put it in my head that I really ought to go out and take a walk in
the wind; so, I gave up the magnificent chapter for that day,
entirely persuading myself that I was under a moral obligation to
have a blow.
I had a good one, and that on the high road - the very high road -
on the top of the cliffs, where I met the stage-coach with all the
outsides holding their hats on and themselves too, and overtook a
flock of sheep with the wool about their necks blown into such
great ruffs that they looked like fleecy owls. The wind played
upon the lighthouse as if it were a great whistle, the spray was
driven over the sea in a cloud of haze, the ships rolled and
pitched heavily, and at intervals long slants and flaws of light
made mountain-steeps of communication between the ocean and the
sky. A walk of ten miles brought me to a seaside town without a
cliff, which, like the town I had come from, was out of the season
too. Half of the houses were shut up; half of the other half were
to let; the town might have done as much business as it was doing
then, if it had been at the bottom of the sea. Nobody seemed to
flourish save the attorney; his clerk's pen was going in the bowwindow
of his wooden house; his brass door-plate alone was free
from salt, and had been polished up that morning. On the beach,
among the rough buggers and capstans, groups of storm-beaten
boatmen, like a sort of marine monsters, watched under the lee of
those objects, or stood leaning forward against the wind, looking
out through battered spy-glasses. The parlour bell in the Admiral
Benbow had grown so flat with being out of the season, that neither
could I hear it ring when I pulled the handle for lunch, nor could
the young woman in black stockings and strong shoes, who acted as
waiter out of the season, until it had been tinkled three times.
Admiral Benbow's cheese was out of the season, but his home-made
bread was good, and his beer was perfect. Deluded by some earlier
spring day which had been warm and sunny, the Admiral had cleared
the firing out of his parlour stove, and had put some flower-pots
in - which was amiable and hopeful in the Admiral, but not
judicious: the room being, at that present visiting, transcendantly
cold. I therefore took the liberty of peeping out across a little
stone passage into the Admiral's kitchen, and, seeing a high settle
with its back towards me drawn out in front of the Admiral's
kitchen fire, I strolled in, bread and cheese in hand, munching and
looking about. One landsman and two boatmen were seated on the
settle, smoking pipes and drinking beer out of thick pint crockery
Page 55
Dickens, Charles - Reprinted Pieces
mugs - mugs peculiar to such places, with parti-coloured rings
round them, and ornaments between the rings like frayed-out roots.
The landsman was relating his experience, as yet only three nights
old, of a fearful running-down case in the Channel, and therein
presented to my imagination a sound of music that it will not soon
forget.
'At that identical moment of time,' said he (he was a prosy man by
nature, who rose with his subject), 'the night being light and
calm, but with a grey mist upon the water that didn't seem to
spread for more than two or three mile, I was walking up and down
the wooden causeway next the pier, off where it happened, along
with a friend of mine, which his name is Mr. Clocker. Mr. Clocker
is a grocer over yonder.' (From the direction in which he pointed
the bowl of his pipe, I might have judged Mr. Clocker to be a
merman, established in the grocery trade in five-and-twenty fathoms
of water.) 'We were smoking our pipes, and walking up and down the
causeway, talking of one thing and talking of another. We were
quite alone there, except that a few hovellers' (the Kentish name
for 'long-shore boatmen like his companions) 'were hanging about
their lugs, waiting while the tide made, as hovellers will.' (One
of the two boatmen, thoughtfully regarding me, shut up one eye;
this I understood to mean: first, that he took me into the
conversation: secondly, that he confirmed the proposition: thirdly,
Clocker and me stood rooted to the spot, by hearing a sound come
through the stillness, right over the sea, LIKE A GREAT SORROWFUL
FLUTE OR AEOLIAN HARP. We didn't in the least know what it was,
and judge of our surprise when we saw the hovellers, to a man, leap
into the boats and tear about to hoist sail and get off, as if they
had every one of 'em gone, in a moment, raving mad! But THEY knew
it was the cry of distress from the sinking emigrant ship.'
When I got back to my watering-place out of the season, and had
done my twenty miles in good style, I found that the celebrated
Black Mesmerist intended favouring the public that evening in the
Hall of the Muses, which he had engaged for the purpose. After a
good dinner, seated by the fire in an easy chair, I began to waver
in a design I had formed of waiting on the Black Mesmerist, and to
incline towards the expediency of remaining where I was. Indeed a
point of gallantry was involved in my doing so, inasmuch as I had
not left France alone, but had come from the prisons of St. Pelagie
with my distinguished and unfortunate friend Madame Roland (in two
volumes which I bought for two francs each, at the book-stall in
the Place de la Concorde, Paris, at the corner of the Rue Royale).
