The Mudfog Papers
Page 1
The Mudfog Papers
Charles Dickens
ALMA CLASSICS
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The Mudfog Papers first published as a single volume in 1880
This edition first published by Alma Books Ltd in 2014
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Contents
The Mudfog Papers
Introduction
Public Life of Mr Tulrumble, Once Mayor of Mudfog
Full Report of the First Meeting of the Mudfog Association for the Advancement of Everything
Full Report of the Second Meeting of the Mudfog Association for the Advancement of Everything
The Pantomime of Life
Some Particulars Concerning a Lion
Mr Robert Bolton, the “Gentleman Connected with the Press”
Note on the Text
Notes
Extra Material
Charles Dickens’s Life
Charles Dickens’s Works
Select Bibliography
The Mudfog Papers
Introduction
The papers contained in this little volume were written by Charles Dickens for the early numbers of Bentley’s Miscellany.* The manuscripts of the two meetings of the Mudfog Association, and of ‘Mr Robert Bolton, the “Gentleman Connected with the Press”’, in my possession, are covered with corrections, erasures and additions. At that time Charles Dickens wrote a freer and bolder hand than he came to write in later years, and these manuscripts are easily decipherable.
Something perhaps of the comparative freedom of the handwriting of these sketches, when set by the side of the manuscript of Our Mutual Friend,* may be owing to the quill pen, with whose exit has gone out much of that free and graceful penmanship of which Mr Lupton reminds us that Thomas Tomkins, of St Paul’s School, was so unrivalled a teacher.*
George Bentley*
New Burlington Street,
July 26th [1880]
Public Life of Mr Tulrumble,
Once Mayor of Mudfog
Mudfog is a pleasant town – a remarkably pleasant town – situated in a charming hollow by the side of a river, from which river Mudfog derives an agreeable scent of pitch, tar, coals and rope yarn, a roving population in oilskin hats, a pretty steady influx of drunken bargemen and a great many other maritime advantages. There is a good deal of water about Mudfog, and yet it is not exactly the sort of town for a watering place, either. Water is a perverse sort of element at the best of times, and in Mudfog it is particularly so. In winter, it comes oozing down the streets and tumbling over the fields – nay, rushes into the very cellars and kitchens of the houses, with a lavish prodigality that might well be dispensed with; but in the hot summer weather it will dry up and turn green; and, although green is a very good colour in its way, especially in grass, still it certainly is not becoming to water; and it cannot be denied that the beauty of Mudfog is rather impaired, even by this trifling circumstance. Mudfog is a healthy place – very healthy; damp, perhaps, but none the worse for that. It’s quite a mistake to suppose that damp is unwholesome: plants thrive best in damp situations, and why shouldn’t men? The inhabitants of Mudfog are unanimous in asserting that there exists not a finer race of people on the face of the earth; here we have an indisputable and veracious contradiction of the vulgar error at once. So, admitting Mudfog to be damp, we distinctly state that it is salubrious.
The town of Mudfog is extremely picturesque. Limehouse and Ratcliff Highway* are both something like it, but they give you a very faint idea of Mudfog. There are a great many more public houses in Mudfog – more than in Ratcliff Highway and Limehouse put together. The public buildings, too, are very imposing. We consider the town hall one of the finest specimens of shed architecture extant: it is a combination of the pigsty and tea-garden-box orders; and the simplicity of its design is of surpassing beauty. The idea of placing a large window on one side of the door and a small one on the other is particularly happy. There is a fine bold Doric beauty, too, about the padlock and scraper, which is strictly in keeping with the general effect.
