The Uncommercial Traveller

by Dickens, Charles

  - amounting that evening, as I calculated, to about two thousand

  and odd hundreds. Magnificently lighted by a firmament of

  sparkling chandeliers, the building was ventilated to perfection.

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  Dickens, Charles - The Uncommercial Traveller

  My sense of smell, without being particularly delicate, has been so

  offended in some of the commoner places of public resort, that I

  have often been obliged to leave them when I have made an

  uncommercial journey expressly to look on. The air of this Theatre

  was fresh, cool, and wholesome. To help towards this end, very

  sensible precautions had been used, ingeniously combining the

  experience of hospitals and railway stations. Asphalt pavements

  substituted for wooden floors, honest bare walls of glazed brick

  and tile - even at the back of the boxes - for plaster and paper,

  no benches stuffed, and no carpeting or baize used; a cool material

  with a light glazed surface, being the covering of the seats.

  These various contrivances are as well considered in the place in

  question as if it were a Fever Hospital; the result is, that it is

  sweet and healthful. It has been constructed from the ground to

  the roof, with a careful reference to sight and sound in every

  corner; the result is, that its form is beautiful, and that the

  appearance of the audience, as seen from the proscenium - with

  every face in it commanding the stage, and the whole so admirably

  raked and turned to that centre, that a hand can scarcely move in

  the great assemblage without the movement being seen from thence -

  is highly remarkable in its union of vastness with compactness.

  The stage itself, and all its appurtenances of machinery,

  cellarage, height and breadth, are on a scale more like the Scala

  at Milan, or the San Carlo at Naples, or the Grand Opera at Paris,

  than any notion a stranger would be likely to form of the Britannia

  Theatre at Hoxton, a mile north of St. Luke's Hospital in the Oldstreet-

  road, London. The Forty Thieves might be played here, and

  every thief ride his real horse, and the disguised captain bring in

  his oil jars on a train of real camels, and nobody be put out of

  the way. This really extraordinary place is the achievement of one

  man's enterprise, and was erected on the ruins of an inconvenient

  old building in less than five months, at a round cost of five-andtwenty

  thousand pounds. To dismiss this part of my subject, and

  still to render to the proprietor the credit that is strictly his

  due, I must add that his sense of the responsibility upon him to

  make the best of his audience, and to do his best for them, is a

  highly agreeable sign of these times.

  As the spectators at this theatre, for a reason I will presently

  show, were the object of my journey, I entered on the play of the

  night as one of the two thousand and odd hundreds, by looking about

  me at my neighbours. We were a motley assemblage of people, and we

  had a good many boys and young men among us; we had also many girls

  and young women. To represent, however, that we did not include a

  very great number, and a very fair proportion of family groups,

  would be to make a gross mis-statement. Such groups were to be

  seen in all parts of the house; in the boxes and stalls

  particularly, they were composed of persons of very decent

  appearance, who had many children with them. Among our dresses

  there were most kinds of shabby and greasy wear, and much fustian

  and corduroy that was neither sound nor fragrant. The caps of our

  young men were mostly of a limp character, and we who wore them,

  slouched, high-shouldered, into our places with our hands in our

  pockets, and occasionally twisted our cravats about our necks like

  eels, and occasionally tied them down our breasts like links of

  sausages, and occasionally had a screw in our hair over each cheekbone

  with a slight Thief-flavour in it. Besides prowlers and

  idlers, we were mechanics, dock-labourers, costermongers, petty

  tradesmen, small clerks, milliners, stay-makers, shoe-binders,

  slop-workers, poor workers in a hundred highways and byways. Many

  of us - on the whole, the majority - were not at all clean, and not

  at all choice in our lives or conversation. But we had all come

  together in a place where our convenience was well consulted, and

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  Dickens, Charles - The Uncommercial Traveller

  where we were well looked after, to enjoy an evening's

  entertainment in common. We were not going to lose any part of

  what we had paid for through anybody's caprice, and as a community

  we had a character to lose. So, we were closely attentive, and

  kept excellent order; and let the man or boy who did otherwise

  instantly get out from this place, or we would put him out with the

  greatest expedition.

  We began at half-past six with a pantomime - with a pantomime so

  long, that before it was over I felt as if I had been travelling

  for six weeks - going to India, say, by the Overland Mail. The

  Spirit of Liberty was the principal personage in the Introduction,

  and the Four Quarters of the World came out of the globe,

  glittering, and discoursed with the Spirit, who sang charmingly.

  We were delighted to understand that there was no liberty anywhere

  but among ourselves, and we highly applauded the agreeable fact.

