26 10 361 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Speeches Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context speeches Description An account of the resource <h4>This collection brings together Dickens’s collected and uncollected speeches, making an under-explored body of work searchable for the first time. </h4> Dickens made more than a hundred speeches between 1837 and 1870 at events ranging from charitable dinners and award ceremonies to banquets in his honour or brief words of thanks before a public reading. In these speeches, the author touched on topics including his own life and professional development as well as other subjects such as politics, education, literature, public health and the development of the railway. Efforts to collect Dickens’s speeches prior to 1960 were incomplete at best, and misleading and fragmentary at worst. John Camden Hotten’s collection of speeches, begun without the author’s consent (although he never responded to Hotten’s letters, Dickens did begin efforts to block their publication) and published together with a hastily-compiled biography shortly after the author’s death, remained the primary collected version of the speeches until the Nonesuch Dickens of 1938-39 (a limited print run). Finally, K. J. Fielding brought all known speeches together in 1960, correcting shoddy transcriptions by Hotten using contemporary newspaper accounts, and nearly doubling the total number of speeches attributed to Dickens (The Speeches of Charles Dickens [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1960]): Hotten had only featured the text of 56 speeches, the Nonesuch edition of the speeches provided an additional nine, and Fielding presented more than a hundred. Since this monumental work, a handful have also appeared in The Dickensian;<a href="#fn1" id="ref1">1</a> there are certainly more to be found, as the volume of digitised newspapers and periodicals increases, and corrections to be made to existing transcriptions. No effort to collect the speeches has been made since Fielding; this collection thus represents the most complete body of Dickens's speeches ever assembled. Dickens did not write his speeches beforehand, nor did he speak from notes. George Dolby recounted his imaginative process in 1884: <blockquote>[S]upposing the speech was to be delivered in the evening, his habit was to take a long walk in the morning, during which he would decide on the various heads to be dealt with. These being arranged in their proper order, he would in his 'mind's eye,' liken the whole subject to the tire of a cart wheel – he being the hub. From the hub to the tire he would run as many spokes as there were subjects to be treated, and during the progress of the speech he would deal with each spoke separately, elaborating them as he went round the wheel; and when all the spokes dropped out one by one, and nothing but the tire and space remained […] his speech was at an end. (Charles Dickens as I Knew Him: The Story of the Reading Tours in Great Britain and America, pp. 273-74)</blockquote> However, on important occasions, Dickens might personally correct transcriptions of speeches for major London newspapers like The Times. As such, these newspaper accounts are as accurate a source as we can hope to have for what Dickens said (or meant to say). Our Transcription field will only include words attributed directly to Dickens rather than third-person reports or paraphrases of his speeches. Where only such reports exist, we will provide the text in the 'Summary' field. Ngram search and other text analysis tools will be applied to what are given as Dickens's words only, to avoid skewing the results, but of course we are reliant on the quality of the reporting: we recommend analysing topics, themes, quotations and concepts rather than granular detail such as prepositions, punctuation, capitalisation and the intricacies of grammar, as different newspaper accounts can vary on these points. Please <a href="https://dickenssearch.com/contact">contact us</a> with any errors, corrections, suggestions, or to contribute other uncollected speeches by Dickens. 1. These are Philip Collins, 'Some Uncollected Speeches by Dickens', The Dickensian 73.382 (1977): pp. 89-99; David A. Roos, 'Dickens at the Royal Academy of Arts: A New Speech and Two Eulogies', The Dickensian 73.382 (1977): pp. 100-107; and William F. Long, 'Dickens and the Coming of Rail to Deal: An Uncollected Speech and its Context', The Dickensian 85.418 (1989): pp. 66-80. <a href="#ref1" title="Jump back to footnote 1 in the text.">↩</a> Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Emily Middleton; Ellie-Louise Crampton; Maisie Howard; Adam Woods Speech Summary Occasionally speeches are summarised in sources in third person. Include that here, so that everything in the text transcription is only Dickens's words. In proposing this toast, he said, he hoped it would not be at all supposed that he intended to hint that there was any connexion between a Hospital for Incurables, and the Houses of Lords and Commons. Yet it must be admitted that these houses had given symptoms of labouring under a lingering disease, with intermittent fever – with this difference, that it appeared the cold fits were very long, and the hot fits very short. Yet under the influence of gentle stimulants, the Legislature had occasionally assumed an appearance of being possessed of a strong and vigorous constitution. With the toast of the two Houses of Parliament he would couple the name of Lord Alfred Paget, who notwithstanding he had nearly met with a watery grave last night by his yacht being run down in the Channel, had been determined to be present that evening to support this great and noble charity. He approached the next toast, he said, with some trepidation, because he felt he could scarcely do justice to an institution which had for its object the finding a permanent home for a most deserving and afflicted class of the community. He had the high privilege to give a toast which recognized the immense social importance and the great Christian humanities of a hospital designed for the permanent care and comfort of those who, by disease, accident, or deformity, were hopelessly disqualified for the duties of life. It was to be remembered at the outset that it was the distinguishing feature of this institution that it entered into competition with none of the existing hospitals, but came in aid of every one of them. It did appear to him somewhat extraordinary that amongst the innumerable and valuable charities of this metropolis it had been so long without an institution for the relief of those who, in their helplessness, could not be relieved by any other hospital. There was no establishment for the treatment of the sick in this city from the doors of which some unfortunate persons altogether disqualified for the duties of life, were not driven away in consequence of the impossibility there was of rendering them that assistance which their state of health required. The institution was therefore no sooner in existence than, as might be expected, numbers of the most distinguished and experienced members of the medical profession recorded their conviction of its immense usefulness; and certificates had since been signed which placed it wholly and for ever beyond dispute. There were very many cases of great distress; of person who, brought up in a respectable position, were cut down by hopeless disease with no aid, no solace, in the dark hour of their affliction. It was to afford such a home, it was to relieve such parties that this charity was founded, and he trusted that it would grow, through the fostering care of the public, into one of the greatest of those benevolent institutions which did so much honour to the country. The Royal Hospital had scarcely achieved the second year of its existence; but nevertheless it had obtained ‘ a local habitation and a name’, in one of the prettiest places in the environs of London. There was nothing about the institution which partook of sectarianism; its principle was to know no distinction in religion; and there were not forty-four patients under its protective care. It divided itself into two branches, affording, first, to those objects of charity a home for life who had no other home; and, secondly, assisting with regular donations and kind counsels such patients as had friends to relieve them in part, and give them shelter, feeling that they could not bear that sharpest pain – the separation from those they loved. The necessity for such a hospital, which he could not but observe with regret, was shown by the circumstance that at the election within the last month, for ten recipients of the advantages of the charity, there were no less than 87 candidates, many of them having particular claims on the sympathy of the benevolent. He felt it was their duty to do everything that could be done to give these poor creatures even a chance of recovery – or, if not of recovery, of comfort in their closing days; and he trusted, therefore, that the institution would be liberally supported. In remembrance of those from whom they derived their birth; in remembrance of Him who said to the afflicted, ‘Take up thy bed and walk’; in remembrance of those whose pillows it might some day be their duty to smooth; in the name of those bright creatures upon whose breasts they hoped hereafter to rest their heads; for the love of God; for the love of man – which was one – he implored their aid on behalf of this infant institution, so that I might hereafter rank as a most beneficent giant. In conclusion he had great pleasure in proposing ‘Prosperity and Perpetuity to the Royal Hospital’. Location The location London Venue Where the speech was given London Tavern Ngram Date Hidden from users and search. All items in a collection need to have the same data in the same format in order to show up in Ngram (either YYYY, YYYYMMDD, or YYYYMMDD). No combinations will work. For journalism, letters and poetry, if there is no month or day, default to the first of the month or January. So a poem with a date of March 1843 would be 18430301. A poem published in 1856 with no month or date information would be 18560101. 18560605 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Royal Hospital for Incurables Annual Dinner 1856 Description An account of the resource Chairman's toasts at the Royal Hospital for Incurables Annual Dinner (5 June 1856). Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Dickens, Charles Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1856-06-05 Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context 1856-06-05_Speech_Royal-Hospital-for-Incurables-Annual-Dinner Bibliographic Citation A bibliographic reference for the resource. Recommended practice is to include sufficient bibliographic detail to identify the resource as unambiguously as possible. Dickens, Charles. 'Royal Hospital for Incurables Annual Dinner' (5 June 1856). Dickens Search. Eds. Emily Middleton and Lydia Craig. Accessed [date]. <a href="https://dickenssearch.com/speeches/1856-06-05_Speech_Royal-Hospital-for-Incurables-Annual-Dinner">https://dickenssearch.com/speeches/1856-06-05_Speech_Royal-Hospital-for-Incurables-Annual-Dinner</a>. https://www.dickenssearch.com/files/original/3/To_Mrs_Horne/1856-10-20_Letter_To_Mrs_Horne_Poem.pdf 9d566c755905ab9ce376dde2a3b85921 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Verse Description An account of the resource <h4>This collection brings together the most complete set of Dickens's verse to date, supplementing the work of existing editions with previously uncollected poems Dickens contributed to albums, or wrote anonymously.</h4> Though such productions receive scant attention from scholars interested in his fiction and journalism, Dickens composed a surprising amount of verse. It was a genre in which he evidently felt much less at home (and financially rewarded) than when writing in prose. However, several poems gained popular favour during his lifetime; that so many were <a href="https://dickenssearch.com/items/browse?advanced%5B0%5D%5Belement_id%5D=51&advanced%5B0%5D%5Btype%5D=is+exactly&advanced%5B0%5D%5Bterms%5D=Song">written to be set to music</a> indicates the permeable boundary between metered verse functioning as poem or song in the nineteenth century, and may explain why some of Dickens’s poems were more enduringly popular than others. Notably, <a href="https://dickenssearch.com/verse/1836-05_Pickwick_Papers_The_Ivy_Green">'The Ivy Green'</a> from Pickwick Papers (1837), a story of time’s inexorable passing, was frequently republished in newspapers. Several poems written to young ladies of Dickens’s acquaintance are released on Dickens Search as part of the author’s poetic output for the first time, testifying to the author’s ability to write impromptu poetry and gallantly turn a phrase. Since keeping <a href="https://dickenssearch.com/items/browse?search=&advanced%5B0%5D%5Bjoiner%5D=and&advanced%5B0%5D%5Belement_id%5D=94&advanced%5B0%5D%5Btype%5D=is+exactly&advanced%5B0%5D%5Bterms%5D=Autograph+Album&collection=&type=&tags=&date_search_term=&submit_search=Search+For+Items">autograph albums</a> was a popular pastime for women in the Victorian era, it is possible that further examples of such activity remain to be discovered in various archives and private collections. When writing <a href="https://dickenssearch.com/items/browse?search=&advanced%5B0%5D%5Bjoiner%5D=and&advanced%5B0%5D%5Belement_id%5D=94&advanced%5B0%5D%5Btype%5D=is+exactly&advanced%5B0%5D%5Bterms%5D=Letter&collection=3&type=&tags=&date_search_term=&submit_search=Search+For+Items">letters</a> to friends, Dickens occasionally included comedic poems for the recipient. Several of these are included. Considering the enormity of Dickens’s correspondence, likely more instances of this sort of poetic humour will result over time. <a href="https://dickenssearch.com/items/browse?advanced%5B0%5D%5Belement_id%5D=51&advanced%5B0%5D%5Btype%5D=is+exactly&advanced%5B0%5D%5Bterms%5D=Epitaph">Epitaphs</a> Dickens wrote for friends and family, whether used or not, are included with Dickens's other verse for the first time. Users can also browse <a href="https://dickenssearch.com/items/browse?advanced%5B0%5D%5Belement_id%5D=94&advanced%5B0%5D%5Btype%5D=is+exactly&advanced%5B0%5D%5Bterms%5D=Play">verse from Dickens's plays</a>, including songs removed from The Strange Gentleman and Is She His Wife? Or, Something Singular! before performance. Care is necessary when verifying the accuracy of these poems, as some are misattributed to Dickens. Widespread reprintings of 'Dickens poems' in nineteenth-century newspapers are insufficient evidence for authorial attribution, owing to the mistakes intentionally or inadvertently made in ascribing authorship. An unusual example of a poem that is and is not by Dickens, the lines of 'Little Nell’s Funeral' are taken, with minimal alterations, from Chapter 72 of The Old Curiosity Shop. An instance of the strikingly lyrical quality of Dickens’s sentimental prose, they were divided into metered, unrhymed verse by M.A.H. for the 1849 collection Echoes of Infant Voices. Because Dickens did not intend for this passage to be structured in verse form, the poem is not included in the poetry collection of Dickens Search. <a href="https://dickenssearch.com/poetry-dickens-didnt-write">Read our blog post for more on poetry Dickens didn't write.</a> Occasionally, Dickens will quote a poem by another author, as in his burlesque Is She his Wife? Or, Something Singular! (1836). The character Mr Felix Tapkins launches into a short hunting song beginning 'The wife around her husband throws/Her arms to make him stay'. As William Chappell noted in 1840, this is a well-known variant of 'A Hunting We Will Go' (1777), by Thomas Arne, though he misattributes its composition to Henry Fielding. Previous notable collections of some of Dickens's poetry include The Plays and Poems of Charles Dickens (1882) edited by Richard Herne Shepherd and The Poems and Verses of Charles Dickens (1903) edited by Frederic G. Kitton. In 2025, we published <a href="https://edinburghuniversitypress.com/book-the-verse-of-charles-dickens.html" target="_blank" rel="noopener">The Verse of Charles Dickens</a> (Edinburgh University Press), which includes an introduction and editorial apparatus for this verse.  Caution has been taken when ascertaining that each poem is indeed by Dickens. Please <a href="https://dickenssearch.com/contact">contact us</a> with any errors, corrections, suggestions, or other poems written by Dickens. 1. The Verse of Charles Dickens. Edited by Lydia Craig and Emily Middleton. Edinburgh University Press, 2025; Robert Butterworth. 'The Hymn of the Wiltshire Labourers.' The Dickensian 516.118.1 (Spring 2022): pp. 43-56; Eva-Charlotta Mebius. 'Dreams of Dying Girls: The Poetry of Thomas J. Ouseley and Charles Dickens.' Dickens Quarterly 34.3 (September 2017): pp. 256-261; Robert C. Hanna. 'Before Boz; The Juvenilia and Early Writings of Charles Dickens, 1820-1833'. Dickens Studies Annual 40 (2009): pp. 231-364. Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context verse Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Lydia Craig; Emily Middleton Poem Publication Type E.g. newspaper/serial Letter TEI File Link to TEI file <a href="https://dickenssearch.com/teibp/dist/content/1856-10-20_Letter_To_Mrs_Horne_Poem.xml" target="_blank" rel="noopener">'To Mrs Horne' (20 October 1856).</a> Ngram Date Hidden from users and search. All items in a collection need to have the same data in the same format in order to show up in Ngram (either YYYY, YYYYMMDD, or YYYYMMDD). No combinations will work. For journalism, letters and poetry, if there is no month or day, default to the first of the month or January. So a poem with a date of March 1843 would be 18430301. A poem published in 1856 with no month or date information would be 18560101. 18561020 Ngram Text Hidden from users and search. Copy and paste from the Scripto transcription. Then check and uncheck HTML to strip out all formatting. Finally, search and remove any   (which is the HTML for spaces). This will prevent the Ngram picking up on irrelevant HTML. My heart disowns Ophelia Jones; only I think it was a more sounding name, Are these the tones, – Volumnia Jones? No. Again it seems doubtful. God bless her bones, Petronia Jones! I think not. Carve I on stones Olympia Jones? Can that be the name? Fond memory favours it more than any other. My love to her. Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource 'To Mrs Horne' Description An account of the resource From a letter to Mrs Horne (20 October 1856). Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Dickens, Charles Source A related resource from which the described resource is derived 'Mrs. Horne.' The Letters of Charles Dickens. Edited by his Sister-in-Law and his Eldest Daughter. Volume 1 (1833-1856), p. 456-457. Chapman and Hall, 1880. Internet Archive, <a href="https://archive.org/details/letterscharlesd09dickgoog/page/n473/mode/2up" target="_blank" rel="noopener">https://archive.org/details/letterscharlesd09dickgoog/page/n473/mode/2up</a>. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1856-10-20 Type The nature or genre of the resource Poem Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context 1856-10-20_Letter_To_Mrs_Horne_Poem Bibliographic Citation A bibliographic reference for the resource. Recommended practice is to include sufficient bibliographic detail to identify the resource as unambiguously as possible. Dickens, Charles. 'To Mrs Horne' (20 October 1856). Dickens Search. Eds. Emily Middleton and Lydia Craig. Accessed [date]. <a href="https://dickenssearch.com/verse/1856-10-20_Letter_To_Mrs_Horne_Poem" target="_blank" rel="noopener">https://dickenssearch.com/verse/1856-10-20_Letter_To_Mrs_Horne_Poem</a>. Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Internet Archive: Access to the Archive’s Collections is provided at no cost and is granted for scholarship and research purposes only (<a href="https://archive.org/about/terms.php" target="_blank" rel="noopener">https://archive.org/about/terms.php</a>). Scripto Transcription A written representation of a document. <div style="text-align: left;">My heart disowns Ophelia Jones; only I think it was a more sounding name, Are these the tones, – Volumnia Jones? No. Again it seems doubtful. God bless her bones, Petronia Jones! I think not. Carve I on stones Olympia Jones? Can that be the name? Fond memory favours it more than any other. My love to her.</div> https://www.dickenssearch.com/files/original/3/A_Child_s_Hymn/1856-12-06_Household_Words_A_Childs_Hymn.pdf bb5463206c186adcf47fcdc5f05a5375 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Verse Description An account of the resource <h4>This collection brings together the most complete set of Dickens's verse to date, supplementing the work of existing editions with previously uncollected poems Dickens contributed to albums, or wrote anonymously.</h4> Though such productions receive scant attention from scholars interested in his fiction and journalism, Dickens composed a surprising amount of verse. It was a genre in which he evidently felt much less at home (and financially rewarded) than when writing in prose. However, several poems gained popular favour during his lifetime; that so many were <a href="https://dickenssearch.com/items/browse?advanced%5B0%5D%5Belement_id%5D=51&advanced%5B0%5D%5Btype%5D=is+exactly&advanced%5B0%5D%5Bterms%5D=Song">written to be set to music</a> indicates the permeable boundary between metered verse functioning as poem or song in the nineteenth century, and may explain why some of Dickens’s poems were more enduringly popular than others. Notably, <a href="https://dickenssearch.com/verse/1836-05_Pickwick_Papers_The_Ivy_Green">'The Ivy Green'</a> from Pickwick Papers (1837), a story of time’s inexorable passing, was frequently republished in newspapers. Several poems written to young ladies of Dickens’s acquaintance are released on Dickens Search as part of the author’s poetic output for the first time, testifying to the author’s ability to write impromptu poetry and gallantly turn a phrase. Since keeping <a href="https://dickenssearch.com/items/browse?search=&advanced%5B0%5D%5Bjoiner%5D=and&advanced%5B0%5D%5Belement_id%5D=94&advanced%5B0%5D%5Btype%5D=is+exactly&advanced%5B0%5D%5Bterms%5D=Autograph+Album&collection=&type=&tags=&date_search_term=&submit_search=Search+For+Items">autograph albums</a> was a popular pastime for women in the Victorian era, it is possible that further examples of such activity remain to be discovered in various archives and private collections. When writing <a href="https://dickenssearch.com/items/browse?search=&advanced%5B0%5D%5Bjoiner%5D=and&advanced%5B0%5D%5Belement_id%5D=94&advanced%5B0%5D%5Btype%5D=is+exactly&advanced%5B0%5D%5Bterms%5D=Letter&collection=3&type=&tags=&date_search_term=&submit_search=Search+For+Items">letters</a> to friends, Dickens occasionally included comedic poems for the recipient. Several of these are included. Considering the enormity of Dickens’s correspondence, likely more instances of this sort of poetic humour will result over time. <a href="https://dickenssearch.com/items/browse?advanced%5B0%5D%5Belement_id%5D=51&advanced%5B0%5D%5Btype%5D=is+exactly&advanced%5B0%5D%5Bterms%5D=Epitaph">Epitaphs</a> Dickens wrote for friends and family, whether used or not, are included with Dickens's other verse for the first time. Users can also browse <a href="https://dickenssearch.com/items/browse?advanced%5B0%5D%5Belement_id%5D=94&advanced%5B0%5D%5Btype%5D=is+exactly&advanced%5B0%5D%5Bterms%5D=Play">verse from Dickens's plays</a>, including songs removed from The Strange Gentleman and Is She His Wife? Or, Something Singular! before performance. Care is necessary when verifying the accuracy of these poems, as some are misattributed to Dickens. Widespread reprintings of 'Dickens poems' in nineteenth-century newspapers are insufficient evidence for authorial attribution, owing to the mistakes intentionally or inadvertently made in ascribing authorship. An unusual example of a poem that is and is not by Dickens, the lines of 'Little Nell’s Funeral' are taken, with minimal alterations, from Chapter 72 of The Old Curiosity Shop. An instance of the strikingly lyrical quality of Dickens’s sentimental prose, they were divided into metered, unrhymed verse by M.A.H. for the 1849 collection Echoes of Infant Voices. Because Dickens did not intend for this passage to be structured in verse form, the poem is not included in the poetry collection of Dickens Search. <a href="https://dickenssearch.com/poetry-dickens-didnt-write">Read our blog post for more on poetry Dickens didn't write.</a> Occasionally, Dickens will quote a poem by another author, as in his burlesque Is She his Wife? Or, Something Singular! (1836). The character Mr Felix Tapkins launches into a short hunting song beginning 'The wife around her husband throws/Her arms to make him stay'. As William Chappell noted in 1840, this is a well-known variant of 'A Hunting We Will Go' (1777), by Thomas Arne, though he misattributes its composition to Henry Fielding. Previous notable collections of some of Dickens's poetry include The Plays and Poems of Charles Dickens (1882) edited by Richard Herne Shepherd and The Poems and Verses of Charles Dickens (1903) edited by Frederic G. Kitton. In 2025, we published <a href="https://edinburghuniversitypress.com/book-the-verse-of-charles-dickens.html" target="_blank" rel="noopener">The Verse of Charles Dickens</a> (Edinburgh University Press), which includes an introduction and editorial apparatus for this verse.  Caution has been taken when ascertaining that each poem is indeed by Dickens. Please <a href="https://dickenssearch.com/contact">contact us</a> with any errors, corrections, suggestions, or other poems written by Dickens. 1. The Verse of Charles Dickens. Edited by Lydia Craig and Emily Middleton. Edinburgh University Press, 2025; Robert Butterworth. 'The Hymn of the Wiltshire Labourers.' The Dickensian 516.118.1 (Spring 2022): pp. 43-56; Eva-Charlotta Mebius. 'Dreams of Dying Girls: The Poetry of Thomas J. Ouseley and Charles Dickens.' Dickens Quarterly 34.3 (September 2017): pp. 256-261; Robert C. Hanna. 'Before Boz; The Juvenilia and Early Writings of Charles Dickens, 1820-1833'. Dickens Studies Annual 40 (2009): pp. 231-364. Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context verse Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Lydia Craig; Emily Middleton Poem Ngram Date Hidden from users and search. All items in a collection need to have the same data in the same format in order to show up in Ngram (either YYYY, YYYYMMDD, or YYYYMMDD). No combinations will work. For journalism, letters and poetry, if there is no month or day, default to the first of the month or January. So a poem with a date of March 1843 would be 18430301. A poem published in 1856 with no month or date information would be 18560101. 18561206 Ngram Text Hidden from users and search. Copy and paste from the Scripto transcription. Then check and uncheck HTML to strip out all formatting. Finally, search and remove any   (which is the HTML for spaces). This will prevent the Ngram picking up on irrelevant HTML. Hear my prayer, O! Heavenly Father, Ere I lay me down to sleep; Bid thy Angels, pure and holy, Round my bed their vigil keep. My sins are heavy, but Thy mercy Far outweighs them every one; Down before Thy Cross I cast them, Trusting in Thy help alone. Keep me through this night of peril Underneath its boundless shade; Take me to Thy rest, I pray Thee, When my pilgrimage is made. None shall measure out Thy patience By the span of human thought; None shall bound the tender mercies Which Thy Holy Son has bought. Pardon all my past transgressions, Give me strength for days to come; Guide and guard me with Thy blessing Till Thy Angels bid me home. Publication Type E.g. newspaper/serial Periodical Publication The title of the newspaper/serial (if applicable) Household Words TEI File Link to TEI file <a href="https://dickenssearch.com/teibp/dist/content/1856-12-06_Household_Words_A_Childs_Hymn.xml" target="_blank" rel="noopener">'A Child's Hymn.' Household Words vol. XIV (6 December 1856): p. 593.</a> Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource 'A Child's Hymn' Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Charles, Dickens Source A related resource from which the described resource is derived Household Words Volume XIV (6 December 1856): p. 21. Dickens Journals Online, <a href="https://www.djo.org.uk/household-words/volume-xiv/page-593.html" target="_blank" rel="noopener">https://www.djo.org.uk/household-words/volume-xiv/page-593.html</a>. Type The nature or genre of the resource Poem Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context 1856-12-06_Household_Words_A_Childs_Hymn Bibliographic Citation A bibliographic reference for the resource. Recommended practice is to include sufficient bibliographic detail to identify the resource as unambiguously as possible. Dickens, Charles. 