The Uncommercial Traveller

The Uncommercial Traveller, by
Charles Dickens

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Charles Dickens (#23 in our series by Charles Dickens)
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Title: The Uncommercial Traveller
Author: Charles Dickens

Release Date: May, 1997 [EBook #914] [This file was first posted on
May 20, 1997] [Most recently updated: May 20, 2003]
Edition: 10
Language: English
Character set encoding: US-ASCII
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK, THE
UNCOMMERCIAL TRAVELLER ***

Transcribed by David Price, email [email protected]

THE UNCOMMERCIAL TRAVELLER
CHAPTER I
--HIS GENERAL LINE OF BUSINESS

Allow me to introduce myself--first negatively.
No landlord is my friend and brother, no chambermaid loves me, no
waiter worships me, no boots admires and envies me. No round of beef
or tongue or ham is expressly cooked for me, no pigeon-pie is
especially made for me, no hotel-advertisement is personally addressed
to me, no hotel-room tapestried with great-coats and railway wrappers
is set apart for me, no house of public entertainment in the United
Kingdom greatly cares for my opinion of its brandy or sherry. When I
go upon my journeys, I am not usually rated at a low figure in the bill;
when I come home from my journeys, I never get any commission. I
know nothing about prices, and should have no idea, if I were put to it,
how to wheedle a man into ordering something he doesn't want. As a
town traveller, I am never to be seen driving a vehicle externally like a

young and volatile pianoforte van, and internally like an oven in which
a number of flat boxes are baking in layers. As a country traveller, I am
rarely to be found in a gig, and am never to be encountered by a
pleasure train, waiting on the platform of a branch station, quite a Druid
in the midst of a light Stonehenge of samples.
And yet--proceeding now, to introduce myself positively--I am both a
town traveller and a country traveller, and am always on the road.
Figuratively speaking, I travel for the great house of Human Interest
Brothers, and have rather a large connection in the fancy goods way.
Literally speaking, I am always wandering here and there from my
rooms in Covent-garden, London--now about the city streets: now,
about the country by-roads--seeing many little things, and some great
things, which, because they interest me, I think may interest others.
These are my chief credentials as the Uncommercial Traveller.
CHAPTER II
--THE SHIPWRECK

Never had I seen a year going out, or going on, under quieter
circumstances. Eighteen hundred and fifty-nine had but another day to
live, and truly its end was Peace on that sea-shore that morning.
So settled and orderly was everything seaward, in the bright light of the
sun and under the transparent shadows of the clouds, that it was hard to
imagine the bay otherwise, for years past or to come, than it was that
very day. The Tug-steamer lying a little off the shore, the Lighter lying
still nearer to the shore, the boat alongside the Lighter, the
regularly-turning windlass aboard the Lighter, the methodical figures at
work, all slowly and regularly heaving up and down with the breathing
of the sea, all seemed as much a part of the nature of the place as the
tide itself. The tide was on the flow, and had been for some two hours
and a half; there was a slight obstruction in the sea within a few yards
of my feet: as if the stump of a tree, with earth enough about it to keep

it from lying horizontally on the water, had slipped a little from the
land--and as I stood upon the beach and observed it dimpling the light
swell that was coming in, I cast a stone over it.
So orderly, so quiet, so regular--the rising and falling of the
Tug-steamer, the Lighter, and the boat--the turning of the windlass--the
coming in of