The ‘Other World’ of ‘A Lazy Tour of Two Idle Apprentices’

Abstract

In September 1857 Dickens and Wilkie Collins undertook a whistlestop tour of the north of Britain, visiting Carlisle, Cumberland, Leeds and Doncaster. The ostensible purpose of the tour was to gather material for an article, written in collaboration by the two authors, to boost flagging sales of Household Words. Dickens’s biographers are convinced, however, that the real purpose of the expedition was to give Dickens an opportunity to see Ellen Ternan, whom he had first met that summer, and who was acting at the Theatre Royal, Doncaster, with her mother and sister that autumn. The resulting article, ‘A Lazy Tour of Two Idle Apprentices’, duly appeared in five instalments between 3 and 31 October. It was not reprinted during Dickens’s lifetime and has attracted little notice since its first appearance. Such comment as it has attracted has located its primary interest not in its merit as travelogue but in its cryptic revelations of Dickens’s unsettled emotions at this period of his life. While I agree that the biographical interest is genuine, in the present essay I would like to suggest that ‘A Lazy Tour’ is also worth notice for its literary value. In drawing attention to this neglected piece of journalism, I want to argue that travel to unfamiliar places provided Dickens with a vehicle for two fascinating tales of the uncanny, as haunting as the tales of Edgar Allan Poe.