Retitled 'Nurse's Stories' in collected editions of the series 

The present item appears to hark back to Dickens's remarks on the psychology of young children in ['The Uncommercial Traveller [vi]', ATYR, Vol. II, 7 April 1860; retitled 'Travelling Abroad' in collected editions of the series], but it also acts as a companion piece to 'Dullborough Town' ('The Uncommercial Traveller [xi]', ATYR, Vol. III, 30 June 1860; retitled 'Dullborough Town' in collected editions of the series): both pieces were indexed in Vol. III of ATYR under 'Childhood Associations', and in para. 5 the narrator refers to 'revisiting the associations of my childhood as recorded in previous pages of these notes.' In the preceding paragraphs, however, 'revisiting' is taken by analogy to mean the process of re-reading books of voyage and travel, of which Dickens was passionately fond, and in general, of re-reading children's classics such as Robinson Crusoe.

He had already celebrated his ability to go back to an almost identical selection of details from this text – Will Atkins, the 'grave and gentlemanly Spaniard', Crusoe's 'parrot, or his dog, ...or the horrible old staring goat he came upon in the cave', the Cannibals' dinner, and the blowing up of the wolves – in a HW essay of 1853, 'Where We Stopped Growing' [HW, Vol. VI, 1 January 1853]. Mention is made there too of Le Sage's The Adventures of Gil Blas of Santillane and of Cervantes' Don Quixote. The present item also recalls his grand tribute to horror stories and winter's tales in 'A Christmas Tree' (HW, Vol. II, 21 December 1850, repr. in Reprinted Pieces, 1858), which illustrates Dickens's point here about the 'authentication' of ghost stories by their tellers, by making the tales told happen to 'a friend of somebody's whom most of us know', or to 'the uncle of my brother's wife' or 'a connexion of our family'.
      The 'identity' of the nurse described here has been the subject of some debate. Charles Dickens Jnr. suggests (The Uncommercial Traveller, ed. & intro. Charles Dickens Jnr [Macmillan, 1925], p. xxiii) that the character figures also in 'The Guest', one of Dickens's contributions to the HW Christmas number for 1855 (repr. in Christmas Stories, 1874, in 'The Holly Tree: Three Branches'), in which she is depicted as 'a sallow woman with a fishy eye, an aquiline nose, and a green gown, whose speciality was a dismal narrative of a landlord by the roadside, whose visitors unaccountably disappeared for many a year, until it was discovered that the pursuit of his life had been to convert them into pies.' The narrator of 'The Guest' also recalls that '[t]his same narrator, ...had a Ghoulish pleasure, I have long been persuaded, in terrifying me to the utmost confines of my reason' (ibid.). It should be noted that both the speaker of this account, and 'The Uncommercial Traveller' are personae whose nurses may be supposed similarly fictitious, but this has not discouraged biographers from taking Dickens's references to be, as Peter Ackroyd puts it, 'true transcripts from memory, considerably enlivening Dickens's childhood as a result' (Ackroyd, p. 30). The most popular identification for the nurse is Mary Weller, a young nursemaid employed in the Dickens household at Chatham, from 1817 to 1822. Michael Slater provides a full summary of such biographical interpretations in 'How Many Nurses Had Charles Dickens? The Uncommercial Traveller and Dickensian Biography,' and cautions against the 'tendency to read The Uncommercial Traveller as though it contained straightforward chunks of autobiography' (Prose Studies, Vol. 10 [1987], pp. 250–58).
      It is similarly difficult to find printed sources for the ghoulish stories which Dickens links to the nursery, but Harry Stone explores the possible impact of such material, and of 'tales...heard from Mary Weller's lips' in 'Dark Corners of the Mind: Dickens's Childhood Reading' (The Horn Book Magazine, June 1963, p. 310f.) and in The Night Side of Dickens, 1994, pp. 15–18.

Literary allusions

• 'the little creek which Friday swam across': Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe (1719), Ch. 14; 
• 'Mr. Atkins's ..track on the memorable evening': ibid., Ch. 18; 
• 'the flaring eyes of the old goat...': ibid., Ch. 12; 
• 'belated among wolves... makes me tremble': ibid., Ch. 20; 
• 'the robber's cave, where Gil Blas lived': Le Sage, Adventures of Gil Blas of Santillane (1715) chaps. 4–10; 
• 'Don Quixote's study' is described in Cervantes' Don Quixote, Part I (1605), Chs. 1 and 5; 
• 'the little old woman... the Talisman of Oromanes': events in the Rev. J. Ridley's Tales of the Genii (1764), Vol. I, Tale the First 'History of the Merchant Abudah; or, the Talisman of Oromanes'; 
• 'the boy Horatio Nelson... with a sheet': Southey's Life of Nelson (1813), Ch. 1; 
• 'Damascus and Bagdad': general allusions to the settings of The Arabian Nights' Entertainments; 
• 'Brobdingnag... and Lilliput, and Laputa': places visited by Gulliver in Swift's Gulliver's Travels (1726); 
• 'the Blue Beard family': allusion to Charles Perrault's telling of the fairy-tale 'Blue Beard' in Histoires ou Contes du temps passé (1697); 
• 'commended the awful chalice to my lips': Shakespeare, Macbeth (c. 1605) Act 1, Sc. 7.

Textual note

Copytext has 'Brobdingnag (which has the curious fate of being usually misspelt when written)': [The Uncommercial Traveller (The Charles Dickens Edition), (Chapman & Hall, 1868)] and some subsequent editions have 'Brobingnag (which...)' &c. The former is the correct spelling. 

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.

Click here for further information about texts cited.