Results 3581 - 3600 of 8213 Article Index

Attribution: The Letters of Charles Dickens, ed. by Graham Storey, Kathleen Tillotson and others, Pilgrim Edition, 12 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965-2002), IX, p. 185. 

Attribution: The Letters of Charles Dickens, ed. by Graham Storey, Kathleen Tillotson and others, Pilgrim Edition, 12 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965-2002), IX, p. 185.

Split in two and retitled 'His General Line of Business' and 'The Shipwreck' in collected editions of the series 

On 29 December 1859 Dickens travelled to the village of Llanalgo in Anglesey, to inspect the site of the wreck of the 'Royal Charter', a full-rigged iron liner en route to Liverpool from Melbourne with 498 passengers on board and £800,000 in gold specie and bullion. After a good passage as far as Holyhead, the ship met fearsome gales and was driven off course, and sank on the night of 26 October 1859, holed by rocks in Muffa Redwharf bay. Only 39 of those on board survived. Later reports have suggested that the Captain's judgement was impaired by heavy drinking on the leg from Queenstown to Holyhead (see Jack Shaw, 'The Wreck of the "Royal Charter", 1859', The Dickensian, Vol. 3 [1907], pp. 185–86). By the time of Dickens's visit, numerous factual accounts had already appeared in the newspapers, along with graphic depictions of the disaster (e.g. in The Illustrated London News, 29 Oct 1859, p. 413; 5 Nov 1859, pp. 447-48).

Read more...

Part of a series of articles on Turkey.

Part of a series of articles on Turkey.

Attribution: The Letters of Charles Dickens, ed. by Graham Storey, Kathleen Tillotson and others, Pilgrim Edition, 12 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965-2002), IX, p. 185.