Ships,Storms and Sea-Sickness

 I am the world’s worst traveller. I starve myself before any journey and set off for my destination armed with prescription travel tablets and wrist bands, and I am still ill. Anything involving water is worst of all – oceans, seas, rivers, canals, boating pools in the park, you name it, I’ve been sick on it. I can’t even watch films about boats without feeling queasy. So Charles Dickens’ account of his first voyage across the Atlantic rang a chord, and I felt enormous sympathy for him, his wife, her maid, and all the other passengers (and crew) who sailed to America in January 1842 in the roughest weather encountered for many years. 

The steam-packet Britannia was the flagship of the
Cunard line. 

Dickens wrote about the experience, very humorously, in American Notes, which charts his travels around the New World. He and Catherine were booked into a ‘state-room’ on board the steam-packet Britannia, but it was so small that their two enormous portmanteaus could ‘no more be got in at the door ... than a giraffe could be persuaded or forced into a flower-pot’. And he adds that ‘nothing smaller for sleeping in was ever had except coffins’.

Describing the sufferings of passengers during the storm, which lasted well over a week, he says: “Two passengers’ wives (one of them my own) lay in silent agonies on the sofa; and one lady’s maid (MY lady’s) was a mere bundle on the floor, execrating her destiny, and pounding her curl-papers among the stray boxes. Everything sloped the wrong way: which in itself was an aggravation scarcely to be born. I had left the door open a moment before, in the bosom of a gentle declivity, and, when I tuned to shut it, it was on the summit of a lofty eminence.”

Charles Dickens

On the third morning out his wife wakes him with a ‘dismal shriek’, demanding to know if they are in danger. He finds: “The water jug is plunging and leaping like a lively dolphin; all the smaller articles are afloat, except my shoes, which are stranded on a carpet-bag, high and dry, like a couple of coal-barges. Suddenly, I see them spring in to the air, and behold the looking-glass, which is nailed to the wall, sticking fast to the ceiling. At the same time the door entirely disappears, and a new one is opened in the floor. Then I begin to comprehend that the state-room is standing on its head.

Before it is possible to make any arrangement at all compatible with this novel state of things, the ship rights. Before one can say ‘Thank Heaven!’ she wrongs again. Before one can cry she IS wrong, she seems to have started forward, and to be a creature of its own accord, with broken knees and failing legs, through every variety of hole and pitfall, and stumbling constantly.”

Dickens' wife Catherine

Dickens also tells us about ‘the domestic noises of the ship: such as the breaking of glass and crockery, the tumbling down of stewards, the gambols overhead, of loose casks and truant dozens of bottles of porter, and they remarkable and far from exhilerating sounds raised in their various state-rooms by the seventy passengers who were too ill to get up for breakfast’.

According to him one gentleman had a large mustard poultice placed upon his stomach by the ship’s doctor (which sounds a very strange remedy), while another hopeful passenger tried hot roast pig and bottled ale as a cure for his sea sickness, taking them day after day (usually in bed), ‘with astonishing perseverance’, although they ‘decidedly failed’.

At one stage Dickens obtained a tumbler of hot brandy-and-water as a restorative for his wife, her maid, and a little Scotch lady, who clung to each other at one end of a long sofa.  Dickens explains: “When I approached this pace with my specific, and was about to administer it, with many consolatory expressions, to the nearest sufferer, what was my dismay to see them all roll slowly down to the other end! And when I staggered to that end, and held out the glass once more, how immensely baffled were my good intentions by the ship giving another lurch, and their all rolling back again! I suppose I dodged them up and down the sofa for at least a quarter of an hour, without reaching them once, and by the time I did catch them the brandy-and-water was diminished by constant spilling, to a tea-spoonful.”

The tiny cabin used by Dickens and wife.

 As the voyage progresses he tells us four hands are ill, several berths are full of water, the cabins leak, the cooks are ill (one is drunk!) and all the stewards have fallen downstairs and ‘go about with plasters in various places’. 18 days 

I intended to write about Dickens’ tour of America, but got side-tracked by the Atlantic crossing. Suffice to say I really enjoyed American Notes, which shows his keen observational powers. He had an eye for oddities, whether they were people, buildings, landscapes or events, and some of the scenes he describes are as grotesque as anything you find in the novels, enabling him to give full rein to his comic abilities. 

The steam-packet Britannia, owned by the Cunard company,
made her maiden voyage in 1840. Sails were seldom used
but helped stabilise the ship in bad weather.

I posted this as part of the Dickens Month being hosted by Amanada at http://figandthistle.blogspot.com/. And here's a couple more links: if you want to know more about the Britannia and sea travel in the 1840s, go to http://www.laphamsquarterly.org and http://wearecunard.com - but please read Dickens!

Dickens and Daughter

I had my week all planned, but my mother has been ill, and I have been with her. Thankfully, she is much better, so I’m back home, it’s catch-up time on the computer, and I’m posting a piece I was going to do on Tuesday as part of a Dickens tribute. I’m hoping to re-read his novels during the year, but thought I’d start by finding out more about him.

I have Claire Tomalin’s Charles Dickens: A Life and The Invisible Woman: The Story of Nelly Ternan and Charles Dickens, but I wanted to see what people who knew him had to say, so (thanks to my Kindle and Project Gutenberg) I’ve downloaded The Life of Charles Dickens by his friend John Forster, and My Father as I Recall Him, by Mamie Dickens, his eldest daughter.

