Retitled 'A Little Dinner in an Hour' in collected editions of the series.

Dickens had been in Paris in early June 1868, staying at the Hôtel du Helder prior to the opening night at the 'Vaudeville' of his play No Thoroughfare, co-written with Wilkie Collins.

There is no record of his visiting Paris during the Autumn, however; nor is there strong reason to suppose that the present item is based on any particular episode of Dickens's experience. T. W. Hill suggests that Namelesston, with its 'ancient dandies... from the time of George the Fourth', may be a depiction of Brighton (orginally, 'Brighthelmstone'), which owed its fashionable reputation to the patronage of George IV, when Prince Regent (Hill, 32.6). In earlier essays, Dickens had attacked the poor standards of service and cuisine in British refreshment houses and contrasted them unfavourably with the excellence of French provision (see Item 9, and Item 4 of Vol. 2 of the Dent edition of Dickens's Journalism). Here, he chooses for the name of the shabby hotel that has lost its former glory, that of the elderly 'First Rate' warship HMS Temeraire, one of the 'wooden walls' of England which had seen service at Trafalgar in 1805.

Literary allusions:

• 'began to babble of green geese': Falstaff 'babbled of green fields' on his deathbed in Shakespeare's King Henry V (1600) Act 2, Sc. 3;
• 'set our own stomachs on a cast...hazard of the die': 'I have set my life upon a cast,/And I will stand the hazard of the die', Shakespeare, Richard III (1597) Act 5, Sc. 4;
• 'out at the portal': Shakespeare, Hamlet (1603), Act 3, Sc. 4;
• 'Mr Indignation Cocker': the surname ironically recalling that of Edward Cocker, arithmetician and author of a much-reprinted textbook (1664).

MS Draft fragment, Robert H Taylor Collection, Princeton University Library. 1 page, numbered six, showing c. 56 deletions and 34 interpolations in a text of some 360 words.

Author: John Drew; © J. M. Dent/Orion Publishing Group, Dickens' Journalism Volume IV: 'The Uncommercial Traveller' and Other Papers, 1859-1870, 2000.

DJO gratefully acknowledges permission to reproduce this material.

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