Retitled 'The Calais Night Mail' in collected editions of the series
Dickens had already recorded his impressions of travelling on the South Eastern Railway's 'Special Express Train and Steam Ship' service between London and Paris, in a HW article of August 1851 (see ['A Flight', HW, Vol. III, 30 August 1851] Vol 3 of [the Dent Uniform Edition of Dickens' Journalism], article 4). In the present item, he draws on memories of cross-channel trips going back to his first journey abroad in July 1837, when he had written to Forster of his sea-sickness as 'that dismal extremity of qualmishness into which I am accustomed to sink whenever I have "the blue above and the blue below". I have always thought that "the silence where'er I go" is a beautiful touch of Barry Cornwall's... descriptive of the depression produced by sea voyaging.' (Pilgrim, Vol. I, p. 280). The allusion then was to "Cornwall's" [Procter's] song 'The Sea' (English Songs, 1832); in the present item, poetry again distracts him, this time a ballad by Thomas Moore (see Literary Allusions, below). Dominic Rainford explores Dickens's representation of such voyages in 'Crossing the Channel with Dickens', the opening essay in Dickens, Europe and the New Worlds, ed. Anny Sadrin, 1999.
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