In two earlier HW articles Dickens had mocked the current craze for Spiritualism and Spiritualist seances which originated in America and began flourishing in England in the early 1850s.

In 'The Spirit Business' (HW, 7 May 1853) he had satirised the reports of seances and other communications published in such American Spiritualist journals as The Spiritual Telegraph (which began publication in Boston in 1850) and had had some fun, as he does in this article, with a new term used in American Spiritualist circles, 'Tippings', punning on the established sense of the word to mean 'giving money':

We did at first suppose this excessive word to be of English growth, and to refer to the preliminary 'tipping' of the medium, which is found to be indispensable to the entertainments on this side of the Atlantic. We have discovered, however, that it denotes the spiritual movements of the tables and chairs, and of a mysterious peice of furniture called a 'stand', which appears to be in every apartment. The word has passed into current use, insomuch that one correspondent writes: 'The other evening, as myself and a party of friends were entertianing ourselves with the tippings',—and so on.

In the same piece he also mocked the recent 'Spiritual' revelations of the great social reformer Robert Owen, and he did so again in 'Stores for the First of April' (HW, 7 March 1857). See also the hilarious opening of his AYR Christmas Story for 1859, 'The Haunted House', and two further satirical pieces in AYR ('Rather a Strong Dose', 21 March 1863, and 'The Martyr Medium', 4 April 1863).

Another of Dickens's bêtes noires was the unfriendly service and poor quality of food and drink often found in railway refreshment rooms and the disdainful young lady who serves him his dubious pork pie reappears in an early Uncommercial Traveller essay, 'Refreshments for Travellers', as well as in the shape of the redoubtable 'Missis' who presides with her myrmidons over the refreshment room at Mugby Junction in Dickens's AYR Christmas Story for 1866.

Literary allusions

• 'Cobweb, Moth and Mustard-Seed': Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night's Dream, Act 3, Sc. 1;
• 'The same pork in its time, makes many pies ...': parody of Jacques's Seven Ages of Man speech in Shakespeare's As You Like It, Act 2, Sc. 7.

Author: Michael Slater; © J. M. Dent/Orion Publishing Group, Dickens' Journalism Volume III: 'Gone Astray' and Other Papers from Household Words, 1851-1859, 1998.

DJO gratefully acknowledges permission to reproduce this material.

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