'A Child's Hymn' from The Wreck of the Golden Mary (6 December 1856), Household Words, Volume XIV, p. 21. Dickens Search. Eds. Emily Middleton and Lydia Craig. Accessed [date]. <a href="https://dickenssearch.com/verse/1856-12-06_Household_Words_A_Childs_Hymn">https://dickenssearch.com/verse/1856-12-06_Household_Words_A_Childs_Hymn</a>. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1856-12-06 Description An account of the resource Published in Household Words vol. XIV (6 December 1856). Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Scanned material from Dickens Journals Online, <a href="http://www.djo.org.uk" id="LPNoLPOWALinkPreview" contenteditable="false" title="http://www.djo.org.uk">www.djo.org.uk</a>. Available under CC BY licence. Scripto Transcription A written representation of a document. Hear my prayer, O! Heavenly Father, Ere I lay me down to sleep; Bid thy Angels, pure and holy, Round my bed their vigil keep. My sins are heavy, but Thy mercy Far outweighs them every one; Down before Thy Cross I cast them, Trusting in Thy help alone. Keep me through this night of peril Underneath its boundless shade; Take me to Thy rest, I pray Thee, When my pilgrimage is made. None shall measure out Thy patience By the span of human thought; None shall bound the tender mercies Which Thy Holy Son has bought. Pardon all my past transgressions, Give me strength for days to come; Guide and guard me with Thy blessing Till Thy Angels bid me home. https://www.dickenssearch.com/files/original/8/The_Wreck_of_the_Golden_Mary_[1856_Christmas_Number]/1856-12-25-The_Wreck_of_the_Golden_Mary.pdf 236c3be9caee2a354e4a486992616c67 https://www.dickenssearch.com/files/original/8/The_Wreck_of_the_Golden_Mary_[1856_Christmas_Number]/1856-12-25-The_Wreck.pdf 33654836ca892f29fb8c261148763a63 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Christmas Numbers Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Lydia Craig Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context christmas-numbers Scripto Transcription A written representation of a document. This collection (still in development) unites the eighteen Christmas numbers that Dickens orchestrated between 1850 and 1867 in conjunction with multiple Victorian authors, notably Wilkie Collins, and published in his periodicals Household Words and All the Year Round. After writing five Christmas books and multiple sketches on Yuletide cheer - notably 'Scenes and Characters, No. 10, Christmas Festivities', published as 'A Christmas Dinner' in Sketches by Boz (1836) - not to mention the holiday merry-making described in Pickwick Papers (1836-1837), Charles Dickens might reasonably be supposed to have had his fill of seasonal writing. However, he published a Christmas number in 1850 in HW that contained a series of sketches about Christmas, contributing 'A Christmas Tree' (1850). In the next year's Christmas number, he included the short piece 'What Christmas is, as we Grow Older' (1851). Holiday fiction, though, was what Dickens's readership seemed to crave, and the author, editor, and entrepreneur in Dickens all recognised the opportunity. In 1852, Dickens decided to develop an extra Christmas number for HW which would harness the creative talents of other writers for a series of unrelated stories told within a frame narrative of his own composition. Each year he himself would write several of these parts, generally two to three. Soon, the Christmas number became as much of an expected holiday tradition among Victorian subscribers as had been the Christmas books. All in all, eighteen Christmas numbers of this kind resulted (1850-1867); nine published in HW and nine in ATYR.  <div style="text-align: center;">Extra Christmas Numbers - Household Words</div> On 24 December 1852, Dickens published A Round of Stories by the Christmas Fire. Personally, he had written 'The Poor Relation's Story' (No.1) and 'The Child's Story' (No.2) with successive stories authored by other contributors, though no names appeared. What would have been the 1853 extra number was late, published instead on 18 February 1854, a circumstance that would not occur again until the 1864 Christmas number. This time, Dickens published more short stories by himself and others, contributing 'The Schoolboy's Story' and 'Nobody's Story', but the Christmas number, for once, lacked a frame narrative or overarching title, though it would come to be known as Another Round of Stories by the Christmas Fire. 25 December 1854 saw The Seven Poor Travellers, with Dickens penning 'The First' (No.1) and 'The Road' (No.7). By writing the first and last stories in the collection, he, as editor, might steer the entire composition towards a cohesive conclusion.  Next, Dickens wrote 'The Guest' (No.1), 'The Boots' (No.3), and 'The Bill' (No.7) as part of The Holly-Tree Inn (15 December 1855). The Wreck of the 'Golden Mary' followed on 25 December 1856, with Dickens composing only 'The Wreck' (No.1), a lengthy description of a shipwreck which sets up the framing narrative. Next, Dickens collaborated with Wilkie Collins on The Perils of Certain English Prisoners, and their Treasure in Women, Children, Silver, and Jewels (7 December 1857), Dickens writing 'The Island of Silver-Store' (No.1) and 'The Rafts on the River' (No.3) with Collins contributing the second chapter. Rounding out the extra Christmas numbers for HW, A House to Let appeared on 7 December 1858, with Dickens authoring 'Going into Society' (No.3). The last issue of HW appeared on 28 May 1859, with the journal virtually concluded, due to disagreements with Dickens's publishers Bradbury and Evans, though it was symbolically folded into ATYR. <div style="text-align: center;">Extra Christmas Numbers - All the Year Round</div> After Dickens launched his new journal ATYR on 30 April 1859, Christmas remained house-themed with the extra Christmas number The Haunted House (13 December 1859). It featured three offerings from him, 'The Mortals in the House' (No.1), 'The Ghost in Master B's Room' (No.6), and 'The Ghost in the Corner Room' (No.8). Yet Dickens continued to experiment with his holiday themes. He would write 'The Village' (No.1), 'The Money' (No.2), and 'The Restitution' (No.5) for A Message from the Sea, published on 25 December 1860, a story about a New England mariner, Captain Jorgan, who seeks to discover the truth about the origin of a Welsh family's mysterious nest-egg.  For Tom Tiddler's Ground, published 25 December 1861, Dickens produced 'Picking up Soot and Cinders' (No.1), 'Picking up Miss Kimmeens' (No.6), and 'Picking up the Tinker' (No. 7). An impressive four parts of Somebody's Luggage (4 December 1862), 'His Leaving it Till Called For' (No.1), 'His Boots' (No.2), 'His Brown-Paper Parcel' (No.7), and 'His Wonderful End' (No. 10) were produced by Dickens, who notably portrays himself in the story as a character, in his capacity as AYTR editor, to amusing effect. Two subsequent Christmas numbers, Mrs. Lirriper's Lodgings (25 December 1863) and Mrs. Lirriper's Legacy' (12 January 1864), concern the life and activities of a generous landlady who adopts a young boy and raises him with the help of her gallant lodger, Major Jackman. The former contained Dickens's two introductory and conclusion chapters, 'How Mrs. Lirriper carried on the Business' (No.1) and 'How the Parlours added a few words' (No.6), while the latter featured 'Mrs. Lirriper relates how she went on, and went over' (No.1) and 'Mrs. Lirriper relates how Jimmy topped up' (No.7), a story including a jaunt to France, with identical placement at the beginning and end of the number. Doctor Marigold's Prescriptions appeared in 1865, with Mugby Junction following in 1866; both frame narratives deal with themes of disability and poverty. For the first, Dickens contributed 'To be Taken Immediately' (No.1), 'To be Taken with a Grain of Salt' (No.6), and 'To be Taken for Life' (No.8); for the latter, he wrote 'Barbox Brothers' (No.1), 'Barbox Brothers and Co.' (No.2), 'Main Line. The Boy at Mugby' (No.3), and 'No.1 Branch Line. The Signal-man' (No.4). For the final Christmas number, No Thoroughfare (12 December 1867), Dickens collaborated with Collins on an imaginative European thriller that ranges from orphanages and offices in London to hotels and precipices in the Swiss Alps. Dickens is known to have primarily written most of The Overture, Act I, Act III, with Collins taking Act 2. Both collaborated on Acts IV and V. However, they deliberately interspersed passages into each other's parts to confuse readers as to which author had written which 'Acts' (Slater, Charles Dickens, pp. 569-573). Consequently, we have merely transcribed the Christmas number in its entirety, as a collaboration. Though Dickens considered beginning a Christmas number in 1868, his other activities, coupled with failing health, led him to gratefully relinquish the idea. Instead, he would eventually go on to attempt another novel, The Mystery of Edwin Drood (1870), evidently sensing the public's interest in the detective genre, one which he and Collins had, more or less, pioneered with their respective novels Bleak House (1853) (Inspector Bucket) and The Moonstone (1868) (Sergeant Cuff). His mind may also have been running on the mysterious plot of No Thoroughfare, with its malevolent villain, though he did not live to see the plot through to its conclusion. While building this collection, we have consulted, and transcribed scans from Dickens Journals Online; all items are linked to their original location on the internet. With the exception of No Thoroughfare, transcripts have been made only of parts of numbers Dickens is known to have authored. Lists of writers known to have authored chapters or portions of these extra Christmas numbers have been added to the metadata of each item (Klimaszewski, Appendix A).  Please contact us with any errors, corrections, and suggestions. 1. See Melisa Klimaszewski. Collaborative Dickens: Authorship and Victorian Christmas Periodicals (Ohio University Press, 2019); Jude Piesse. 'Dreaming Across Oceans: Emigration and Nation in the Mid-Victorian Christmas Issue'. Victorian Periodicals Review 46.1 (Spring 2013): 37-60; Robert Tracy. '"A Whimsical Kind of Masque": The Christmas Books and Victorian Spectacle'. Dickens Studies Annual 27 (1998): 113-30; Deborah A. Thomas. 'The Chord of the Christmas Season'. In Dickens and the Short Story (University of Pennsylvania Press, 1982): pp. 62-93; Sarah A. Solberg. '"Text Dropped into the Woodcuts": Dickens's Christmas Books'. Dickens Studies Annual 8 (1980): pp. 103-18; Ruth Glancy. 'Dickens and Christmas: His Framed-Tale Themes'. Nineteenth-Century Fiction 35.1 (June 1980): pp. 53-72; Thomas. 'Contributors to the Christmas Numbers of Household Words and All the Year Round, 1850-1867.' Part I. The Dickensian 70.372 (1973): pp. 163-72. and Part II. TD 70 (1974): pp. 21-29; 'Messages in Bottles and Collins's Seafaring Man'. Anthea Trodd. SEL: Studies in English Literature 41.4 (Autumn 2002), pp. 751-64; Susan Shatto. 'Miss Havisham and Mr. Mopes the Hermit: Dickens and the Mentally Ill'. (Part One) Dickens Quarterly 2.2 (June 1985): pp. 43-50 and (Part Two) DQ 2.3 (September 1985): pp. 79-84; Molly Boggs. '"Given to you by nature for an enemy": The landlady in mid-century London'. Journal of Victorian Culture 23.3 (2018): pp. 310-331; Thomas. 'Dickens' Mrs. Lirriper and the Evolution of a Feminine Stereotype'. Dickens Studies Annual 6 (1977): 154-169; Martha Stoddard Holmes. '"Happy and Yet Pitying Tears": Deafness and Affective Disjuncture in Dickens's Doctor Marigold'. Victorian Review 35.2 (Fall 2009): 53-64; Diana C. Archibald. 'Dickens's Visit to the Perkins School and Doctor Marigold'. Dickens and Massachusetts: The Lasting Legacy of the Commonwealth Visits. Eds. Archibald and Joel J. Brattin (University of Massachusetts, 2015): pp. 123-33; Anne Chapman. '"I am not going on": Negotiating Christmas Publishing Rhythms with Dickens's Mugby Junction'. Victorian Periodicals Review 51.1 (2018): 70-85; Samia Ounoughi. 'The Swiss Alps and Character Framing in No Thoroughfare'. Ed. Maxime Leroy. In Charles Dickens and Europe. Cambridge Scholars Publishing; 2013. pp. 114-25; Lillian Nayder. Unequal Partners: Charles Dickens, Wilkie Collins, and Victorian Authorship (Cornell University Press, 2002). Michael Hollington. '"To the Droodstone": Or, From The Moonstone to Edwin Drood via No Thoroughfare'. Q/W/E/R/T/Y: Arts, Littératures & Civilisations du Monde Anglophone 5 (1995): 141-9.  Short Story Publication Type E.g. newspaper/serial Periodical Publication The title of the newspaper/serial (if applicable) Household Words Ngram Date Hidden from users and search. All items in a collection need to have the same data in the same format in order to show up in Ngram (either YYYY, YYYYMMDD, or YYYYMMDD). No combinations will work. For journalism, letters and poetry, if there is no month or day, default to the first of the month or January. So a poem with a date of March 1843 would be 18430301. A poem published in 1856 with no month or date information would be 18560101. 18561225 Ngram Text Hidden from users and search. Copy and paste from the Scripto transcription. Then check and uncheck HTML to strip out all formatting. Finally, search and remove any   (which is the HTML for spaces). This will prevent the Ngram picking up on irrelevant HTML. I was apprenticed to the Sea when I was twelve years old, and I have encountered a great deal of rough weather, both literal and metaphorical. It has always been my opinion since I first possessed such a thing as an opinion, that the man who knows only one subject is next tiresome to the man who knows no subject. Therefore, in the course of my life I have taught myself whatever I could, and although I am not an educated man, I am able, I am thankful to say, to have an intelligent interest in most things. A person might suppose, from reading the above, that I am in the habit of holding forth about number one. That is not the case. Just as if I was to come into a room among strangers, and must either be introduced or introduce myself, so I have taken the liberty of passing these few remarks, simply and plainly that it may be known who and what I am. I will add no more of the sort than that my name is William George Ravender, that I was born at Penrith half a year after my own father was drowned, and that I am on the second day of this present blessed Christmas week of one thousand eight hundred and fifty-six, fifty-six years of age. When the rumour first went flying up and down that there was gold in California—which, as most people know, was before it was discovered in the British colony of Australia—I was in the West Indies, trading among the Islands. Being in command and likewise part-owner of a smart schooner, I had my work cut out for me, and I was doing it. Consequently, gold in California was no business of mine. But, by the time when I came home to England again, the thing was as clear as your hand held up before you at noon-day. There was Californian gold in the museums and in the goldsmiths’ shops, and the very first time I went upon ’Change, I met a friend of mine (a seafaring man like myself), with a Californian nugget hanging to his watch-chain. I handled it. It was as like a peeled walnut with bits unevenly broken off here and there, and then electrotyped all over, as ever I saw anything in my life. I am a single man (she was too good for this world and for me, and she died six weeks before our marriage-day), so when I am ashore, I live in my house at Poplar. My house at Poplar is taken care of and kept ship-shape by, an old lady who was my mother's maid before I was born. She is as handsome and as upright as any old lady in the world. She is as fond of me as if she had ever had an only son, and I was he. Well do I know wherever I sail that she never lays down her head at night without having said, “Merciful Lord! bless and preserve William George Ravender, and send him safe home, through Christ our Saviour!” I have thought of it in many a dangerous moment, when it has done me no harm, I am sure. In my house at Poplar, along with this old lady, I lived quiet for best part of a year: having had a long spell of it among the Islands, and having (which was very uncommon in me) taken the fever rather badly. At last, being strong and hearty, and having read every book I could lay hold of, right out, I was walking down Leadenhall Street in the City of London, thinking of turning-to again, when I met what I call Smithick and Watersby of Liverpool. I chanced to lift up my eyes from looking in at a ship's chronometer in a window, and I saw him bearing down upon me, head on. It is, personally, neither Smithick, nor Watersby, that I here mention, nor was I ever acquainted with any man of either of those names, nor do I think that there has been any one of either of those names in that Liverpool House for years back. But, it is in reality the House itself that I refer to; and a wiser merchant or a truer gentleman never stepped. “My dear Captain Ravender,” says he. “Of all the men on earth, I wanted to see you most. I was on my way to you.” “Well!” says I. “That looks as if you were to see me, don't it?” With that, I put my arm in his, and we walked on towards the Royal Exchange, and, when we got there, walked up and down at the back of it where the Clock-Tower is. We walked an hour and more, for he had much to say to me. He had a scheme for chartering a new ship of their own to take out cargo to the diggers and emigrants in California, and to buy and bring back gold. Into the particulars of that scheme I will not enter, and I have no right to enter. All I say of it, is, that it was a very original one, a very fine one, a very sound one, and a very lucrative one, beyond doubt. He imparted it to me as freely as if l had been a part of himself. After doing so, he made me the handsomest sharing offer that ever was made to me, boy or man—or I believe to any other captain in the Merchant Navy—and he took this round turn to finish with: “Ravender, you are well aware that the lawlessness of that coast and country at present, is as special as the circumstances in which it is placed. Crews of vessels outward-bound, desert as soon as they make the land; crews of vessels homeward-bound, ship at enormous wages, with the express intention of murdering the captain and seizing the gold freight; no man can trust another, and the devil seems let loose. Now,” says he, “you know my opinion of you, and you know I am only expressing it, and with no singularity, when I tell you that you are almost the only man on whose integrity, discretion, and energy—” &c., &c. For, I don't want to repeat what he said, though I was and am sensible of it. Notwithstanding my being, as I have mentioned, quite ready for a voyage, still I had some doubts of this voyage. Of course I knew, without being told, that there were peculiar difficulties and dangers in it, a long way over and above those which attend all voyages. It must not be supposed that I was afraid to face them; but, in my opinion a man has no manly motive or sustainment in his own breast for facing dangers, unless he has well considered what they are, and is able quietly to say to himself, “None of these perils can now take me by surprise; I shall know what to do for the best in any of them; all the rest lies in the higher and greater hands to which I humbly commit myself.” On this principle I have so attentively considered (regarding it as my duty) all the hazards I have ever been able to think of, in the ordinary way of storm, shipwreck, and fire at sea, that I hope I should be prepared to do, in any of those cases, whatever could be done, to save the lives entrusted to my charge. As I was thoughtful, my good friend proposed that he should leave me to walk there as long as I liked, and that I should dine with him by-and-by at his club in Pall Mall. I accepted the invitation, and I walked up and down there, quarter-deck fashion, a matter of a couple of hours; now and then looking up at the weathercock as I might have looked up aloft; and now and then taking a look into Cornhill, as I might have taken a look over the side. All dinner-time, and all after-dinner-time, we talked it over again. I gave him my views of his plan, and he very much approved of the same. I told him I had nearly decided, but not quite. “Well, well,” says he, “come down to Liverpool to-morrow with me, and see the Golden Mary.” I liked the name (her name was Mary, and she was golden, if golden stands for good), so I began to feel that it was almost done when I said I would go to Liverpool. On the next morning but one we were on board the Golden Mary. I might have known, from his asking me to come down and see her, what she was. I declare her to have been the completest and most exquisite Beauty that ever I set my eyes upon. We had inspected every timber in her, and had come back to the gangway to go ashore from the dock-basin, when I put out my hand to my friend. “Touch upon it,” says I, “and touch heartily. I take command of this ship, and I am hers and yours, if I can get John Steadiman for my chief mate.” John Steadiman had sailed with me four voyages. The first voyage, John was third mate out to China, and came home second. The other three voyages, he was my first officer. At this time of chartering the Golden Mary, he was aged thirty-two. A brisk, bright, blue-eyed fellow, a very neat figure and rather under the middle size, never out of the way and never in it, a face that pleased everybody and that all children took to, a habit of going about singing as cheerily as a blackbird, and a perfect sailor. We were in one of those Liverpool hackney- coaches in less than a minute, and we cruised about in her upwards of three hours, looking for John. John had come home from Van Diemen’s Land barely a month before, and I had heard of him as taking a frisk in Liverpool. We asked after him, among many other places, at the two boarding-houses he was fondest of, and we found he had had a week's spell at each of them; but, he had gone here and gone there, and had set off “to lay out on the main-to'-gallant-yard of the highest Welsh mountain” (so he had told the people of the house), and where he might be then, or when he might come back nobody could tell us. But it was surprising, to be sure, to see how every face brightened the moment there was mention made of the name of Mr. Steadiman. We were taken aback at meeting with no better luck, and we had wore ship and put her head for my friends, when, as we were jogging through the streets, I clap my eyes on John himself coming out of a toyshop! He was carrying a little boy, and conducting two uncommon pretty women to their coach, and he told me afterwards that he had never in his life seen one of the three before, but that he was so taken with them on looking in at the toy-shop while they were buying the child a cranky Noah’s Ark, very much down by the head, that he had gone in and asked the ladies’ permission to treat him to a tolerably correct Cutter there was in the window, in order that such a handsome boy might not grow up with a lubberly idea of naval architecture. We stood off and on until the ladies’ coachman began to give way, and then we hailed John. On his coming aboard of us, I told him, very gravely, what I had said to my friend. It struck him, as he said himself, amidships. He was quite shaken by it. “Captain Ravender,” were John Steadiman’s words, “such an opinion from you is true commendation, and I’ll sail round the world with you for twenty years if you hoist the signal, and stand by you for ever!” And now indeed I felt that it was done, and that the Golden Mary was afloat. Grass never grew yet under the feet of Smithick and Watersby. The riggers were out of that ship in a fortnight’s time, and we had begun taking in cargo. John was always aboard, seeing everything stowed with his own eyes; and whenever I went aboard myself, early or late, whether he was below in the hold, or on deck at the hatchway, or overhauling his cabin, nailing up pictures in it of the Blush Roses of England, the Blue Belles of Scotland, and the female Shamrock of Ireland: of a certainty I heard John singing like a blackbird. We had room for twenty passengers. Our sailing advertisement was no sooner out, than we might have taken these, twenty times over. In entering our men, I and John (both together) picked them, and we entered none but good hands—as good as were to be found in that port. And so, in a good ship of the best build, well owned, well arranged, well officered, well manned, well found in all respects, we parted with our pilot at a quarter past four o’clock in the afternoon of the seventh of March, one thousand eight hundred and fifty-one, and stood with a fair wind out to sea. It may be easily believed that up to that time I had had no leisure to be intimate with my passengers. The most of them were then in their berths sea-sick; however, in going among them, telling them what was good for them, persuading them not to be there, but to come up on deck and feel the breeze, and in rousing them with a joke, or a comfortable word, I made acquaintance with them, perhaps, in a more friendly and confidential way from the first, than I might have done at the cabin table. Of my passengers, I need only particularise, just at present, a bright-eyed, blooming young wife who was going out to join her husband in California, taking with her their only child, a little girl of three years old, whom he had never seen; a sedate young woman in black, some five years older (about thirty, as I should say), who was going out to join a brother; and an old gentleman, a good deal like a hawk if his eyes had been better and not so red, who was always talking, morning, noon, and night, about the gold discovery. But, whether he was making the voyage, thinking his old arms could dig for gold, or whether his speculation was to buy it, or, to barter for it, or to cheat for it, or to snatch it anyhow from other people, was his secret. He kept his secret. These three and the child were the soonest well. The child was a most engaging child, to be sure, and very fond of me: though I am bound to admit that John Steadiman and I were borne on her pretty little books in reverse order, and that he was captain there, and I was mate. It was beautiful to watch her with John, and it was beautiful to watch John with her. Few would have thought it possible, to see John playing at bo-peep round the mast, that he was the man who had caught up an iron bar and struck a Malay and a Maltese dead, as they were gliding with their knives down the cabin stair aboard the barque Old England, when the captain lay ill in his cot, off Saugar Point. But he was; and give him his back against a bulwark, he would have done the same by half a dozen of them. The name of the young mother was Mrs. Atherfield, the name of the young lady in black was Miss Coleshaw, and the name of the old gentleman was Mr. Rarx. As the child had a quantity of shining fair hair, clustering in curls all about her face, and as her name was Lucy, Steadiman gave her the name of the Golden Lucy. So, we had the Golden Lucy and the Golden Mary; and John kept up the idea to that extent as he and the child went playing about the decks, that I believe she used to think the ship was alive somehow—a sister or companion, going to the same place as herself. She liked to be by the wheel, and in fine weather, I have often stood by the man whose trick it was at the wheel, only to hear her, sitting near my feet, talking to the ship. Never had a child such a doll before, I suppose; but she made a doll of the Golden Mary, and used to dress her up by tying ribbons and little bits of finery to the belaying-pins; and nobody ever moved them, unless it was to save them from being blown away. Of course I took charge of the two young women, and I called them “my dear,” and they never minded, knowing that whatever I said was said in a fatherly and protecting spirit. I gave them their places on each side of me at dinner, Mrs. Atherfield on my right and Miss Coleshaw on my left; and I directed the unmarried lady to serve out the breakfast, and the married lady to serve out the tea. Likewise I said to my black steward in their presence, “Tom Snow, these two ladies are equally the mistresses of this house, and do you obey their orders equally;” at which Tom laughed, and they all laughed. Old Mr. Rarx was not a pleasant man to look at, nor yet to talk to, or to be with, for no one could help seeing that he was a sordid and selfish character, and that he had warped further and further out of the straight with time. Not but what he was on his best behaviour with us, as everybody was; for, we had no bickering among us, for’ard or aft. I only mean to say, he was not the man one would have chosen for a messmate. If choice there had been, one might even have gone a few points out of one’s course, to say, “No! Not him!” But, there was one curious inconsistency in Mr. Rarx. That was, that he took an astonishing interest in the child. He looked, and, I may add, he was, one of the last of men to care at all for a child, or to care much for any human creature. Still, he went so far as to be habitually uneasy, if the child was