Titled 'Chambers' in collected editions of the series

Dickens's interest in London's Inns of Court goes back to his vivid experiences of renting chambers and entertaining friends there in the early 1830s. From May 1827 to November 1828, he had worked in Gray's Inn as a clerk in Edward Blackmore's attorney's office, and then from December 1834 to March 1837 he was in chambers at 13 and 15 Furnival's Inn where latterly he lived with his new wife, first child, and sister-in-law Mary Hogarth as semi-permanent guest (see Vol. 1 of [the Dent Uniform Edition of Dickens' Journalism], pp. xxxii-xxxiii). Some of Dickens's earliest fiction tells of tenants in similar circumstances to himself, professional visits to lawyers in chambers (see Vol. 1 of [the Dent Uniform Edition of Dickens' Journalism], 'The Steam Excursion', p. 369; Pickwick Papers, Ch. 31), or 'queer' stories relating to them (see Jack Bamber's tales, ibid., Ch. 21). Writing to Forster in 1839 with 'rough notes of proposals for the New Work' to be undertaken with Chapman & Hall for Master Humphrey's Clock, Dickens commented that 'the Chapters on Chambers which I have long thought and spoken of, might be very well incorporated with it' (Pilgrim, Vol. I [14 July 1839], p. 564). Although these were never published, the idea mooted in 1839 seems eventually to find an outlet in the present item.

      The chambers Dickens has in mind are those belonging to the four ancient Inns of Court: the Inner and Middle Temple, Lincoln's Inn and, particularly, Gray's Inn; and the lesser Inns of Chancery: Furnival's, Lyon's, Clement's, Barnard's, the New, and Staple Inn. In 1688 Gray's Inn was still divided into three courts: Holborn, Coney, and Middle (later Chapel), but by 1793 Chapel and Coney had been replaced by what is now Gray's Inn Square. South Square has likewise replaced Holborn Court, which in turn 'must have included Field Court', mentioned below (see W. R. Douthwaite, Gray's Inn, its History and Associations, 1886, pp. 101–2). The preamble to a HW essay of 1850, 'The Ghost of Art' (HW, Vol. 1, 20 July 1850) gives a brief portrait of 'a dreary set of chambers in the Temple', and Dickens returns to the theme again in Great Expectations, by putting Pip and Herbert Pocket in a 'top set' at Barnard's Inn. As Scott Foll has noted in The Dickensian (Vol. 81 [1985], pp. 109–116), even the phrasing of the present item is repeated in Ch. 21 ('Great Expectations [xiii]', ATYR, Vol. IV, 23 Feb. 1861), where Pip recalls his first impressions of the Inn:

I thought it had the most dismal trees in it..., and the most dismal houses ... that I had ever seen. I thought the windows of the sets of chambers into which those houses were divided, were in every stage of dilapidated blind and curtain, crippled flower-pot, cracked glass, dusty decay, and miserable makeshift; while To Let To Let To Let, glared at me from empty rooms, as if no new wretches ever came there....

Dickens's own experience of the Inns of Court was renewed in 1849 when he began eating dinners in the Middle Temple, a decade after first registering his name there as a student. The description of the narrator 'uncommercially preparing for the Bar' would appear to be a direct reference to this.
      The grim story of the 'great judge and lover of port wine' elaborates on the macabre death of Rowland Durrant, a stockbroker, bon-viveur and fellow-member of the Garrick Club '...who came to a sad end, poor fellow, dying alone in his Temple chambers, on a Christmas Eve, of loss of blood from an accident, while men in the rooms below heard him staggering about and groaning, but took no notice, imagining their neighbour to be only in his normal condition. (Edmund Yates: His Recollections and Experiences, 1884, Vol. 2, p. 4). The kneeling statue of a black person in Clement's Inn was brought from Italy in 1700, but removed to the Inner Temple Gardens on the construction of Aldwych in 1905; it now faces the King's Bench Walk.

Literary allusions

• 'the last old prolix bencher all of the olden time...': puns on the title of C.H. Purday's popular song 'The Fine Old English Gentleman, All of the Olden Time'; 
• 'lumbering Marius among the ruins of Carthage ...': 'go tell him that you have seen C. Marius sitting upon the rubbish of Carthage', an image from Plutarch's Life of Caius Marius (c. 75 A.D.) memorably rendered in Stapleton's translation of 1684 (ed. Dryden, Vol. III, p. 145) which became a commonplace; 
• 'Macbeth's Amen sticking in their throats': ''Amen'/ Stuck in my throat,' Macbeth (c. 1605), Act 2, Sc. 2; 
• 'in furniture stepped so far': 'I am in blood/ Stepp'd in so far, that... / Returning were as tedious as go'er', Shakespeare, Ibid., Act 3, Sc. 4.

Textual note

• Copytext has 'a very mysterious bunk': [The Uncommercial Traveller (The Charles Dickens Editions), (Chapman & Hall, 1868)] has 'a mysterious bunk';
• Copytext has 'a lady, in figure extremely like an old family umbrella, named Sweeney': [The Uncommercial Traveller (The Charles Dickens Editions), (Chapman & Hall, 1868)] has 'a lady named Sweeney, in figure extremely like an old family umbrella'; 
• copytext has 'having lain buried': [The Uncommercial Traveller (The Charles Dickens Editions), (Chapman & Hall, 1868)] has 'having remained buried.' 

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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