wife, are

persons to whom you cannot be too liberal. This benevolent pastor

omitted no work of his hands to fit the good couple out, for with

half an eye you can recognise his autograph on the spade.

Another class of tramp is a man, the most valuable part of whose

stock-in-trade is a highly perplexed demeanour. He is got up like

a countryman, and you will often come upon the poor fellow, while

he is endeavouring to decipher the inscription on a milestone –

quite a fruitless endeavour, for he cannot read. He asks your

pardon, he truly does (he is very slow of speech, this tramp, and

he looks in a bewildered way all round the prospect while he talks

to you), but all of us shold do as we wold be done by, and he’ll

take it kind, if you’ll put a power man in the right road fur to

jine his eldest son as has broke his leg bad in the masoning, and

is in this heere Orspit’l as is wrote down by Squire Pouncerby’s

own hand as wold not tell a lie fur no man. He then produces from

under his dark frock (being always very slow and perplexed) a neat

but worn old leathern purse, from which he takes a scrap of paper.

On this scrap of paper is written, by Squire Pouncerby, of The

Grove, ‘Please to direct the Bearer, a poor but very worthy man, to

the Sussex County Hospital, near Brighton’ – a matter of some

difficulty at the moment, seeing that the request comes suddenly

upon you in the depths of Hertfordshire. The more you endeavour to

indicate where Brighton is – when you have with the greatest

difficulty remembered – the less the devoted father can be made to

comprehend, and the more obtusely he stares at the prospect;

whereby, being reduced to extremity, you recommend the faithful

parent to begin by going to St. Albans, and present him with halfa-

crown. It does him good, no doubt, but scarcely helps him

forward, since you find him lying drunk that same evening in the

wheelwright’s sawpit under the shed where the felled trees are,

opposite the sign of the Three Jolly Hedgers.

But, the most vicious, by far, of all the idle tramps, is the tramp

who pretends to have been a gentleman. ‘Educated,’ he writes, from

the village beer-shop in pale ink of a ferruginous complexion;

‘educated at Trin. Coll. Cam. – nursed in the lap of affluence –

once in my small way the pattron of the Muses,’ &c. &c. &c. –

surely a sympathetic mind will not withhold a trifle, to help him

on to the market-town where he thinks of giving a Lecture to the

FRUGES CONSUMERE NATI, on things in general? This shameful

creature lolling about hedge tap-rooms in his ragged clothes, now

so far from being black that they look as if they never can have

been black, is more selfish and insolent than even the savage

tramp. He would sponge on the poorest boy for a farthing, and

spurn him when he had got it; he would interpose (if he could get

anything by it) between the baby and the mother’s breast. So much

lower than the company he keeps, for his maudlin assumption of

being higher, this pitiless rascal blights the summer road as he

maunders on between the luxuriant hedges; where (to my thinking)

even the wild convolvulus and rose and sweet-briar, are the worse

for his going by, and need time to recover from the taint of him in

the air.

The young fellows who trudge along barefoot, five or six together,

their boots slung over their shoulders, their shabby bundles under

their arms, their sticks newly cut from some roadside wood, are not

eminently prepossessing, but are much less objectionable. There is