long on deck, out of his sight. He was always afraid of her falling overboard, or falling down a hatchway, or of a block or what not coming down upon her from the rigging in the working of the ship, or of her getting some hurt or other. He used to look at her and touch her, as if she was something precious to him. He was always solicitous about her not injuring her health, and constantly entreated her mother to be careful of it. This was so much the more curious, because the child did not like him, but used to shrink away from him, and would not even put out her hand to him without coaxing from others. I believe that every soul on board frequently noticed this, and that not one of us understood it. However, it was such a plain fact, that John Steadiman said more than once when old Mr. Rarx was not within earshot, that if the Golden Mary felt a tenderness for the dear old gentleman she carried in her lap, she must be bitterly jealous of the Golden Lucy. Before I go any further with this narrative, I will state that our ship was a barque of three hundred tons, carrying a crew of eighteen men, a second mate in addition to John, a carpenter, an armourer or smith, and two apprentices (one a Scotch boy, poor little fellow). We had three boats; the Long-boat, capable of carrying twenty-five men; the Cutter, capable of carrying fifteen; and the Surf-boat, capable of carrying ten. I put down the capacity of these boats according to the numbers they were really meant to hold. We had tastes of bad weather and headwinds, of course; but, on the whole we had as fine a run as any reasonable man could expect, for sixty days. I then began to enter two remarks in the ship’s Log and in my Journal; first, that there was an unusual and amazing quantity of ice; second, that the nights were most wonderfully dark, in spite of the ice. For five days and a half, it seemed quite useless and hopeless to alter the ship’s course so as to stand out of the way of this ice. I made what southing I could; but, all that time, we were beset by it. Mrs. Atherfield after standing by me on deck once, looking for some time in an awed manner at the great bergs that surrounded us, said in a whisper, “O! Captain Ravender, it looks as if the whole solid earth had changed into ice, and broken up!” I said to her, laughing, “I don't wonder that it does, to your inexperienced eyes, my dear.” But I had never seen a twentieth part of the quantity, and, in reality, I was pretty much of her opinion. However, at two p.m. on the afternoon of the sixth day, that is to say, when we were sixty-six days out, John Steadiman who had gone aloft, sang out from the top, that the sea was clear ahead. Before four p.m. a strong breeze springing up right astern, we were in open water at sunset. The breeze then freshening into half a gale of wind, and the Golden Mary being a very fast sailer, we went before the wind merrily, all night. I had thought it impossible that it could be darker than it had been, until the sun, moon, and stars should fall out of the Heavens, and Time should be destroyed; but, it had been next to light, in comparison with what it was now. The darkness was so profound, that looking into it was painful and oppressive—like looking, without a ray of light, into a dense black bandage put as close before the eyes as it could be, without touching them. I doubled the look-out, and John and I stood in the bow side-by-side, never leaving it all night. Yet I should no more have known that he was near me when he was silent, without putting out my arm and touching him, than I should if he had turned in and been fast asleep below. We were not so much looking out, all of us, as listening to the utmost, both with our eyes and ears. Next day, I found that the mercury in the barometer, which had risen steadily since we cleared the ice, remained steady. I had had very good observations, with now and then the interruption of a day or so, since our departure. I got the sun at noon, and found that we were in Lat. 58° S., Long. 60° W., off New South Shetland; in the neighbourhood of Cape Horn. We were sixty-seven days out, that day. The ship’s reckoning was accurately worked and made up. The ship did her duty admirably, all on board were well, and all hands were as smart, efficient, and contented, as it was possible to be. When the night came on again as dark as before, it was the eighth night I had been on deck. Nor had I taken more than a very little sleep in the day-time, my station being always near the helm, and often at it, while we were among the ice. Few but those who have tried it can imagine the difficulty and pain of only keeping the eyes open—physically open—under such circumstances, in such darkness. They get struck by the darkness, and blinded by the darkness. They make patterns in it, and they flash in it, as if they had gone out of your head to look at you. On the turn of midnight, John Steadiman, who was alert and fresh (for I had always made him turn in by day), said to me, “Captain Ravender, I entreat of you to go below. I am sure you can hardly stand, and your voice is getting weak, sir. Go below, and take a little rest. I’ll call you if a block chafes.” I said to John in answer, “Well, well, John! Let us wait till the turn of one o’clock, before we talk about that.” I had just had one of the ship’s lanterns held up, that I might see how the night went by my watch, and it was then twenty minutes after twelve. At five minutes before one, John sang out to the boy to bring the lantern again, and, when I told him once more what the time was, entreated and prayed of me to go below. “Captain Ravender,” says he, “all’s well; we can’t afford to have you laid up for a single hour; and I respectfully and earnestly beg of you to go below.” The end of it was, that I agreed to do so, on the understanding that if I failed to come up of my own accord within three hours, I was to be punctually called. Having settled that, I left John in charge. But, I called him to me once afterwards, to ask him a question. I had been to look at the barometer, and had seen the mercury still perfectly steady, and had come up the companion again, to take a last look about me—if I can use such a word in reference to such darkness—when I thought that the waves, as the Golden Mary parted them and shook them off, had a hollow sound in them; something that I fancied was a rather unusual reverberation. I was standing by the quarter-deck rail on the starboard side, when I called John aft to me, and bade him listen. He did so with the greatest attention. Turning to me he then said, “Rely upon it, Captain Ravender, you have been without rest too long, and the novelty is only in the state of your sense of hearing.” I thought so too by that time, and I think so now, though I can never know for absolute certain in this world, whether it was or not. When I left John Steadiman in charge, the ship was still going at a great rate through the water. The wind still blew right astern. Though she was making great way, she was under shortened sail, and had no more than she could easily carry. All was snug, and nothing complained. There was a pretty sea running, but not a very high sea neither, nor at all a confused one. I turned in, as we seamen say, all standing. The meaning of that, is, I did not pull my clothes off—no, not even so much as my coat: though I did my shoes, for my feet were badly swelled with the deck. There was a little swing-lamp alight in my cabin. I thought, as I looked at it before shutting my eyes, that I was so tired of darkness, and troubled by darkness, that I could have gone to sleep best in the midst of a million of flaming gas-lights. That was the last thought I had before I went off, except the prevailing thought that I should not be able to get to sleep at all. I dreamed that I was back at Penrith again, and was trying to get round the church, which had altered its shape very much since I last saw it, and was cloven all down the middle of the steeple in a most singular manner. Why I wanted to get round the church, I don't know; but, I was as anxious to do it as if my life depended on it. Indeed, I believe it did, in the dream. For all that, I could not get round the church. I was still trying, when I came against it with a violent shock, and was flung out of my cot against the ship’s side. Shrieks and a terrific outcry struck me far harder than the bruising timbers, and amidst sounds of grinding and crashing, and a heavy rushing and breaking of water—sounds I understood too well—I made my way on deck. It was not an easy thing to do, for the ship heeled over frightfully, and was beating in a furious manner. I could not see the men as I went forward, but I could hear that they were hauling in sail, in disorder. I had my trumpet in my hand, and, after directing and encouraging them in this till it was done, I hailed first John Steadiman, and then my second mate, Mr. William Rames. Both answered clearly and steadily. Now, I had practised them and all my crew, as I have ever made it a custom to practise all who sail with me, to take certain stations, and wait my orders, in case of any unexpected crisis. When my voice was heard hailing, and their voices were heard answering, I was aware, through all the noises of the ship and sea, and all the crying of the passengers below, that there was a pause. “Are you ready, Rames?”— “Aye, aye, sir!”—“Then light up, for God’s sake!” In a moment he and another were burning blue-lights, and the ship and all on board seemed to be enclosed in a mist of light, under a great black dome. The light shone up so high that I could see the huge Iceberg upon which we had struck, cloven at the top and down the middle, exactly like Penrith Church in my dream. At the same moment I could see the watch last relieved, crowding up and down on deck; I could see Mrs. Atherfield and Miss Coleshaw thrown about on the top of the companion as they struggled to bring the child up from below; I could see that the masts were going with the shock and the beating of the ship; I could see the frightful breach stove in on the starboard side, half the length of the vessel, and the sheathing and timbers spirting up; I could see that the Cutter was disabled, in a wreck of broken fragments; and I could see every eye turned upon me. It is my belief that if there had been ten thousand eyes there, I should have seen them all, with their different looks. And all this in a moment. But you must consider what a moment. I saw the men, as they looked at me, fall towards their appointed stations, like good men and true. If she had not righted, they could have done very little there or anywhere but die—not that it is little for a man to die at his post—I mean they could have done nothing to save the passengers and themselves. Happily, however, the violence of the shock with which we had so determinedly borne down direct on that fatal Iceberg, as if it had been our destination instead of our destruction, had so smashed and pounded the ship that she got off in this same instant, and righted. I did not want the carpenter to tell me she was filling and going down; I could see and hear that. I gave Rames the word to lower the Long-boat and the Surf-boat, and I myself told off the men for each duty. Not one hung back, or came before the other. I now whispered to John Steadiman, “John, I stand at the gangway here, to see every soul on board safe over the side. You shall have the next post of honor, and shall be the last but one to leave the ship. Bring up the passengers, and range them behind me; and put what provision and water you can get at, in the boats. Cast your eye for’ard, John, and you’ll see you have not a moment to lose.” My noble fellows got the boats over the side, as orderly as I ever saw boats lowered with any sea running, and, when they were launched, two or three of the nearest men in them as they held on, rising and falling with the swell, called out, looking up at me, “Captain Ravender, if anything goes wrong with us and you are saved, remember we stood by you!”—“We’ll all stand by one another ashore, yet, please God, my lads!” says I. “Hold on bravely, and be tender with the women.” The women were an example to us. They trembled very much, but they were quiet and perfectly collected. “Kiss me, Captain Ravender,” says Mrs. Atherfield, “and God in Heaven bless you, you good man!” “My dear,” says I, “those words are better for me than a life-boat.” I held her child in my arms till she was in the boat, and then kissed the child and handed her safe down. I now said to the people in her, “You have got your freight, my lads, all but me, and I am not coming yet awhile. Pull away from the ship, and keep off!” That was the Long-boat. Old Mr. Rarx was one of her complement, and he was the only passenger who had greatly misbehaved since the ship struck. Others had been a little wild, which was not to be wondered at, and not very blameable; but, he had made a lamentation and uproar which it was dangerous for the people to hear, as there is always contagion in weakness and selfishness. His incessant cry had been that he must not be separated from the child, that he couldn’t see the child, and that he and the child must go together. He had even tried to wrest the child out of my arms, that he might keep her in his. “Mr. Rarx,” said I to him when it came to that, “I have a loaded pistol in my pocket; and if you don't stand out of the gangway, and keep perfectly quiet, I shall shoot you through the heart, if you have got one.” Says he, “You won’t do murder, Captain Ravender?” “No, sir,” says I, “I won’t murder forty-four people to humour you, but I’ll shoot you to save them.” After that, he was quiet, and stood shivering a little way off, until I named him to go over the side. The Long-boat being cast off, the Surf-boat was soon filled. There only remained aboard the Golden Mary, John Mullion the man who had kept on burning the blue-lights (and who had lighted every new one at every old one before it went out, as quietly as if he had been at an illumination); John Steadiman; and myself. I hurried those two into the Surf-boat, called to them to keep off, and waited with a grateful and relieved heart for the Long-boat to come and take me in, if she could. I looked at my watch, and it showed me, by the blue-light, ten minutes past two. They lost no time. As soon as she was near enough, I swung myself in to her, and called to the men, “With a will, lads! She’s reeling!” We were not an inch too far out of the inner vortex of her going down, when, by the blue-light which John Mullion still burnt in the bow of the Surf-boat, we saw her lurch, and plunge to the bottom head- foremost. The child cried, weeping wildly, “O the dear Golden Mary! O look at her! Save her! Save the poor Golden Mary!” And then the light burnt out, and the black dome seemed to come down upon us. I suppose if we had all stood a-top of a mountain, and seen the whole remainder of the world sink away from under us, we could hardly have felt more shocked and solitary than we did when we knew we were alone on the wide ocean, and that the beautiful ship in which most of us had been securely asleep within half an hour was gone for ever. There was an awful silence in our boat, and such a kind of palsy on the rowers and the man at the rudder, that I felt they were scarcely keeping her before the sea. I spoke out then, and said, “Let every one here thank the Lord for our preservation!” All the voices answered (even the child’s), “We thank the Lord!” I then said the Lord’s Prayer, and all hands said it after me with a solemn murmuring. Then I gave the word “Cheerily, O men, Cherrily!” and I felt that they were handling the boat again as a boat ought to be handled. The Surf-boat now burnt another blue-light to show us where they were, and we made for her, and laid ourselves as nearly alongside of her as we dared. I had always kept my boats with a coil or two of good stout stuff in each of them, so both boats had a rope at hand. We made a shift, with much labor and trouble, to get near enough to one another to divide the blue-lights (they were no use after that night, for the sea-water soon got at them), and to get a tow-rope out between us. All night long we kept together, sometimes obliged to cast off the rope, and sometimes getting it out again, and all of us wearying for the morning—which appeared so long in coming that old Mr. Rarx screamed out, in spite of his fears of me, “The world is drawing to an end, and the sun will never rise any more!” When the day broke, I found that we were all huddled together in a miserable manner. We were deep in the water; being, as I found on mustering, thirty-one in number, or at least six too many. In the Surf-boat they were fourteen in number, being at least four too many. The first thing I did, was to get myself passed to the rudder—which I took from that time—and to get Mrs. Atherfield, her child, and Miss Coleshaw, passed on to sit next me. As to old Mr. Rarx, I put him in the bow, as far from us as I could. And I put some of the best men near us, in order that if I should drop, there might be a skilful hand ready to take the helm. The sea moderating as the sun came up, though the sky was cloudy and wild, we spoke the other boat, to know what stores they had, and to overhaul what we had. I had a compass in my pocket, a small telescope, a double-barrelled pistol, a knife, and a fire-box and matches. Most of my men had knives, and some had a little tobacco: some, a pipe as well. We had a mug among us, and an iron-spoon. As to provisions, there were in my boat two bags of biscuit, one piece of raw beef, one piece of raw pork, a bag of coffee, roasted but not ground (thrown in, I imagine, by mistake, for something else), two small casks of water, and about half-a-gallon of rum in a keg. The Surf-boat, having rather more rum than we, and fewer to drink it, gave us, as I estimated, another quart into our keg. In return, we gave them three double-handfuls of coffee, tied up in a piece of a handkerchief; they reported that they had aboard besides, a bag of biscuit, a piece of beef, a small cask of water, a small box of lemons, and a Dutch cheese. It took a long time to make these exchanges, and they were not made without risk to both parties; the sea running quite high enough to make our approaching near to one another very hazardous. In the bundle with the coffee, I conveyed to John Steadiman (who had a ship’s compass with him), a paper written in pencil, and torn from my pocket-book, containing the course I meant to steer, in the hope of making land, or being picked up by some vessel—I say in the hope, though I had little hope of either deliverance. I then sang out to him, so as all might hear, that if we two boats could live or die together, we would; but, that if we should be parted by the weather, and join company no more, they should have our prayers and blessings, and we asked for theirs. We then gave them three cheers, which they returned, and I saw the men’s heads droop in both boats as they fell to their oars again. These arrangements had occupied the general attention advantageously for all, though (as I expressed in the last sentence) they ended in a sorrowful feeling. I now said a few words to my fellow-voyagers on the subject of the small stock of food on which our lives depended if they were preserved from the great deep, and on the rigid necessity of our eking it out in the most frugal manner. One and all replied that whatever allowance I thought best to lay down should be strictly kept to. We made a pair of scales out of a thin scrap of iron-plating and some twine, and I got together for weights such of the heaviest buttons among us as I calculated made up some fraction over two ounces. This was the allowance of solid food served out once a-day to each, from that time to the end; with the addition of a coffee-berry, or sometimes half a one, when the weather was very fair, for breakfast. We had nothing else whatever, but half a pint of water each per day, and sometimes, when we were coldest and weakest, a teaspoonful of rum each, served out as a dram. I know how learnedly it can be shown that rum is poison, but I also know that in this case, as in all similar cases I have ever read of—which are numerous—no words can express the comfort and support derived from it. Nor have I the least doubt that it saved the lives of far more than half our number. Having mentioned half a pint of water as our daily allowance, I ought to observe that sometimes we had less, and sometimes we had more; for, much rain fell, and we caught it in a canvas stretched for the purpose. Thus, at that tempestuous time of the year, and in that tempestuous part of the world, we shipwrecked people rose and fell with the waves. It is not my intention to relate (if I can avoid it), such circumstances appertaining to our doleful condition as have been better told in many other narratives of the kind than I can be expected to tell them. I will only note, in so many passing words, that day after day and night after night, we received the sea upon our backs to prevent it from swamping the boat; that one party was always kept baling, and that every hat and cap among us soon got worn out, though patched up fifty times, as the only vessels we had for that service; that another party lay down in the bottom of the boat, while a third rowed; and that we were soon all in boils and blisters and rags. The other boat was a source of such anxious interest to all of us that I used to wonder whether, if we were saved, the time could ever come when the survivors in this boat of ours could be at all indifferent to the fortunes of the survivors in that. We got out a tow-rope whenever the weather permitted, but that did not often happen, and how we two parties kept within the same horizon, as we did, He, who mercifully permitted it to be so for our consolation, only knows. I never shall forget the looks with which, when the morning light came, we used to gaze about us over the stormy waters, for the other boat. We once parted company for seventy-two hours, and we believed them to have gone down, as they did us. The joy on both sides when we came within view of one another again, had something in a manner Divine in it; each was so forgetful of individual suffering, in tears of delight and sympathy for the people in the other boat. I have been wanting to get round to the individual or personal part of my subject, as I call it, and the foregoing incident puts me in the right way. The patience and good disposition aboard of us, was wonderful. I was not surprised by it in the women; for, all men born of women know what great qualities they will show when men will fail; but, I own I was a little surprised by it in some of the men. Among one-and-thirty people assembled at the best of times, there will usually, I should say, be two or three uncertain tempers. I knew that I had more than one rough temper with me among my own people, for I had chosen those for the Long-boat that I might have them under my eye. But, they softened under their misery, and were as considerate of the ladies, and as compassionate of the child, as the best among us, or among men they could not have been more so. I heard scarcely any complaining. The party lying down would moan a good deal in their sleep, and I would often notice a man—not always the same man, it is to be understood, but nearly all of them at one time or other—sitting moaning at his oar, or in his place, as he looked mistily over the sea. When it happened to be long before I could catch his eye, he would go on moaning all the time in the dismallest manner; but, when our looks met, he would brighten and leave off. I almost always got the impression that he did not know what sound he had been making, but that he thought he had been humming a tune. Our sufferings from cold and wet were far greater than our sufferings from hunger. We managed to keep the child warm; but, I doubt if any one else among us ever was warm for five minutes together; and the shivering, and the chattering of teeth, were sad to hear. The child cried a little at first for her lost playfellow, The Golden Mary; but hardly ever whimpered afterwards; and when the state of the weather made it possible, she used now and then to be held up in the arms of some of us, to look over the sea for John Steadiman’s boat. I see the golden hair and the innocent face now, between me and the driving clouds, like an Angel going to fly away. It had happened on the second day, towards night, that Mrs. Atherfield, in getting Little Lucy to sleep, sang her a song. She had a soft, melodious voice, and, when she had finished it, our people up and begged for. another. She sang them another, and after it had fallen dark ended with the Evening Hymn. From that time, whenever anything could be heard above the sea and wind, and while she had any voice left, nothing would serve the people but that she should sing at sunset. She always did, and always ended with the Evening Hymn. We mostly took up the last line, and shed tears when it was done, but not miserably. We had a prayer night and morning, also, when the weather allowed of it. Twelve nights and eleven days we had been driving in the boat, when old Mr. Rarx began to be delirious, and to cry out to me to throw the gold overboard or it would sink us, and we should all be lost. For days past the child had been declining, and that was the great cause of his wildness. He had been over and over again shrieking out to me to give her all the remaining meat, to give her all the remaining rum, to save her at any cost, or we should all be ruined. At this time, she lay in her mother’s arms at my feet. One of her little hands was almost always creeping about her mother's neck or chin. I had watched the wasting of the little hand, and I knew it was nearly over. The old man’s cries were so discordant with the mother’s love and submission, that I called out to him in an angry voice, unless he held his peace on the instant, I would order him to be knocked on the head and thrown overboard. He was mute then, until the child died, very peacefully, an hour afterwards: which was known to all in the boat by the mother’s breaking out into lamentations for the first time since the wreck—for, she had great fortitude and constancy, though she was a little gentle woman. Old Mr. Rarx then became quite ungovernable, tearing what rags he had on him, raging in imprecations, and calling to me that if I had thrown the gold overboard (always the gold with him!) I might have saved the child, “And now,” says he, in a terrible voice, “we shall founder, and all go to the Devil, for our sins will sink us, when we have no innocent child to bear us up!” We so discovered with amazement, that this old wretch had only cared for the life of the pretty little creature dear to all of us, because of the influence he superstitiously hoped she might have in preserving him! Altogether it was too much for the smith or armourer, who was sitting next the old man, to bear. He took him by the throat and rolled him under the thwarts, where he lay still enough for hours afterwards. All that thirteenth night, Miss Coleshaw, lying across my knees as I kept the helm, comforted and supported the poor mother. Her child, covered with a pea-jacket of mine, lay in her lap. It troubled me all night to think that there was no Prayer-Book among us, and that I could remember but very few of the exact words of the burial service. When I stood up at broad day, all knew what was going to be done, and I noticed that my poor fellows made the motion of uncovering their heads, though their heads had been stark bare to the sky and sea for many a weary hour. There was a long heavy swell on, but otherwise it was a fair morning, and there were broad fields of sunlight on the waves in the east. I said no more than this. “I am the Resurrection and the Life, saith the Lord. He raised the daughter of Jairus the ruler, and said she was not dead but slept. He raised the widow’s son. He arose himself, and was seen of many. He loved little children, saying Suffer them to come unto me and rebuke them not, for of such is the kingdom of Heaven. In His name, my friends, and committed to His merciful goodness!” With those words I laid my rough face softly on the placid little forehead, and buried the Golden Lucy in the grave of the Golden Mary. Having had it on my mind to relate the end of this dear little child, I have omitted something from its exact place, which I will supply here. It will come quite as well here as anywhere else. Foreseeing that if the boat lived through the stormy weather, the time must come, and soon come, when we should have absolutely no morsel to eat, I had one momentous point often in my thoughts. Although I had, years before that, fully satisfied myself that the instances in which human beings in the last distress have fed upon each other, are exceedingly few, and have very seldom indeed (if ever) occurred when the people in distress, however dreadful their extremity, have been accustomed to moderate forbearance and restraint—I say, though I had, long before, quite satisfied my mind on this topic, I felt doubtful whether there