  In an allegorical way, which did as well as any other way, we and

  the Spirit of Liberty got into a kingdom of Needles and Pins, and

  found them at war with a potentate who called in to his aid their

  old arch enemy Rust, and who would have got the better of them if

  the Spirit of Liberty had not in the nick of time transformed the

  leaders into Clown, Pantaloon, Harlequin, Columbine, Harlequina,

  and a whole family of Sprites, consisting of a remarkably stout

  father and three spineless sons. We all knew what was coming when

  the Spirit of Liberty addressed the king with a big face, and His

  Majesty backed to the side-scenes and began untying himself behind,

  with his big face all on one side. Our excitement at that crisis

  was great, and our delight unbounded. After this era in our

  existence, we went through all the incidents of a pantomime; it was

  not by any means a savage pantomime, in the way of burning or

  boiling people, or throwing them out of window, or cutting them up;

  was often very droll; was always liberally got up, and cleverly

  presented. I noticed that the people who kept the shops, and who

  represented the passengers in the thoroughfares, and so forth, had

  no conventionality in them, but were unusually like the real thing

  - from which I infer that you may take that audience in (if you

  wish to) concerning Knights and Ladies, Fairies, Angels, or such

  like, but they are not to be done as to anything in the streets. I

  noticed, also, that when two young men, dressed in exact imitation

  of the eel-and-sausage-cravated portion of the audience, were

  chased by policemen, and, finding themselves in danger of being

  caught, dropped so suddenly as to oblige the policemen to tumble
>
  over them, there was great rejoicing among the caps - as though it

  were a delicate reference to something they had heard of before.

  The Pantomime was succeeded by a Melo-Drama. Throughout the

  evening I was pleased to observe Virtue quite as triumphant as she

  usually is out of doors, and indeed I thought rather more so. We

  all agreed (for the time) that honesty was the best policy, and we

  were as hard as iron upon Vice, and we wouldn't hear of Villainy

  getting on in the world - no, not on any consideration whatever.

  Between the pieces, we almost all of us went out and refreshed.

  Many of us went the length of drinking beer at the bar of the

  neighbouring public-house, some of us drank spirits, crowds of us

  had sandwiches and ginger-beer at the refreshment-bars established

  for us in the Theatre. The sandwich - as substantial as was

  consistent with portability, and as cheap as possible - we hailed

  as one of our greatest institutions. It forced its way among us at

  all stages of the entertainment, and we were always delighted to

  see it; its adaptability to the varying moods of our nature was

  surprising; we could never weep so comfortably as when our tears

  fell on our sandwich; we could never laugh so heartily as when we

  choked with sandwich; Virtue never looked so beautiful or Vice so

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  Dickens, Charles - The Uncommercial Traveller

  deformed as when we paused, sandwich in hand, to consider what

  would come of that resolution of Wickedness in boots, to sever

  Innocence in flowered chintz from Honest Industry in striped

  stockings. When the curtain fell for the night, we still fell back

  upon sandwich, to help us through the rain and mire, and home to

  bed.

  This, as I have mentioned, was Saturday night. Being Saturday

  night, I had accomplished but the half of my uncommercial journey;

  for, its object was to compare the play on Saturday evening with

  the preaching in the same Theatre on Sunday evening.

  Therefore, at the same hour of half-past six on the similarly damp

  and muddy Sunday evening, I returned to this Theatre. I drove up

  to the entrance (fearful of being late, or I should have come on

  foot), and found myself in a large crowd of people who, I am happy

  to state, were put into excellent spirits by my arrival. Having

  nothing to look at but the mud and the closed doors, they looked at

  me, and highly enjoyed the comic spectacle. My modesty inducing me

  to draw off, some hundreds of yards, into a dark corner, they at

  once forgot me, and applied themselves to their former occupation

  of looking at the mud and looking in at the closed doors: which,

  being of grated ironwork, allowed the lighted passage within to be

  seen. They were chiefly people of respectable appearance, odd and

  impulsive as most crowds are, and making a joke of being there as

  most crowds do.

  In the dark corner I might have sat a long while, but that a very

  obliging passer-by informed me that the Theatre was already full,

  and that the people whom I saw in the street were all shut out for

  want of room. After that, I lost no time in worming myself into

  the building, and creeping to a place in a Proscenium box that had

  been kept for me.

  There must have been full four thousand people present. Carefully

  estimating the pit alone, I could bring it out as holding little

  less than fourteen hundred. Every part of the house was well

  filled, and I had not found it easy to make my way along the back

  of the boxes to where I sat. The chandeliers in the ceiling were

  lighted; there was no light on the stage; the orchestra was empty.

