I shall never forget the one-fourth serious and three-fourths
comical astonishment, with which, on the morning
of the third of January eighteen-hundred-and-forty-two,
I opened the door of, and put my head into, a ‘state-room’
on board the Britannia steam-packet, twelve hundred
tons burthen per register, bound for Halifax and
Boston, and carrying Her Majesty’s mails.
That this state-room had been specially engaged for
’Charles Dickens, Esquire, and Lady,’
was rendered sufficiently clear even to my scared
intellect by a very small manuscript, announcing the
fact, which was pinned on a very flat quilt, covering
a very thin mattress, spread like a surgical plaster
on a most inaccessible shelf. But that this
was the state-room concerning which Charles Dickens,
Esquire, and Lady, had held daily and nightly conferences
for at least four months preceding: that this
could by any possibility be that small snug chamber
of the imagination, which Charles Dickens, Esquire,
with the spirit of prophecy strong upon him, had
always foretold would contain at least one little sofa,
and which his lady, with a modest yet most magnificent
sense of its limited dimensions, had from the first
opined would not hold more than two enormous portmanteaus
in some odd corner out of sight (portmanteaus which
could now no more be got in at the door, not to say
stowed away, than a giraffe could be persuaded or forced
into a flower-pot): that this utterly impracticable,
thoroughly hopeless, and profoundly preposterous
box, had the remotest reference to, or connection
with, those chaste and pretty, not to say gorgeous
little bowers, sketched by a masterly hand, in the
highly varnished lithographic plan hanging up in
the agent’s counting-house in the city of London:
that this room of state, in short, could be anything
but a pleasant fiction and cheerful jest of the captain’s,
invented and put in practice for the better relish
and enjoyment of the real state-room presently to
be disclosed:- these were truths which I really could
not, for the moment, bring my mind at all to bear
upon or comprehend. And I sat down upon a kind
of horsehair slab, or perch, of which there were
two within; and looked, without any expression of
countenance whatever, at some friends who had come
on board with us, and who were crushing their faces
into all manner of shapes by endeavouring to squeeze
them through the small doorway.
We had experienced a pretty smart shock before coming
below, which, but that we were the most sanguine
people living, might have prepared us for the worst.
The imaginative artist to whom I have already made
allusion, has depicted in the same great work, a
chamber of almost interminable perspective, furnished,
as Mr. Robins would say, in a style of more than
Eastern splendour, and filled (but not inconveniently
so) with groups of ladies and gentlemen, in the very