In this room do the Mayor and corporation of Mudfog assemble together in solemn council for the public weal. Seated on the massive wooden benches, which, with the table in the centre, form the only furniture of the whitewashed apartment, the sage men of Mudfog spend hour after hour in grave deliberation. Here they settle at what hour of the night the public houses shall be closed, at what hour of the morning they shall be permitted to open, how soon it shall be lawful for people to eat their dinner on church days and other great political questions; and sometimes, long after silence has fallen on the town and the distant lights from the shops and houses have ceased to twinkle, like far-off stars, to the sight of the boatmen on the river, the illumination in the two unequal-sized windows of the town hall warns the inhabitants of Mudfog that its little body of legislators, like a larger and better-known body of the same genus, a great deal more noisy, and not a whit more profound, are patriotically dozing away in company, far into the night, for their country’s good.
Among this knot of sage and learned men, no one was so eminently distinguished, during many years, for the quiet modesty of his appearance and demeanour, as Nicholas Tulrumble, the well-known coal-dealer. However exciting the subject of discussion, however animated the tone of the debate, or however warm the personalities exchanged (and even in Mudfog we get personal sometimes), Nicholas Tulrumble was always the same. To say truth, Nicholas, being an industrious man, and always up betimes, was apt to fall asleep when a debate began, and to remain asleep till it was over, when he would wake up very much refreshed, and give his vote with the greatest complacency. The fact was that Nicholas Tulrumble, knowing that everybody there had made up his mind beforehand, considered the talking as just a long botheration about nothing at all; and to the present hour it remains a question whether, on this point at all events, Nicholas Tulrumble was not pretty near right.
Time, which strews a man’s head with silver, sometimes fills his pockets with gold. As he gradually performed one good office for Nicholas Tulrumble, he was obliging enough not to omit the other. Nicholas began life in a wooden tenement of four feet square, with a capital of two and ninepence and a stock-in-trade of three bushels and a half of coals, exclusive of the large lump which hung, by way of signboard, outside. Then he enlarged the shed and kept a truck; then he left the shed, and the truck too, and started a donkey and a Mrs Tulrumble; then he moved again and set up a cart; the cart was soon afterwards exchanged for a wagon; and so he went on like his great predecessor Whittington* – only without a ca
t for a partner – increasing in wealth and fame, until at last he gave up business altogether, and retired with Mrs Tulrumble and family to Mudfog Hall, which he had himself erected, on something which he attempted to delude himself into the belief was a hill, about a quarter of a mile distant from the town of Mudfog.
About this time, it began to be murmured in Mudfog that Nicholas Tulrumble was growing vain and haughty; that prosperity and success had corrupted the simplicity of his manners and tainted the natural goodness of his heart; in short, that he was setting up for a public character, and a great gentleman, and affected to look down upon his old companions with compassion and contempt. Whether these reports were at the time well founded or not, certain it is that Mrs Tulrumble very shortly afterwards started a four-wheel chaise, driven by a tall postilion in a yellow cap, that Mr Tulrumble junior took to smoking cigars, and calling the footman a “feller”, and that Mr Tulrumble from that time forth was no more seen in his old seat in the chimney corner of the Lighterman’s Arms at night. This looked bad; but, more than this, it began to be observed that Mr Nicholas Tulrumble attended the corporation meetings more frequently than heretofore, and he no longer went to sleep as he had done for so many years, but propped his eyelids open with his two forefingers; that he read the newspapers by himself at home; and that he was in the habit of indulging abroad in distant and mysterious allusions to “masses of people”, and “the property of the country”, and “productive power”, and “the monied interest”: all of which denoted and proved that Nicholas Tulrumble was either mad or worse; and it puzzled the good people of Mudfog amazingly.
At length, about the middle of the month of October, Mr Tulrumble and family went up to London; the middle of October being, as Mrs Tulrumble informed her acquaintance in Mudfog, the very height of the fashionable season.
Somehow or other, just about this time, despite the health-preserving air of Mudfog, the Mayor died. It was a most extraordinary circumstance; he had lived in Mudfog for eighty-five years. The corporation didn’t understand it at all; indeed it was with great difficulty that one old gentleman, who was a great stickler for forms, was dissuaded from proposing a vote of censure on such unaccountable conduct. Strange as it was, however, die he did, without taking the slightest notice of the corporation; and the corporation were imperatively called upon to elect his successor. So, they met for the purpose, and being very full of Nicholas Tulrumble just then, and Nicholas Tulrumble being a very important man, they elected him, and wrote off to London by the very next post to acquaint Nicholas Tulrumble with his new elevation.
