“Withnail, and I” Dir: Bruce Robinson

This post is contributed by Dr. Katie Bell , co-editor of the Dickens Society Blog.

If you have read Pictures from Italy or American Notes, you may have gotten the impression that Dickens was a bit of a grumpy traveller. This is something with which most of us can relate: where vacationing is concerned, when things go wrong, they seem to go drastically wrong. The persona of Dickens with which the public is most aware is a well-seasoned traveller, and from most accounts, he seemed to genuinely enjoy meeting new people and partaking in good conversations with them. However, he takes the gains with the losses and has a knack for very comically describing both. One of his first jobs was reporting for The Morning Chronicle, a publication which allowed for him to work with his friend, Thomas Beard. Beard was a close friend of Dickens throughout his life, and in Dickens’s letters, he was often frank with his friend about the ups and downs of an author’s life. Walter Dexter (treasurer and editor of The Dickensian until 1925) noted the gravity of the friendship and compiled a collection of Dickens’s letters solely to Beard: Dickens to His Oldest Friend: The Letters of a Lifetime from Charles Dickens to Thomas Beard. The Chronicle sent both young reporters out to document the ongoing general election polling in early 1835. Being stuck at his evening’s lodgings in Chelmsford, Dickens wrote his trusted friend and colleague to complain of the “dull” state of his evening:

If any one were to ask me what in my opinion was the dullest and most stupid spot on the face of the Earth, I should decidedly say Chelmsford. Though only 29 miles from town, there is not a single shop where they sell Sunday Papers. I can’t get an Athenæum, a Literary Gazette—no not even a penny Magazine. And here I am on a wet Sunday looking out of a damned large bow window at the rain as it falls into the puddles opposite, wondering when it will be dinner time, and cursing my folly in having put no books in my Portmanteau. (Dickens “To Thomas Beard” 16-17).

It’s a sad state of affairs when an avid reader like Dickens could not even get his hands on a penny magazine! There seems to have been one book at his lodgings—”Field Exercises and Evolutions of the Army”—however, this proved to be as dull as it sounds.

Fig. 1 Illustration of the Black Boy Inn after it was rebuilt, nd., from Essex Record Office Blog.

Dickens stayed at the well-known “Black Boy Inn” which was named to coincide with the “Black Boy Brewery” of Chelmsford. It was demolished in 1857 to become a temperance hotel, later a Boots, and is now a Next, but still retains a Blue Plaque to mark its importance to the city. As he was wont to do, Dickens included “Black Boy” in The Pickwick Papers to ground Tony Weller’s narrative in well-known places.[1] Dickens’s dislike of Chelmsford was not restricted to its lack of reading materials, as he further explained:

 

“There is not even anything to look at in the place, except two immense prisons, large enough to hold all the Inhabitants of the county—whom they can have been built for I can’t imagine” (Dickens “To Thomas Beard” 16-17).

Fig. 2 Photograph of Chelmsford High Street⎯on the far right (where the people are gathered) is the space made by the demolition of the “Black Boy,” nd., from Essex Record Office Blog.

To be generous to Chelmsford, the photograph of the street in fig.2 (which would have been taken after 1857 when Black Boy Inn was demolished, and a good 22 years after Dickens stayed there) makes it hard to see why he felt there was nothing “to look at” because by all accounts, it seems to be a standard High Street with shops and businesses.

To hypothesize, it is likely that Dickens’s distaste of the town had more to do with the sad combination of the poor weather that Sunday (he did state it was “a wet Sunday”) and there being little entertainment to be had on the day when most businesses and places of recreation were closed. These would likely have had the combining effect of making Dickens feel as though he were in “Dullborough,” to borrow his own phrase from The Uncommercial Traveller (1860). Dickens was a life-long advocate for releasing Sundays from their ecclesiastical hold, which would allow for everyone to enjoy the day in whatever way they fancied (he wrote about this topic in his 1836 piece “Sunday Under Three Heads” and later the 1855 piece “The Great Baby” in Household Words). Perhaps the extent of his boredom with Chelmsford on that wet Sunday played a minor part in this drive of his for secular Sundays. More than likely, the small town of Chelmsford didn’t have much to offer for Sunday recreation on that rainy January in 1835. It does seem more like a spot of bad luck—the bugbear of travellers. Having been to Chelmsford once myself, I can’t account for the prisons (they were not on my route I suppose), but I can say that my guide didn’t show me much of anything noteworthy. Luckily, I did bring my own books.

