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Commentary

The collected Uncommercial Traveller essays were preceded by individual periodical publication, beginning on 28 January 1860. The first part of the series, involving seventeen articles, was collected in volume form in 1861, unillustrated. In 1865, eleven additional pieces were published in volume form in the Cheap Edition; five years after Dickens's death, eight of the nine last essays in the series appeared in the Library Edition with four illustrations by G. J. Pinwell, and another four by "W. M."

The full-page illustration of "time and His Wife" as a frontispiece anticipates a churchyard scene in "The City of the Absent," listed in this volume as number 21, but in the standard Oxford Illustrated Dickens volume as number 23. The lamp in the background, left, suggests it is early evening, but the grave markers and wrought-iron railing, as well as the clothing worn by the elderly couple, are consistent with the text. However, the pair seem to be raking far more hay than in Dickens's essay. Reinhart has realised in detail the following passage:

Such was the surrounding of one City church-yard that I saw last summer, on a Volunteering Saturday evening towards eight of the clock, when with astonishment I beheld an old, old man and an old, old woman in it, making hay. Yes, of all occupations in this world, making hay! It was a very confined patch of church-yard lying between Gracechurch Street and the Tower, capable of yielding, say, an apronful of hay. By what means the old, old man and woman had got into it, with an almost toothless hay-making rake, I could not fathom. No open window was within view; no window at all was within view, sufficiently near the ground to have enabled their old legs to descend from it; the rusty church-yard gate was locked, the mouldy church was locked. Gravely among the graves, they made hay, all alone by themselves. They looked like Time and his wife. There was but the one rake between them, and they both had hold of it in a pastorally-loving manner, and there was hay on the old woman's black bonnet, as if the old man had recently been playful. The old man was quite an obsolete old man, in knee-breeches and coarse grey stockings, and the old woman wore mittens like unto his stockings in texture and in color. They took no heed of me as I looked on, unable to account for them. The old woman was much too bright for a pew-opener, the old man much too meek for a beadle. On an old tombstone in the foreground between me and them, were two cherubim; but for those celestial embellishments being represented as having no possible use for knee-breeches, stockings, or mittens, I should have compared them with the hay-makers, and sought a likeness. I coughed and awoke the echoes, but the hay-makers never looked at me. They used the rake with a measured action, drawing the scanty crop towards them; and so I was fain to leave them under three yards and a half of darkening sky, gravely making hay among the graves, all alone by themselves. Perhaps they were spectres, and I wanted a medium. [91]

Bibliography

Bentley, Nicolas, Michael Slater, and Nina Burgis. The Dickens Index. New York and Oxford: Oxford U. P., 1990.

Dickens, Charles. The Uncommercial Traveller, Hard Times, and The Mystery of Edwin Drood. Il. C. S. Reinhart and Luke Fildes. The Household Edition. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1876.

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Created 24 May 2011

Last modified 6 January 2020