Results 161 - 180 of 423 Article Index

The personal-reminiscent tone of the earlier part of this article anticipates that of many of Dickens's later 'Uncommercial Traveller' essays, though the device on which the piece turns, the play upon the idiomatic phrase that supplies its title, is characteristic of his 1850s' journalism.

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Dickens's lifelong passion for The Arabian Nights, expressed most notably in his essay 'A Christmas Tree' (first published in HW, 2 December 1850, subsequently included in Reprinted Pieces; now usually collected with Christmas Stories), enables him to write with consummate ease the following 'fine little bit of satire', as he calls it in a letter to Forster (Pilgrim, Vol. VII, p. 581).

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'Toady' (abbreviation of 'toad-eater') was nineteenth-century slang for someone who fawned on those of higher social rank or greater wealth. Dickens draws on the legend of the deadly poisonous Upas Tree of Java to provide his device for this satirical onslaught on the proneness of the English to abase themselves before aristocrats.

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Writing to Layard on 2 June to apologise for his inability to attend a meeting connected with the Administrative Reform Association, Dickens tells him, 'I am constantly putting the subject in as sharp lights as I can kindle, in Household Words' (Pilgrim, Vol. VII, p. 637), and mentions as an example this 'little paper' which, he says, he has in press.

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The immediate provocation for this article was the evidence given during July by magistrates, the police and some temperance campaigners like Cruikshank to a Parliamentary Select Committee set up to review the working of the 1854 Sunday Beer Act, known as the Wilson Patten Act.

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Thomas Wakley had begun a campaign against the adulteration of food in The Lancet in 1850 and published in the journal a review of Food and its Adulteration; comprising the Reports of the Analytical Sanitary Commision for the years 1851 to 1854 inclusive shortly before the following article appeared.

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Dickens and his family were resident in Folkestone at 3 Albion Villas, 'a very pleasant little house overlooking the sea' (Pilgrim, Vol. VII, p. 675), from mid-July until mid-October, when they moved to Paris for seven months.

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The 'famous golden calf' Dickens refers to in paragraph 2 was George Hudson, the so-called 'Railway King', who had been much courted by the upper classes anxious to obtain shares during the 'railway mania' of 1844-1847 (see Punch cartoon, 'King Hudson's Levee', 29 November 1845) and became MP for Sunderland in 1845.

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'Our Almanac,' an announcement of the first issue of The Household Words Almanac, is solely by Dickens.
Henry Morley conceived the notion of producing a Household Words almanac and suggested the idea to Dickens. On 21 June 1855, Dickens wrote to Morley: 'I think your idea of an almanac an excellent one.' The scheme was approved at an editorial dinner at the Household Words offices, and Morley subsequently received £25 for his share in the project.
The venture in almanac publishing was no great success, however, and after two years the project was dropped. On 25 November 1855, Dickens wrote to Wills: 'THE ALMANACK ought to have done more. It is a pity (I observe now) that my name is nowhere upon it.' - The plan and the contents of the almanac are described in 'Our Almanac.'

Harry Stone; © Bloomington and Indiana University Press, 1968. DJO gratefully acknowledges permission to reproduce this material.

The final two paragraphs that concluded 'The Guest' (p. 581) - Dickens' opening contribution to The Holly-Tree Inn - were the framework link that allowed Dickens to introduce the five interpolated stories which followed. In the version of The Holly-Tree Inn that Dickens prepared for his collected Christmas stories, a version which excluded the stories not by himself, he changed and greatly reduced the first paragraph and eliminated the second paragraph altogether. See note to The Holly-Tree Inn [1855 Christmas].

Harry Stone; © Bloomington and Indiana University Press, 1968. DJO gratefully acknowledges permission to reproduce this material.

Dickens wrote the whole of 'The Bill,' but in 1867, when he decided to separate his contribution to The Holly-Tree Inn from the rest of the Christmas number and reprint his share in an edition of his collected Christmas stories, he left out or rewrote those passages (such as the opening paragraph, p. 607) which referred to segments not by him. Editions of the Collected Works have reprinted these writings (usually under the title Christmas Stories) in their 1867 form. See note to The Holly-Tree Inn [1855 Christmas].

Harry Stone; © Bloomington and Indiana University Press, 1968. DJO gratefully acknowledges permission to reproduce this material.

Dickens visited the Paris 'Exposition Universelle' in November 1855 and wrote to Forster that he 'did not think that English art showed to advantage beside the French'.

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The great animal painter and later sculptor of the lions in Trafalgar Square, Sir Edwin Landseer, with whom Dickens had been on very friendly terms since about 1840, had evidently urged Dickens to draw attention to the inadequacy of the living space provided for the lion and lioness from Mozambique and South Africa that were among the animals at this time housed in the Carnivore Terrace (built 1843 and surmounted by a walkway) at Regent's Park.

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