Retitled 'City of London Churches' in collected editions of the series 

In his notes to The Uncommercial Traveller, ed. and introd Charles Dickens Jnr (Macmillan, 1925) (written in 1895) Charles Dickens Junior records having 'vivid recollections of some of the churches described in this paper, having on more than one occasion accompanied my father, when I was a boy, on Sunday expeditions from Devonshire Terrace into the City' (p. xx). As the Dickens household left their house at 1 Devonshire Terrace in November 1851, at least some of the 'expeditions' on which Dickens bases this paper clearly belong to the late 1840s or early 1850s. The sketch given in Dombey & Son of the church where Walter Gay and Florence Dombey marry (No. 18 [February 1848]; Ch. 56) is clearly the forerunner of the paper.

      Although an impressionistic sketch, and despite the narrator's disparagement of putting names to individual churches, 'originals' for many of those described can be identified. Thus the first church drawn in detail corresponds to St James Garlickhythe, on Garlick Hill. The small church from 'the date of Queen Anne' is likely to be based on St Michael Paternoster Royal, on College Hill – a foundation with longstanding connections to the wine trade – although the church was in fact constructed 1686–94 and the steeple in 1713–17, either side of the reign of Queen Anne. 'My own village church' almost certainly refers to Dickens's local church at Gadshill: St. Mary's, on Church St., Lower Higham, where the family attended services in the 1860s. If the 'Angelica' mentioned offers a faint recollection of Maria Beadnell, object of Dickens's unrequited love in the early 1830s (see Michael Slater, Dickens and Women, 1983, Ch. 4), then the church 'in Huggin Lane' where they plighted their troth is likely to be St. Michael Queenhithe, that stood on what is now Huggin Hill. This is close to Lombard Sreet, where the Beadnells lived. The 'City personage' and his child appear to frequent All Hallows London Wall, which still possesses the inconvenience noted by the narrator. The churches noted for their smells are not positively identifiable, though E. Beresford Chancellor in The London of Charles Dickens (London, 1924, p. 267) and Gwen Major, in a series of well-researched articles in The Dickensian (Vol. 37 [1941], pp. 125–47; Vol. 44 [1948], pp. 71 & 130f.; Vol. 64 [1968], pp. 28–33), offer suggestions.
      As G. J. Worth has suggested (The Dickensian, Vol. 83 [1987], pp. 19–20), Dickens probably borrowed the name of 'Comport' from the surname on the ten small graves of children in Cooling Churchyard, Kent. The same graves reemerge shortly afterwards as the 'five little stone lozenges' marking the tombs of Pip's brothers and sisters in the opening installment of Great Expectations (AYR, Vol. IV, 1 December 1860), underlining the fact that the novel itself grew out of ideas Dickens was working with in his composition of this first series of 'Uncommercial Traveller' papers (see also Pilgrim, Vol. IX, p. 310&nn.). In 1863, Dickens wrote a companion piece to the present article, on disused city churchyards, for the second series of 'Uncommercial Traveller' papers in ATYR (see 'Uncommercial Traveller [xxii]', AYR, Vol. IX, 18 July 1863; titled 'City of the Absent' in collected editions of the series]).

Literary allusions

• 'the exact counterpart of the church in the Rake's Progress...': alludes to one of Hogarth's famous series of paintings on 'modern moral subjects', The Rake's Progress (1733–35). The church Hogarth painted was old Mary-le-bone Church, while its City 'counterpart' was probably St. Mildred's Bread Street (destroyed in WWII), located near the headquarters of the hide-trading Hudson Bay Company.

MS and textual note

In the Houghton Library, University of Harvard. MS Eng. 58. Dickens had the MS bound and sent to his close American friend James T. Fields, who, it would appear, had requested the original as a keepsake (see Pilgrim, Vol. IX, p. 255&n.) The MS text is headed 'The Uncommercial Traveller', showing it to have been written during 1860 (most probably in April). From his familiarity with Dickens's hand-writing, it is to be supposed that Fields could decipher the MS, which is a mass of corrections, deletions, additions and emendations. The second slip contains a paragraph of seven lines cancelled by two horizontal and four vertical slashes, omitted from the published version, originally running between the words 'he brought to me!' and 'Now, I have heard many preachers since...'. It can be tentatively restored as follows:

Only once since have our ways lain together. Not long ago, within a year or two, I chanced on my uncommercial travels to [be in a?] place where there was a Fancy Sale in his behalf. It was not the place of my early days, but there was something in the look of the Posting Bills about the Sale, that took me back to it, and seemed to shrink me to the old smaller size.

'The place of my early days' is a reference to Chatham and the Medway towns where Dickens spent part of his childhood.

• Copy text has 'they will be satisfied (I hope)': whereas MS has 'they will be appeased (I hope)'; 
• Copy text has 'journeys of curiosity': whereas MS has 'pilgrimages of curiosity';
• Copy text has 'I jostle the clergyman, who is entering': whereas UT1 has 'I jostle the clergyman in his canonicals, who is entering...' 

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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