Collins / Gregory The Lazy Tour of Two Idle Apprentices

1. Auflage 2011
ISBN: 978-1-78094-009-0
Verlag: Hesperus Press Ltd.
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 142 Seiten

A delightful meditation on the pleasures of bachelor bonding and an example of collaborative journalism at its best _x000D_  _x000D_ In autumn 1857, Charles Dickens embarked on a sightseeing trip to Cumberland with his friend, the rising star of literature Wilkie Collins. Writing together, they reported their adventures for Dickens' periodical Household Words, producing a showcase of both long-cherished and entirely novel sides of these well-loved men of letters. Boasting two ghost stories from undisputed masters of the genre, it also uniquely demonstrates their glee in caricaturing themselves and one another-Collins assumes the identity of Thomas Idle (a born-and-bred idler) and Dickens that of Francis Goodchild (laboriously idle). Through their fictional counterparts, the men relentlessly satirize Dickens' maniacal energy and Collins' idleness. The result is an exuberant diary of a journey and a rare insight into one of literature's most famed and intriguing friendships.

Wilkie Collins was a pioneer of detective fiction as well as one of Dickens' closest companions and collaborators. He published some of his most famous novels,The Woman in White and The Moonstone, in Dickens' journal All the Year Round

Autoren/Hrsg.

Collins, Wilkie

Gregory, Melissa Valiska

Leseproben

Originally published in five instalments in Charles Dickens’ weekly periodical, is the collaboratively written and comically exaggerated chronicle of a trip that Dickens and Wilkie Collins took together in September of 1857. Seeking a holiday ‘escape’ as two apprentices of ‘Lady Literature’, the two men travelled from London to Doncaster to see the races, writing about their trip on the way. Dickens and Collins assign themselves the identities of Francis Goodchild and Thomas Idle, adopted from a series of engravings by William Hogarth that features the contrasting lives of two apprentice weavers: one industrious (Goodchild) and one dissipated (Idle). Much of the text’s humour stems from the satirical juxtaposition of these types, which often reflect each writer’s personal foibles and insecurities, but is more than a comic send-up of Goodchild’s and Idle’s temperamental differences. An expansive text, one part travelogue and one part showy literary spectacle, it bounces from slapstick comedy to horror and everything in between.

revels in the art of the running gag with recurring characters such as the braying drunk called the ‘Gong Donkey’ at Doncaster. Verbal tics also abound, including Goodchild’s feeble effort to cheer a bedridden Idle with the silly refrain, ‘There is the sea, and here are the shrimps – let us eat ’em.’ Its neurotic lead characters gleefully satirise respectable English pastimes, evident in Idle’s traumatic account of an adolescent game of cricket that results in a potentially catastrophic state of perspiration. But when plunges into gothic nightmare, it pulls out all the stops. A man returns from the dead during a dark and stormy night, and a ghost who has terrified his young bride to death holds listeners hostage while recounting his frightful tale. Along the way, Dickens and Collins do not fail to touch upon important Victorian social issues, including the fear of technological progress, the desolation of the mentally ill, or the suffering of human slaves, who appear suddenly in a description of dark, varnished mahogany that recalls ‘in the depth of its grain, through all its polish, the hue of the wretched slaves who groaned long ago under old Lancaster merchants’. In short, is ambitious in scope and stubbornly un-idle.

Indeed, is in many ways a hyper-stimulated text, one that meditates on the hectic, exciting and sometimes frantic quality of ever more modern urban life. As the train carries Goodchild and Idle across a dreary industrialised landscape, the two men repeatedly try to make their holiday a restorative experience. Goodchild seeks out the reinvigorating effects of the countryside, hoping to find a sublime experience in the ‘mountains’ of Cumberland, while Idle takes the leisure spa approach, trying his best to luxuriate in doing nothing at all in a series of hotels. Both men fail miserably to achieve any kind of rest, and today’s readers will no doubt recognise the syndrome of the vacation becoming more work than work itself. Of course, many Victorian novels are anxiously preoccupied with the accelerated feeling of the modern world, but, as a humorous travel piece contained within the pages of a periodical, experiments with capturing modernity’s rhythms in an especially freewheeling way. It uses the episodic digressions of the travelogue to comment on the enormous changes that were propelling Victorians through stages of technological advancement (and their own landscape) at an alarmingly swift pace.