might not have been in former cases some harm and danger from keeping it out of sight and pretending not to think of it. I felt doubtful whether some. minds, growing weak with fasting and exposure, and having such a terrific idea to dwell upon in secret, might not magnify it until it got to have an awful attraction about it. This was not a new thought of mine, for it had grown out of my reading. However, it came over me stronger than it had ever done before—as it had reason for doing—in the boat, and on the fourth day I decided that I would bring out into the light that unformed fear which must have been more or less darkly in every brain among us. Therefore, as a means of beguiling the time and inspiring hope, I gave them the best summary in my power of Bligh’s voyage of more than three thousand miles, in an open boat, after the Mutiny of the Bounty, and of the wonderful preservation of that boat’s crew. They listened throughout with great interest, and I concluded by telling them, that, in my opinion, the happiest circumstance in the whole narrative was, that Bligh, who was no delicate man either, had solemnly placed it on record therein that he was sure and certain that under no conceivable circumstances whatever, would that emaciated party who had gone through all the pains of famine, have preyed on one another. I cannot describe the visible relief which this spread through the boat, and how the tears stood in every eye. From that time I was as well convinced as Bligh himself that there was no danger, and that this phantom, at any rate, did not haunt us. Now, it was a part of Bligh’s experience that when the people in his boat were most cast down, nothing did them so much good as hearing a story told by one of their number. When I mentioned that, I saw that it struck the general attention as much as it did my own, for I had not thought of it until I came to it in my summary. This was on the day after Mrs. Atherfield first sang to us. I proposed that whenever the weather would permit, we should have a story two hours after dinner (I always issued the allowance I have mentioned, at one o’clock and called it by that name), as well as our song at sunset. The proposal was received with a cheerful satisfaction that warmed my heart within me; and I do not say too much when I say that those two periods in the four-and-twenty hours were expected with positive pleasure, and were really enjoyed, by all hands. Spectres as we soon were in our bodily wasting, our imaginations did not perish like the gross flesh upon our bones. Music and Adventure, two of the great gifts of Providence to mankind, could charm us long after that was lost. The wind was almost always against us after the second day; and for many days together we could not nearly hold our own. We had all varieties of bad weather. We had rain, hail, snow, wind, mist, thunder and lightning. Still the boats lived through the heavy seas, and still we perishing people rose and fell with the great waves. Sixteen nights and fifteen days, twenty nights and nineteen days, twenty-four nights and twenty-three days. So the time went on. Disheartening as I knew that our progress, or want of progress, must be, I never deceived them as to my calculations of it. In the first place, I felt that we were all too near eternity for deceit; in the second place, I knew that if I failed, or died, the man who followed me must have a knowledge of the true state of things to begin upon. When I told them at noon, what I reckoned we had made or lost, they generally received what I said, in a tranquil and resigned manner, and always gratefully towards me. It was not unusual at any time of the day for some one to burst out weeping loudly without any new cause, and, when the burst was over, to calm down a little better than before. I had seen exactly the same thing in a house of mourning. During the whole of this time, old Mr. Rarx had had his fits of calling out to me to throw the gold (always the gold!) overboard, and of heaping violent reproaches upon me for not having saved the child; but, now, the food being all gone, and I having nothing left to serve out but a bit of coffee-berry now and then, he began to be too weak to do this, and consequently fell silent. Mrs. Atherneld and Miss Coleshaw generally lay, each with an arm across one of my knees, and her head upon it. They never complained at all. Up to the time of her child’s death, Mrs. Atherfield had bound up her own beautiful hair every day; and I took particular notice that this was always before she sang her song at night, when every one looked at her. But, she never did it after the loss of her darling; and it would have been now all tangled with dirt and wet, but that Miss Coleshaw was careful of it long after she was herself, and would sometimes smooth it down with her weak thin hands. We were past mustering a story now; but, one day, at about this period, I reverted to the superstition of old Mr. Rarx, concerning the Golden Lucy, and told them that nothing vanished from the eye of God, though much might pass away from the eyes of men. “We were all of us,” says I, “children once; and our baby feet have strolled in green woods ashore; and our baby hands have gathered flowers in gardens, where the birds were singing. The children that we were, are not lost to the great knowledge of our Creator. Those innocent creatures will appear with us before Him, and plead for us. What we were in the best time of our generous youth will arise and go with us too. The purest part of our lives will not desert us at the pass to which all of us here present are gliding. What we were then, will be as much in existence before Him, as what we are now.” They were no less comforted by this consideration, than I was myself; and Miss Coleshaw, drawing my ear nearer to her lips, said, “Captain Ravender, I was on my way to marry a disgraced and broken man, whom I dearly loved when he was honorable and good. Your words seem to have come out of my own poor heart.” She pressed my hand upon it, smiling. Twenty-seven nights and twenty-six days. We were in no want of rain-water, but we had nothing else. And yet, even now, I never turned my eyes upon a waking face but it tried to brighten before mine. O! what a thing it is, in a time of danger, and in the presence of death, the shining of a face upon a face! I have heard it broached that orders should be given in great new ships by electric telegraph. I admire machinery as much as any man, and am as thankful to it as any man can be for what it does for us. But, it will never be a substitute for the face of a man, with his soul in it, encouraging another man to be brave and true. Never try it for that. It will break down like a straw. I now began to remark certain changes in myself which I did not like. They caused me much disquiet. I often saw the Golden Lucy in the air above the boat. I often saw her I have spoken of before, sitting beside me. I saw the Golden Mary go down as she really had gone down, twenty times in a day. And yet the sea was mostly, to my thinking, not sea neither, but moving country and extraordinary mountainous regions, the like of which have never been beheld. I felt it time to leave my last words regarding John Steadiman, in case any lips should last out to repeat them to any living ears. I said that John had told me (as he had on deck) that he had sung out “Breakers ahead!” the instant they were audible, and had tried to wear ship, but she struck before it could be done. (His cry, I dare say, had made my dream.) I said that the circumstances were altogether without warning and out of any course that could have been guarded against; that the same loss would have happened if I had been in charge; and that John was not to blame, but from first to last had done his duty nobly, like the man he was. I tried to write it down in my pocket-book, but could make no words, though I knew what the words were that I wanted to make. When it had come to that, her hands—though she was dead so long—laid me down gently in the bottom of the boat, and she and the Golden Lucy swung me to sleep. Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource The Wreck of the 'Golden Mary' (1856 Christmas Number) Description An account of the resource Published in Household Words, Vol. XIV, Extra Christmas Number, 25 December 1856, pp. 1-30. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Dickens, Charles Source A related resource from which the described resource is derived Dickens Journals Online, <a href="https://www.djo.org.uk/household-words/volume-xiv/page-573.html">https://www.djo.org.uk/household-words/volume-xiv/page-573.html</a>. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1856-12-25 Type The nature or genre of the resource Christmas Number Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context 1856-12-25-The_Wreck_of_the_Golden_Mary Bibliographic Citation A bibliographic reference for the resource. Recommended practice is to include sufficient bibliographic detail to identify the resource as unambiguously as possible. Dickens, Charles et. al. The Wreck of the Golden Mary (25 December 1856). Dickens Search. Eds. Emily Middleton and Lydia Craig. Accessed [date]. <a href="https://www.dickenssearch.com/christmas-numbers/1856-12-25-The_Wreck_of_the_Golden_Mary">https://www.dickenssearch.com/christmas-numbers/1856-12-25-The_Wreck_of_the_Golden_Mary</a>. Table Of Contents A list of subunits of the resource. <ul> <li>Charles Dickens. 'The Wreck' (No.1), pp. 1-10. <ul> <li>Wilkie Collins. 'All that follows was written by John Steadiman, Chief Mate' (No.1), pp. 11-13.</li> </ul> </li> <li>Percy Fitzgerald. 'The Beguilement in the Boats' (No.2), pp. 13-18. <ul> <li>Harriet Parr. 'Poor Dick's Story', pp. 18-21.</li> <li>Percy Fitzgerald. 'The Supercargo's Story', pp. 21-25.</li> <li>Adelaide Anne Procter. 'The Old Sailor's Story', pp. 25-27.</li> <li>Rev. James White. 'The Scotch Boy's Story', pp. 27-29.</li> </ul> </li> <li>Wilkie Collins. 'The Deliverance' (No.3), pp. 30-36.</li> </ul> Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Scanned material from Dickens Journals Online, <a href="http://www.djo.org.uk" id="LPNoLPOWALinkPreview" contenteditable="false" title="http://www.djo.org.uk">www.djo.org.uk</a>. Available under CC BY licence. Scripto Transcription A written representation of a document. I was apprenticed to the Sea when I was twelve years old, and I have encountered a great deal of rough weather, both literal and metaphorical. It has always been my opinion since I first possessed such a thing as an opinion, that the man who knows only one subject is next tiresome to the man who knows no subject. Therefore, in the course of my life I have taught myself whatever I could, and although I am not an educated man, I am able, I am thankful to say, to have an intelligent interest in most things. A person might suppose, from reading the above, that I am in the habit of holding forth about number one. That is not the case. Just as if I was to come into a room among strangers, and must either be introduced or introduce myself, so I have taken the liberty of passing these few remarks, simply and plainly that it may be known who and what I am. I will add no more of the sort than that my name is William George Ravender, that I was born at Penrith half a year after my own father was drowned, and that I am on the second day of this present blessed Christmas week of one thousand eight hundred and fifty-six, fifty-six years of age. When the rumour first went flying up and down that there was gold in California—which, as most people know, was before it was discovered in the British colony of Australia—I was in the West Indies, trading among the Islands. Being in command and likewise part-owner of a smart schooner, I had my work cut out for me, and I was doing it. Consequently, gold in California was no business of mine. But, by the time when I came home to England again, the thing was as clear as your hand held up before you at noon-day. There was Californian gold in the museums and in the goldsmiths’ shops, and the very first time I went upon ’Change, I met a friend of mine (a seafaring man like myself), with a Californian nugget hanging to his watch-chain. I handled it. It was as like a peeled walnut with bits unevenly broken off here and there, and then electrotyped all over, as ever I saw anything in my life. I am a single man (she was too good for this world and for me, and she died six weeks before our marriage-day), so when I am ashore, I live in my house at Poplar. My house at Poplar is taken care of and kept ship-shape by, an old lady who was my mother's maid before I was born. She is as handsome and as upright as any old lady in the world. She is as fond of me as if she had ever had an only son, and I was he. Well do I know wherever I sail that she never lays down her head at night without having said, “Merciful Lord! bless and preserve William George Ravender, and send him safe home, through Christ our Saviour!” I have thought of it in many a dangerous moment, when it has done me no harm, I am sure. In my house at Poplar, along with this old lady, I lived quiet for best part of a year: having had a long spell of it among the Islands, and having (which was very uncommon in me) taken the fever rather badly. At last, being strong and hearty, and having read every book I could lay hold of, right out, I was walking down Leadenhall Street in the City of London, thinking of turning-to again, when I met what I call Smithick and Watersby of Liverpool. I chanced to lift up my eyes from looking in at a ship's chronometer in a window, and I saw him bearing down upon me, head on. It is, personally, neither Smithick, nor Watersby, that I here mention, nor was I ever acquainted with any man of either of those names, nor do I think that there has been any one of either of those names in that Liverpool House for years back. But, it is in reality the House itself that I refer to; and a wiser merchant or a truer gentleman never stepped. “My dear Captain Ravender,” says he. “Of all the men on earth, I wanted to see you most. I was on my way to you.” “Well!” says I. “That looks as if you were to see me, don't it?” With that, I put my arm in his, and we walked on towards the Royal Exchange, and, when we got there, walked up and down at the back of it where the Clock-Tower is. We walked an hour and more, for he had much to say to me. He had a scheme for chartering a new ship of their own to take out cargo to the diggers and emigrants in California, and to buy and bring back gold. Into the particulars of that scheme I will not enter, and I have no right to enter. All I say of it, is, that it was a very original one, a very fine one, a very sound one, and a very lucrative one, beyond doubt. He imparted it to me as freely as if l had been a part of himself. After doing so, he made me the handsomest sharing offer that ever was made to me, boy or man—or I believe to any other captain in the Merchant Navy—and he took this round turn to finish with: “Ravender, you are well aware that the lawlessness of that coast and country at present, is as special as the circumstances in which it is placed. Crews of vessels outward-bound, desert as soon as they make the land; crews of vessels homeward-bound, ship at enormous wages, with the express intention of murdering the captain and seizing the gold freight; no man can trust another, and the devil seems let loose. Now,” says he, “you know my opinion of you, and you know I am only expressing it, and with no singularity, when I tell you that you are almost the only man on whose integrity, discretion, and energy—” &c., &c. For, I don't want to repeat what he said, though I was and am sensible of it. Notwithstanding my being, as I have mentioned, quite ready for a voyage, still I had some doubts of this voyage. Of course I knew, without being told, that there were peculiar difficulties and dangers in it, a long way over and above those which attend all voyages. It must not be supposed that I was afraid to face them; but, in my opinion a man has no manly motive or sustainment in his own breast for facing dangers, unless he has well considered what they are, and is able quietly to say to himself, “None of these perils can now take me by surprise; I shall know what to do for the best in any of them; all the rest lies in the higher and greater hands to which I humbly commit myself.” On this principle I have so attentively considered (regarding it as my duty) all the hazards I have ever been able to think of, in the ordinary way of storm, shipwreck, and fire at sea, that I hope I should be prepared to do, in any of those cases, whatever could be done, to save the lives entrusted to my charge. As I was thoughtful, my good friend proposed that he should leave me to walk there as long as I liked, and that I should dine with him by-and-by at his club in Pall Mall. I accepted the invitation, and I walked up and down there, quarter-deck fashion, a matter of a couple of hours; now and then looking up at the weathercock as I might have looked up aloft; and now and then taking a look into Cornhill, as I might have taken a look over the side. All dinner-time, and all after-dinner-time, we talked it over again. I gave him my views of his plan, and he very much approved of the same. I told him I had nearly decided, but not quite. “Well, well,” says he, “come down to Liverpool to-morrow with me, and see the Golden Mary.” I liked the name (her name was Mary, and she was golden, if golden stands for good), so I began to feel that it was almost done when I said I would go to Liverpool. On the next morning but one we were on board the Golden Mary. I might have known, from his asking me to come down and see her, what she was. I declare her to have been the completest and most exquisite Beauty that ever I set my eyes upon. We had inspected every timber in her, and had come back to the gangway to go ashore from the dock-basin, when I put out my hand to my friend. “Touch upon it,” says I, “and touch heartily. I take command of this ship, and I am hers and yours, if I can get John Steadiman for my chief mate.” John Steadiman had sailed with me four voyages. The first voyage, John was third mate out to China, and came home second. The other three voyages, he was my first officer. At this time of chartering the Golden Mary, he was aged thirty-two. A brisk, bright, blue-eyed fellow, a very neat figure and rather under the middle size, never out of the way and never in it, a face that pleased everybody and that all children took to, a habit of going about singing as cheerily as a blackbird, and a perfect sailor. We were in one of those Liverpool hackney- coaches in less than a minute, and we cruised about in her upwards of three hours, looking for John. John had come home from Van Diemen’s Land barely a month before, and I had heard of him as taking a frisk in Liverpool. We asked after him, among many other places, at the two boarding-houses he was fondest of, and we found he had had a week's spell at each of them; but, he had gone here and gone there, and had set off “to lay out on the main-to'-gallant-yard of the highest Welsh mountain” (so he had told the people of the house), and where he might be then, or when he might come back nobody could tell us. But it was surprising, to be sure, to see how every face brightened the moment there was mention made of the name of Mr. Steadiman. We were taken aback at meeting with no better luck, and we had wore ship and put her head for my friends, when, as we were jogging through the streets, I clap my eyes on John himself coming out of a toyshop! He was carrying a little boy, and conducting two uncommon pretty women to their coach, and he told me afterwards that he had never in his life seen one of the three before, but that he was so taken with them on looking in at the toy-shop while they were buying the child a cranky Noah’s Ark, very much down by the head, that he had gone in and asked the ladies’ permission to treat him to a tolerably correct Cutter there was in the window, in order that such a handsome boy might not grow up with a lubberly idea of naval architecture. We stood off and on until the ladies’ coachman began to give way, and then we hailed John. On his coming aboard of us, I told him, very gravely, what I had said to my friend. It struck him, as he said himself, amidships. He was quite shaken by it. “Captain Ravender,” were John Steadiman’s words, “such an opinion from you is true commendation, and I’ll sail round the world with you for twenty years if you hoist the signal, and stand by you for ever!” And now indeed I felt that it was done, and that the Golden Mary was afloat. Grass never grew yet under the feet of Smithick and Watersby. The riggers were out of that ship in a fortnight’s time, and we had begun taking in cargo. John was always aboard, seeing everything stowed with his own eyes; and whenever I went aboard myself, early or late, whether he was below in the hold, or on deck at the hatchway, or overhauling his cabin, nailing up pictures in it of the Blush Roses of England, the Blue Belles of Scotland, and the female Shamrock of Ireland: of a certainty I heard John singing like a blackbird. We had room for twenty passengers. Our sailing advertisement was no sooner out, than we might have taken these, twenty times over. In entering our men, I and John (both together) picked them, and we entered none but good hands—as good as were to be found in that port. And so, in a good ship of the best build, well owned, well arranged, well officered, well manned, well found in all respects, we parted with our pilot at a quarter past four o’clock in the afternoon of the seventh of March, one thousand eight hundred and fifty-one, and stood with a fair wind out to sea. It may be easily believed that up to that time I had had no leisure to be intimate with my passengers. The most of them were then in their berths sea-sick; however, in going among them, telling them what was good for them, persuading them not to be there, but to come up on deck and feel the breeze, and in rousing them with a joke, or a comfortable word, I made acquaintance with them, perhaps, in a more friendly and confidential way from the first, than I might have done at the cabin table. Of my passengers, I need only particularise, just at present, a bright-eyed, blooming young wife who was going out to join her husband in California, taking with her their only child, a little girl of three years old, whom he had never seen; a sedate young woman in black, some five years older (about thirty, as I should say), who was going out to join a brother; and an old gentleman, a good deal like a hawk if his eyes had been better and not so red, who was always talking, morning, noon, and night, about the gold discovery. But, whether he was making the voyage, thinking his old arms could dig for gold, or whether his speculation was to buy it, or, to barter for it, or to cheat for it, or to snatch it anyhow from other people, was his secret. He kept his secret. These three and the child were the soonest well. The child was a most engaging child, to be sure, and very fond of me: though I am bound to admit that John Steadiman and I were borne on her pretty little books in reverse order, and that he was captain there, and I was mate. It was beautiful to watch her with John, and it was beautiful to watch John with her. Few would have thought it possible, to see John playing at bo-peep round the mast, that he was the man who had caught up an iron bar and struck a Malay and a Maltese dead, as they were gliding with their knives down the cabin stair aboard the barque Old England, when the captain lay ill in his cot, off Saugar Point. But he was; and give him his back against a bulwark, he would have done the same by half a dozen of them. The name of the young mother was Mrs. Atherfield, the name of the young lady in black was Miss Coleshaw, and the name of the old gentleman was Mr. Rarx. As the child had a quantity of shining fair hair, clustering in curls all about her face, and as her name was Lucy, Steadiman gave her the name of the Golden Lucy. So, we had the Golden Lucy and the Golden Mary; and John kept up the idea to that extent as he and the child went playing about the decks, that I believe she used to think the ship was alive somehow—a sister or companion, going to the same place as herself. She liked to be by the wheel, and in fine weather, I have often stood by the man whose trick it was at the wheel, only to hear her, sitting near my feet, talking to the ship. Never had a child such a doll before, I suppose; but she made a doll of the Golden Mary, and used to dress her up by tying ribbons and little bits of finery to the belaying-pins; and nobody ever moved them, unless it was to save them from being blown away. Of course I took charge of the two young women, and I called them “my dear,” and they never minded, knowing that whatever I said was said in a fatherly and protecting spirit. I gave them their places on each side of me at dinner, Mrs. Atherfield on my right and Miss Coleshaw on my left; and I directed the unmarried lady to serve out the breakfast, and the married lady to serve out the tea. Likewise I said to my black steward in their presence, “Tom Snow, these two ladies are equally the mistresses of this house, and do you obey their orders equally;” at which Tom laughed, and they all laughed. Old Mr. Rarx was not a pleasant man to look at, nor yet to talk to, or to be with, for no one could help seeing that he was a sordid and selfish character, and that he had warped further and further out of the straight with time. Not but what he was on his best behaviour with us, as everybody was; for, we had no bickering among us, for’ard or aft. I only mean to say, he was not the man one would have chosen for a messmate. If choice there had been, one might even have gone a few points out of one’s course, to say, “No! Not him!” But, there was one curious inconsistency in Mr. Rarx. That was, that he took an astonishing interest in the child. He looked, and, I may add, he was, one of the last of men to care at all for a child, or to care much for any human creature. Still, he went so far as to be habitually uneasy, if the child was long on deck, out of his sight. He was always afraid of her falling overboard, or falling down a hatchway, or of a block or what not coming down upon her from the rigging in the working of the ship, or of her getting some hurt or other. He used to look at her and touch her, as if she was something precious to him. He was always solicitous about her not injuring her health, and constantly entreated her mother to be careful of it. This was so much the more curious, because the child did not like him, but used to shrink away from him, and would not even put out her hand to him without coaxing from others. I believe that every soul on board frequently noticed this, and that not one of us understood it. However, it was such a plain fact, that John Steadiman said more than once when old Mr. Rarx was not within earshot, that if the Golden Mary felt a tenderness for the dear old gentleman she carried in her lap, she must be bitterly jealous of the Golden Lucy. Before I go any further with this narrative, I will state that our ship was a barque of three hundred tons, carrying a crew of eighteen men, a second mate in addition to John, a carpenter, an armourer or smith, and two apprentices (one a Scotch boy, poor little fellow). We had three boats; the Long-boat, capable of carrying twenty-five men; the Cutter, capable of carrying fifteen; and the Surf-boat, capable of carrying ten. I put down the capacity of these boats according to the numbers they were really meant to hold. We had tastes of bad weather and headwinds, of course; but, on the whole we had as fine a run as any reasonable man could expect, for sixty days. I then began to enter two remarks in the ship’s Log and in my Journal; first, that there was an unusual and amazing quantity of ice; second, that the nights were most wonderfully dark, in spite of the ice. For five days and a half, it seemed quite useless and hopeless to alter the ship’s course so as to stand out of the way of this ice. I made what southing I could; but, all that time, we were beset by it. Mrs. Atherfield after standing by me on deck once, looking for some time in an awed manner at the great bergs that surrounded us, said in a whisper, “O! Captain Ravender, it looks as if the whole solid earth had changed into ice, and broken up!” I said to her, laughing, “I don't wonder that it does, to your inexperienced eyes, my dear.” But I had never seen a twentieth part of the quantity, and, in reality, I was pretty much of her opinion. However, at two p.m. on the afternoon of the sixth day, that is to say, when we were sixty-six days out, John Steadiman who had gone aloft, sang out from the top, that the sea was clear ahead. Before four p.m. a strong breeze springing up right astern, we were in open water at sunset. The breeze then freshening into half a gale of wind, and the Golden Mary being a very fast sailer, we went before the wind merrily, all night. I had thought it impossible that it