Retitled 'Aboard Ship' in collected editions of the series.

The present item and the six which follow it comprise the final series of Uncommercial Traveller papers.

Their general title, 'New Uncommercial Samples' indicates (as do Dickens's opening words below) that they are designed to complement the 'New Series' of AYR which began publication on 5 December 1868.

Dickens left New York at the end of his exhausting final tour of public readings in America on 22 April, aboard the Cunard liner 'Russia', and impressions of the voyage clearly provide material for the present item. A letter to W. H. Wills written on his return indicates that during the journey he began work on a piece of writing intended to form an introduction to the 'Christmas Number' of AYR for 1868:

I have begun something... (aboard the American mail steamer) but I don't like it because the stories must come limping in after the old fashion—though of course, what I have done will be good for A.Y.R. (31 July 1868; Charles Dickens as Editor, ed. R. C. Lehmann [1912], p. 387).

In the event, there was no 'Christmas Number' in 1868, and assuming Dickens did make use of the fragment described above for AYR, then the present item constitutes the most likely place (see note on MS below).

Before embarking, Dickens had taken an emotional farewell of many American friends, and his parody of Sterne (see Literary Allusions below) also involves a private joke shared with two of the closest: James T. Fields—here addressed as 'Eugenius'—and his wife, Annie. Following publication, Dickens wrote to Annie Fields, addressing her husband during the letter as '...my dear Eugenius', and trusting 'that you have recognised yourself in a certain Uncommercial, and also some small reference to a name rather dear to you?' (16 Dec 1868; Nonesuch, Vol. III, p. 687). Dickens suppresses all reference to his own ill-health and partial lameness on board the 'Russia' in his account here, but as his travelling companion George Dolby recalled, he was in fact obliged to 'keep his room' for the first three days of the voyage, and it was only 'one the fourth day [that] he was enabled to get a boot on his right foot' (Charles Dickens as I Knew Him, 1885, p. 328).

Throughout November 1867 (the period of Dickens's 'passage out' to America), British troops under Sir Robert Napier were being prepared to march on 'Abyssinia' (Ethiopia), where the British consul had been imprisoned, prompting Dickens's reference to the turn of British 'public events'. The ensuing references to a 'savage boy' prince inspecting British Volunteers, and to an 'old screw' of a horse at the Crystal Palace, are not easy to trace to news stories, but may be connected with the state visit of the Turkish Sultan and family during July and August 1867. The Sultan's young son, Prince Youssouf Izzedin Effendi, had indeed become popular with the British public, and had visited the Crystal Palace, while his father had inspected British Volunteers at Wimbledon, mounted on one of Queen Victoria's splendid Arab horses, though it seems unlikely that Dickens, even as satire, would refer to a Turkish prince as 'a poor young savage boy' (see Times reports of 14 August, p. 9, col. f; 19 July, p. 12, col. d; 22 July, p. 5, col. c). The deliberately vague presentation of memories in the essay, and the distance of these events from the writing of the article, might account for the inconsistencies.

MS. Draft fragment, British Library MS Add 56082. 1 page, numbered '11' ('...relief from a long strain' to '...in the theatre of our boyhood, and comporting'). Written in the present tense, and in an unsteady hand (105 deletions and 16 interpolations in circa 433 words), this section of MS was possibly drafted on board the 'Russia' (see above). The only alteration between MS and copytext is the substitution of light' for the more technical 'Calf Light' to refer to the beacon of the port authorities at Queenstown.

Literary allusions:

• 'My salad-days, when I was green of visage and sea-sick': 'my salad days/When I was green of judgement,' Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra (c. 1608) Act 1, Scene 5;
• 'no coming event cast its shadow before': Thomas Campbell, 'Lochiel's Warning' (1805), l. 54;
• 'have imitated Sterne ...Eugenius was gone': parallels Parson Yorick's phrasing in Laurence Sterne's Life and Adventures of Tristram Shandy (1760-1768?) Vol. I, Ch. 12, Vol. VII, Ch. 1;
• 'grown-up brood of Giant Despair': John Bunyan, The Pilgrim's Progress (1678), part 1;
• 'poisoned chalice': Shakespeare's Macbeth (c. 1605), Act I, Sc. 7;
• 'as I lay, part of that day, in the Bay of New York, O': adapts the chorus of Andrew Cherry's song 'The Bay of Biscay O!' from John Davy's opera Spanish Dollars (1805);
• 'had ceased from troubling': Job 3:17;
• 'the Miller and his Men': Isaac Pocock's melodrama (often adapted for toy theatre performance), The Miller and His Men (1813).

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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