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
Page 127
Dickens, Charles - The Uncommercial Traveller
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
Page 128
Dickens, Charles - The Uncommercial Traveller
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
Page 129
Dickens, Charles - The Uncommercial Traveller
'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
Page 130
Dickens, Charles - The Uncommercial Traveller
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
Page 131
Dickens, Charles - The Uncommercial Traveller
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
The Uncommercial Traveller Page 30
