The Uncommercial Traveller

by Dickens, Charles

  box of blankets which I knew contained the snakes, were set forth

  the cups and saucers and the teapot. It was on an evening in

  August, that I chanced upon this ravishing spectacle, and I noticed

  that, whereas the Giant reclined half concealed beneath the

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  overhanging boughs and seemed indifferent to Nature, the white hair

  of the gracious Lady streamed free in the breath of evening, and

  her pink eyes found pleasure in the landscape. I heard only a

  single sentence of her uttering, yet it bespoke a talent for modest

  repartee. The ill-mannered Giant - accursed be his evil race! -

  had interrupted the Lady in some remark, and, as I passed that

  enchanted corner of the wood, she gently reproved him, with the

  words, 'Now, Cobby;' - Cobby! so short a name! - 'ain't one fool

  enough to talk at a time?'

  Within appropriate distance of this magic ground, though not so

  near it as that the song trolled from tap or bench at door, can

  invade its woodland silence, is a little hostelry which no man

  possessed of a penny was ever known to pass in warm weather.

  Before its entrance, are certain pleasant, trimmed limes; likewise,

  a cool well, with so musical a bucket-handle that its fall upon the

  bucket rim will make a horse prick up his ears and neigh, upon the

  droughty road half a mile off. This is a house of great resort for

  haymaking tramps and harvest tramps, insomuch that as they sit

  within, drinking their mugs of beer, their relinquished scythes and

  reaping-hooks glare out of the open windows, as if the whole

  establishment were a family war-coach of Ancient Britons. Later in

  the season, the whole country-side, for miles and miles, will swarm

  with hopping tramps. They come in families, men, women, and

  children, every family provided with a bundle of bedding, an iron

  pot, a number of babies, and too often with some poor sick creature

  quite unfit for the rough life, for whom they suppose the smell of

  the fresh hop to be a sovereign remedy. Many of these hoppers are

  Irish, but many come from London. They crowd all the roads, and

  camp under all the hedges and on all the scraps of common-land, and

  live among and upon the hops until they are all picked, and the

  hop-gardens, so beautiful through the summer, look as if they had

  been laid waste by an invading army. Then, there is a vast exodus

  of tramps out of the country; and if you ride or drive round any

  turn of any road, at more than a foot pace, you will be bewildered

  to find that you have charged into the bosom of fifty families, and

  that there are splashing up all around you, in the utmost

  prodigality of confusion, bundles of bedding, babies, iron pots,

  and a good-humoured multitude of both sexes and all ages, equally

  divided between perspiration and intoxication.

  CHAPTER XII - DULLBOROUGH TOWN

  It lately happened that I found myself rambling about the scenes

  among which my earliest days were passed; scenes from which I

  departed when I was a child, and which I did not revisit until I

  was a man. This is no uncommon chance, but one that befalls some

  of us any day; perhaps it may not be quite uninteresting to compare

  notes with the reader respecting an experience so familiar and a

  journey so uncommercial.

  I call my boyhood's home (and I feel like a Tenor in an English

  Opera when I mention it) Dullborough. Most of us come from

  Dullborough who come from a country town.

  As I left Dullborough in the days when there were no railroads in

  the land, I left it in a stage-coach. Through all the years that

  have since passed, have I ever lost the smell of the damp straw in

  which I was packed - like game - and forwarded, carriage paid, to

  the Cross Keys, Wood-street, Cheapside, London? There was no other

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  inside passenger, and I consumed my sandwiches in solitude and

  dreariness, and it rained hard all the way, and I thought life

  sloppier than I had expected to find it.

  With this tender remembrance upon me, I was cavalierly shunted back

  into Dullborough the other day, by train. My ticket had been

  previously collected, like my taxes, and my shining new portmanteau

  had had a great plaster stuck upon it, and I had been defied by Act

  of Parliament to offer an objection to anything that was done to

  it, or me, under a penalty of not less than forty shillings or more

  than five pounds, compoundable for a term of imprisonment. When I

  had sent my disfigured property on to the hotel, I began to look

  about me; and the first discovery I made, was, that the Station had

  swallowed up the playing-field.

  It was gone. The two beautiful hawthorn-trees, the hedge, the

  turf, and all those buttercups and daisies, had given place to the

  stoniest of jolting roads: while, beyond the Station, an ugly dark

  monster of a tunnel kept its jaws open, as if it had swallowed them

  and were ravenous for more destruction. The coach that had carried

  me away, was melodiously called Timpson's Blue-Eyed Maid, and

  belonged to Timpson, at the coach-office up-street; the locomotive

  engine that had brought me back, was called severely No. 97, and

  belonged to S.E.R., and was spitting ashes and hot water over the

  blighted ground.