Mamie Dickens

Mamie, born in 1838, was christened Mary Hogarth Dickens in memory of her mother’s younger sister. Her book, published in 1897 (the year after her death), is very short, only six chapters long, but it offers the most delightful, and touching, glimpses of Dickens as a family man, as well as providing insights into the way he wrote. It’s very readable as Mamie seems to have inherited her father’s gift with words and makes him leap off the page.  She was obviously devoted to Dickens, and at the outset she says:

“But in what I write about my father I shall depend chiefly upon my own memory of him, for I wish no other dearer remembrance. My love for my father has never been touched or approached by any other love. I hold him in my heart of hearts as a man apart from all other men, as one apart from all other beings.”

She speaks of his ‘tender and most affectionate nature’, and remembers: “He was always glad to give us ‘treats’ as he called them, and used to conceive all manner of these ‘treats’ for us.” The biggest treat of all was Christmas, and she tells us: “In our childish days my father used to take us, every twenty-fourth day of December, to a toy shop in Holborn, where we were allowed to select our Christmas presents, and also any that we wished to give to our little companions. Although I believe we were often an hour or more in the shop before our several tastes were satisfied, he never showed the least impatience, was always interested, and as desirous as we, that we should choose exactly what we liked best.”

Mamie describes the dinners and parties held at the various homes where the family lived, the famous visitors, and the many activities organised by Dickens, who seems to have taken a leading role in everything – sporting events, theatrical performances, charades, conjuring shows. He was a charismatic figure who did everything, and did it all outstandingly well.

Charles Dickens

His writing was very much part of his home life. Whatever house they lived in, his writing room was always a special place. He liked peace and quiet when working, and preferred to be alone. He always wrote in blue ink, never in pencil; was very affected by the death of characters, especially children, and became so immersed in a story that he would actually take on the characteristics of his creations as he wrote. On one occasion, says Mamie: “... he suddenly jumped up from his chair and rushed to the mirror which hug near, and in which I could see the reflection of some extraordinary facial contortions which he was making. He returned rapidly to his desk, wrote furiously for a few moments, and then went again to the mirror. The facial pantomime was resumed, and then turning toward, but evidently not seeing, me, he began talking rapidly in a low voice. Ceasing this soon, however, he returned once more to his desk....”

She gives an equally lively account of the way he practised his public readings: “...into their performance and preparation he threw the best energy of his heart and soul, practising and rehearsing at all times and places. The meadow near our home was a favourite place, and people passing though the lane, not knowing who he was or what doing, must have thought him a madman from his reciting and gesticulation.”

I have this image of him in the meadow, declaiming his work aloud, pulling faces and waving his arms around, to the consternation of passing strangers. Imagine their surprise if they had realised who he was!

Mamie makes no mention of her mother, or the split between her parents, but paints an enchanting picture of a magical childhood, packed with fun and games and laughter, emphasising her father’s love of children and animals. There’s an enchanting account of the family pets, with a description of Dickens’ sorrow when Grip, his first raven, died. Above all else, she says, he was a ‘home-man in every respect’, and she explains: “His care and thoughtfulness about home matters, nothing being deemed too small or trivial to claim his attention and consideration, were really marvellous when we remember his active, eager, restless, working brain.”

She says: “There never existed, I think, in all the world, a more thoroughly tidy or methodical creature than was my father,” and adds that his punctuality was ‘almost frightul’.

Mamie attributes Dickens’ obsessive attention to detail as sign of his love and affection for others, but personally, I’m inclined to think he was a bit of a control freak, and perhaps the happy family life Mamie remembers was as much a creation as the wonderful plots and characters Dickens brought to life in his stories, requiring constant supervision if it was to be maintained. I think stability must have been very important to him, and he wanted his own children to have the kind of life he missed out on when he was young.

The small, plain stone which marks Dickens' grave
at Poets' Corner in Westminster Abbey.

The book ends with Mamie’s account of her father’s death and funeral, which I found very moving. However, Tomalin believes Dickens was taken ill while he was with his mistress, Nelly Ternan,  and if this is true, Mamie must have made a conscious decision to perpetuate the myth of her father as a perfect family man. 


I was planning to join the Dickens Month being hosted by Amanda at http://figandthistle.blogspot.com/2012/01/charles-dickens-month-post-first.html, so I've linked in - a little late, but never mind. Take a look nd see what other people are reading.

Christmas Comfort with Mr Pickwick

Christmas Eve at Mr Wardle's, by
Hablot Knight Browne,
known as Phiz.

How can I have got this far through December without mentioning Charles Dickens? Dickens loved Christmas, and as the 200th anniversary of his birth approaches our image of the traditional, family festival is still shaped by his writings.

So here’s a passage from The Pickwick Papers or, to give it the original title, The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club, Containing a Faithful Record of the Perambulations, Perils, Travels, Adventures and Sporting Transactions of the Corresponding Members. Mr Pickwick is attending the Christmas Eve festivities at Mr Wardle’s:

“It was a pleasant thing to see Mr. Pickwick in the centre of the group, now pulled this way, and then that, and first kissed on the chin, and then on the nose, and then on the spectacles, and to hear the peals of laughter which were raised on every side; but it was a still more pleasant thing to see Mr. Pickwick, blinded shortly afterwards with a silk handkerchief, falling up against the wall, and scrambling into corners, and going through all the mysteries of blind-man's buff, with the utmost relish for the game, until at last he caught one of the poor relations, and then had to evade the blind-man himself, which he did with a nimbleness and agility that elicited the admiration and applause of all beholders. The poor relations caught the people who they thought would like it, and, when the game flagged, got caught themselves. When they all tired of blind-man's buff, there was a great game at snap-dragon, and when fingers enough were burned with that, and all the raisins were gone, they sat down by the huge fire of blazing logs to a substantial supper, and a mighty bowl of wassail, something smaller than an ordinary wash-house copper, in which the hot apples were hissing and bubbling with a rich look, and a jolly sound, that were perfectly irresistible.

 “'This,' said Mr. Pickwick, looking round him, 'this is, indeed, comfort.””