The Uncommercial Traveller

by Dickens, Charles

  from him the wooden leg of a Guinea-fowl which he was pressing on

  my acceptance, and to substitute a slice of the breast, when a

  ringing at the door-bell suspended the strife. I looked round me,

  and perceived the sudden pallor which I knew my own visage

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  revealed, reflected in the faces of the company. Flipfield

  hurriedly excused himself, went out, was absent for about a minute

  or two, and then re-entered with the Long-lost.

  I beg to say distinctly that if the stranger had brought Mont Blanc

  with him, or had come attended by a retinue of eternal snows, he

  could not have chilled the circle to the marrow in a more efficient

  manner. Embodied Failure sat enthroned upon the Long-lost's brow,

  and pervaded him to his Long-lost boots. In vain Mrs. Flipfield

  senior, opening her arms, exclaimed, 'My Tom!' and pressed his nose

  against the counterfeit presentment of his other parent. In vain

  Miss Flipfield, in the first transports of this re-union, showed

  him a dint upon her maidenly cheek, and asked him if he remembered

  when he did that with the bellows? We, the bystanders, were

  overcome, but overcome by the palpable, undisguisable, utter, and

  total break-down of the Long-lost. Nothing he could have done

  would have set him right with us but his instant return to the

  Ganges. In the very same moments it became established that the

  feeling was reciprocal, and that the Long-lost detested us. When a

  friend of the family (not myself, upon my honour), wishing to set

  things going again, asked him, while he partook of soup - asked him

  with an amiability of intention beyond all praise, but with a

  weakness of execution open to defeat - what kind of river he

  considered the Ganges, the Long-lost, scowling at the friend of the

  family over his spoon, as one of an abhorrent race, replied, 'Why,

  a river of water, I suppose,' and spooned his soup into himself

  with a malignancy of hand and eye that blighted the amiable

  questioner. Not an opinion could be elicited from the Long-lost,

  in unison with the sentiments of any individual present. He

  contradicted Flipfield dead, before he had eaten his salmon. He

  had no idea - or affected to have no idea - that it was his

  brother's birthday, and on the communication of that interesting

  fact to him, merely wanted to make him out four years older than he

  was. He was an antipathetical being, with a peculiar power and

  gift of treading on everybody's tenderest place. They talk in

  America of a man's 'Platform.' I should describe the Platform of

  the Long-lost as a Platform composed of other people's corns, on

  which he had stumped his way, with all his might and main, to his

  present position. It is needless to add that Flipfield's great

  birthday went by the board, and that he was a wreck when I

  pretended at parting to wish him many happy returns of it.

  There is another class of birthdays at which I have so frequently

  assisted, that I may assume such birthdays to be pretty well known

  to the human race. My friend Mayday's birthday is an example. The

  guests have no knowledge of one another except on that one day in

  the year, and are annually terrified for a week by the prospect of

  meeting one another again. There is a fiction among us that we

  have uncommon reasons for being particularly lively and spirited on

  the occasion, whereas deep despondency is no phrase for the

  expression of our feelings. But the wonderful feature of the case

  is, that we are in tacit accordance to avoid the subject - to keep

  it as far off as possible, as long as possible - and to talk about

  anything else, rather than the joyful event. I may even go so far

  as to assert that there is a dumb compact among us that we will

  pretend that it is NOT Mayday's birthday. A mysterious and gloomy

  Being, who is said to have gone to school with Mayday, and who is

  so lank and lean that he seriously impugns the Dietary of the

  establishment at which they were jointly educated, always leads us,

  as I may say, to the block, by laying his grisly hand on a decanter

  and begging us to fill our glasses. The devices and pretences that

  I have seen put in practice to defer the fatal moment, and to

  interpose between this man and his purpose, are innumerable. I

  have known desperate guests, when they saw the grisly hand

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  approaching the decanter, wildly to begin, without any antecedent

  whatsoever, 'That reminds me - ' and to plunge into long stories.

  When at last the hand and the decanter come together, a shudder, a

  palpable perceptible shudder, goes round the table. We receive the

  reminder that it is Mayday's birthday, as if it were the

  anniversary of some profound disgrace he had undergone, and we

  sought to comfort him. And when we have drunk Mayday's health, and

  wished him many happy returns, we are seized for some moments with

  a ghastly blitheness, an unnatural levity, as if we were in the

  first flushed reaction of having undergone a surgical operation.

  Birthdays of this species have a public as well as a private phase.

  My 'boyhood's home,' Dullborough, presents a case in point. An

  Immortal Somebody was wanted in Dullborough, to dimple for a day

  the stagnant face of the waters; he was rather wanted by

  Dullborough generally, and much wanted by the principal hotelkeeper.