Deciding to pass the evening tete-a-tete with Madame Roland, I
derived, as I always do, great pleasure from that spiritual woman's
society, and the charms of her brave soul and engaging
conversation. I must confess that if she had only some more
faults, only a few more passionate failings of any kind, I might
love her better; but I am content to believe that the deficiency is
in me, and not in her. We spent some sadly interesting hours
together on this occasion, and she told me again of her cruel
discharge from the Abbaye, and of her being re-arrested before her
free feet had sprung lightly up half-a-dozen steps of her own
staircase, and carried off to the prison which she only left for
the guillotine.
Madame Roland and I took leave of one another before mid-night, and
I went to bed full of vast intentions for next day, in connexion
with the unparalleled chapter. To hear the foreign mail-steamers
coming in at dawn of day, and to know that I was not aboard or
obliged to get up, was very comfortable; so, I rose for the chapter
in great force.
Page 56
Dickens, Charles - Reprinted Pieces
I had advanced so far as to sit down at my window again on my
second morning, and to write the first half-line of the chapter and
strike it out, not liking it, when my conscience reproached me with
not having surveyed the watering-place out of the season, after
all, yesterday, but with having gone straight out of it at the rate
of four miles and a half an ho
ur. Obviously the best amends that I
could make for this remissness was to go and look at it without
another moment's delay. So - altogether as a matter of duty - I
gave up the magnificent chapter for another day, and sauntered out
with my hands in my pockets.
All the houses and lodgings ever let to visitors, were to let that
morning. It seemed to have snowed bills with To Let upon them.
This put me upon thinking what the owners of all those apartments
did, out of the season; how they employed their time, and occupied
their minds. They could not be always going to the Methodist
chapels, of which I passed one every other minute. They must have
some other recreation. Whether they pretended to take one
another's lodgings, and opened one another's tea-caddies in fun?
Whether they cut slices off their own beef and mutton, and made
believe that it belonged to somebody else? Whether they played
little dramas of life, as children do, and said, 'I ought to come
and look at your apartments, and you ought to ask two guineas aweek
too much, and then I ought to say I must have the rest of the
day to think of it, and then you ought to say that another lady and
gentleman with no children in family had made an offer very close
to your own terms, and you had passed your word to give them a
positive answer in half an hour, and indeed were just going to take
the bill down when you heard the knock, and then I ought to take
them, you know?' Twenty such speculations engaged my thoughts.
Then, after passing, still clinging to the walls, defaced rags of
the bills of last year's Circus, I came to a back field near a
timber-yard where the Circus itself had been, and where there was
yet a sort of monkish tonsure on the grass, indicating the spot
where the young lady had gone round upon her pet steed Firefly in
her daring flight. Turning into the town again, I came among the
shops, and they were emphatically out of the season. The chemist
had no boxes of ginger-beer powders, no beautifying sea-side soaps
and washes, no attractive scents; nothing but his great goggle-eyed
red bottles, looking as if the winds of winter and the drift of the
salt-sea had inflamed them. The grocers' hot pickles, Harvey's
Sauce, Doctor Kitchener's Zest, Anchovy Paste, Dundee Marmalade,
and the whole stock of luxurious helps to appetite, were
hybernating somewhere underground. The china-shop had no trifles
from anywhere. The Bazaar had given in altogether, and presented a
notice on the shutters that this establishment would re-open at
Whitsuntide, and that the proprietor in the meantime might be heard
of at Wild Lodge, East Cliff. At the Sea-bathing Establishment, a
row of neat little wooden houses seven or eight feet high, I SAW
the proprietor in bed in the shower-bath. As to the bathingmachines,
they were (how they got there, is not for me to say) at
the top of a hill at least a mile and a half off. The library,
which I had never seen otherwise than wide open, was tight shut;
and two peevish bald old gentlemen seemed to be hermetically sealed
up inside, eternally reading the paper. That wonderful mystery,
the music-shop, carried it off as usual (except that it had more
cabinet pianos in stock), as if season or no season were all one to
it. It made the same prodigious display of bright brazen windinstruments,
horribly twisted, worth, as I should conceive, some
thousands of pounds, and which it is utterly impossible that
anybody in any season can ever play or want to play. It had five
triangles in the window, six pairs of castanets, and three harps;
likewise every polka with a coloured frontispiece that ever was
Page 57
Dickens, Charles - Reprinted Pieces
published; from the original one where a smooth male and female
Pole of high rank are coming at the observer with their arms akimbo,
to the Ratcatcher's Daughter. Astonishing establishment,
amazing enigma! Three other shops were pretty much out of the
season, what they were used to be in it. First, the shop where
they sell the sailors' watches, which had still the old collection
of enormous timekeepers, apparently designed to break a fall from
the masthead: with places to wind them up, like fire-plugs.