could be darker than it had been, until the sun, moon, and stars should fall out of the Heavens, and Time should be destroyed; but, it had been next to light, in comparison with what it was now. The darkness was so profound, that looking into it was painful and oppressive—like looking, without a ray of light, into a dense black bandage put as close before the eyes as it could be, without touching them. I doubled the look-out, and John and I stood in the bow side-by-side, never leaving it all night. Yet I should no more have known that he was near me when he was silent, without putting out my arm and touching him, than I should if he had turned in and been fast asleep below. We were not so much looking out, all of us, as listening to the utmost, both with our eyes and ears. Next day, I found that the mercury in the barometer, which had risen steadily since we cleared the ice, remained steady. I had had very good observations, with now and then the interruption of a day or so, since our departure. I got the sun at noon, and found that we were in Lat. 58° S., Long. 60° W., off New South Shetland; in the neighbourhood of Cape Horn. We were sixty-seven days out, that day. The ship’s reckoning was accurately worked and made up. The ship did her duty admirably, all on board were well, and all hands were as smart, efficient, and contented, as it was possible to be. When the night came on again as dark as before, it was the eighth night I had been on deck. Nor had I taken more than a very little sleep in the day-time, my station being always near the helm, and often at it, while we were among the ice. Few but those who have tried it can imagine the difficulty and pain of only keeping the eyes open—physically open—under such circumstances, in such darkness. They get struck by the darkness, and blinded by the darkness. They make patterns in it, and they flash in it, as if they had gone out of your head to look at you. On the turn of midnight, John Steadiman, who was alert and fresh (for I had always made him turn in by day), said to me, “Captain Ravender, I entreat of you to go below. I am sure you can hardly stand, and your voice is getting weak, sir. Go below, and take a little rest. I’ll call you if a block chafes.” I said to John in answer, “Well, well, John! Let us wait till the turn of one o’clock, before we talk about that.” I had just had one of the ship’s lanterns held up, that I might see how the night went by my watch, and it was then twenty minutes after twelve. At five minutes before one, John sang out to the boy to bring the lantern again, and, when I told him once more what the time was, entreated and prayed of me to go below. “Captain Ravender,” says he, “all’s well; we can’t afford to have you laid up for a single hour; and I respectfully and earnestly beg of you to go below.” The end of it was, that I agreed to do so, on the understanding that if I failed to come up of my own accord within three hours, I was to be punctually called. Having settled that, I left John in charge. But, I called him to me once afterwards, to ask him a question. I had been to look at the barometer, and had seen the mercury still perfectly steady, and had come up the companion again, to take a last look about me—if I can use such a word in reference to such darkness—when I thought that the waves, as the Golden Mary parted them and shook them off, had a hollow sound in them; something that I fancied was a rather unusual reverberation. I was standing by the quarter-deck rail on the starboard side, when I called John aft to me, and bade him listen. He did so with the greatest attention. Turning to me he then said, “Rely upon it, Captain Ravender, you have been without rest too long, and the novelty is only in the state of your sense of hearing.” I thought so too by that time, and I think so now, though I can never know for absolute certain in this world, whether it was or not. When I left John Steadiman in charge, the ship was still going at a great rate through the water. The wind still blew right astern. Though she was making great way, she was under shortened sail, and had no more than she could easily carry. All was snug, and nothing complained. There was a pretty sea running, but not a very high sea neither, nor at all a confused one. I turned in, as we seamen say, all standing. The meaning of that, is, I did not pull my clothes off—no, not even so much as my coat: though I did my shoes, for my feet were badly swelled with the deck. There was a little swing-lamp alight in my cabin. I thought, as I looked at it before shutting my eyes, that I was so tired of darkness, and troubled by darkness, that I could have gone to sleep best in the midst of a million of flaming gas-lights. That was the last thought I had before I went off, except the prevailing thought that I should not be able to get to sleep at all. I dreamed that I was back at Penrith again, and was trying to get round the church, which had altered its shape very much since I last saw it, and was cloven all down the middle of the steeple in a most singular manner. Why I wanted to get round the church, I don't know; but, I was as anxious to do it as if my life depended on it. Indeed, I believe it did, in the dream. For all that, I could not get round the church. I was still trying, when I came against it with a violent shock, and was flung out of my cot against the ship’s side. Shrieks and a terrific outcry struck me far harder than the bruising timbers, and amidst sounds of grinding and crashing, and a heavy rushing and breaking of water—sounds I understood too well—I made my way on deck. It was not an easy thing to do, for the ship heeled over frightfully, and was beating in a furious manner. I could not see the men as I went forward, but I could hear that they were hauling in sail, in disorder. I had my trumpet in my hand, and, after directing and encouraging them in this till it was done, I hailed first John Steadiman, and then my second mate, Mr. William Rames. Both answered clearly and steadily. Now, I had practised them and all my crew, as I have ever made it a custom to practise all who sail with me, to take certain stations, and wait my orders, in case of any unexpected crisis. When my voice was heard hailing, and their voices were heard answering, I was aware, through all the noises of the ship and sea, and all the crying of the passengers below, that there was a pause. “Are you ready, Rames?”— “Aye, aye, sir!”—“Then light up, for God’s sake!” In a moment he and another were burning blue-lights, and the ship and all on board seemed to be enclosed in a mist of light, under a great black dome. The light shone up so high that I could see the huge Iceberg upon which we had struck, cloven at the top and down the middle, exactly like Penrith Church in my dream. At the same moment I could see the watch last relieved, crowding up and down on deck; I could see Mrs. Atherfield and Miss Coleshaw thrown about on the top of the companion as they struggled to bring the child up from below; I could see that the masts were going with the shock and the beating of the ship; I could see the frightful breach stove in on the starboard side, half the length of the vessel, and the sheathing and timbers spirting up; I could see that the Cutter was disabled, in a wreck of broken fragments; and I could see every eye turned upon me. It is my belief that if there had been ten thousand eyes there, I should have seen them all, with their different looks. And all this in a moment. But you must consider what a moment. I saw the men, as they looked at me, fall towards their appointed stations, like good men and true. If she had not righted, they could have done very little there or anywhere but die—not that it is little for a man to die at his post—I mean they could have done nothing to save the passengers and themselves. Happily, however, the violence of the shock with which we had so determinedly borne down direct on that fatal Iceberg, as if it had been our destination instead of our destruction, had so smashed and pounded the ship that she got off in this same instant, and righted. I did not want the carpenter to tell me she was filling and going down; I could see and hear that. I gave Rames the word to lower the Long-boat and the Surf-boat, and I myself told off the men for each duty. Not one hung back, or came before the other. I now whispered to John Steadiman, “John, I stand at the gangway here, to see every soul on board safe over the side. You shall have the next post of honor, and shall be the last but one to leave the ship. Bring up the passengers, and range them behind me; and put what provision and water you can get at, in the boats. Cast your eye for’ard, John, and you’ll see you have not a moment to lose.” My noble fellows got the boats over the side, as orderly as I ever saw boats lowered with any sea running, and, when they were launched, two or three of the nearest men in them as they held on, rising and falling with the swell, called out, looking up at me, “Captain Ravender, if anything goes wrong with us and you are saved, remember we stood by you!”—“We’ll all stand by one another ashore, yet, please God, my lads!” says I. “Hold on bravely, and be tender with the women.” The women were an example to us. They trembled very much, but they were quiet and perfectly collected. “Kiss me, Captain Ravender,” says Mrs. Atherfield, “and God in Heaven bless you, you good man!” “My dear,” says I, “those words are better for me than a life-boat.” I held her child in my arms till she was in the boat, and then kissed the child and handed her safe down. I now said to the people in her, “You have got your freight, my lads, all but me, and I am not coming yet awhile. Pull away from the ship, and keep off!” That was the Long-boat. Old Mr. Rarx was one of her complement, and he was the only passenger who had greatly misbehaved since the ship struck. Others had been a little wild, which was not to be wondered at, and not very blameable; but, he had made a lamentation and uproar which it was dangerous for the people to hear, as there is always contagion in weakness and selfishness. His incessant cry had been that he must not be separated from the child, that he couldn’t see the child, and that he and the child must go together. He had even tried to wrest the child out of my arms, that he might keep her in his. “Mr. Rarx,” said I to him when it came to that, “I have a loaded pistol in my pocket; and if you don't stand out of the gangway, and keep perfectly quiet, I shall shoot you through the heart, if you have got one.” Says he, “You won’t do murder, Captain Ravender?” “No, sir,” says I, “I won’t murder forty-four people to humour you, but I’ll shoot you to save them.” After that, he was quiet, and stood shivering a little way off, until I named him to go over the side. The Long-boat being cast off, the Surf-boat was soon filled. There only remained aboard the Golden Mary, John Mullion the man who had kept on burning the blue-lights (and who had lighted every new one at every old one before it went out, as quietly as if he had been at an illumination); John Steadiman; and myself. I hurried those two into the Surf-boat, called to them to keep off, and waited with a grateful and relieved heart for the Long-boat to come and take me in, if she could. I looked at my watch, and it showed me, by the blue-light, ten minutes past two. They lost no time. As soon as she was near enough, I swung myself in to her, and called to the men, “With a will, lads! She’s reeling!” We were not an inch too far out of the inner vortex of her going down, when, by the blue-light which John Mullion still burnt in the bow of the Surf-boat, we saw her lurch, and plunge to the bottom head- foremost. The child cried, weeping wildly, “O the dear Golden Mary! O look at her! Save her! Save the poor Golden Mary!” And then the light burnt out, and the black dome seemed to come down upon us. I suppose if we had all stood a-top of a mountain, and seen the whole remainder of the world sink away from under us, we could hardly have felt more shocked and solitary than we did when we knew we were alone on the wide ocean, and that the beautiful ship in which most of us had been securely asleep within half an hour was gone for ever. There was an awful silence in our boat, and such a kind of palsy on the rowers and the man at the rudder, that I felt they were scarcely keeping her before the sea. I spoke out then, and said, “Let every one here thank the Lord for our preservation!” All the voices answered (even the child’s), “We thank the Lord!” I then said the Lord’s Prayer, and all hands said it after me with a solemn murmuring. Then I gave the word “Cheerily, O men, Cherrily!” and I felt that they were handling the boat again as a boat ought to be handled. The Surf-boat now burnt another blue-light to show us where they were, and we made for her, and laid ourselves as nearly alongside of her as we dared. I had always kept my boats with a coil or two of good stout stuff in each of them, so both boats had a rope at hand. We made a shift, with much labor and trouble, to get near enough to one another to divide the blue-lights (they were no use after that night, for the sea-water soon got at them), and to get a tow-rope out between us. All night long we kept together, sometimes obliged to cast off the rope, and sometimes getting it out again, and all of us wearying for the morning—which appeared so long in coming that old Mr. Rarx screamed out, in spite of his fears of me, “The world is drawing to an end, and the sun will never rise any more!” When the day broke, I found that we were all huddled together in a miserable manner. We were deep in the water; being, as I found on mustering, thirty-one in number, or at least six too many. In the Surf-boat they were fourteen in number, being at least four too many. The first thing I did, was to get myself passed to the rudder—which I took from that time—and to get Mrs. Atherfield, her child, and Miss Coleshaw, passed on to sit next me. As to old Mr. Rarx, I put him in the bow, as far from us as I could. And I put some of the best men near us, in order that if I should drop, there might be a skilful hand ready to take the helm. The sea moderating as the sun came up, though the sky was cloudy and wild, we spoke the other boat, to know what stores they had, and to overhaul what we had. I had a compass in my pocket, a small telescope, a double-barrelled pistol, a knife, and a fire-box and matches. Most of my men had knives, and some had a little tobacco: some, a pipe as well. We had a mug among us, and an iron-spoon. As to provisions, there were in my boat two bags of biscuit, one piece of raw beef, one piece of raw pork, a bag of coffee, roasted but not ground (thrown in, I imagine, by mistake, for something else), two small casks of water, and about half-a-gallon of rum in a keg. The Surf-boat, having rather more rum than we, and fewer to drink it, gave us, as I estimated, another quart into our keg. In return, we gave them three double-handfuls of coffee, tied up in a piece of a handkerchief; they reported that they had aboard besides, a bag of biscuit, a piece of beef, a small cask of water, a small box of lemons, and a Dutch cheese. It took a long time to make these exchanges, and they were not made without risk to both parties; the sea running quite high enough to make our approaching near to one another very hazardous. In the bundle with the coffee, I conveyed to John Steadiman (who had a ship’s compass with him), a paper written in pencil, and torn from my pocket-book, containing the course I meant to steer, in the hope of making land, or being picked up by some vessel—I say in the hope, though I had little hope of either deliverance. I then sang out to him, so as all might hear, that if we two boats could live or die together, we would; but, that if we should be parted by the weather, and join company no more, they should have our prayers and blessings, and we asked for theirs. We then gave them three cheers, which they returned, and I saw the men’s heads droop in both boats as they fell to their oars again. These arrangements had occupied the general attention advantageously for all, though (as I expressed in the last sentence) they ended in a sorrowful feeling. I now said a few words to my fellow-voyagers on the subject of the small stock of food on which our lives depended if they were preserved from the great deep, and on the rigid necessity of our eking it out in the most frugal manner. One and all replied that whatever allowance I thought best to lay down should be strictly kept to. We made a pair of scales out of a thin scrap of iron-plating and some twine, and I got together for weights such of the heaviest buttons among us as I calculated made up some fraction over two ounces. This was the allowance of solid food served out once a-day to each, from that time to the end; with the addition of a coffee-berry, or sometimes half a one, when the weather was very fair, for breakfast. We had nothing else whatever, but half a pint of water each per day, and sometimes, when we were coldest and weakest, a teaspoonful of rum each, served out as a dram. I know how learnedly it can be shown that rum is poison, but I also know that in this case, as in all similar cases I have ever read of—which are numerous—no words can express the comfort and support derived from it. Nor have I the least doubt that it saved the lives of far more than half our number. Having mentioned half a pint of water as our daily allowance, I ought to observe that sometimes we had less, and sometimes we had more; for, much rain fell, and we caught it in a canvas stretched for the purpose. Thus, at that tempestuous time of the year, and in that tempestuous part of the world, we shipwrecked people rose and fell with the waves. It is not my intention to relate (if I can avoid it), such circumstances appertaining to our doleful condition as have been better told in many other narratives of the kind than I can be expected to tell them. I will only note, in so many passing words, that day after day and night after night, we received the sea upon our backs to prevent it from swamping the boat; that one party was always kept baling, and that every hat and cap among us soon got worn out, though patched up fifty times, as the only vessels we had for that service; that another party lay down in the bottom of the boat, while a third rowed; and that we were soon all in boils and blisters and rags. The other boat was a source of such anxious interest to all of us that I used to wonder whether, if we were saved, the time could ever come when the survivors in this boat of ours could be at all indifferent to the fortunes of the survivors in that. We got out a tow-rope whenever the weather permitted, but that did not often happen, and how we two parties kept within the same horizon, as we did, He, who mercifully permitted it to be so for our consolation, only knows. I never shall forget the looks with which, when the morning light came, we used to gaze about us over the stormy waters, for the other boat. We once parted company for seventy-two hours, and we believed them to have gone down, as they did us. The joy on both sides when we came within view of one another again, had something in a manner Divine in it; each was so forgetful of individual suffering, in tears of delight and sympathy for the people in the other boat. I have been wanting to get round to the individual or personal part of my subject, as I call it, and the foregoing incident puts me in the right way. The patience and good disposition aboard of us, was wonderful. I was not surprised by it in the women; for, all men born of women know what great qualities they will show when men will fail; but, I own I was a little surprised by it in some of the men. Among one-and-thirty people assembled at the best of times, there will usually, I should say, be two or three uncertain tempers. I knew that I had more than one rough temper with me among my own people, for I had chosen those for the Long-boat that I might have them under my eye. But, they softened under their misery, and were as considerate of the ladies, and as compassionate of the child, as the best among us, or among men they could not have been more so. I heard scarcely any complaining. The party lying down would moan a good deal in their sleep, and I would often notice a man—not always the same man, it is to be understood, but nearly all of them at one time or other—sitting moaning at his oar, or in his place, as he looked mistily over the sea. When it happened to be long before I could catch his eye, he would go on moaning all the time in the dismallest manner; but, when our looks met, he would brighten and leave off. I almost always got the impression that he did not know what sound he had been making, but that he thought he had been humming a tune. Our sufferings from cold and wet were far greater than our sufferings from hunger. We managed to keep the child warm; but, I doubt if any one else among us ever was warm for five minutes together; and the shivering, and the chattering of teeth, were sad to hear. The child cried a little at first for her lost playfellow, The Golden Mary; but hardly ever whimpered afterwards; and when the state of the weather made it possible, she used now and then to be held up in the arms of some of us, to look over the sea for John Steadiman’s boat. I see the golden hair and the innocent face now, between me and the driving clouds, like an Angel going to fly away. It had happened on the second day, towards night, that Mrs. Atherfield, in getting Little Lucy to sleep, sang her a song. She had a soft, melodious voice, and, when she had finished it, our people up and begged for. another. She sang them another, and after it had fallen dark ended with the Evening Hymn. From that time, whenever anything could be heard above the sea and wind, and while she had any voice left, nothing would serve the people but that she should sing at sunset. She always did, and always ended with the Evening Hymn. We mostly took up the last line, and shed tears when it was done, but not miserably. We had a prayer night and morning, also, when the weather allowed of it. Twelve nights and eleven days we had been driving in the boat, when old Mr. Rarx began to be delirious, and to cry out to me to throw the gold overboard or it would sink us, and we should all be lost. For days past the child had been declining, and that was the great cause of his wildness. He had been over and over again shrieking out to me to give her all the remaining meat, to give her all the remaining rum, to save her at any cost, or we should all be ruined. At this time, she lay in her mother’s arms at my feet. One of her little hands was almost always creeping about her mother's neck or chin. I had watched the wasting of the little hand, and I knew it was nearly over. The old man’s cries were so discordant with the mother’s love and submission, that I called out to him in an angry voice, unless he held his peace on the instant, I would order him to be knocked on the head and thrown overboard. He was mute then, until the child died, very peacefully, an hour afterwards: which was known to all in the boat by the mother’s breaking out into lamentations for the first time since the wreck—for, she had great fortitude and constancy, though she was a little gentle woman. Old Mr. Rarx then became quite ungovernable, tearing what rags he had on him, raging in imprecations, and calling to me that if I had thrown the gold overboard (always the gold with him!) I might have saved the child, “And now,” says he, in a terrible voice, “we shall founder, and all go to the Devil, for our sins will sink us, when we have no innocent child to bear us up!” We so discovered with amazement, that this old wretch had only cared for the life of the pretty little creature dear to all of us, because of the influence he superstitiously hoped she might have in preserving him! Altogether it was too much for the smith or armourer, who was sitting next the old man, to bear. He took him by the throat and rolled him under the thwarts, where he lay still enough for hours afterwards. All that thirteenth night, Miss Coleshaw, lying across my knees as I kept the helm, comforted and supported the poor mother. Her child, covered with a pea-jacket of mine, lay in her lap. It troubled me all night to think that there was no Prayer-Book among us, and that I could remember but very few of the exact words of the burial service. When I stood up at broad day, all knew what was going to be done, and I noticed that my poor fellows made the motion of uncovering their heads, though their heads had been stark bare to the sky and sea for many a weary hour. There was a long heavy swell on, but otherwise it was a fair morning, and there were broad fields of sunlight on the waves in the east. I said no more than this. “I am the Resurrection and the Life, saith the Lord. He raised the daughter of Jairus the ruler, and said she was not dead but slept. He raised the widow’s son. He arose himself, and was seen of many. He loved little children, saying Suffer them to come unto me and rebuke them not, for of such is the kingdom of Heaven. In His name, my friends, and committed to His merciful goodness!” With those words I laid my rough face softly on the placid little forehead, and buried the Golden Lucy in the grave of the Golden Mary. Having had it on my mind to relate the end of this dear little child, I have omitted something from its exact place, which I will supply here. It will come quite as well here as anywhere else. Foreseeing that if the boat lived through the stormy weather, the time must come, and soon come, when we should have absolutely no morsel to eat, I had one momentous point often in my thoughts. Although I had, years before that, fully satisfied myself that the instances in which human beings in the last distress have fed upon each other, are exceedingly few, and have very seldom indeed (if ever) occurred when the people in distress, however dreadful their extremity, have been accustomed to moderate forbearance and restraint—I say, though I had, long before, quite satisfied my mind on this topic, I felt doubtful whether there might not have been in former cases some harm and danger from keeping it out of sight and pretending not to think of it. I felt doubtful whether some. minds, growing weak with fasting and exposure, and having such a terrific idea to dwell upon in secret, might not magnify it until it got to have an awful attraction about it. This was not a new thought of mine, for it had grown out of my reading. However, it came over me stronger than it had ever done before—as it had reason for doing—in the boat, and on the fourth day I decided that I would bring out into the light that unformed fear which must have been more or less darkly in every brain among us. Therefore, as a means of beguiling the time and inspiring hope, I gave them the best summary in my power of Bligh’s voyage of more than three thousand miles, in an open boat, after the Mutiny of the Bounty, and of the wonderful preservation of that boat’s crew. They listened throughout with great interest, and I concluded by telling them, that, in my opinion, the happiest circumstance in the whole narrative was, that Bligh, who was no delicate man either, had solemnly placed it on record therein that he was sure and certain that under no conceivable circumstances whatever, would that emaciated party who had gone through all the pains of famine, have preyed on one another. I cannot describe the visible relief which this spread through the boat, and how the tears stood in every eye. From that time I was as well convinced as Bligh himself that there was no danger, and that this phantom, at any rate, did not haunt us. Now, it was a part of Bligh’s experience that when the people in his boat were most cast down, nothing did them so much good as hearing a story told by one of their number. When I mentioned that, I saw that it struck the general attention as much as it did my own, for I had not thought of it until I came to it in my summary. This was on the day after Mrs. Atherfield first sang to us. I proposed that whenever the weather would permit, we should have a story two hours after dinner (I always issued the allowance I have mentioned, at one o’clock and called it by that name), as well as our song at sunset. The proposal was received with a cheerful satisfaction that warmed my heart within me; and I do not say too much when I say that those two periods in the four-and-twenty hours were expected with positive pleasure, and were really enjoyed, by all hands. Spectres as we soon were in our bodily wasting, our imaginations did not perish like the gross flesh upon our bones. Music and Adventure, two of the great gifts of Providence to mankind, could charm us long after that was lost. The wind was almost always against us after the second day; and for many days together we could not nearly hold our own. We had all varieties of bad weather. We had rain, hail, snow, wind, mist, thunder and lightning. Still the boats lived through the heavy seas, and still we