Titled 'Refreshments for Travellers' in The Uncommercial Traveller, Vol. 1 (1860, 1863). 

The French idea of a 'restaurant' to refresh and restore travellers of both sexes during a journey, was still foreign to British cities in 1860, but the end of March saw the second reading of Gladstone's 'Refreshment Houses and Wine Licensing Bill', which proposed: to let small retailers take out licences (at the discretion of the issuing magistrate) for the sale of wine to be consumed off the premises, to let eating-house keepers take out licences for the sale of wine to be consumed on the premises, and to place all eating houses under the control of the police; the Bill became law on 1 July 1860 (Refreshment Houses and Wine Licenses Act, 23 Vict. cap. 27). Dickens's paper is in one sense highly topical, anticipating a leader in The Times of 28 March, which repeats the main complaint in Dickens's essay: '[o]ne of the most grievous discomforts to which all visitors to London are exposed is the difficulty of finding in it either a dinner or a luncheon, more especially if ladies are of the party... The want is in the deficiency of small Refreshment houses where people of moderate or even humble means may procure dinner and other necessary refreshments at a [small] cost' (p. 9 cols. d-e).

Dickens may also have been encouraged to handle the subject following the enthusiastic response to his comments about railway hotels and travellers' fare, in his speeches to the Commercial Travellers' Schools in 1854 and 1859. The first of these had concluded with a description of 'that grope [in the dark] to the New Railway Hotel, which will be an excellent house when the customers come, but which at present has nothing to offer but a liberal allowance of damp mortar and new lime [continued laughter]' (Speeches, pp. 172–73 & p. 290). The joke about the railway pork-pie is still going strong (see 'Well-Authenticated Rappings', HW, Vol. XVII, 20 February 1858).
      The 'late high winds' mentioned by the 'Uncommercial Traveller' were a notable feature of the early spring 1860. An article in The Times of 29 February, headed 'Terrific Gale,' noted how two men, thought to be dock labourers, had been blown off the towpath into the Surrey Canal 'at an early hour in the morning'; their bodies were never recovered. The same piece contained reports of falling masonry in Sydenham, Dulwich and Peckham, and of collapsed buildings and rooves at no fewer than five locations on or near the Walworth Road (p. 12 cols. a, b). Dickens described himself as 'spinning like [a] top..., in a vortex of east wind and snow' at Gad's Hill on 9 March (Pilgrim, Vol. IX, p. 219). The 'Uncommercial Traveller' is not so reliable as a mere mask for Dickens himself, however, when he recalls 'breaking up' from boarding school. While Dickens may have been content for his readers to imagine him to have received such a thoroughly middle-class education, he of course did not (see Michael Slater, 'How Many Nurses had Charles Dickens' &c., Prose Studies, 10 [1987], pp. 250–58). Then again, the reference to an 'oblong box of stale pastry' on display in a baker's window recalls a genuinely autobiographical recollection of Dickens's from the 'fragment' passed to Forster in 1847, about how he 'could not resist the stale pastry put out at half price on trays at the confectioners' doors on Tottenham Court Road' as he wandered to and fro from Warren's Blacking Factory (Forster, Book 1, Ch. 2).
      The paper was considered as 'the most entertaining... in the Uncommercial Traveller ...with the greatest accuracy and point', by The Saturday Review critic, Sir James Fitzjames Stephen, and excerpted at length in The Examiner, which called for an end to 'the sort of pastry-cook's shop so truthfully and graphically described in All the Year Round' (31 March 1860, p. 194 cols. a, b).

Illustration

The preliminary sketch by 'Phiz' showing the arrival of the famous cutlet is something of an anomaly. According to D. Croal Thomson (Life and Labours of Hablot Knight Browne, "Phiz", 1884, p. 147) Browne 'did no more work for Dickens after ...1859,' but Browne did have separate contracts with Chapman & Hall to illustrate reprints of Dickens's work such as the illustrated re-issue of the 'Library Edition' (1861–1885), under which he may have drawn the sketch. No plate was made from it, however, and it has never been used in volume editions of UT.

Literary allusions

• 'saddling Surrey for the field': 'saddle white Surrey for the field,' Shaekespeare, King Richard III, Act 5, Sc. 3; 
• 'I am aware that I never will be a slave': adapting 'Britons never, never, never will be slaves', lines from James Thomson's Alfred, A Masque (1740), Act 2, Scene the Last (later popularised as 'Rule, Britannia')

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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