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).

As in Dickens's account here, there was some dwelling on the practical difficulties which the local Church in Wales clergyman, the Rev. Stephen Roose Hughes, found in burying 145 corpses in a small parish churchyard. After the publication of the first volume edition of The Uncommercial Traveller in December 1860, opinion was mixed as to the propriety of Dickens's praise of the priest; The Saturday Review considered it 'questionable taste' to have 'thus placarded ...the virtues of a Welsh clergyman ...for helping the sufferers' (23 Feb 1861, p. 195), while The Morning Chronicle asserted that 'so long as our language endures will this marvellous narrative of the wreck be read, and the good deeds of the Rev. Stephen Roose Hughes... be remembered' (10 Jan 1861, p. 2, col. 2).
      The almost morbid interest in the burial process revealed by Dickens's narrator here may be partly explained by the fact that four of his relations by marriage had been drowned in the shipwreck. These were Robert and Peter Hogarth, the latter's wife, Georgina, and young son Robert: all cousins of Catherine Dickens, but also of course, cousins of Georgina and the late Mary Hogarth, whose memory Dickens cherished with such extravagant tenderness. He had doubtless heard pleasant reports of Robert and Peter from Mary, who had spent part of her seventeen years at their family home at 'dear happy Scremerston' in Northumbria (see Pilgrim, Vol. I, pp. 689–90). The body of Robert Hogarth junior was never recovered, but those of the three older cousins had been buried by Mr Hughes.
      Dickens's reference to the possibility of 'superstitious avoidance of the drowned' among the peasantry is illuminated by Walter Scott's note to chapter 8 of The Pirate (1821) concerning an 'inhuman superstition' common among the 'lower orders' that 'to save a drowning man was to run the risk of future injury from him.' This had sometimes led to local people refusing their aid when a ship was wrecked on their shores, but the practice, while 'almost general' in the early eighteenth century, had by 1800 been 'weeded out by the sedulous instructions of the clergy and the rigorous injunctions' of landowners.
      Dickens seems to have spent the night of 30 December 1859 at the Rectory in Llanalgo (see letter from D.W. Irons, 'A Letter from Wales', The Dickensian, Vol. 80 [1984], p. 177) and to have drafted the paper fairly soon after his return to London. By 10 January, he was able to send a printer's proof to Mr Hughes for the correction of details, and to return, by the same post, grateful letters to Hughes from relatives of the victims, which Dickens had excerpted liberally in his article. He remarks in his covering letter that 'I have written [the essay] out of the honest convictions of my heart... It says for me, all that I should otherwise have attempted to say to you in this note, and merely strives to express what any visitor to you must surely feel' (Pilgrim, Vol. IX, pp. 196–97).

Textual note

As with all the papers published in the first two series of 'The Uncommercial Traveller' papers in 1860 and 1863, this item appeared untitled under that heading in ATYR (Vol. 2, pp. 321–26), and was later given titles by Dickens for the volume edition. Backpage advertisements in ATYR at the time announced 'The Uncommercial Traveller / a Series of Occasional Journeys / By Charles Dickens', this being the first time Dickens had given advance notice of authorship of any of his journalism. In all volume editions, including UT1, the first four paragraphs of this item were printed as a separate introductory chapter called 'His General Line of Business', omitting the final sentence of paragraph four, and the remaining paragraphs were printed as a second chapter, titled 'The Shipwreck'.

Literary allusions

• 'flourishing of trumpets': Matthew 6:2 ('do not sound a trumpet before thee'); 
• 'weeping and wailing': Jeremiah 9:10; 
• 'not left off your kindness to the living and the dead': Ruth 2:20.

Author: John Drew; © J. M. Dent/Orion Publishing Group, Dickens' Journalism Volume IV: 'The Uncommercial Traveller' and Other Papers, 1859–70 (2000). DJO gratefully acknowledges permission to reproduce this material.

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