Charles DickensImagine the Calais Night Mail boat in 1863, heaving, shuddering and belching soot in the faces of a multitude of sickening travellers.
Amongst them, Charles Dickens's Uncommercial Traveller alone is entirely oblivious to his surroundings, as he cedes to a curious compulsion to provide a charming and expressive rendition of a Moore's melody. For this crossing, the Irish ballad belted out is "Rich and rare were the ge-ems she-e-e-e wore . . .", until the Traveller is "bumped rolled gurgled washed and pitched into Calais Harbour".
Such a cameo is typical of this colourful collection of fictional excerpts, journalistic passages and nuggets from Dickens's travel writings on France. This miscellany not only reveals the writer's evident love of France and of most things French, but also provides rich insight into French everyday life, travel and society from revolutionary excesses through to Second Empire enrichment.
Some of Dickens's own obsessions pepper the selected excerpts with recurrent images or themes, such as the obligatory visit to the Paris Morgue, situated on the city-centre quays of the Île de la Cité. Bodies of unidentified suicides and murder victims were exposed to the public behind a sheet of plain glass for three days. That same public, from elegant ladies to street boys, would rush unceremoniously into the morgue to view any newly exposed body, speculating wildly and apparently unperturbable. Perhaps drawn by the often ghoulish display, or struck by such a tangible memento mori, or simply overwhelmed by a voyeuristic desire to observe the crowd's avid reaction to such exhibits, Dickens's travellers return to the Morgue as to a magnet.
BY TIMES, FACT and fiction fuse in Dickens's pieces, but because the focus is on the individual, on trade, and on types, the reader is incredibly indulgent, wooed by the sheer wealth of detail, the irresistible caricatures, and a keen evocation of sights, sounds and smells from a bygone era. This is social history at its richest: a fair day in flat Flanders conjures up ventriloquists, peep shows, and travelling players, while Paris offers public baths, cafés and wine shops to the literary flâneur.
Although Dickens himself spoke French with reasonable fluency, the mortifying infantilisation involved in speaking foreign languages is a recurrent comic motif. Intelligent adults are seen attempting to engage in monosyllabic conversation, while their foreign counterpart replies in a loud shout, as if to a deaf child. When Mr Englishman tries to speak French he is likened to a goldfish, emitting "certain fishy gasps", with no actual words forthcoming.
The French are invariably depicted as gentle, courteous and full of humanity, receptive to oddity and idiosyncrasy. The not-so-subtle subtext is a concomitant criticism of the contemporary English emphasis on conformism. As with any literary foil, Dickens has his own axes to grind, and his satirical pieces are particularly acerbic. Nineteenth-century stereotypes that depict the French as frog-eating clog wearers prefigure equally reductive modern sterotypes such as the cheese-eating surrender monkeys of The Simpsons. Through mockery, Dickens rejects such over-simplifications and provides persuasive counter images of French people who value culinary excellence, travellers' comforts and human warmth.
Each excerpt is accompanied by a wealth of contextualisations and annotations that will interest amateur and scholar alike. However, there is a regrettable tendency to hold the reader's hand through excessive textual paraphrase and explanation, suggestive of the above "fishy gasp" exchange. The passages stand very solidly on their own; the modern reader is not an imbecile; and Dickens's is certainly not (yet) a foreign language. Long may all his works remain as readable and enjoyable as this rich and wonderful collection on France.
Síofra Pierse is lecturer in French and francophone studies in the school of languages, literatures and film, UCD. She is editor of The City in French Literature, published by UCD Press
Dickens on France - Fiction, Journalism and Travel Writing Edited by John Edmondson Signal Books, 425pp. £16.99