perishing people rose and fell with the great waves. Sixteen nights and fifteen days, twenty nights and nineteen days, twenty-four nights and twenty-three days. So the time went on. Disheartening as I knew that our progress, or want of progress, must be, I never deceived them as to my calculations of it. In the first place, I felt that we were all too near eternity for deceit; in the second place, I knew that if I failed, or died, the man who followed me must have a knowledge of the true state of things to begin upon. When I told them at noon, what I reckoned we had made or lost, they generally received what I said, in a tranquil and resigned manner, and always gratefully towards me. It was not unusual at any time of the day for some one to burst out weeping loudly without any new cause, and, when the burst was over, to calm down a little better than before. I had seen exactly the same thing in a house of mourning. During the whole of this time, old Mr. Rarx had had his fits of calling out to me to throw the gold (always the gold!) overboard, and of heaping violent reproaches upon me for not having saved the child; but, now, the food being all gone, and I having nothing left to serve out but a bit of coffee-berry now and then, he began to be too weak to do this, and consequently fell silent. Mrs. Atherneld and Miss Coleshaw generally lay, each with an arm across one of my knees, and her head upon it. They never complained at all. Up to the time of her child’s death, Mrs. Atherfield had bound up her own beautiful hair every day; and I took particular notice that this was always before she sang her song at night, when every one looked at her. But, she never did it after the loss of her darling; and it would have been now all tangled with dirt and wet, but that Miss Coleshaw was careful of it long after she was herself, and would sometimes smooth it down with her weak thin hands. We were past mustering a story now; but, one day, at about this period, I reverted to the superstition of old Mr. Rarx, concerning the Golden Lucy, and told them that nothing vanished from the eye of God, though much might pass away from the eyes of men. “We were all of us,” says I, “children once; and our baby feet have strolled in green woods ashore; and our baby hands have gathered flowers in gardens, where the birds were singing. The children that we were, are not lost to the great knowledge of our Creator. Those innocent creatures will appear with us before Him, and plead for us. What we were in the best time of our generous youth will arise and go with us too. The purest part of our lives will not desert us at the pass to which all of us here present are gliding. What we were then, will be as much in existence before Him, as what we are now.” They were no less comforted by this consideration, than I was myself; and Miss Coleshaw, drawing my ear nearer to her lips, said, “Captain Ravender, I was on my way to marry a disgraced and broken man, whom I dearly loved when he was honorable and good. Your words seem to have come out of my own poor heart.” She pressed my hand upon it, smiling. Twenty-seven nights and twenty-six days. We were in no want of rain-water, but we had nothing else. And yet, even now, I never turned my eyes upon a waking face but it tried to brighten before mine. O! what a thing it is, in a time of danger, and in the presence of death, the shining of a face upon a face! I have heard it broached that orders should be given in great new ships by electric telegraph. I admire machinery as much as any man, and am as thankful to it as any man can be for what it does for us. But, it will never be a substitute for the face of a man, with his soul in it, encouraging another man to be brave and true. Never try it for that. It will break down like a straw. I now began to remark certain changes in myself which I did not like. They caused me much disquiet. I often saw the Golden Lucy in the air above the boat. I often saw her I have spoken of before, sitting beside me. I saw the Golden Mary go down as she really had gone down, twenty times in a day. And yet the sea was mostly, to my thinking, not sea neither, but moving country and extraordinary mountainous regions, the like of which have never been beheld. I felt it time to leave my last words regarding John Steadiman, in case any lips should last out to repeat them to any living ears. I said that John had told me (as he had on deck) that he had sung out “Breakers ahead!” the instant they were audible, and had tried to wear ship, but she struck before it could be done. (His cry, I dare say, had made my dream.) I said that the circumstances were altogether without warning and out of any course that could have been guarded against; that the same loss would have happened if I had been in charge; and that John was not to blame, but from first to last had done his duty nobly, like the man he was. I tried to write it down in my pocket-book, but could make no words, though I knew what the words were that I wanted to make. When it had come to that, her hands—though she was dead so long—laid me down gently in the bottom of the boat, and she and the Golden Lucy swung me to sleep. Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Speeches Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context speeches Description An account of the resource <h4>This collection brings together Dickens’s collected and uncollected speeches, making an under-explored body of work searchable for the first time. </h4> Dickens made more than a hundred speeches between 1837 and 1870 at events ranging from charitable dinners and award ceremonies to banquets in his honour or brief words of thanks before a public reading. In these speeches, the author touched on topics including his own life and professional development as well as other subjects such as politics, education, literature, public health and the development of the railway. Efforts to collect Dickens’s speeches prior to 1960 were incomplete at best, and misleading and fragmentary at worst. John Camden Hotten’s collection of speeches, begun without the author’s consent (although he never responded to Hotten’s letters, Dickens did begin efforts to block their publication) and published together with a hastily-compiled biography shortly after the author’s death, remained the primary collected version of the speeches until the Nonesuch Dickens of 1938-39 (a limited print run). Finally, K. J. Fielding brought all known speeches together in 1960, correcting shoddy transcriptions by Hotten using contemporary newspaper accounts, and nearly doubling the total number of speeches attributed to Dickens (The Speeches of Charles Dickens [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1960]): Hotten had only featured the text of 56 speeches, the Nonesuch edition of the speeches provided an additional nine, and Fielding presented more than a hundred. Since this monumental work, a handful have also appeared in The Dickensian;<a href="#fn1" id="ref1">1</a> there are certainly more to be found, as the volume of digitised newspapers and periodicals increases, and corrections to be made to existing transcriptions. No effort to collect the speeches has been made since Fielding; this collection thus represents the most complete body of Dickens's speeches ever assembled. Dickens did not write his speeches beforehand, nor did he speak from notes. George Dolby recounted his imaginative process in 1884: <blockquote>[S]upposing the speech was to be delivered in the evening, his habit was to take a long walk in the morning, during which he would decide on the various heads to be dealt with. These being arranged in their proper order, he would in his 'mind's eye,' liken the whole subject to the tire of a cart wheel – he being the hub. From the hub to the tire he would run as many spokes as there were subjects to be treated, and during the progress of the speech he would deal with each spoke separately, elaborating them as he went round the wheel; and when all the spokes dropped out one by one, and nothing but the tire and space remained […] his speech was at an end. (Charles Dickens as I Knew Him: The Story of the Reading Tours in Great Britain and America, pp. 273-74)</blockquote> However, on important occasions, Dickens might personally correct transcriptions of speeches for major London newspapers like The Times. As such, these newspaper accounts are as accurate a source as we can hope to have for what Dickens said (or meant to say). Our Transcription field will only include words attributed directly to Dickens rather than third-person reports or paraphrases of his speeches. Where only such reports exist, we will provide the text in the 'Summary' field. Ngram search and other text analysis tools will be applied to what are given as Dickens's words only, to avoid skewing the results, but of course we are reliant on the quality of the reporting: we recommend analysing topics, themes, quotations and concepts rather than granular detail such as prepositions, punctuation, capitalisation and the intricacies of grammar, as different newspaper accounts can vary on these points. Please <a href="https://dickenssearch.com/contact">contact us</a> with any errors, corrections, suggestions, or to contribute other uncollected speeches by Dickens. 1. These are Philip Collins, 'Some Uncollected Speeches by Dickens', The Dickensian 73.382 (1977): pp. 89-99; David A. Roos, 'Dickens at the Royal Academy of Arts: A New Speech and Two Eulogies', The Dickensian 73.382 (1977): pp. 100-107; and William F. Long, 'Dickens and the Coming of Rail to Deal: An Uncollected Speech and its Context', The Dickensian 85.418 (1989): pp. 66-80. <a href="#ref1" title="Jump back to footnote 1 in the text.">↩</a> Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Emily Middleton; Ellie-Louise Crampton; Maisie Howard; Adam Woods Speech Summary Occasionally speeches are summarised in sources in third person. Include that here, so that everything in the text transcription is only Dickens's words. As, he said, he should not speak seven minutes, he hoped he should not incur the sacred wrath of the gentlemen in the middle of the room who were so impatient of any waste of time when those opposed to the Committee spoke, but who did not feel the slightest annoyance however long the speeches of the honourable gentlemen at the table might be. He, however, wished it to be distinctly understood that if he were going to speak seven hours instead of seven minutes, although he did not represent Literature in the attitude in which it was there most favourably received – namely, in the person of a suppliant certified by two householders – he should most strenuously though respectfully maintain his claim to be heard in this place above all others; for, in whatever manner it was treated elsewhere, there, at all events, every other consideration should yield to its dignity.  As to the denial of Mr. Bell as to the analogy to be drawn between the Literary Fund and the Artists’ Benevolent Fund, he at once took issue with him; he was very well acquainted with both funds, and protested that he knew of no difference between them, and of no reason whatever why this society should not be managed as cheaply as the other. With reference to the claims of Mr. Blewitt, and Mr. Dilke’s frequent acknowledgement of those claims, he impressed upon the meeting that there had been no change in the sentiments of his friend. All that they wanted was, that this society should avail themselves of the valuable services of Mr. Blewitt, in a wider and more efficient manner; and they had declared again and again that nothing would delight them more than to double or even treble Mr. Blewitt’s salary, on the society’s extending his sphere of operations. He passed over the somewhat lengthy case of Mr. Haydn, which, he submitted, with all due deference, had nothing whatever to do with the present discussion, and would endeavour to bring the attention of the meeting to the point at issue. The question as to the existence or not of the House fund, was not a question of 1821, but of last year; because, on the second Wednesday of last March, they – the conspiring reformers – were put down by the solemn assertion that there was a House fund of some £6,400. The subscription for that fund was a complete failure. He took it upon himself to say that it did not exceed £600. And the way in which this imaginary sum was got at was as follows: – the Prince Regent allowed two hundred guineas a year to pay the rent of the house inhabited by the society, paid yearly or half-yearly; but the sums paid for the rent had been put down as an accumulated fund, precisely as if they had it in hand at the present moment, – so the extraordinary statement made last year as to the existence of this sum, never had any real foundation. If statements were so rashly made in that expensive little room he thought it would not be long before the society itself would fall into disrepute.  He would, with their permission, give a short illustration of the mode in which this question had been dealt with. Let him suppose the case of a clerk in the receipt of one hundred pounds a year, paid half-yearly, and every farthing of which was anticipated before he received it. His having received that income twenty years, would not make him the possessor of £2,000. But he would carry the case further. Let them suppose a family picture representing an estimable old gentleman bestowing the hand of his only daughter upon the man of her heart, and saying to them, while tears of generosity coursed down his cheeks, My darling Emma, my dear Edward! take my blessing upon you each; and with my blessing accept my twenty years’ receipts of my rent at £200 a year, which your filial affection will at once enable you to perceive are equal to £4,000 Consols, in perpetuity.’ Or let them, without any derogation of dignity, just fancy themselves for a moment upon an Old Bailey jury, – would they, or would they not decide that such a representation was a false one? His assertion was, most distinctly, that they (the reform party) were put out of court last year on an utterly false pretence; and that part of the resolution, at all events, every gentleman in the room was bound to consider before he decided.   Location The location London Venue Where the speech was given Royal Literary Fund Ngram Date Hidden from users and search. All items in a collection need to have the same data in the same format in order to show up in Ngram (either YYYY, YYYYMMDD, or YYYYMMDD). No combinations will work. For journalism, letters and poetry, if there is no month or day, default to the first of the month or January. So a poem with a date of March 1843 would be 18430301. A poem published in 1856 with no month or date information would be 18560101. 18570311 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Royal Literary Fund Annual General Meeting 1857 Description An account of the resource Speech at the Royal Literary Fund Annual General Meeting (11 March 1857). Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Dickens, Charles Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1857-03-11 Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context 1857-03-11_Speech_Royal-Literary-Fund-Annual-General-Meeting Bibliographic Citation A bibliographic reference for the resource. Recommended practice is to include sufficient bibliographic detail to identify the resource as unambiguously as possible. Dickens, Charles. 'Speech at the Royal Literary Fund Annual General Meeting' (11 March 1857). Dickens Search. Eds. Emily Middleton and Lydia Craig. Accessed [date]. <a href="https://dickenssearch.com/speeches/1857-03-11_Speech_Royal-Literary-Fund-Annual-General-Meeting">https://dickenssearch.com/speeches/1857-03-11_Speech_Royal-Literary-Fund-Annual-General-Meeting</a>. Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Speeches Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context speeches Description An account of the resource <h4>This collection brings together Dickens’s collected and uncollected speeches, making an under-explored body of work searchable for the first time. </h4> Dickens made more than a hundred speeches between 1837 and 1870 at events ranging from charitable dinners and award ceremonies to banquets in his honour or brief words of thanks before a public reading. In these speeches, the author touched on topics including his own life and professional development as well as other subjects such as politics, education, literature, public health and the development of the railway. Efforts to collect Dickens’s speeches prior to 1960 were incomplete at best, and misleading and fragmentary at worst. John Camden Hotten’s collection of speeches, begun without the author’s consent (although he never responded to Hotten’s letters, Dickens did begin efforts to block their publication) and published together with a hastily-compiled biography shortly after the author’s death, remained the primary collected version of the speeches until the Nonesuch Dickens of 1938-39 (a limited print run). Finally, K. J. Fielding brought all known speeches together in 1960, correcting shoddy transcriptions by Hotten using contemporary newspaper accounts, and nearly doubling the total number of speeches attributed to Dickens (The Speeches of Charles Dickens [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1960]): Hotten had only featured the text of 56 speeches, the Nonesuch edition of the speeches provided an additional nine, and Fielding presented more than a hundred. Since this monumental work, a handful have also appeared in The Dickensian;<a href="#fn1" id="ref1">1</a> there are certainly more to be found, as the volume of digitised newspapers and periodicals increases, and corrections to be made to existing transcriptions. No effort to collect the speeches has been made since Fielding; this collection thus represents the most complete body of Dickens's speeches ever assembled. Dickens did not write his speeches beforehand, nor did he speak from notes. George Dolby recounted his imaginative process in 1884: <blockquote>[S]upposing the speech was to be delivered in the evening, his habit was to take a long walk in the morning, during which he would decide on the various heads to be dealt with. These being arranged in their proper order, he would in his 'mind's eye,' liken the whole subject to the tire of a cart wheel – he being the hub. From the hub to the tire he would run as many spokes as there were subjects to be treated, and during the progress of the speech he would deal with each spoke separately, elaborating them as he went round the wheel; and when all the spokes dropped out one by one, and nothing but the tire and space remained […] his speech was at an end. (Charles Dickens as I Knew Him: The Story of the Reading Tours in Great Britain and America, pp. 273-74)</blockquote> However, on important occasions, Dickens might personally correct transcriptions of speeches for major London newspapers like The Times. As such, these newspaper accounts are as accurate a source as we can hope to have for what Dickens said (or meant to say). Our Transcription field will only include words attributed directly to Dickens rather than third-person reports or paraphrases of his speeches. Where only such reports exist, we will provide the text in the 'Summary' field. Ngram search and other text analysis tools will be applied to what are given as Dickens's words only, to avoid skewing the results, but of course we are reliant on the quality of the reporting: we recommend analysing topics, themes, quotations and concepts rather than granular detail such as prepositions, punctuation, capitalisation and the intricacies of grammar, as different newspaper accounts can vary on these points. Please <a href="https://dickenssearch.com/contact">contact us</a> with any errors, corrections, suggestions, or to contribute other uncollected speeches by Dickens. 1. These are Philip Collins, 'Some Uncollected Speeches by Dickens', The Dickensian 73.382 (1977): pp. 89-99; David A. Roos, 'Dickens at the Royal Academy of Arts: A New Speech and Two Eulogies', The Dickensian 73.382 (1977): pp. 100-107; and William F. Long, 'Dickens and the Coming of Rail to Deal: An Uncollected Speech and its Context', The Dickensian 85.418 (1989): pp. 66-80. <a href="#ref1" title="Jump back to footnote 1 in the text.">↩</a> Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Emily Middleton; Ellie-Louise Crampton; Maisie Howard; Adam Woods Speech Location The location Manchester Venue Where the speech was given Free Trade Hall Ngram Date Hidden from users and search. All items in a collection need to have the same data in the same format in order to show up in Ngram (either YYYY, YYYYMMDD, or YYYYMMDD). No combinations will work. For journalism, letters and poetry, if there is no month or day, default to the first of the month or January. So a poem with a date of March 1843 would be 18430301. A poem published in 1856 with no month or date information would be 18560101. 18570731 Ngram Text Hidden from users and search. Copy and paste from the Scripto transcription. Then check and uncheck HTML to strip out all formatting. Finally, search and remove any   (which is the HTML for spaces). This will prevent the Ngram picking up on irrelevant HTML. Ladies and Gentlemen, Between the two parts of my reading tonight, I have had the honour of receiving a visit from some of the gentlemen distinguished in England as being the leading men in this city, who have had the kindness to request that I would endeavour to bring my amateur company here, in order that we might give a repetition in Manchester, for the same purpose as we have met tonight, of Mr. Wilkie Collins’s Frozen Deep. I replied to those gentlemen, that we have no intention of going to any other place out of London, our object now drawing to a close; but that we have too lively a remembrance of the old generosity and encouragement of Manchester in similar cases, and too affectionate a memory of the happy nights we have passed here, to admit of our doubting for a moment as to what we should do. I will make it my duty to go into the necessary calculations and details; and if I find that with any reasonable prospect of benefit to the object we have in view, we can come here, we shall most certainly do it. Cheered by the prospect, and I may say the hope, of seeing you again before very long, allow me to thank you most heartily for your cordial reception and kind welcome this evening. Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource After a Reading in Manchester July 1857 Description An account of the resource After a Reading in Manchester (31 July 1857). Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Dickens, Charles Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1857-03-31 Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context 1857-07-31_Speech_After-a-Reading-in-Manchester Bibliographic Citation A bibliographic reference for the resource. Recommended practice is to include sufficient bibliographic detail to identify the resource as unambiguously as possible. Dickens, Charles. 'After a Reading in Manchester' (31 July 1857). Dickens Search. Eds. Emily Middleton and Lydia Craig. Accessed [date]. <a href="https://dickenssearch.com/speeches/1857-07-31_Speech_After-a-Reading-in-Manchester">https://dickenssearch.com/speeches/1857-07-31_Speech_After-a-Reading-in-Manchester</a>. Scripto Transcription A written representation of a document. Ladies and Gentlemen, Between the two parts of my reading tonight, I have had the honour of receiving a visit from some of the gentlemen distinguished in England as being the leading men in this city, who have had the kindness to request that I would endeavour to bring my amateur company here, in order that we might give a repetition in Manchester, for the same purpose as we have met tonight, of Mr. Wilkie Collins’s Frozen Deep. I replied to those gentlemen, that we have no intention of going to any other place out of London, our object now drawing to a close; but that we have too lively a remembrance of the old generosity and encouragement of Manchester in similar cases, and too affectionate a memory of the happy nights we have passed here, to admit of our doubting for a moment as to what we should do. I will make it my duty to go into the necessary calculations and details; and if I find that with any reasonable prospect of benefit to the object we have in view, we can come here, we shall most certainly do it. Cheered by the prospect, and I may say the hope, of seeing you again before very long, allow me to thank you most heartily for your cordial reception and kind welcome this evening. manchester Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Speeches Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context speeches Description An account of the resource <h4>This collection brings together Dickens’s collected and uncollected speeches, making an under-explored body of work searchable for the first time. </h4> Dickens made more than a hundred speeches between 1837 and 1870 at events ranging from charitable dinners and award ceremonies to banquets in his honour or brief words of thanks before a public reading. In these speeches, the author touched on topics including his own life and professional development as well as other subjects such as politics, education, literature, public health and the development of the railway. Efforts to collect Dickens’s speeches prior to 1960 were incomplete at best, and misleading and fragmentary at worst. John Camden Hotten’s collection of speeches, begun without the author’s consent (although he never responded to Hotten’s letters, Dickens did begin efforts to block their publication) and published together with a hastily-compiled biography shortly after the author’s death, remained the primary collected version of the speeches until the Nonesuch Dickens of 1938-39 (a limited print run). Finally, K. J. Fielding brought all known speeches together in 1960, correcting shoddy transcriptions by Hotten using contemporary newspaper accounts, and nearly doubling the total number of speeches attributed to Dickens (The Speeches of Charles Dickens [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1960]): Hotten had only featured the text of 56 speeches, the Nonesuch edition of the speeches provided an additional nine, and Fielding presented more than a hundred. Since this monumental work, a handful have also appeared in The Dickensian;<a href="#fn1" id="ref1">1</a> there are certainly more to be found, as the volume of digitised newspapers and periodicals increases, and corrections to be made to existing transcriptions. No effort to collect the speeches has been made since Fielding; this collection thus represents the most complete body of Dickens's speeches ever assembled. Dickens did not write his speeches beforehand, nor did he speak from notes. George Dolby recounted his imaginative process in 1884: <blockquote>[S]upposing the speech was to be delivered in the evening, his habit was to take a long walk in the morning, during which he would decide on the various heads to be dealt with. These being arranged in their proper order, he would in his 'mind's eye,' liken the whole subject to the tire of a cart wheel – he being the hub. From the hub to the tire he would run as many spokes as there were subjects to be treated, and during the progress of the speech he would deal with each spoke separately, elaborating them as he went round the wheel; and when all the spokes dropped out one by one, and nothing but the tire and space remained […] his speech was at an end. (Charles Dickens as I Knew Him: The Story of the Reading Tours in Great Britain and America, pp. 273-74)</blockquote> However, on important occasions, Dickens might personally correct transcriptions of speeches for major London newspapers like The Times. As such, these newspaper accounts are as accurate a source as we can hope to have for what Dickens said (or meant to say). Our Transcription field will only include words attributed directly to Dickens rather than third-person reports or paraphrases of his speeches. Where only such reports exist, we will provide the text in the 'Summary' field. Ngram search and other text analysis tools will be applied to what are given as Dickens's words only, to avoid skewing the results, but of course we are reliant on the quality of the reporting: we recommend analysing topics, themes, quotations and concepts rather than granular detail such as prepositions, punctuation, capitalisation and the intricacies of grammar, as different newspaper accounts can vary on these points. Please <a href="https://dickenssearch.com/contact">contact us</a> with any errors, corrections, suggestions, or to contribute other uncollected speeches by Dickens. 