Results 281 - 300 of 423 Article Index

Based in part on Douglas Dunglas Home, Incidents in My Life (London: Longman and Company, 1863).

The attribution of this article to Charles Dickens is discussed here.

John Drew and Hugh Craig. 'Did Dickens write "Temperate Temperance"?: (An Attempt to Identify Authorship of an Anonymous Article in All the Year Round).' Victorian Periodicals Review 44.3 (2011): 267-290.

Retitled 'The Calais Night Mail' in collected editions of the series

Dickens had already recorded his impressions of travelling on the South Eastern Railway's 'Special Express Train and Steam Ship' service between London and Paris, in a HW article of August 1851 (see ['A Flight', HW, Vol. III, 30 August 1851] Vol 3 of [the Dent Uniform Edition of Dickens' Journalism], article 4). In the present item, he draws on memories of cross-channel trips going back to his first journey abroad in July 1837, when he had written to Forster of his sea-sickness as 'that dismal extremity of qualmishness into which I am accustomed to sink whenever I have "the blue above and the blue below". I have always thought that "the silence where'er I go" is a beautiful touch of Barry Cornwall's... descriptive of the depression produced by sea voyaging.' (Pilgrim, Vol. I, p. 280). The allusion then was to "Cornwall's" [Procter's] song 'The Sea' (English Songs, 1832); in the present item, poetry again distracts him, this time a ballad by Thomas Moore (see Literary Allusions, below). Dominic Rainford explores Dickens's representation of such voyages in 'Crossing the Channel with Dickens', the opening essay in Dickens, Europe and the New Worlds, ed. Anny Sadrin, 1999.

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Retitled 'Some Recollections of Mortality' in collected editions of the series

Georges Haussmann, later Baron, had been appointed prefect of the Seine under Napoleon III in 1853, and was responsible for many of the improvements in the layout and appearance of Paris which Dickens notes in the present item. Dickens had been lodging in the Rue du Faubourg St. Honoré in the last few months of 1862; letters of 24 October and 4 November comment on the 'vast changes... and the vast works doing and done' in the city, and the way 'the Genius of the Lamp is always building Palaces in the night' (see Pilgrim, Vol. X, p. 149, p. 154). He returned to Paris in the early months of 1863, staying intermittently at the Hôtel du Helder.

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Retitled 'Birthday Celebrations' in collected editions of the series.

The 'accidental circumstance' described in paragraph 1 sounds attractively like a reference to a birthday in the Dickens family at the time of the paper's composition, but the only Dickens child with a birthday near was Sidney Smith Dickens ('The Admiral'), sixteen on the 18 April and already enlisted as a Naval cadet—hardly a likely candidate.

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Retitled 'The Short-Timers' in collected editions of the series.

The Uncommercial's recollection of being 'one of seventy boys' at a school is closer to the circumstances of Dickens's life than the depiction of schooldays in the previous item: Wellington House Academy, Hampstead Road, which Dickens attended between 1825 and 1827, was a day school of about this size (see Vol. 1 of Dent edition of Dickens's Journalism, pp. xxx-xxxi).

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Retitled 'Bound for the Great Salt Lake' in collected editions of the series.

The first thirty years of Victoria's reign saw the emigration of over 5 million British and Irish subjects, and while the British North American territories of what is now Canada were an increasingly popular destination for pioneers, the majority—over three and a half million—were bound for the United States, already an industrialised society.

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Retitled 'City of the Absent' in collected editions of the series.

Between 1841 and 1901, the population of the City shrank from 123,000 to 27,000. In the present article Dickens offers a companion piece to his paper of 5 May 1860 on deserted churches in the City of London (see 'City of London Churches'): both explore the phenomenon now known to social scientists as depopulation of the urban core.

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