DICKENS' FIRST SEA VOYAGE.

Daily Telegraph (Napier), Issue 3201, 1 October 1881, Page 3

DICKENS' FIRST SEA VOYAGE.

Upon the morrow of the prorogation of Parliament the Prime Minister, as it happened, was pledged to attend a grand banquet, -which was to be given in his honour at Edinburgh. Thither Mr Thomas Beard and his young colleague, Charles Dickens, were early despatched, so that they might be in ample time to report the proceedings. They had such leisure for their journey northwards, in fact, that they went round jby sea to Leith. This was Dickens' first taste of the salt water; it was the very first Voyage he had ever had the opportunity- of* enjoying. And his exhilaration in earlier part of it Mr Beard describes to ; nic as having been intense ; first of all, wh*en the vessel dropped down the river/ and afterwards when it began to skirt the eastern coast of England. Conspicuous among the passengers on board was one who, by his Tory manner and occupation at starting, helped materially to enhance the blithe young humorist's enjoyment. This, in point of fact, was ji"well-tempered, fresh complexioned, sandy-haired, commercial traveller, to wtom Dickens's attention 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 Bloomebury Christening," in the April number for that year of the Monthly Magazine. At every fresh paroxysm of mirth, provoked by the comically lugubrious proceeding of Mr Nicodemus Damps, the beardless author's heart warmed more and more to the good-humoured bagman, who thus unwittingly 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, the young novelist of the hereafter, little dreaming then of his alter David Copperfield, and of the . old boat On the sands, inhabited, among others, by Little Em'ly and Mr Peggotty, was suddenly prostrated by the mat de mer, of which he 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.