  When I had been let out at the platform-door, like a prisoner whom

  his turnkey grudgingly released, I looked in again over the low

  wall, at the scene of departed glories. Here, in the haymaking

  time, had I been delivered from the dungeons of Seringapatam, an

  immense pile (of haycock), by my own countrymen, the victorious

  British (boy next door and his two cousins), and had been

  recognised with ecstasy by my affianced one (Miss Green), who had

  come all the way from England (second house in the terrace) to

  ransom me, and marry me. Here, had I first heard in confidence,

  from one whose father was greatly connected, being under

  Government, of the existence of a terrible banditti, called 'The

  Radicals,' whose principles were, that the Prince Regent wore

  stays, and that nobody had a right to any salary, and that the army

  and navy ought to be put down - horrors at which I trembled in my

  bed, after supplicating that the Radicals might be speedily taken

  and hanged. Here, too, had we, the small boys of Boles's, had that

  cricket match against the small boys of Coles's, when Boles and

  Coles had actually met upon the ground, and when, instead of

  instantly hitting out at one another with the utmost fury, as we

  had all hoped and expected, those sneaks had said respectively, 'I

  hope Mrs. Boles is well,' and 'I hope Mrs. Coles and the baby are

  doing charmingly.' Could it be that, after all this, and much

  more, the Playing-field was a Station, and No. 97 expectorated

  boiling water and redhot cinders on it, and the whole belonged by

  Act of Parliament to S.E.R.?

  As it could be, and was, I left the place with a heavy heart for a

  walk all over the town
. And first of Timpson's up-street. When I

  departed from Dullborough in the strawy arms of Timpson's Blue-Eyed

  Maid, Timpson's was a moderate-sized coach-office (in fact, a

  little coach-office), with an oval transparency in the window,

  which looked beautiful by night, representing one of Timpson's

  coaches in the act of passing a milestone on the London road with

  great velocity, completely full inside and out, and all the

  passengers dressed in the first style of fashion, and enjoying

  themselves tremendously. I found no such place as Timpson's now -

  no such bricks and rafters, not to mention the name - no such

  edifice on the teeming earth. Pickford had come and knocked

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  Timpson's down. Pickford had not only knocked Timpson's down, but

  had knocked two or three houses down on each side of Timpson's, and

  then had knocked the whole into one great establishment with a pair

  of big gates, in and out of which, his (Pickford's) waggons are, in

  these days, always rattling, with their drivers sitting up so high,

  that they look in at the second-floor windows of the old-fashioned

  houses in the High-street as they shake the town. I have not the

  honour of Pickford's acquaintance, but I felt that he had done me

  an injury, not to say committed an act of boyslaughter, in running

  over my Childhood in this rough manner; and if ever I meet Pickford

  driving one of his own monsters, and smoking a pipe the while

  (which is the custom of his men), he shall know by the expression

  of my eye, if it catches his, that there is something wrong between

  us.

  Moreover, I felt that Pickford had no right to come rushing into

  Dullborough and deprive the town of a public picture. He is not

  Napoleon Bonaparte. When he took down the transparent stage-coach,

  he ought to have given the town a transparent van. With a gloomy

  conviction that Pickford is wholly utilitarian and unimaginative, I

  proceeded on my way.

  It is a mercy I have not a red and green lamp and a night-bell at

  my door, for in my very young days I was taken to so many lyings-in

  that I wonder I escaped becoming a professional martyr to them in

  after-life. I suppose I had a very sympathetic nurse, with a large

  circle of married acquaintance. However that was, as I continued

  my walk through Dullborough, I found many houses to be solely

  associated in my mind with this particular interest. At one little

  greengrocer's shop, down certain steps from the street, I remember

  to have waited on a lady who had had four children (I am afraid to

  write five, though I fully believe it was five) at a birth. This

  meritorious woman held quite a reception in her room on the morning

  when I was introduced there, and the sight of the house brought

  vividly to my mind how the four (five) deceased young people lay,

  side by side, on a clean cloth on a chest of drawers; reminding me

  by a homely association, which I suspect their complexion to have

  assisted, of pigs' feet as they are usually displayed at a neat

  tripe-shop. Hot candle was handed round on the occasion, and I

  further remembered as I stood contemplating the greengrocer's, that

  a subscription was entered into among the company, which became

  extremely alarming to my consciousness of having pocket-money on my

  person. This fact being known to my conductress, whoever she was,

  I was earnestly exhorted to contribute, but resolutely declined:

  therein disgusting the company, who gave me to understand that I

  must dismiss all expectations of going to Heaven.