  The green curtain was down, and, packed pretty closely on chairs on

  the small space of stage before it, were some thirty gentlemen, and

  two or three ladies. In the centre of these, in a desk or pulpit

  covered with red baize, was the presiding minister. The kind of

  rostrum he occupied will be very well understood, if I liken it to

  a boarded-up fireplace turned towards the audience, with a

  gentleman in a black surtout standing in the stove and leaning

  forward over the mantelpiece.

  A portion of Scripture was being read when I went in. It was

  followed by a discourse, to which the congregation listened with

  most exemplary attention and uninterrupted silence and decorum. My

  own attention comprehended both the auditory and the speaker, and

  shall turn to both in this recalling of the scene, exactly as it

  did at the time.

  'A very difficult thing,' I thought, when the discourse began, 'to

  speak appropriately to so large an audience, and to speak with

  tact. Without it, better not to speak at all. Infinitely better,

  to read the New Testament well, and to let THAT speak. In this

  congregation there is indubitably one pulse; but I doubt if any

  power short of genius can touch it as one, and make it answer as

  one.'

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  I could not possibly say to myself as the discourse proceeded, that

  the minister was a good speaker. I could not possibly say to

  myself that he expressed an understanding of the general mind and

  character of his audience. There was a supposititious working-man

  introduced into the homily, to make supposititious objections to

  our Christian religion and be reasoned down, who was not only a

  very disagreeable person, but remarkably unlike life - very much

  more unlike it than anything I had seen in the pantomime. The

  native independence of character this artisan was supposed to

  possess, was represented by a suggestion of a dialect that I

  certainly never heard in my uncommercial travels, and with a coarse

  swing of voice and manner anything but agreeable to his feelings, I

  should conceive, considered in the light of a portrait, and as far

  away from the fact as a Chinese Tartar. There was a model pauper

  introduced in like manner, who appeared to me to be the most

  intolerably arrogant pauper ever relieved, and to show himself in

  absolute want and dire necessity of a course of Stone Yard. For,

  how did this pauper testify to his having received the gospel of

  humility? A gentleman met him in the workhouse, and said (which I

  myself really thought good-natured of him), 'Ah, John? I am sorry

  to see you here. I am sorry to see you so poor.' 'Poor, sir!'

  replied that man, drawing himself up, 'I am the son of a Prince!

  MY father is the King of Kings. MY father is the Lord of Lords.

  MY father is the ruler of all the Princes of the Earth!' &c. And

  this was what all the preacher's fellow-sinners might come to, if

  they would embrace this blessed book - which I must say it did some

  violence to my own feelings of reverence, to see held out at arm's

  length at frequent intervals and soundingly slapped, like a slow

  lot at a sale. Now, could I help asking myself the question,

  whether the mechanic before me, who must detect the preacher as

  being wrong about the visible manner of himself and the like of

  himself, and about such a noisy lip-serve
r as that pauper, might

  not, most unhappily for the usefulness of the occasion, doubt that

  preacher's being right about things not visible to human senses?

  Again. Is it necessary or advisable to address such an audience

  continually as 'fellow-sinners'? Is it not enough to be fellowcreatures,

  born yesterday, suffering and striving to-day, dying tomorrow?

  By our common humanity, my brothers and sisters, by our

  common capacities for pain and pleasure, by our common laughter and

  our common tears, by our common aspiration to reach something

  better than ourselves, by our common tendency to believe in

  something good, and to invest whatever we love or whatever we lose

  with some qualities that are superior to our own failings and

  weaknesses as we know them in our own poor hearts - by these, Hear

  me! - Surely, it is enough to be fellow-creatures. Surely, it

  includes the other designation, and some touching meanings over and

  above.

  Again. There was a personage introduced into the discourse (not an

  absolute novelty, to the best of my remembrance of my reading), who

  had been personally known to the preacher, and had been quite a

  Crichton in all the ways of philosophy, but had been an infidel.

  Many a time had the preacher talked with him on that subject, and

  many a time had he failed to convince that intelligent man. But he

  fell ill, and died, and before he died he recorded his conversion -

  in words which the preacher had taken down, my fellow-sinners, and

  would read to you from this piece of paper. I must confess that to

  me, as one of an uninstructed audience, they did not appear

  particularly edifying. I thought their tone extremely selfish, and

  I thought they had a spiritual vanity in them which was of the

  before-mentioned refractory pauper's family.

  All slangs and twangs are objectionable everywhere, but the slang

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  and twang of the conventicle - as bad in its way as that of the

  House of Commons, and nothing worse can be said of it - should be

  studiously avoided under such circumstances as I describe. The

  avoidance was not complete on this occasion. Nor was it quite

  agreeable to see the preacher addressing his pet 'points' to his

  backers on the stage, as if appealing to those disciples to show