Retitled 'Birthday Celebrations' in collected editions of the series.

The 'accidental circumstance' described in paragraph 1 sounds attractively like a reference to a birthday in the Dickens family at the time of the paper's composition, but the only Dickens child with a birthday near was Sidney Smith Dickens ('The Admiral'), sixteen on the 18 April and already enlisted as a Naval cadet—hardly a likely candidate.

As so often with the 'Uncommercial Papers,' the reliability of the present item as autobiography, is suspect, however intimate and allusive its manner. Dickens's reason for not writing recollections of 'hostelries' and 'Inns' may have been the more pragmatic one that he had already done so at length in the opening section ('The Guest') he contributed to the Extra Christmas Number of HW for 1855, The Holly-Tree Inn.

The same caveat applies to much of the narrator's reminiscences about birthdays. The 'peach-faced creature' is unlikely to be a representation of Dickens' childhood friend Lucy Stroughill, and the entire passage about birthday hampers is purely fictive, as Dickens never boarded at school (see Michael Slater, Dickens and Women, 1983, pp. 40-41, and 'How Many Nurses Had Charles Dickens? The Uncommercial Traveller and Dickensian Biography', Prose Studies, Vol. 10 [1987], p. 255). Similar recollections of a childhood sweetheart are given to the young David in David Copperfield, who 'adored' Miss Shepherd of the 'round face and curly flaxen hair': 'in my room I am sometimes moved to cry out, 'Oh Miss Shepherd!' in a transport of love' (Ch. 18). Nevertheless, it is hard not to associate the narrator's wry memories of being thwarted in love at his coming-of-age party, with what is known of Dickens's love for Maria Beadnell in the early 1830s, or to sense that Dickens is working around a distinct autobiographical matrix. Dickens first met Maria Beadnell in May 1830, and, commenting upon his infatuation with her in 1855, recalled how 'it excluded every other idea from my mind for four years' (Pilgrim, Vol. VII, pp. 556-557&n.). An evening party was held to celebrate Dickens's 21st birthday on 11 February 1833, and letters to Maria of 18 March and 14 May confirm that her painful rejection of his suit did occur at this time—as well as touch the same note of earnest self-importance which Dickens parodies in the imaginary letters to 'Mrs Onowenever'. Again in David Copperfield, a similar set of relationships is depicted: in Ch. 18, David is a youth of seventeen 'who shall be one-and-twenty in no time almost' and is hopelessly in love with the flirtatious but cruel 'eldest Miss Larkins,' before meeting and setting his heart on Dora Spenlow (Ch. 26 et seq.).

Dickens's dislike of over-didactic and 'improving' entertainments for children, such as the 'Orrery' described (an early form of planetarium), was lifelong, and forms the basis for a later 'Uncommercial' paper in 1869 (see article 41 in Vol. 4 of the Dent edition of Dickens's Journalism, p. 371). The speaker who praises the entertainment as 'devoid of anything that could call a blush into the cheek of youth' looks forward to the creation of Podsnap in Our Mutual Friend, and his anxiety about anything that might 'bring a blush into the cheek of the young person' (see Book 1, Ch. 11). The meaning of the allusion to the South Kensington Museum is unclear. Gordon Spence has noted that sage green was in fact a prevalent colour in displays at the Museum's opening in 1857 (Charles Dickens as a Familiar Essayist, 1977, p. 130), but as the museum and its first General Superintendent, Henry Cole, made much of its educational and didactic aims, the remark may simply reflect the same dislike of pedagogy and pedagogues noted earlier.

Literary allusions:

• 'the coming hamper cast its shadow before': Thomas Campbell, 'Lochiel's Warning', l. 54;
• 'volumes of Imaginary Conversations': Walter Savage Landor's Imaginary Conversations (1824 etc.);
• 'letters more in number than Horace Walpole's': Dickens had recently acquired Peter Cunningham's edition of Walpole's Letters in 9 vols. (1857-1859; Stonehouse);
• 'made a vacuum in Nature': '...the air, which but for vacancy/Had gone to gaze on Cleopatra too,/And made a gap in nature', Shakespeare, Antony and Cleopatra, Act 2, Sc. 5;
• 'Was there sufficient ground for supposing that the Immortal Shakespeare ever stole deer': allusion to Walter Savage Landor's Citation and Examination of William Shakspeare... before... Sir Thomas Lucy, Knight, touching Deer-stealing (1834).

Author: John Drew; © J. M. Dent/Orion Publishing Group, Dickens' Journalism Volume IV: 'The Uncommercial Traveller' and Other Papers, 1859-1870, 2000.

DJO gratefully acknowledges permission to reproduce this material.

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