  The County history was looked up for a locally Immortal

  Somebody, but the registered Dullborough worthies were all

  Nobodies. In this state of things, it is hardly necessary to

  record that Dullborough did what every man does when he wants to

  write a book or deliver a lecture, and is provided with all the

  materials except a subject. It fell back upon Shakespeare.

  No sooner was it resolved to celebrate Shakespeare's birthday in

  Dullborough, than the popularity of the immortal bard became

  surprising. You might have supposed the first edition of his works

  to have been published last week, and enthusiastic Dullborough to

  have got half through them. (I doubt, by the way, whether it had

  ever done half that, but that is a private opinion.) A young

  gentleman with a sonnet, the retention of which for two years had

  enfeebled his mind and undermined his knees, got the sonnet into

  the Dullborough Warden, and gained flesh. Portraits of Shakespeare

  broke out in the bookshop windows, and our principal artist painted

  a large original portrait in oils for the decoration of the diningroom.

  It was not in the least like any of the other Portraits, and

  was exceedingly admired, the head being much swollen. At the

  Institution, the Debating Society discussed the new question, Was

  there sufficient ground for supposing that the Immortal Shakespeare

  ever stole deer? This was indignantly decided by an overwhelming

  majority in the negative; indeed, there was but one vote on the

  Poaching side, and that was the vote of the orator who had

  undertaken to advocate it, and who became quite an obnoxi
ous

  character - particularly to the Dullborough 'roughs,' who were

  about as well informed on the matter as most other people.

  Distinguished speakers were invited down, and very nearly came (but

  not quite). Subscriptions were opened, and committees sat, and it

  would have been far from a popular measure in the height of the

  excitement, to have told Dullborough that it wasn't Stratford-upon-

  Avon. Yet, after all these preparations, when the great festivity

  took place, and the portrait, elevated aloft, surveyed the company

  as if it were in danger of springing a mine of intellect and

  blowing itself up, it did undoubtedly happen, according to the

  inscrutable mysteries of things, that nobody could be induced, not

  to say to touch upon Shakespeare, but to come within a mile of him,

  until the crack speaker of Dullborough rose to propose the immortal

  memory. Which he did with the perplexing and astonishing result

  that before he had repeated the great name half-a-dozen times, or

  had been upon his legs as many minutes, he was assailed with a

  general shout of 'Question.'

  CHAPTER XXI - THE SHORT-TIMERS

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  'Within so many yards of this Covent-garden lodging of mine, as

  within so many yards of Westminster Abbey, Saint Paul's Cathedral,

  the Houses of Parliament, the Prisons, the Courts of Justice, all

  the Institutions that govern the land, I can find - MUST find,

  whether I will or no - in the open streets, shameful instances of

  neglect of children, intolerable toleration of the engenderment of

  paupers, idlers, thieves, races of wretched and destructive

  cripples both in body and mind, a misery to themselves, a misery to

  the community, a disgrace to civilisation, and an outrage on

  Christianity. - I know it to be a fact as easy of demonstration as

  any sum in any of the elementary rules of arithmetic, that if the

  State would begin its work and duty at the beginning, and would

  with the strong hand take those children out of the streets, while

  they are yet children, and wisely train them, it would make them a

  part of England's glory, not its shame - of England's strength, not

  its weakness - would raise good soldiers and sailors, and good

  citizens, and many great men, out of the seeds of its criminal

  population. Yet I go on bearing with the enormity as if it were

  nothing, and I go on reading the Parliamentary Debates as if they

  were something, and I concern myself far more about one railwaybridge

  across a public thoroughfare, than about a dozen generations

  of scrofula, ignorance, wickedness, prostitution, poverty, and

  felony. I can slip out at my door, in the small hours after any

  midnight, and, in one circuit of the purlieus of Covent-garden

  Market, can behold a state of infancy and youth, as vile as if a

  Bourbon sat upon the English throne; a great police force looking

  on with authority to do no more than worry and hunt the dreadful

  vermin into corners, and there leave them. Within the length of a

  few streets I can find a workhouse, mismanaged with that dull

  short-sighted obstinacy that its greatest opportunities as to the

  children it receives are lost, and yet not a farthing saved to any

  one. But the wheel goes round, and round, and round; and because

  it goes round - so I am told by the politest authorities - it goes

  well.'