Now, it being November time, and Mr Nicholas Tulrumble being in the capital, it fell out that he was present at the Lord Mayor’s Show and dinner, at sight of the glory and splendour whereof, he, Mr Tulrumble, was greatly mortified, inasmuch as the reflection would force itself on his mind that, had he been born in London instead of in Mudfog, he might have been a lord mayor too, and have patronized the judges, and been affable to the Lord Chancellor, and friendly with the premier, and coldly condescending to the Secretary to the Treasury, and have dined with a flag behind his back, and done a great many other acts and deeds which unto lord mayors of London peculiarly appertain. The more he thought of the Lord Mayor, the more enviable a personage he seemed. To be a king was all very well; but what was the King to the Lord Mayor! When the King made a speech, everybody knew it was somebody else’s writing; whereas here was the Lord Mayor, talking away for half an hour – all out of his own head – amidst the enthusiastic applause of the whole company, while it was notorious that the King might talk to his Parliament till he was black in the face without getting so much as a single cheer. As all these reflections passed through the mind of Mr Nicholas Tulrumble, the Lord Mayor of London appeared to him the greatest sovereign on the face of the earth, beating the Emperor of Russia all to nothing, and leaving the Great Mogul immeasurably behind.
Mr Nicholas Tulrumble was pondering over these things, and inwardly cursing the fate which had pitched his coal shed in Mudfog, when the letter of the corporation was put into his hand. A crimson flush mantled over his face as he read it, for visions of brightness were already dancing before his imagination.
“My dear,” said Mr Tulrumble to his wife, “they have elected me mayor of Mudfog.”
“Lor-a-mussy!” said Mrs Tulrumble. “Why, what’s become of old Sniggs?”
“The late Mr Sniggs, Mrs Tulrumble,” said Mr Tulrumble sharply, for he by no means approved of the notion of unceremoniously designating a gentleman who filled the high office of mayor as “Old Sniggs”, “the late Mr Sniggs, Mrs Tulrumble, is dead.”
The communication was very unexpected; but Mrs Tulrumble only ejaculated “Lor-a-mussy!” once again, as if a mayor were a mere ordinary Christian, at which Mr Tulrumble frowned gloomily.
“What a pity ’tan’t in London, ain’t it?” said Mrs Tulrumble, after a short pause. “What a pity ’tan’t in London, where you might have had a show.”
“I might have a show in Mudfog, if I thought proper, I apprehend,” said Mr Tulrumble mysteriously.
“Lor! So you might, I declare,” replied Mrs Tulrumble.
“And a good one too,” said Mr Tulrumble.
“Delightful!” exclaimed Mrs Tulrumble.
“One which would rather astonish the ignorant people down there,” said Mr Tulrumble.
“It would kill them with envy,” said Mrs Tulrumble.
So it was agreed that His Majesty’s lieges in Mudfog should be astonished with splendour and slaughtered with envy, and that such a show should take place as had never been seen in that town, or in any other town before – no, not even in London itself.
On the very next day after the receipt of the letter, down came the tall postilion in a post-chaise, not upon one of the horses, but inside – actually inside the chaise – and, driving up to the very door of the town hall, where the corporation were assembled, delivered a letter, written by the Lord knows who, and signed by Nicholas Tulrumble, in which Nicholas said, all through four sides of closely written, gilt-edged, hot-pressed, Bath-post letter paper, that he responded to the call of his fellow townsmen with feelings of heartfelt delight; that he accepted the arduous office which their confidence had imposed upon him; that they would never find him shrinking from the discharge of his duty; that he would endeavour to execute his functions with all that dignity which their magnitude and importance demanded; and a great more to the same effect. But even this was not all. The tall postilion produced from his right-hand top boot a damp copy of that afternoon’s number of the county paper; and there, in large type, running the whole length of the very first column, was a long address from Nicholas Tulrumble to the inhabitants of Mudfog, in which he said that he cheerfully complied with their requisition and, in short, as if to prevent any mistake about the matter, told them over again what a grand fellow he meant to be, in very much the same terms as those in which he had already told them all about the matter in his letter.