  How does it happen that when all else is change wherever one goes,

  there yet seem, in every place, to be some few people who never

  alter? As the sight of the greengrocer's house recalled these

  trivial incidents of long ago, the identical greengrocer appeared

  on the steps, with his hands in his pockets, and leaning his

  shoulder against the door-post, as my childish eyes had seen him

  many a time; indeed, there was his old mark on the door-post yet,

  as if his shadow had become a fixture there. It was he himself; he

  might formerly have been an old-looking young man, or he might now

  be a young-looking old man, but there he was. In walking along the

  street, I had as yet looked in vain for a familiar face, or even a

  transmitted face; here was the very greengrocer who had been

  weighing and handling baskets on the morning of the reception. As

  he brought with him a dawning remembrance that he had had no

  proprietary interest in those babies, I crossed the road, and

  accosted him on the subject. He was not in the least excited or

  gratified, or in any way roused, by the accuracy of my

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  recollection, but said, Yes, summut out of the common - he didn't

  remember how many it was (as if half-a-dozen babes either way made

  no difference) - had happened to a Mrs. What's-her-name, as once

  lodged there - but he didn't call it to mind, particular. Nettled

  by this phlegmatic conduct, I informed him that I had left the town

  when I was a child. He slowly returned, quite unsoftened, and not

  without a sarcastic kind of complacency, HAD I? Ah! And did I

  find it had got on tolerably well without me? Such is the

  difference (I thought, when I had left him a few hundred yards

  behind, and was by so much in a better temper) between going away

  from a place and remaining in it. I had no right, I reflected, to

  be angry with the greengrocer for his want of interest, I was

  nothing to him: whereas he was the town, the cathedral, the

  bridge, the river, my childhood, and a large slice of my life, to

  me.

  Of course the town had shrunk fearfully, since I was a child there.

  I had entertained the impression that the High-street was at least

  as wide as Regent-street, London, or the Italian Boulevard at

  Paris. I found it little better than a lane. There was a public

  clock in it, which I had supposed to be the finest clock in the

  world: whereas it now turned out to be as inexpressive, moonfaced,

  and weak a clock as ever I saw. It belonged to a Town Hall,

  where I had seen an Indian (who I now suppose wasn't an Indian)

  swallow a sword (which I now suppose he didn't). The edifice had

  appeared to me in those days so glorious a structure, that I had

  set it up in my mind as the model on which the Genie of the Lamp

  built the palace for Aladdin. A mean little brick heap, like a

  demented chapel, with a few yawning persons in leather gaiters, and

  in the last extremity for something to do, lounging at the door

  with their hands in their pockets, and calling themselves a Corn

  Exchange!

  The Theatre was in existence, I found, on asking the fishmonger,

  who had a compact show of stock in his window, consisting of a sole

  and a quart of shrimps - and I resolved to comfort my mind by going

  to look at it. Richard the Third, in a very uncomfortable cloak,

  had first appeared to me there, and had made my heart leap with

 
terror by backing up against the stage-box in which I was posted,

  while struggling for life against the virtuous Richmond. It was

  within those walls that I had learnt as from a page of English

  history, how that wicked King slept in war-time on a sofa much too

  short for him, and how fearfully his conscience troubled his boots.

  There, too, had I first seen the funny countryman, but countryman

  of noble principles, in a flowered waistcoat, crunch up his little

  hat and throw it on the ground, and pull off his coat, saying, 'Dom

  thee, squire, coom on with thy fistes then!' At which the lovely

  young woman who kept company with him (and who went out gleaning,

  in a narrow white muslin apron with five beautiful bars of five

  different-coloured ribbons across it) was so frightened for his

  sake, that she fainted away. Many wondrous secrets of Nature had I

  come to the knowledge of in that sanctuary: of which not the least

  terrific were, that the witches in Macbeth bore an awful

  resemblance to the Thanes and other proper inhabitants of Scotland;

  and that the good King Duncan couldn't rest in his grave, but was

  constantly coming out of it and calling himself somebody else. To

  the Theatre, therefore, I repaired for consolation. But I found

  very little, for it was in a bad and declining way. A dealer in

  wine and bottled beer had already squeezed his trade into the boxoffice,

  and the theatrical money was taken - when it came - in a

  kind of meat-safe in the passage. The dealer in wine and bottled

  beer must have insinuated himself under the stage too; for he

  announced that he had various descriptions of alcoholic drinks 'in

  the wood,' and there was no possible stowage for the wood anywhere

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  else. Evidently, he was by degrees eating the establishment away

  to the core, and would soon have sole possession of it. It was To

  Let, and hopelessly so, for its old purposes; and there had been no

  entertainment within its walls for a long time except a Panorama;

  and even that had been announced as 'pleasingly instructive,' and I

  know too well the fatal meaning and the leaden import of those

  terrible expressions. No, there was no comfort in the Theatre. It

  was mysteriously gone, like my own youth. Unlike my own youth, it

  might be coming back some day; but there was little promise of it.