  Thus I reflected, one day in the Whitsun week last past, as I

  floated down the Thames among the bridges, looking - not

  inappropriately - at the drags that were hanging up at certain

  dirty stairs to hook the drowned out, and at the numerous

  conveniences provided to facilitate their tumbling in. My object

  in that uncommercial journey called up another train of thought,

  and it ran as follows:

  'When I was at school, one of seventy boys, I wonder by what secret

  understanding our attention began to wander when we had pored over

  our books for some hours. I wonder by what ingenuity we brought on

  that confused state of mind when sense became nonsense, when

  figures wouldn't work, when dead languages wouldn't construe, when

  live languages wouldn't be spoken, when memory wouldn't come, when

  dulness and vacancy wouldn't go. I cannot remember that we ever

  conspired to be sleepy after dinner, or that we ever particularly

  wanted to be stupid, and to have flushed faces and hot beating

  heads, or to find blank hopelessness and obscurity this afternoon

  in what would become perfectly clear and bright in the freshness of

  to-morrow morning. We suffered for these things, and they made us

  miserable enough. Neither do I remember that we ever bound

  ourselves by any secret oath or other solemn obligation, to find

  the seats getting too hard to be sat upon after a certain time; or

  to have intolerable twitches in our legs, rendering us aggressive

  and malicious with those members; or to be troubled with a similar

  uneasiness in our elbows, attended with fistic consequences to our

  neighbours; or to carry two pounds of lead in the chest, four

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  pounds in the head, and several active blue-bottles in each ear.

  Yet, for certain, we suffered under those distresses, and were

  always charged at for labouring under them, as if we had brought

  them on, of our own deliberate act and deed. As to the mental

  portion of them being my own fault in my own case - I should like

  to ask any well-trained and experienced teacher, not to say

  psychologist. And as to the physical portion - I should like to

  ask PROFESSOR OWEN.'

  It happened that I had a small bundle of papers with me, on what is

  called 'The Half-Time System' in schools. Referring to one of

  those papers I found that the indefatigable MR. CHADWICK had been

  beforehand with me, and had already asked Professor Owen: who had

  handsomely replied that I was not to blame, but that, being

  troubled with a skeleton, and having been constituted according to

  certain natural laws, I and my skeleton were unfortunately bound by

  those laws even in school - and had comported ourselves

  accordingly. Much comforted by the good Professor's being on my

  side, I read on to discover whether the indefatigable Mr. Chadwick

  had taken up the mental part of my afflictions. I found that he

  had, and that he had gained on my behalf, SIR BENJAMIN BRODIE, SIR

  DAVID WILKIE, SIR WALTER SCOTT, and the common sense of mankind.

  For which I beg Mr. Chadwick, if this should meet his eye, to

  accept my warm acknowledgments.

  Up to that time I had retained a misgiving that the seventy

  unfortunates of whom I was one, must have been, without knowing it,

  leagued together by the spirit of evil in a sort of perpetual Guy

  Fawkes Plot, to grope about in vaults with dark lanterns after a

  certain period of continuous study. But now the misgiving

  vanished, and I floated on with a quieted mind to see the Half-Time

  System in action. For that was the purpose of my journey, both by

&nbs
p; steamboat on the Thames, and by very dirty railway on the shore.

  To which last institution, I beg to recommend the legal use of coke

  as engine-fuel, rather than the illegal use of coal; the

  recommendation is quite disinterested, for I was most liberally

  supplied with small coal on the journey, for which no charge was

  made. I had not only my eyes, nose, and ears filled, but my hat,

  and all my pockets, and my pocket-book, and my watch.

  The V.D.S.C.R.C. (or Very Dirty and Small Coal Railway Company)

  delivered me close to my destination, and I soon found the Half-

  Time System established in spacious premises, and freely placed at

  my convenience and disposal.

  What would I see first of the Half-Time System? I chose Military

  Drill. 'Atten-tion!' Instantly a hundred boys stood forth in the

  paved yard as one boy; bright, quick, eager, steady, watchful for

  the look of command, instant and ready for the word. Not only was

  there complete precision - complete accord to the eye and to the

  ear - but an alertness in the doing of the thing which deprived it,

  curiously, of its monotonous or mechanical character. There was

  perfect uniformity, and yet an individual spirit and emulation. No

  spectator could doubt that the boys liked it. With noncommissioned

  officers varying from a yard to a yard and a half

  high, the result could not possibly have been attained otherwise.

  They marched, and counter-marched, and formed in line and square,

  and company, and single file and double file, and performed a

  variety of evolutions; all most admirably. In respect of an air of

  enjoyable understanding of what they were about, which seems to be

  forbidden to English soldiers, the boys might have been small

  French troops. When they were dismissed and the broadsword

  exercise, limited to a much smaller number, succeeded, the boys who

  had no part in that new drill, either looked on attentively, or

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  disported themselves in a gymnasium hard by. The steadiness of the

  broadsword boys on their short legs, and the firmness with which

  they sustained the different positions, was truly remarkable.

  The broadsword exercise over, suddenly there was great excitement

  and a rush. Naval Drill!

  In the corner of the ground stood a decked mimic ship, with real

  masts, yards, and sails - mainmast seventy feet high. At the word