Results 261 - 280 of 423 Article Index

Retitled 'Nurse's Stories' in collected editions of the series 

The present item appears to hark back to Dickens's remarks on the psychology of young children in ['The Uncommercial Traveller [vi]', ATYR, Vol. II, 7 April 1860; retitled 'Travelling Abroad' in collected editions of the series], but it also acts as a companion piece to 'Dullborough Town' ('The Uncommercial Traveller [xi]', ATYR, Vol. III, 30 June 1860; retitled 'Dullborough Town' in collected editions of the series): both pieces were indexed in Vol. III of ATYR under 'Childhood Associations', and in para. 5 the narrator refers to 'revisiting the associations of my childhood as recorded in previous pages of these notes.' In the preceding paragraphs, however, 'revisiting' is taken by analogy to mean the process of re-reading books of voyage and travel, of which Dickens was passionately fond, and in general, of re-reading children's classics such as Robinson Crusoe.

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Retitled 'Arcadian London' in collected editions of the series 

The theme of the present item – London during the Autumn recess of Parliament – was something of a set piece for Victorian sketch-writers: three essays all entitled 'Out of Town' by Dickens, Thackeray and Edmund Yates make interesting parallel reading (see HW, Vol. XII, 29 September 1855; Punch, Vol. 17 [II, 18 August 1849], pp. 53, 66–69; repr. in Miscellanies, 1854-57, Vol. II, p. 279f.; After Office Hours, 1861, Ch. 8). The title and subsequent development of this paper plays on the word Arcadia, as the traveller's Autumn lodgings are in London's fashionable West End, close to the Burlington Arcade, a permanent covered shopping mall of a kind becoming common in London and other European capitals. In a literary context, however, 'Arcadia' was celebrated in the pastoral tradition as the home of the most primitive of the Ancient Greek peoples, those least corrupted by civilisation.

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