Turning to another area in Great Britain, every Dickens fan knows of the work he did to bring to light the terrible conditions under which pupils suffered at Yorkshire schools. From the 18^th century until Nicholas Nickleby was published, these conditions were prevalent and the publishing of Nickleby helped to bring about their demise. Dickens’s time as a court reporter (with his friend Beard) enabled him to have an eye for reading between the lines of the copious amounts of Yorkshire school advertisements, and John Sutherland noted that an advertisement for Bowes Academy printed in The Times in 1817 was reproduced in chapter three of Nicholas Nickleby wherein Dotheboys Hall advertises for an educator.[2] Dickens visited Yorkshire with Hablot Browne (the Phiz to his Boz) in 1838 in order to properly research the upcoming novel (Slater 124). He wrote to Catherine a wonderfully humorous letter detailing some of the things he found in Yorkshire.

Dickens writes Catherine that on their first night going north, they stayed in Grantham in Lincolnshire, which was “the very best … [he] had ever put up at”—one check mark in the “pro” column for the trip. He goes on to write that, in a strange turn of events, he dined with none other than a mistress of a Yorkshire school (or maybe this speaks to how many Yorkshire schools there were). This lady, who was a “very queer old body,” showed Dickens and Browne a letter she was carrying to one of her pupils from his father in London explaining (via Bible verse) that he needed to eat his “boiled meat.” This lady then proceeded to become tipsy (she was on holiday after all) and Brown and Dickens left her to her own devices. The following day, as they continued north, their trip had them spend an entire day with a “very droll” man, a “most delicious lady’s maid,” with whom the two joked around, and “a very dirty girl” of which nothing more is noted. Dickens doesn’t tell Catherine what happened to the dirty girl.

Fig. 3 “Greta Bridge.” John Sell Cotman, 1805, British Museum.

Ever cognisant of the weather, Dickens detailed how the snow was becoming increasingly deeper and the cold was closing in as they were making their way to Greta Bridge. When they finally arrived at the George Inn, he detailed that he “was in a perfect agony of apprehension” from the miserable sight with which he was presented. He explained: “at eleven we reached a bare place with a house standing alone in the midst of a dreary moor…there were no outward signs of anybody being up in the house” (shades of Dotheboys Hall). After an entire day travelling with a “droll man” and “a very dirty girl” Dickens’s opinion of the trip was turned by food (isn’t everyone’s bad day positively impacted by food and drink?) as he was given a “smoking supper and a bottle of mulled port” for dinner, and for breakfast the next day, “toast, cakes, a Yorkshire pie, [a] piece of beef about the size and much the shape of my portmanteau, tea, coffee, [and] ham and eggs.” These “capital” luxuries are notably missing from the Yorkshire school Dickens makes central to the opening of his novel, and this creates an interesting juxtaposition. February in Yorkshire was undoubtedly inhospitable with the terrible weather and long journeys, but he demonstrates how surprisingly hospitable the Inns actually were with a wealth of hearty food. This underscores the maltreatment of Wackford Squeers—he could have offered more to his pupils, but chose not to. Dickens ends his account that on the following day, the two would be off to Barnard Castle (which he explains was four miles from their lodging) and by visiting as many schools around there as he could visit, finally reaching York on the Saturday.

I can’t imagine that travelling via the Mail in February through Yorkshire would have offered anyone comfort, but Dickens seems to have made the most of it, unlike his visit to Chelmsford. He did have more things on his side this time to make the most of the journey: a comrade for conversation and people-watching, and a plentiful array of delicious food to fend off the cold. Chelmsford had been lacking in both friends and food, the absence of which can make or break a trip. Yorkshire wins out over Essex in the Dickens travelogue, but only by a slight margin.

[1] See chapter 20.

[2] “Nicholas Nickleby and the Yorkshire schools.” https://www.bl.uk/romantics-and-victorians/articles/nicholas-nickleby-and-the-yorkshire-schools

Works Cited

Dickens, Charles. “To Catherine Dickens, [1 February 1838].” The Selected Letters of Charles Dickens, edited by Jenny Hartley, Oxford University Press, 1960, 40-41.

—“To Thomas Beard, [11 January 1835].” The Selected Letters of Charles Dickens, edited by Jenny Hartley, Oxford University Press, 1960, 16-17.

Slater, Michael. Charles Dickens: a life defined by writing. Yale University Press, 2011.