From the very beginning, spotlights the tension between the stated purpose of the trip – a lazy holiday from urban professional life – and its less than lazy reality. Goodchild and Idle have planned their holiday idealistically, imagining the journey as a relaxed walking tour and themselves as rugged travellers capable of roughing it in the open air. They send their luggage on ahead and carry only light packs. But by the end of the first day, they are antsy, bored and craving the convenience of the train. ‘[W]hat was the use of walking, when you could ride at such a pace as that’, wonders Idle. Longing for the trappings of the city life they had intended to leave behind, the men decide to take the express train, a ‘thundering meteor’ that hurtles through the countryside. s description of the train, ‘[t]he greatest power in nature and art combined’, celebrates its speed and strength, and the passage depicting what the landscape looks like from the window reproduces the cadence of the engine as well as the abrupt breaks in the rapidly changing scenery: ‘The pastoral country darkened, became coaly, became smoky, became infernal, got better, got worse, improved again, grew rugged, turned romantic…’. For all their efforts to unwind, the idle apprentices find themselves stimulated by and more in sync with the formidable energy of the express.

also attends to the troubling side effects of this powerful technology, describing, for instance, the way the train aggressively takes over the environment. Whole stations are ‘swallowed up’ by the train’s presence, and the express bears down on towns like a military attack, complete with ‘a volley of cannonballs’. In other words, despite its convenience, the railway also has the potential to make its passengers feel disempowered. Once the men opt to ride instead of walk, the express keeps them on its schedule and deposits them at a series of unpleasant backwater stops. Perhaps finding themselves at the mercy of the train explains their comparison of it to an overwrought female hysteric in need of domination:

Now, the engine shrieked in hysterics of such intensity, that it seemed desirable that the men who had her in charge should hold her feet, slap her hands, and bring her to; now, burrowed into tunnels with a stubborn and undemonstrative energy so confusing that the train seemed to be flying back into leagues of darkness.

This startlingly violent moment begins with the restraining and striking of a woman yet ends with a classic phallic image of the train penetrating tunnels at an astonishing speed. Such a portrayal redirects the reader’s attention away from the experience of being a passenger and toward the masculine prowess of the train operators who control it, suggesting an equivocal response to the railway and, potentially, a need to reassert control over a central mid-Victorian technology that required surrender. Although train travel is sometimes milked for comedy in as when Goodchild sprints around the platform pretending he is in a hurry to be somewhere simply because haste is the most appropriate sentiment for a train station, the text also suggests that trains and especially railway stations can be depressing, dehumanising places. In the junction station at Allonby, for instance, people are transformed into ‘human locomotives’, less emotionally sensitive than the poor beasts torturously trapped in the livestock cars. Throughout, depicts the train and the train station with compelling ambivalence.

Collins and Dickens depict other aspects of their trip uneasily as well. Both of the ghost stories occur in country inns, which might be interpreted as comic homage to the unpleasantness of travelling or a more heartfelt expression of dislocation and disorientation, augmented by the speed at which one could now traverse the country. The scenery along the way is often grim, featuring depressed town markets and the pinched faces of the poor. Doncaster comes across as unpleasantly seedy, and the text dwells upon the worst elements of the long-standing revelry that accompany the sporting event. Portraying the drunk and disorderly mob as alternately pathetic and vicious, Goodchild compares the grotesque crowd to the lunatic inmates he has just visited, and Idle determines that he will not leave his room at all. When the races are over, two ‘inconceivably drunk’ men, the ‘Gong donkey’ and the ‘Jackall’, tear into each other until they are separated and dragged away by police. The story then concludes with the melancholy image of the day after the Battle of Waterloo. These images and others undermine the text’s cheerful tone and deprive the reader of comedy’s usual affirmation.

Perhaps is a conflicted piece of writing in part because it arose out of an emotionally charged, messy and conflicted situation. First, the relationship between the two writers was enormously complex. The men first met in the spring of 1851 when Collins was twenty-seven and Dickens thirty-nine. Dickens was an internationally celebrated author famous for bestsellers such as (1837–9), (1843) and (1850–1). He was also the founder and editor of a journal that established him as a weekly presence in the lives of many middle-class readers. Wilkie Collins’ fame did not approach the scale of Dickens’ until two years later, when Collins published the phenomenally popular but he was no naive protégé. His early novels, including (1852) and (1854), were crucial in establishing sensation fiction as a recognisable, popular type of Victorian novel with lurid plotlines and shocking family secrets. Collins had also found early success publishing a biography of his father, a well-respected landscape...