The corporation stared at one another very hard at all this, and then looked as if for explanation to the tall postilion, but as the tall postilion was intently contemplating the gold tassel on the top of his yellow cap, and could have afforded no explanation whatever, even if his thoughts had been entirely disengaged, they contented themselves with coughing very dubiously and looking very grave. The tall postilion then delivered another letter, in which Nicholas Tulrumble informed the corporation that he intended repairing to the town hall, in grand state and gorgeous procession, on the Monday afternoon next ensuing. At this the corporation looked still more solemn; but, as the epistle wound up with a formal invitation to the whole body to dine with the Mayor on that day, at Mudfog Hall, Mudfog Hill, Mudfog, they began to see the fun of the thing directly, and sent back their compliments, and they’d be sure to come.
Now there happened to be in Mudfog, as somehow or other there does happen to be in almost every town in the Britis
h dominions, and perhaps in foreign dominions too – we think it very likely, but, being no great traveller, cannot distinctly say – there happened to be, in Mudfog, a merry-tempered, pleasant-faced, good-for-nothing sort of vagabond, with an invincible dislike to manual labour and an unconquerable attachment to strong beer and spirits, whom everybody knew, and nobody, except his wife, took the trouble to quarrel with, who inherited from his ancestors the appellation of Edward Twigger, and rejoiced in the sobriquet of Bottle-Nosed Ned. He was drunk upon the average once a day, and penitent upon an equally fair calculation once a month; and when he was penitent, he was invariably in the very last stage of maudlin intoxication. He was a ragged, roving, roaring kind of fellow, with a burly form, a sharp wit and a ready head, and could turn his hand to anything when he chose to do it. He was by no means opposed to hard labour on principle, for he would work away at a cricket match by the day together – running, and catching, and batting, and bowling, and revelling in toil which would exhaust a galley slave. He would have been invaluable to a fire office; never was a man with such a natural taste for pumping engines, running up ladders and throwing furniture out of two-pair-of-stairs’ windows;* nor was this the only element in which he was at home; he was a humane society in himself, a portable drag, an animated life-preserver, and had saved more people, in his time, from drowning, than the Plymouth lifeboat, or Captain Manby’s apparatus.* With all these qualifications, notwithstanding his dissipation, Bottle-Nosed Ned was a general favourite; and the authorities of Mudfog, remembering his numerous services to the population, allowed him in return to get drunk in his own way, without the fear of stocks, fine or imprisonment. He had a general licence, and he showed his sense of the compliment by making the most of it.
We have been thus particular in describing the character and avocations of Bottle-Nosed Ned, because it enables us to introduce a fact politely, without hauling it into the reader’s presence with indecent haste by the head and shoulders, and brings us very naturally to relate that on the very same evening on which Mr Nicholas Tulrumble and family returned to Mudfog, Mr Tulrumble’s new secretary, just imported from London, with a pale face and light whiskers, thrust his head down to the very bottom of his neckcloth tie, in at the taproom door of the Lighterman’s Arms, and enquiring whether one Ned Twigger was luxuriating within, announced himself as the bearer of a message from Nicholas Tulrumble, Esquire, requiring Mr Twigger’s immediate attendance at the hall, on private and particular business. It being by no means Mr Twigger’s interest to affront the Mayor, he rose from the fireplace with a slight sigh, and followed the light-whiskered secretary through the dirt and wet of Mudfog streets, up to Mudfog Hall, without further ado.