Secondly, the shop where they sell the sailors' clothing, which
displayed the old sou'-westers, and the old oily suits, and the old
pea-jackets, and the old one sea-chest, with its handles like a
pair of rope ear-rings. Thirdly, the unchangeable shop for the
sale of literature that has been left behind. Here, Dr. Faustus
was still going down to very red and yellow perdition, under the
superintendence of three green personages of a scaly humour, with
excrescential serpents growing out of their blade-bones. Here, the
Golden Dreamer, and the Norwood Fortune Teller, were still on sale
at sixpence each, with instructions for making the dumb cake, and
reading destinies in tea-cups, and with a picture of a young woman
with a high waist lying on a sofa in an attitude so uncomfortable
as almost to account for her dreaming at one and the same time of a
conflagration, a shipwreck, an earthquake, a skeleton, a churchporch,
lightning, funerals performed, and a young man in a bright
blue coat and canary pantaloons. Here, were Little Warblers and
Fairburn's Comic Songsters. Here, too, were ballads on the old
ballad paper and in the old confusion of types; with an old man in
a cocked hat, and an arm-chair, for the illustration to Will Watch
the bold Smuggler; and the Friar of Orders Grey, represented by a
little girl in a hoop, with a ship in the distance. All these as
of yore, when they were infinite delights to me!
It took me so long fully to relish these many enjoyments, that I
had not more than an hour before bedtime to devote to Madame
Roland. We got on admirably together on the subject of her convent
education, and I rose next morning with the full conviction that
the day for the great chapter was at last arrived.
It had fallen calm, however, in the night, and as I sat at
breakfast I blushed to remember that I had not yet been on the
Downs. I a walker, and not yet on the Downs! Really, on so quiet
and bright a morning this must be set right. As an essential part
of the Whole Duty of Man, therefore, I left the chapter to itself -
for the present - and went on the Downs. They were wonderfully
green and beautiful, and gave me a good deal to do. When I had
done with the free air and the view, I had to go down into the
valley and look after the hops (which I know nothing about), and to
be equally solicitous as to the cherry orchards. Then I took it on
myself to cross-examine a tramping family in black (mother alleged,
I have no doubt by herself in person, to have died last week), and
to accompany eighteenpence which produced a great effect, with
moral admonitions which produced none at all. Finally, it was late
in the afternoon before I got back to the unprecedented chapter,
and then I determined that it was out of
the season, as the place
was, and put it away.
I went at night to the benefit of Mrs. B. Wedgington at the
Theatre, who had placarded the town with the admonition, 'DON'T
FORGET IT!' I made the house, according to my calculation, four
and ninepence to begin with, and it may have warmed up, in the
course of the evening, to half a sovereign. There was nothing to
offend any one, - the good Mr. Baines of Leeds excepted. Mrs. B.
Wedgington sang to a grand piano. Mr. B. Wedgington did the like,
and also took off his coat, tucked up his trousers, and danced in
clogs. Master B. Wedgington, aged ten months, was nursed by a
Page 58
Dickens, Charles - Reprinted Pieces
shivering young person in the boxes, and the eye of Mrs. B.
Wedgington wandered that way more than once. Peace be with all the
Wedgingtons from A. to Z. May they find themselves in the Season
somewhere!
A POOR MAN'S TALE OF A PATENT
I AM not used to writing for print. What working-man, that never
labours less (some Mondays, and Christmas Time and Easter Time
excepted) than twelve or fourteen hours a day, is? But I have been
asked to put down, plain, what I have got to say; and so I take
pen-and-ink, and do it to the best of my power, hoping defects will
find excuse.
I was born nigh London, but have worked in a shop at Birmingham
(what you would call Manufactories, we call Shops), almost ever
since I was out of my time. I served my apprenticeship at
Deptford, nigh where I was born, and I am a smith by trade. My
name is John. I have been called 'Old John' ever since I was
nineteen year of age, on account of not having much hair. I am
fifty-six year of age at the present time, and I don't find myself
with more hair, nor yet with less, to signify, than at nineteen
year of age aforesaid.
I have been married five and thirty year, come next April. I was
married on All Fools' Day. Let them laugh that will. I won a good
wife that day, and it was as sensible a day to me as ever I had.
We have had a matter of ten children, six whereof are living. My
eldest son is engineer in the Italian steam-packet 'Mezzo Giorno,
plying between Marseilles and Naples, and calling at Genoa,
Leghorn, and Civita Vecchia.' He was a good workman. He invented
a many useful little things that brought him in - nothing. I have