1. These are Philip Collins, 'Some Uncollected Speeches by Dickens', The Dickensian 73.382 (1977): pp. 89-99; David A. Roos, 'Dickens at the Royal Academy of Arts: A New Speech and Two Eulogies', The Dickensian 73.382 (1977): pp. 100-107; and William F. Long, 'Dickens and the Coming of Rail to Deal: An Uncollected Speech and its Context', The Dickensian 85.418 (1989): pp. 66-80. <a href="#ref1" title="Jump back to footnote 1 in the text.">↩</a> Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Emily Middleton; Ellie-Louise Crampton; Maisie Howard; Adam Woods Speech Location The location London Venue Where the speech was given Freemasons' Tavern Ngram Date Hidden from users and search. All items in a collection need to have the same data in the same format in order to show up in Ngram (either YYYY, YYYYMMDD, or YYYYMMDD). No combinations will work. For journalism, letters and poetry, if there is no month or day, default to the first of the month or January. So a poem with a date of March 1843 would be 18430301. A poem published in 1856 with no month or date information would be 18560101. 18570406 Ngram Text Hidden from users and search. Copy and paste from the Scripto transcription. Then check and uncheck HTML to strip out all formatting. Finally, search and remove any   (which is the HTML for spaces). This will prevent the Ngram picking up on irrelevant HTML. Gentlemen, I have to acknowledge the toast which has been associated by our chairman with such flattering encomiums, and by you with so kind a welcome. Before I do so, I wish to offer a word of explanation in reference to the very startling remark which has fallen from my Right hon. friend the member for the Haymarket. Gentlemen, God forbid that I should have any electioneering designs upon any constituency whatever. My way of life, my delight in life, my means of usefulness in life, such as they are, have long been chosen, and I assure you that I have no intention of canvassing any ‘sex’ whatever, except that sex whose presence I feel behind me, of whose presence I have always a deep perception, appropriately seated in the clouds above me, and that other sex whose presence I see before me. Gentlemen, with this word of explanation, allow me, as one of your Trustees, to express the gratification that we feel, in which I have no doubt you participate, in the very prosperous budget which has been presented to us tonight by my Right Hon. friend, and allow me also to express our great satisfaction in finding him, notwithstanding the very frequent appeals he makes to his constituents, still holding the post of Chancellor of the Exchequer. If he should ever, in another phase of that office, as I have heard it whispered he has some deep prospective intention of doing – if he should ever relieve me of any portion of that income tax which he nightly levies on the public, I hope, as I am sure you do, that in this and in all his enterprises he may be triumphantly successful. Gentlemen, as I have the honour in this institution to hold an official position, you will readily perceive that I should make a most interesting lengthy speech, but for the unfortunate circumstance that I am held in the bonds of official reserve, to which unhappy restraint, as the custom is in such cases, I the more gratefully submit, because I have no statement whatever to make, and nothing whatever to say. I shall, therefore, content myself with thanking you on my own part, and on that of my fellow Trustees, for the toast you have just drunk, and with announcing that I shall beg the chairman's permission to propose another toast when the Toastmaster shall have called upon you, in due form, to charge your glasses. Gentlemen, While I agreed with every part of the excellent address which was made by the chairman in proposing the Fund, I particularly sympathized with that portion of it in which he preferred a claim on the part of the stage to be regarded as a powerful and useful means towards the education of the people. If there were ever a time when the Theatre could be considered to have a strong claim to consideration in that respect, it surely is the present. Gentlemen, we have schoolmasters going about like those horrible old women of whom we read in the public reports, perpetually flaying Whittington's cat alive; we have schoolmasters constantly demonstrating on blackboards to infant minds the utter impossibility of Puss in Boots; we have all the giants utterly dead and gone, with half the Jacks passing examinations every day in mental arithmetic; and with Tom Thumb really only known in these times as the gallant general seeking kisses of the ladies at 6d. a head in the American market; I say really, gentlemen, in these times, when we have torn so many leaves out of our dear old nursery books, I hold it to be more than ever essential to the character of a great people, that the imagination, with all its innumerable graces and charities, should be tenderly nourished; and foremost among the means of training it, I agree with the chairman, must always stand the stage, with its wonderful pictures of passion, with its magnificent illusions, and with its glorious literature. But, gentlemen, there is another aspect, to which the chairman could not with equal modesty advert, in which a thoroughly well-conducted theatre is of vast importance: that is, not only with reference to the public, who so greatly need it, but as a means of sustaining the honour and credit of the dramatic profession itself; as a means of presenting their usefulness to the public in its most striking colours; and as a means of always sustaining them against the reproaches which ignorance and malignity have showered upon them with the only liberality of which such qualities are capable. Gentlemen, an ill-conducted theatre does a world of harm, no doubt. I will not go so far as to say, for that would be going very far indeed, that it does as much harm as a thoroughly ill-conducted school, or a thoroughly ill-conducted chapel; but it does harm enough, and a great deal more. A thoroughly well-conducted theatre, on the contrary, blots out the sins of a thousand bad ones, and will surely attract to itself the goodwill and respect of great numbers of well-meaning and virtuous people, previously objectors, and will conciliate them to understand that what they dreaded in the dramatic art arose not from its use, but from its abuse – not from its exertion, but from its perversion. Now, gentlemen, I perfectly well know that you will all agree with me that if ever a theatre attained these ends, it is the theatre Sadlers’ Wells. Gentlemen, that theatre, rescued from the wretchedest condition, from a condition so disgraceful that if  on any night in the week the New River Company had poured in through its boxes, pit, and gallery the Humane Society could have hardly done a worse thing at one time than have interfered. With a very bad audience – I beg in reference to that gentleman's observation who says ‘No,’ to state that I have as accurate a knowledge of that theatre as any man in the kingdom, and I say, that with one of the most vagabond audiences that ever went into a theatre – utterly displaced from it, and with one of the most intelligent and attentive audiences ever seen, attracted to it and retained in it – I believe I am not very wrong in my rough calculation when I say, that that theatre has been opened under Mr. Phelps’s management 3,000 nights, and that during 2,000 of those nights the author represented has been Shakespeare. Gentlemen, add for the other thousand nights sterling old plays, tragedies and comedies, many new plays of great merit, accepted with a real sense of managerial responsibility, and paid for, as I have reason to know in the case of a friend, with a spirit and liberality that would have done honour to the old days of the two great theatres – add to that, that all these plays have been produced with the same beauty, with the same delicacy and taste, with the same sensible subservience of the scene-painter and the mechanist to the real meaning of the play, and with the same indebtedness to the creator of the whole for his admirable impersonation of a great variety of most opposite and diversified characters, and surely we must all agree, to say the very least, that the public is under a great debt to the profession, is under a great debt of obligation to Mr. Phelps, and that it has a strong legitimate interest in the continued success of his undertaking. Gentlemen, for the public I can only say that so far as I know it, I have never mixed with any grade or class of it by whom those exertions have failed to be held in the highest respect, or from whom they have failed to elicit the highest approval; and it may be worthy of remark, that I have found this feeling to exist quite as strongly among the intelligent artist classes of Paris as here in London. Gentlemen, on the other hand, for the profession, Mr. Phelps’s position here tonight, and our recognition of him in it, are an ample and sufficient answer. He is here before you in a double capacity: firstly, as the mind of the theatre in which the English drama has found a home, and in which graceful homage is rendered to the noblest of all dramatists – that he has there a body of students behind the curtain, and a body of students before the curtain,  striving together to appreciate and extol him; Mr. Phelps is also here in the other capacity of one whose life and labour are a constant credit and a constant honour to, and a constant sustainer of, the dignity and credit of his art. Gentlemen, in this double capacity I am perfectly sure you are ready, for the second time, to give Mr. Phelps a double welcome. I am perfectly sure you will receive the toast, which is his health, with a double acclamation, and that you will unite in a double expression of your best wishes for his success, health, happiness, and prosperity. Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Royal General Theatrical Fund Anniversary Festival 1857 Description An account of the resource Speech at the Royal General Theatrical Fund Anniversary Festival (6 April 1857). Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Dickens, Charles Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1857-04-06 Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context 1857-04-06_Speech_Royal-General-Theatrical-Fund-Anniversary-Festival Bibliographic Citation A bibliographic reference for the resource. Recommended practice is to include sufficient bibliographic detail to identify the resource as unambiguously as possible. Dickens, Charles. 'Speech at the Royal General Theatrical Fund Anniversary Festival' (6 April 1857). Dickens Search. Eds. Emily Middleton and Lydia Craig. Accessed [date]. <a href="https://dickenssearch.com/speeches/1857-04-06_Speech_Royal-General-Theatrical-Fund-Anniversary-Festival">https://dickenssearch.com/speeches/1857-04-06_Speech_Royal-General-Theatrical-Fund-Anniversary-Festival</a>. Scripto Transcription A written representation of a document. Gentlemen, I have to acknowledge the toast which has been associated by our chairman with such flattering encomiums, and by you with so kind a welcome. Before I do so, I wish to offer a word of explanation in reference to the very startling remark which has fallen from my Right hon. friend the member for the Haymarket. Gentlemen, God forbid that I should have any electioneering designs upon any constituency whatever. My way of life, my delight in life, my means of usefulness in life, such as they are, have long been chosen, and I assure you that I have no intention of canvassing any ‘sex’ whatever, except that sex whose presence I feel behind me, of whose presence I have always a deep perception, appropriately seated in the clouds above me, and that other sex whose presence I see before me. Gentlemen, with this word of explanation, allow me, as one of your Trustees, to express the gratification that we feel, in which I have no doubt you participate, in the very prosperous budget which has been presented to us tonight by my Right Hon. friend, and allow me also to express our great satisfaction in finding him, notwithstanding the very frequent appeals he makes to his constituents, still holding the post of Chancellor of the Exchequer. If he should ever, in another phase of that office, as I have heard it whispered he has some deep prospective intention of doing – if he should ever relieve me of any portion of that income tax which he nightly levies on the public, I hope, as I am sure you do, that in this and in all his enterprises he may be triumphantly successful.  Gentlemen, as I have the honour in this institution to hold an official position, you will readily perceive that I should make a most interesting lengthy speech, but for the unfortunate circumstance that I am held in the bonds of official reserve, to which unhappy restraint, as the custom is in such cases, I the more gratefully submit, because I have no statement whatever to make, and nothing whatever to say. I shall, therefore, content myself with thanking you on my own part, and on that of my fellow Trustees, for the toast you have just drunk, and with announcing that I shall beg the chairman's permission to propose another toast when the Toastmaster shall have called upon you, in due form, to charge your glasses.  Gentlemen, While I agreed with every part of the excellent address which was made by the chairman in proposing the Fund, I particularly sympathized with that portion of it in which he preferred a claim on the part of the stage to be regarded as a powerful and useful means towards the education of the people. If there were ever a time when the Theatre could be considered to have a strong claim to consideration in that respect, it surely is the present. Gentlemen, we have schoolmasters going about like those horrible old women of whom we read in the public reports, perpetually flaying Whittington's cat alive; we have schoolmasters constantly demonstrating on blackboards to infant minds the utter impossibility of Puss in Boots; we have all the giants utterly dead and gone, with half the Jacks passing examinations every day in mental arithmetic; and with Tom Thumb really only known in these times as the gallant general seeking kisses of the ladies at 6d. a head in the American market; I say really, gentlemen, in these times, when we have torn so many leaves out of our dear old nursery books, I hold it to be more than ever essential to the character of a great people, that the imagination, with all its innumerable graces and charities, should be tenderly nourished; and foremost among the means of training it, I agree with the chairman, must always stand the stage, with its wonderful pictures of passion, with its magnificent illusions, and with its glorious literature. But, gentlemen, there is another aspect, to which the chairman could not with equal modesty advert, in which a thoroughly well-conducted theatre is of vast importance: that is, not only with reference to the public, who so greatly need it, but as a means of sustaining the honour and credit of the dramatic profession itself; as a means of presenting their usefulness to the public in its most striking colours; and as a means of always sustaining them against the reproaches which ignorance and malignity have showered upon them with the only liberality of which such qualities are capable. Gentlemen, an ill-conducted theatre does a world of harm, no doubt. I will not go so far as to say, for that would be going very far indeed, that it does as much harm as a thoroughly ill-conducted school, or a thoroughly ill-conducted chapel; but it does harm enough, and a great deal more. A thoroughly well-conducted theatre, on the contrary, blots out the sins of a thousand bad ones, and will surely attract to itself the goodwill and respect of great numbers of well-meaning and virtuous people, previously objectors, and will conciliate them to understand that what they dreaded in the dramatic art arose not from its use, but from its abuse – not from its exertion, but from its perversion. Now, gentlemen, I perfectly well know that you will all agree with me that if ever a theatre attained these ends, it is the theatre Sadlers’ Wells. Gentlemen, that theatre, rescued from the wretchedest condition, from a condition so disgraceful that if  on any night in the week the New River Company had poured in through its boxes, pit, and gallery the Humane Society could have hardly done a worse thing at one time than have interfered. With a very bad audience –  I beg in reference to that gentleman's observation who says ‘No,’ to state that I have as accurate a knowledge of that theatre as any man in the kingdom, and I say, that with one of the most vagabond audiences that ever went into a theatre – utterly displaced from it, and with one of the most intelligent and attentive audiences ever seen, attracted to it and retained in it – I believe I am not very wrong in my rough calculation when I say, that that theatre has been opened under Mr. Phelps’s management 3,000 nights, and that during 2,000 of those nights the author represented has been Shakespeare. Gentlemen, add for the other thousand nights sterling old plays, tragedies and comedies, many new plays of great merit, accepted with a real sense of managerial responsibility, and paid for, as I have reason to know in the case of a friend, with a spirit and liberality that would have done honour to the old days of the two great theatres – add to that, that all these plays have been produced with the same beauty, with the same delicacy and taste, with the same sensible subservience of the scene-painter and the mechanist to the real meaning of the play, and with the same indebtedness to the creator of the whole for his admirable impersonation of a great variety of most opposite and diversified characters, and surely we must all agree, to say the very least, that the public is under a great debt to the profession, is under a great debt of obligation to Mr. Phelps, and that it has a strong legitimate interest in the continued success of his undertaking. Gentlemen, for the public I can only say that so far as I know it, I have never mixed with any grade or class of it by whom those exertions have failed to be held in the highest respect, or from whom they have failed to elicit the highest approval; and it may be worthy of remark, that I have found this feeling to exist quite as strongly among the intelligent artist classes of Paris as here in London. Gentlemen, on the other hand, for the profession, Mr. Phelps’s position here tonight, and our recognition of him in it, are an ample and sufficient answer. He is here before you in a double capacity: firstly, as the mind of the theatre in which the English drama has found a home, and in which graceful homage is rendered to the noblest of all dramatists – that he has there a body of students behind the curtain, and a body of students before the curtain,  striving together to appreciate and extol him; Mr. Phelps is also here in the other capacity of one whose life and labour are a constant credit and a constant honour to, and a constant sustainer of, the dignity and credit of his art. Gentlemen, in this double capacity I am perfectly sure you are ready, for the second time, to give Mr. Phelps a double welcome. I am perfectly sure you will receive the toast, which is his health, with a double acclamation, and that you will unite in a double expression of your best wishes for his success, health, happiness, and prosperity. https://www.dickenssearch.com/files/original/3/My_Uncle_Toby_Swore_an_Oath/1857-04-14_My_Uncle_Toby_Swore_an_Oath.pdf 76cf0a1dc2801a5b875e56b841f0695e Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Verse Description An account of the resource <h4>This collection brings together the most complete set of Dickens's verse to date, supplementing the work of existing editions with previously uncollected poems Dickens contributed to albums, or wrote anonymously.</h4> Though such productions receive scant attention from scholars interested in his fiction and journalism, Dickens composed a surprising amount of verse. It was a genre in which he evidently felt much less at home (and financially rewarded) than when writing in prose. However, several poems gained popular favour during his lifetime; that so many were <a href="https://dickenssearch.com/items/browse?advanced%5B0%5D%5Belement_id%5D=51&advanced%5B0%5D%5Btype%5D=is+exactly&advanced%5B0%5D%5Bterms%5D=Song">written to be set to music</a> indicates the permeable boundary between metered verse functioning as poem or song in the nineteenth century, and may explain why some of Dickens’s poems were more enduringly popular than others. Notably, <a href="https://dickenssearch.com/verse/1836-05_Pickwick_Papers_The_Ivy_Green">'The Ivy Green'</a> from Pickwick Papers (1837), a story of time’s inexorable passing, was frequently republished in newspapers. Several poems written to young ladies of Dickens’s acquaintance are released on Dickens Search as part of the author’s poetic output for the first time, testifying to the author’s ability to write impromptu poetry and gallantly turn a phrase. Since keeping <a href="https://dickenssearch.com/items/browse?search=&advanced%5B0%5D%5Bjoiner%5D=and&advanced%5B0%5D%5Belement_id%5D=94&advanced%5B0%5D%5Btype%5D=is+exactly&advanced%5B0%5D%5Bterms%5D=Autograph+Album&collection=&type=&tags=&date_search_term=&submit_search=Search+For+Items">autograph albums</a> was a popular pastime for women in the Victorian era, it is possible that further examples of such activity remain to be discovered in various archives and private collections. When writing <a href="https://dickenssearch.com/items/browse?search=&advanced%5B0%5D%5Bjoiner%5D=and&advanced%5B0%5D%5Belement_id%5D=94&advanced%5B0%5D%5Btype%5D=is+exactly&advanced%5B0%5D%5Bterms%5D=Letter&collection=3&type=&tags=&date_search_term=&submit_search=Search+For+Items">letters</a> to friends, Dickens occasionally included comedic poems for the recipient. Several of these are included. Considering the enormity of Dickens’s correspondence, likely more instances of this sort of poetic humour will result over time. <a href="https://dickenssearch.com/items/browse?advanced%5B0%5D%5Belement_id%5D=51&advanced%5B0%5D%5Btype%5D=is+exactly&advanced%5B0%5D%5Bterms%5D=Epitaph">Epitaphs</a> Dickens wrote for friends and family, whether used or not, are included with Dickens's other verse for the first time. Users can also browse <a href="https://dickenssearch.com/items/browse?advanced%5B0%5D%5Belement_id%5D=94&advanced%5B0%5D%5Btype%5D=is+exactly&advanced%5B0%5D%5Bterms%5D=Play">verse from Dickens's plays</a>, including songs removed from The Strange Gentleman and Is She His Wife? Or, Something Singular! before performance. Care is necessary when verifying the accuracy of these poems, as some are misattributed to Dickens. Widespread reprintings of 'Dickens poems' in nineteenth-century newspapers are insufficient evidence for authorial attribution, owing to the mistakes intentionally or inadvertently made in ascribing authorship. An unusual example of a poem that is and is not by Dickens, the lines of 'Little Nell’s Funeral' are taken, with minimal alterations, from Chapter 72 of The Old Curiosity Shop. An instance of the strikingly lyrical quality of Dickens’s sentimental prose, they were divided into metered, unrhymed verse by M.A.H. for the 1849 collection Echoes of Infant Voices. Because Dickens did not intend for this passage to be structured in verse form, the poem is not included in the poetry collection of Dickens Search. <a href="https://dickenssearch.com/poetry-dickens-didnt-write">Read our blog post for more on poetry Dickens didn't write.</a> Occasionally, Dickens will quote a poem by another author, as in his burlesque Is She his Wife? Or, Something Singular! (1836). The character Mr Felix Tapkins launches into a short hunting song beginning 'The wife around her husband throws/Her arms to make him stay'. As William Chappell noted in 1840, this is a well-known variant of 'A Hunting We Will Go' (1777), by Thomas Arne, though he misattributes its composition to Henry Fielding. Previous notable collections of some of Dickens's poetry include The Plays and Poems of Charles Dickens (1882) edited by Richard Herne Shepherd and The Poems and Verses of Charles Dickens (1903) edited by Frederic G. Kitton. In 2025, we published <a href="https://edinburghuniversitypress.com/book-the-verse-of-charles-dickens.html" target="_blank" rel="noopener">The Verse of Charles Dickens</a> (Edinburgh University Press), which includes an introduction and editorial apparatus for this verse.  Caution has been taken when ascertaining that each poem is indeed by Dickens. Please <a href="https://dickenssearch.com/contact">contact us</a> with any errors, corrections, suggestions, or other poems written by Dickens. 1. The Verse of Charles Dickens. Edited by Lydia Craig and Emily Middleton. Edinburgh University Press, 2025; Robert Butterworth. 'The Hymn of the Wiltshire Labourers.' The Dickensian 516.118.1 (Spring 2022): pp. 43-56; Eva-Charlotta Mebius. 'Dreams of Dying Girls: The Poetry of Thomas J. Ouseley and Charles Dickens.' Dickens Quarterly 34.3 (September 2017): pp. 256-261; Robert C. Hanna. 'Before Boz; The Juvenilia and Early Writings of Charles Dickens, 1820-1833'. Dickens Studies Annual 40 (2009): pp. 231-364. Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context verse Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Lydia Craig; Emily Middleton Poem Publication Type E.g. newspaper/serial Autograph Album Ngram Date Hidden from users and search. All items in a collection need to have the same data in the same format in order to show up in Ngram (either YYYY, YYYYMMDD, or YYYYMMDD). No combinations will work. For journalism, letters and poetry, if there is no month or day, default to the first of the month or January. So a poem with a date of March 1843 would be 18430301. A poem published in 1856 with no month or date information would be 18560101. 18570414 Ngram Text Hidden from users and search. Copy and paste from the Scripto transcription. Then check and uncheck HTML to strip out all formatting. Finally, search and remove any   (which is the HTML for spaces). This will prevent the Ngram picking up on irrelevant HTML. My Uncle Toby swore an oath, - and when The busy Angel with the book and pen Made haste to enter it, his Heav’nly grief Blotted the word from the virgin leaf. I swore an oath, - that I would never rhyme In any album, to the end of Time. I wish the Angel of this book would blot my oath’s infraction, from the present spot! Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource 'My Uncle Toby Swore an Oath' Subject The topic of the resource From an unknown autograph album, 14 April 1857. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Dickens, Charles Source A related resource from which the described resource is derived The New York Public Library's Digital Collections, <a href="https://digitalcollections.nypl.org/items/dc8c3f00-7ba7-0131-1f26-58d385a7b928#/?uuid=dcbabae0-7ba7-0131-8130-58d385a7b928">https://digitalcollections.nypl.org/items/dc8c3f00-7ba7-0131-1f26-58d385a7b928#/?uuid=dcbabae0-7ba7-0131-8130-58d385a7b928</a>. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1857-04-14 Type The nature or genre of the resource Poem Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context 1857-04-14_My_Uncle_Toby_Swore_an_Oath Bibliographic Citation A bibliographic reference for the resource. Recommended practice is to include sufficient bibliographic detail to identify the resource as unambiguously as possible. Dickens, Charles. 'My Uncle Toby Swore an Oath' (14 April 1857). Dickens Search. Eds. Emily Middleton and Lydia Craig. Accessed [date]. <a href="https://dickenssearch.com/verse/1857-04-14_My_Uncle_Toby_Swore_an_Oath">https://dickenssearch.com/verse/1857-04-14_My_Uncle_Toby_Swore_an_Oath</a>. Scripto Transcription A written representation of a document. My Uncle Toby swore an oath, - and when The busy Angel with the book and pen Made haste to enter it, his Heav’nly grief Blotted the word from the virgin leaf. I swore an oath, - that I would never rhyme In any album, to the end of Time. I wish the Angel of this book would blot my oath’s infraction, from the present spot! Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Speeches Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context speeches Description An account of the resource <h4>This collection brings together Dickens’s collected and uncollected speeches, making an under-explored body of work searchable for the first time. </h4> Dickens made more than a hundred speeches between 1837 and 1870 at events ranging from charitable dinners and award ceremonies to banquets in his honour or brief words of thanks before a public reading. In these speeches, the author touched on topics including his own life and professional development as well as other subjects such as politics, education, literature, public health and the development of the railway. Efforts to collect Dickens’s speeches prior to 1960 were incomplete at best, and misleading and fragmentary at worst. John Camden Hotten’s collection of speeches, begun without the author’s consent (although he never responded to Hotten’s letters, Dickens did begin efforts to block their publication) and published together with a hastily-compiled biography shortly after the author’s death, remained the primary collected version of the speeches until the Nonesuch Dickens of 1938-39 (a limited print run). Finally, K. J. Fielding brought all known speeches together in 1960, correcting shoddy transcriptions by Hotten using contemporary newspaper accounts, and nearly doubling the total number of speeches attributed to Dickens (The Speeches of Charles Dickens [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1960]): Hotten had only featured the text of 56 speeches, the Nonesuch edition of the speeches provided an additional nine, and Fielding presented more than a hundred. Since this monumental work, a handful have also appeared in The Dickensian;<a href="#fn1" id="ref1">1</a> there are certainly more to be found, as the volume of digitised newspapers and periodicals increases, and corrections to be made to existing transcriptions. No effort to collect the speeches has been made since Fielding; this collection thus represents the most complete body of Dickens's speeches ever assembled. Dickens did not write his speeches beforehand, nor did he speak from notes. George Dolby recounted his imaginative process in 1884: <blockquote>[S]upposing the speech was to be delivered in the evening, his habit was to take a long walk in the morning, during which he would decide on the various heads to be dealt with. These being arranged in their proper order, he would in his 'mind's eye,' liken the whole subject to the tire of a cart wheel – he being the hub. From the hub to the tire he would run as many spokes as there were subjects to be treated, and during the progress of the speech he would deal with each spoke separately, elaborating them as he went round the wheel; and when all the spokes dropped out one by one, and nothing but the tire and space remained […] his speech was at an end. (Charles Dickens as I Knew Him: The Story of the Reading Tours in Great Britain and America, pp. 273-74)</blockquote> However, on important occasions, Dickens might personally correct transcriptions of speeches for major London newspapers like The Times. As such, these newspaper accounts are as accurate a source as we can hope to have for what Dickens said (or meant to say). Our Transcription field will only include words attributed directly to Dickens rather than third-person reports or paraphrases of his speeches. Where only such reports exist, we will provide the text in the 'Summary' field. Ngram search and other text analysis tools will be applied to what are given as Dickens's words only, to avoid skewing the results, but of course we are reliant on the quality of the reporting: we recommend analysing topics, themes, quotations and concepts rather than granular detail such as prepositions, punctuation, capitalisation and the intricacies of grammar, as different newspaper accounts can vary on these points. Please <a href="https://dickenssearch.com/contact">contact us</a> with any errors, corrections, suggestions, or to contribute other uncollected speeches by Dickens. 1. These are Philip Collins, 'Some Uncollected Speeches by Dickens', The Dickensian 73.382 (1977): pp. 89-99; David A. Roos, 'Dickens at the Royal Academy of Arts: A New Speech and Two Eulogies', The Dickensian 73.382 (1977): pp. 100-107; and William F. Long, 'Dickens and the Coming of Rail to Deal: An Uncollected Speech and its Context', The Dickensian 85.418 (1989): pp. 66-80. <a href="#ref1" title="Jump back to footnote 1 in the text.">↩</a> Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Emily Middleton; Ellie-Louise Crampton; Maisie Howard; Adam Woods Speech Summary Occasionally speeches are summarised in sources in third person. Include that here, so that everything in the text transcription is only Dickens's words. Dickens then gave ‘The President and the Vice-Presidents’, coupled with the name of a distinguished gentleman who was not more remarkable for his talent than he was for possessing the kindest and tenderest heart. He proposed the health of Dr. Connolly.  Finally, the chairman said that although he had been invited to take the Chair on the next occasion, he should recommend a change of diet. But he would accept the office on one condition, that in the event of the City of London re-electing the best sheriff from the time of the great Whittington, he would preside over the next meeting; but if the City took anybody else he must claim his right to take his seat as a private individual. Location The location London Venue Where the speech was given London Tavern Ngram Date Hidden from users and search. All items in a collection need to have the same data in the same format in order to show up in Ngram (either YYYY, YYYYMMDD, or YYYYMMDD). No combinations will work. For journalism, letters and poetry, if there is no month or day, default to the first of the month or January. So a poem with a date of March 1843 would be 18430301. A poem published in 1856 with no month or date information would be 18560101. 18570521 Ngram Text Hidden from users and search. Copy and paste from the Scripto transcription. Then check and uncheck HTML to strip out all formatting. Finally, search and remove any   (which is the HTML for spaces). This will prevent the Ngram picking up on irrelevant HTML. Ladies and Gentlemen, A few days ago I was called upon to fill up my proxy for the election of candidates to be admitted into the Royal Hospital – a Hospital established for the permanent care and comfort of those who by disease, accident, or deformity, are disqualified for the duties of life. Coming on that occasion to the perusal of the extended list of cases there set before me, I could not but feel – in common, I am sure, with many who are here – inexpressible pity for the vast number of persons who are in that forlorn condition. When I saw in that list no fewer than 121 cases, out of whom the subscribers to this charity at the next election can elect but ten, I thought, with a kind of despair, not only of the 111 who must suffer by rejection, but of the great crowd of incurables dispersed about this country of whom this society has never so much as heard, and who will never hear of it. Having that morning been busy about my own country rest and recreation, I could not but strongly feel the contrast between myself – then in the full enjoyment of health and the use of all my limbs – and that of so many of my fellow creatures, until I was glad to put this list aside, and make my escape from the reflections to which it gave rise. In one of my recent walks, I found myself in a pretty village in Surrey, which I had indeed often proposed to visit before, but had only paved the dusty road with good intentions – as I am sorry to say I have paved a worse place with a great deal of the same material – but on this morning I really found myself at the place. I inquired of a labourer for a house I wanted, and he told me, ‘When you can’t go any further, turn to your left, and there you’ll see a house with some writing wrote on the outside, which they tell me is its name; but you’ll know, because you can read, and I can’t read.’ At last I found it, and was shown into an agreeable sitting-room, which might be called a library. One sick man was lying on a sofa, and as soon as he saw me he opened the conversation, doing, as it were, the honours of the place. We spoke of the usual topics, talked of the weather, of our common enemy, the late wind, and of the progress of the crops, in the most pleasant and agreeable manner. He told me that that spot was above the cross of St. Paul’s – a fact of which he seemed excessively proud – and was altogether quite as cheerful as I was, or as I am. As I went upstairs, I got pleasant glimpses of the grounds, and of persons walking about in them, and met another sick man, quite as anxious for the arrival of dinner time as any of us in the London Tavern, and insisting that the cook’s clock must be ten minutes slow. I went upstairs into another sitting-room, where were a number of sick women of various ages grouped about on sofas and chairs, engaged in various feminine tasks, and all talking and smiling as they went on. There was one poor paralytic creature busy at her embroidery, delighted to have her work admired, and I could not help feeling great admiration that anything so orderly and straight could come out of a form so warped and cruelly afflicted. I very much doubt whether she was ever more contented in her whole life. Another woman, much older, having only a thumb and two fingers left to work with, was plodding away at her work, and very proud of what she was able to accomplish with such an imperfect complement of digits. She told me, that in her old healthy days she thought there was no greater pleasure than to sit and read all day, but that would not do now, and she had taken to this work for relief and comfort, and she had found relief and comfort here very much. One old lady, who said she had been awake all night, in great pain and trouble, was nevertheless wonderfully conversable and talkative. She said she was very comfortable on the whole; but had a certain tendency to revert to the subject of rheumatism (and no wonder). In another and smaller room there was an old lady who said she was seventy-five years of age, but she was determined to persevere, which I told her I thought was a capital thing to do. Two other young women, evidently enduring much bodily suffering, had a pleasant consciousness of good looks, and showed a desire to make the most of them. I declare to you that in all these people – and all the inmates of this house whom I saw – there was not only a hopefulness of manner, but a serenity of face, a cheerfulness and social habit that perfectly amazed me. And this was the Royal Hospital, and these its incurable inmates. Ladies and gentlemen, while I congratulated myself, as I need hardly tell you I did that morning most heartily, that this institution was able to give so much relief to sufferers in such very hopeless cases, I must not deceive you as to the Royal Hospital itself. It is not by any means what it ought to be. Its present temporary establishment is in a very inconvenient old house, by no means suitable, with rooms not half high enough, and not half ample enough. The beds are much too crowded together, and I [should] say ventilation is exceedingly difficult. The furniture is excessively inadequate to the requirements of the establishment; and a great number of appliances are needed which healthy people would, perhaps, call mawkish, but are of the gravest importance in the presence of sickness. In one comprehensive word, it wants money; and for that money, ladies and gentlemen, in the name of Christian charity, I have undertaken to appeal to you. I cannot possibly make this appeal sufficiently strong for my own satisfaction; but if I only rested it on this one consideration, that there is no hospital in London or throughout England to which this Royal Hospital is not a natural and necessary adjunct it would, I am sure, not be made in vain. The stronger the case for any of those excellent institutions which you may most favour, the stronger is this case. Every hospital knows what it is to be obliged to discharge incurable patients for whom it can do no more, and whom it cannot retain, and every member of the most generous and devoted of all professions – the medical profession – knows what it is to contemplate with pain the heartrending spectacle of those weary ones turning away from the friendly shelter of the infirmary, without any suitable resting-place, and in all probability to lay themselves down at the door of the poor-house. We know the goodness of the poor, and their readiness to help one another on all occasions. But if we do all we can to relieve them of the burden of incurable sufferers, we shall still leave them field enough for the exercise of their utmost virtues.  I will not distress you by imagining what must be the conditions of these unhappy sufferers, lodged in hot and crowded attics, or what must be the misery which their presence brings to others; I will only end, as I began, by referring you to the list of applicants for admission at the next election. We live in an age of elections – at one time or another we almost all apply to be elected into clubs for pleasure or for profit – into great corporations, the House of Commons, and what not; and three-fourths of us associate our ambition with an election of some sort or other. Within how small a compass lies the ambition of these 121 applicants! If one of this number could but make an audible address to you here at this table, instead of me, how touchingly might he say, ‘Health has departed from us for ever – our place in the struggle for bread has been filled up by others, and we have faintly dropped out of the course. Give us only a quiet home, where we may endure what yet we have to undergo, and where, by our patient manner and our brightened faces, we may somewhat reward your kind interest on our behalf.’ Once they were busy and strong, but now they are hopelessly disqualified for the duties of life; let us discharge the first of these, and provide for them a resting-place, where they may be sheltered and cared for in their irremovable afflictions. I am sure we shall not reject their prayers, and that the time will come when this Hospital shall be nobly and bountifully endowed, so that no other qualification will be needed to ensure entrance within its walls but the presence of incurable disease. I call upon you to drink prosperity to the Royal Hospital. Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Royal Hospital for Incurables Annual Dinner 1857 Description An account of the resource Speech at the Royal Hospital for Incurables Annual Dinner (21 May 1857). Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Dickens, Charles Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1857-05-21 Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context 1857-05-21_Speech_Royal-Hospital-for-Incurables-Annual-Dinner Bibliographic Citation A bibliographic reference for the resource. Recommended practice is to include sufficient bibliographic detail to identify the resource as unambiguously as possible. Dickens, Charles. 'Speech at the Royal Hospital for Incurables Annual Dinner' (21 May 1857). Dickens Search. Eds. Emily Middleton and Lydia Craig. Accessed [date]. <a href="https://dickenssearch.com/speeches/1857-05-21_Speech_Royal-Hospital-for-Incurables-Annual-Dinner">https://dickenssearch.com/speeches/1857-05-21_Speech_Royal-Hospital-for-Incurables-Annual-Dinner</a>. Scripto Transcription A written representation of a document. Ladies and Gentlemen, A few days ago I was called upon to fill up my proxy for the election of candidates to be admitted into the Royal Hospital – a Hospital established for the permanent care and comfort of those who by disease, accident, or deformity, are disqualified for the duties of life. Coming on that occasion to the perusal of the extended list of cases there set before me, I could not but feel – in common, I am sure, with many who are here – inexpressible pity for the vast number of persons who are in that forlorn condition. When I saw in that list no fewer than 121 cases, out of whom the subscribers to this charity at the next election can elect but ten, I thought, with a kind of despair, not only of the 111 who must suffer by rejection, but of the great crowd of incurables dispersed about this country of whom this society has never so much as heard, and who will never hear of it. Having that morning been busy about my own country rest and recreation, I could not but strongly feel the contrast between myself – then in the full enjoyment of health and the use of all my limbs – and that of so many of my fellow creatures, until I was glad to put this list aside, and make my escape from the reflections to which it gave rise.  In one of my recent walks, I found myself in a pretty village in Surrey, which I had indeed often proposed to visit before, but had only paved the dusty road with good intentions – as I am sorry to say I have paved a worse place with a great deal of the same material – but on this morning I really found myself at the place. I inquired of a labourer for a house I wanted, and he told me, ‘When you can't go any further, turn to your left, and there you'll see a house with some writing wrote on the outside, which they tell me is its name; but you'll know, because you can read, and I can't read.’ At last I found it, and was shown into an agreeable sitting-room, which might be called a library. One sick man was lying on a sofa, and as soon as he saw me he opened the conversation, doing, as it were, the honours of the place. We spoke of the usual topics, talked of the weather, of our common enemy, the late wind, and of the progress of the crops, in the most pleasant and agreeable manner. He told me that that spot was above the cross of St. Paul’s – a fact of which he seemed excessively proud – and was altogether quite as cheerful as I was, or as I am. As I went upstairs, I got pleasant glimpses of the grounds, and of persons walking about in them, and met another sick man, quite as anxious for the arrival of dinner time as any of us in the London Tavern, and insisting that the cook's clock must be ten minutes slow. I went upstairs into another sitting-room, where were a number of sick women of various ages grouped about on sofas and chairs, engaged in various feminine tasks, and all talking and smiling as they went on. There was one poor paralytic creature busy at her embroidery, delighted to have her work admired, and I could not help feeling great admiration that anything so orderly and straight could come out of a form so warped and cruelly afflicted. I very much doubt whether she was ever more contented in her whole life. Another woman, much older, having only a thumb and two fingers left to work with, was plodding away at her work, and very proud of what she was able to accomplish with such an imperfect complement of digits. She told me, that in her old healthy days she thought there was no greater pleasure than to sit and read all day, but that would not do now, and she had taken to this work for relief and comfort, and she had found relief and comfort here very much. One old lady, who said she had been awake all night, in great pain and trouble, was nevertheless wonderfully conversable and talkative. She said she was very comfortable on the whole; but had a certain tendency to revert to the subject of rheumatism (and no wonder). In another and smaller room there was an old lady who said she was seventy-five years of age, but she was determined to persevere, which I told her I thought was a capital thing to do. Two other young women, evidently enduring much bodily suffering, had a pleasant consciousness of good looks, and showed a desire to make the most of them. I declare to you that in all these people – and all the inmates of this house whom I saw – there was not only a hopefulness of manner, but a serenity of face, a cheerfulness and social habit that perfectly amazed me. And this was the Royal Hospital, and these its incurable inmates. Ladies and gentlemen, while I congratulated myself, as I need hardly tell you I did that morning most heartily, that this institution was able to give so much relief to sufferers in such very hopeless cases, I must not deceive you as to the Royal Hospital itself. It is not by any means what it ought to be. Its present temporary establishment is in a very inconvenient old house, by no means suitable, with rooms not half high enough, and not half ample enough. The beds are much too crowded together, and I [should] say ventilation is exceedingly difficult. The furniture is excessively inadequate to the requirements of the establishment; and a great number of appliances are needed which healthy people would, perhaps, call mawkish, but are of the gravest importance in the presence of sickness. In one comprehensive word, it wants money; and for that money, ladies and gentlemen, in the name of Christian charity, I have undertaken to appeal to you. I cannot possibly make this appeal sufficiently strong for my own satisfaction; but if I only rested it on this one consideration, that there is no hospital in London or throughout England to which this Royal Hospital is not a natural and necessary adjunct it would, I am sure, not be made in vain. The stronger the case for any of those excellent institutions which you may most favour, the stronger is this case. Every hospital knows what it is to be obliged to discharge incurable patients for whom it can do no more, and whom it cannot retain, and every member of the most generous and devoted of all professions – the medical profession – knows what it is to contemplate with pain the heartrending spectacle of those weary ones turning away from the friendly shelter of the infirmary, without any suitable resting-place, and in all probability to lay themselves down at the door of the poor-house. We know the goodness of the poor, and their readiness to help one another on all occasions. But if we do all we can to relieve them of the burden of incurable sufferers, we shall still leave them field enough for the exercise of their utmost virtues.  I will not distress you by imagining what must be the conditions of these unhappy sufferers, lodged in hot and crowded attics, or what must be the misery which their presence brings to others; I will only end, as I began, by referring you to the list of applicants for admission at the next election. We live in an age of elections – at one time or another we almost all apply to be elected into clubs for pleasure or for profit – into great corporations, the House of Commons, and what not; and three-fourths of us associate our ambition with an election of some sort or other. Within how small a compass lies the ambition of these 121 applicants! If one of this number could but make an audible address to you here at this table, instead of me, how touchingly might he say, ‘Health has departed from us for ever – our place in the struggle for bread has been filled up by others, and we have faintly dropped out of the course. Give us only a quiet home, where we may endure what yet we have to undergo, and where, by our patient manner and our brightened faces, we may somewhat reward your kind interest on our behalf.’ Once they were busy and strong, but now they are hopelessly disqualified for the duties of life; let us discharge the first of these, and provide for them a resting-place, where they may be sheltered and cared for in their irremovable afflictions. I am sure we shall not reject their prayers, and that the time will come when this Hospital shall be nobly and bountifully endowed, so that no other qualification will be needed to ensure entrance within its walls but the presence of incurable disease. I call upon you to drink prosperity to the Royal Hospital. Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Speeches Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context speeches Description An account of the resource <h4>This collection brings together Dickens’s collected and uncollected speeches, making an under-explored body of work searchable for the first time. </h4> Dickens made more than a hundred speeches between 1837 and 1870 at events ranging from charitable dinners and award ceremonies to banquets in his honour or brief words of thanks before a public reading. In these speeches, the author touched on topics including his own life and professional development as well as other subjects such as politics, education, literature, public health and the development of the railway. Efforts to collect Dickens’s speeches prior to 1960 were incomplete at best, and misleading and fragmentary at worst. John Camden Hotten’s collection of speeches, begun without the author’s consent (although he never responded to Hotten’s letters, Dickens did begin efforts to block their publication) and published together with a hastily-compiled biography shortly after the author’s death, remained the primary collected version of the speeches until the Nonesuch Dickens of 1938-39 (a limited print run). Finally, K. J. Fielding brought all known speeches together in 1960, correcting shoddy transcriptions by Hotten using contemporary newspaper accounts, and nearly doubling the total number of speeches attributed to Dickens (The Speeches of Charles Dickens [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1960]): Hotten had only featured the text of 56 speeches, the Nonesuch edition of the speeches provided an additional nine, and Fielding presented more than a hundred. Since this monumental work, a handful have also appeared in The Dickensian;<a href="#fn1" id="ref1">1</a> there are certainly more to be found, as the volume of digitised newspapers and periodicals increases, and corrections to be made to existing transcriptions. No effort to collect the speeches has been made since Fielding; this collection thus represents the most complete body of Dickens's speeches ever assembled. Dickens did not write his speeches beforehand, nor did he speak from notes. George Dolby recounted his imaginative process in 1884: <blockquote>[S]upposing the speech was to be delivered in the evening, his habit was to take a long walk in the morning, during which he would decide on the various heads to be dealt with. These being arranged in their proper order, he would in his 'mind's eye,' liken the whole subject to the tire of a cart wheel – he being the hub. From the hub to the tire he would run as many spokes as there were subjects to be treated, and during the progress of the speech he would deal with each spoke separately, elaborating them as he went round the wheel; and when all the spokes dropped out one by one, and nothing but the tire and space remained […] his speech was at an end. (Charles Dickens as I Knew Him: The Story of the Reading Tours in Great Britain and America, pp. 273-74)</blockquote> However, on important occasions, Dickens might personally correct transcriptions of speeches for major London newspapers like The Times. As such, these newspaper accounts are as accurate a source as we can hope to have for what Dickens said (or meant to say). Our Transcription field will only include words attributed directly to Dickens rather than third-person reports or paraphrases of his speeches. Where only such reports exist, we will provide the text in the 'Summary' field. Ngram search and other text analysis tools will be applied to what are given as Dickens's words only, to avoid skewing the results, but of course we are reliant on the quality of the reporting: we recommend analysing topics, themes, quotations and concepts rather than granular detail such as prepositions, punctuation, capitalisation and the intricacies of grammar, as different newspaper accounts can vary on these points. Please <a href="https://dickenssearch.com/contact">contact us</a> with any errors, corrections, suggestions, or to contribute other uncollected speeches by Dickens. 1. These are Philip Collins, 'Some Uncollected Speeches by Dickens', The Dickensian 73.382 (1977): pp. 89-99; David A. Roos, 'Dickens at the Royal Academy of Arts: A New Speech and Two Eulogies', The Dickensian 73.382 (1977): pp. 100-107; and William F. Long, 'Dickens and the Coming of Rail to Deal: An Uncollected Speech and its Context', The Dickensian 85.418 (1989): pp. 66-80. <a href="#ref1" title="Jump back to footnote 1 in the text.">↩</a> Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Emily Middleton; Ellie-Louise Crampton; Maisie Howard; Adam Woods Speech Summary Occasionally speeches are summarised in sources in third person. Include that here, so that everything in the text transcription is only Dickens's words. Dickens answered on behalf of ‘Our Periodical Literature and the Press’. Location The location London Venue Where the speech was given Freemasons' Tavern Ngram Date Hidden from users and search. All items in a collection need to have the same data in the same format in order to show up in Ngram (either YYYY, YYYYMMDD, or YYYYMMDD). No combinations will work. For journalism, letters and poetry, if there is no month or day, default to the first of the month or January. So a poem with a date of March 1843 would be 18430301. A poem published in 1856 with no month or date information would be 18560101. 18570525 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Royal Geographical Society Anniversary Description An account of the resource Speech at the Royal Geographical Society Anniversary (25 May 1857). Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Dickens, Charles Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1857-05-25 Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context 1857-05-25_Speech_Royal-Geographical-Society-Anniversary Bibliographic Citation A bibliographic reference for the resource. Recommended practice is to include sufficient bibliographic detail to identify the resource as unambiguously as possible. Dickens, Charles. 'Speech at the Royal Geographical Society Anniversary' (25 May 1857). Dickens Search. Eds. Emily Middleton and Lydia Craig. Accessed [date]. <a href="https://dickenssearch.com/speeches/1857-05-25_Speech_Royal-Geographical-Society-Anniversary">https://dickenssearch.com/speeches/1857-05-25_Speech_Royal-Geographical-Society-Anniversary</a>.