Retitled 'Tramps' in collected editions of the series

Dickens had strong feelings on the subject of begging and mendicity (see 'The Begging-Letter Writer', HW, Vol. I, 18 May 1850), and while openly describing in the present article some of his favourite Kent haunts and scenery, also reveals knowledge of the ploys used by tramps and beggars to extract donations from other pedestrians. In David Copperfield (1850), Dickens had described how the young David is robbed on the road to Dover by a young tinker who beats his female companion. 'The trampers', David recalls, '...inspired me with a dread that is yet quite fresh in my mind' (Ch. 13).

      Charles Dickens Jnr. states that '[t]he old hall here described is Cobham Hall close to Gadshill' which it resembles in many particulars; the hall was the seat of the Earl of Darnley, and Dickens had used it as a setting as early as 1836, in the fourth number of Pickwick Papers (The Uncommercial Traveller, ed. and intro. Charles Dickens Jnr [Macmillan, 1925], p. xxiv). The 'ancient sign of the Crispin and Crispianus' still hangs outside a public house of that name at the bottom of Strood Hill, close to Gadshill, and is said to date from the 14th Century. The anecdote of the six workmen required 'for a certain spell of work in a pleasant part of the country' finds a parallel in Dickens's attempts during the summer and early autumn of 1857, to have a water pump installed at Gadshill. His letter of [?27–28 September] states drily that 'five men have been looking attentively at the pump for a week, and ...may begin to fit it in the course of October'. Earlier in the same letter he comments to Forster that 'the seven miles between Maidstone and Rochester is one of the most beautiful walks in England.' This walk appears to inspire the lyrical description (Pilgrim, Vol. VIII, p. 455). Likewise the mention of the prevalent belief that the smell of fresh hops was a 'sovereign remedy' for illness, is anticipated in another letter of the same period: 'Hop-picking is going on, and people sleep in the garden, and breathe in at the keyhole of the house door... I find it is a superstition that the dust of the newly-picked hop... is a cure for consumption' (Pilgrim, Vol. VIII, p. 435).
      The flowing speech of the 'well-spoken young man,' from the words 'he speaks in a flowing confidential voice', to 'a long expectoration, as you leave him behind' Dickens later incorporated into an unperformed and unpublished comic duologue, probably composed, as Philip Collins surmises, 'for private performance at some house party' (see Collins, 'Some Unpublished Comic Duologues of Dickens', 19th-Century Fiction, Vol. 31 [1977], pp. 440–49). Dickens's directions for the sketch describe a pedestrian, A, who is followed by a 'reduced young man', B: 'whenever A stops or looks round impatiently, B drops his voice to a still lower tone, and speaks more respectably and deferentially.' The banter of 'Negro' singers, mock auctioneers and participants in a Public Meeting, also features in the MS fragment, and shows Dickens's fondness for recreating comic patter.

Literary allusions

• 'John Anderson, ... 'pow'': in Robert Burns's version of the traditional lyric 'John Anderson, my Jo' (The Scots Musical Museum, 1790), the worthy rustic John Anderson's wife blesses his 'frosty pow' (white-haired head); 
• 'fruges consumere nati' [lit. 'those born to consume the earth's produce', i.e. countryfolk]: Horace, Epistles, Book 1, no. 2, l. 27.

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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