DICKENS’ FIRST SEA VOYAGE.

Globe, Volume XXIII, Issue 2391, 1 December 1881, Page 4

DICKENS’ FIRST SEA VOYAGE.

Upon the morrow of tho prorogation of Parliament tho Prime Minister, as it happened, was pledged to attend a grand banquet, which waj to be given in hie honor at Edinburgh. Thither Mr Thomas Beard and hia young colleague, Charles Dickens, wore early despatched, so that they might be in ample time to report tho proceedings. They had such leisure for their journey northwards, in fact, that they wont round by sea to Loith. This was Dickens’ first taste of the salt water; it was the very first voyage ho had ever had the opportunity of enjoying. And bis exhilaration iu the earlier part of it Mr Bsard describes to mo as having been intense ; first of all, when the vessel dropped down tho river, and after sards when it began to skirt the eastern coast of England. Conspicuous among the passengers on board was one who, by his very manner and occupation at starting, helped materially to enhance the blithe young humorist’s enjoyment. This, in point of fact, was a welltempered, fresh complexioned, sandy haired, commercial traveller, to whom tion was first of all attracted by the circumstance that, to the unspeakable delight of young Boz, he was reading to himself, with frequent roars of laughter, “ The Bloomsbury Christ onitig,” in tho April number for that year of the “ Monthly Magazine.” At every fresh paroxysm of mirth, provoked by the comically lugubrious proceedings of Mr Nicodomus Damps, the beardless author’s heart warmed more and more to tho good humored bagman, who thus unwillingly took rank to himself among Dickens’ earliest appreciators Later on, in this little coast voyage, when the vessel had fairly got into Yarmouth Roads, and began to encounter rather boisterous weather, tho young novelist of the hereafter, little dreaming then of his alter cr,o, David Oopperfield, and of the old boat on the sands, inhabited among others, by Little Em’ly and Mr Peggotty, was suddenly prostrated by tha mal dc mer, of which ho never before had experience. The life and soul of his companion until then, he from that moment down to their arrival at Leith, completely collapsed.— “ Charles Dickens as a Journalist,” by Charles Kent, in “ Time.”