Though Dickens had ceased to edit The Daily News on the 9th of February, 1846, he contributed to the paper for some few weeks longer.  But by the month of May his connection with it had entirely ceased; and on the 31st of that month, he started, by Belgium and the Rhine, for Lausanne in Switzerland, where he had determined to spend some time, and commence his next great book, and write his next Christmas story.

A beautiful place is Lausanne, as many of my readers will know; and a beautiful house the house called Rosemont, situated on a hill that rises from the Lake of Geneva, with the lake’s blue waters stretching below, and across, on the other side, a magnificent panorama of snowy mountains, the Simplon, St. Gothard, Mont Blanc, towering to the sky.  This delightful place Dickens took at a rent of some L10 a month.  Then he re-arranged all the furniture, as was his energetic wont.  Then he spent a fortnight or so in looking about him, and writing a good deal for Lord John Russell on Ragged Schools, and for Miss Coutts about her various charities; and finally, on the 28th of June, as he announced to Forster in capital letters, BEGAN DOMBEY.

But as the Swiss pine with home-sickness when away from their own dear land, so did this Londoner, amid all the glories of the Alps, pine for the London streets.  It seemed almost as if they were essential to the exercise of his genius.  The same strange mental phenomenon which he had observed in himself at Genoa was reproduced here.  Everything else in his surroundings smiled most congenially.  The place was fair beyond speech.  The shifting, changing beauty of the mountains entranced him.  The walks offered an endless variety of enjoyment.  He liked the people.  He liked the English colony.  He had made several dear friends among them and among the natives.  He was interested in the politics of the country, which happened, just then, to be in a state of peculiar excitement and revolution.  Everything was charming;—­“but,” he writes, “the toil and labour of writing, day after day, without that magic-lantern (of the London streets) is IMMENSE!” It literally knocked him up.  He had “bad nights,” was “sick and giddy,” desponding over his book, more than half inclined to abandon the Christmas story altogether for that year.  However, a short trip to Geneva, and the dissipation of a stroll or so in its thoroughfares, to remind him, as it were, of what streets were like, and a week of “idleness” “rusting and devouring,” “complete and unbroken,” set him comparatively on his legs again, and before he left Lausanne for Paris on the 16th of November, he had finished three parts of “Dombey,” and the “Battle of Life.”