Retitled 'Mr. Barlow' in collected editions of the series.

In a letter to Forster of September 1847, Dickens refers to 'the great British novelists'—Fielding, Smollett and Sterne—suggesting that many people would be interested in an essay 'recalling how one read them as a child (no one read them younger than I, I think), and how one gradually grew up into a different knowledge of them, and so forth' (Pilgrim, Vol. V, p. 158).

In different ways, the HW essay 'Where We Stopped Growing' and Ch. 4 of David Copperfield, work around this original idea.

The present item, however, while referring yet again to Dickens's cherished Arabian Nights (see Literary Allusions, below), shows how Dickens 'grew up' with a work he claimed to have disliked intensely as a child. This was Thomas Day's History of Sandford and Merton, a ruthlessly improving fiction for children first published in three volumes between 1783 and 1789, but which had gone through 23 editions by the year of Dickens's article. Its author was noticeably influenced by Rousseau, and was involved in the 1780s with schemes to improve the social and moral welfare of the poor. 'Mr Barlow' features in Day's text as the story-telling tutor of two pupils from contrasting backgrounds: the plebeian Harry (who is unbearably hard-working and honest), and the aristocratic Tommy (who is unbearably spoilt and conceited). Dickens clearly remembered the book vividly, and supposed that others did. Writing to his friend Richard H. Horne in 1848 about the latter's proposals for a series of lectures on literature, he recommended Sandford and Merton as one which ought to be included in the section dealing with children's books: 'I should say that the story had had great influence on many boys' (and consequently many men's) minds' (Pilgrim, Vol. V, p. 373).

In 'A Christmas Tree', a grand retrospect of childhood memories which opened the Christmas Number of HW for 1850 (21 December), Dickens had recalled the figures of 'Sandford and Merton with Mr Barlow' grouped with others from books read at the same period. By the 1860s, Dickens's denunciation of 'Mr Barlow' as the epitome of a killjoy had become a feature of his tabletalk, and something he entertained friends with, as James T. Fields's anecdote attests:

There were certain books particularly hateful to [Dickens], of which he never spoke except in terms of most ludicrous raillery. Mr Barlow in 'Sandford and Merton', he said, was the favourite enemy of his boyhood, and his first experience of a bore....Dickens, rattling his mental cane over the head of Mr Barlow was as much better than any play as can be imagined. (In and Out of Doors with Charles Dickens, 1876, pp. 154-155).

An intense dislike of 'monomanias', and especially of didacticism intruding into popular entertainments, is frequently detectable in Dickens's journalism.

Literary allusions:

• 'the consumption of a plate of cherries to the contemplation of a starlight night': Sandford and Merton (6th ed., 1791), Vol. II, pp. 54, 61;
• 'the example of a certain awful Master Mash ...at the theatre, ... facing a mad bull single-handed': Sandford and Merton (6th ed., 1791), Vol. II, pp. 246, 305-308;
• 'the Wonderful Lamp': from the story of 'Aladdin and the Wonderful Lamp' in The Arabian Nights;
• 'the peg in the neck of the Enchanted Horse': from the story of 'The Enchanted Horse' in The Arabian Nights;
• 'Casgar, on the frontiers of Tartary ... you couldn't let a Hunchback down an eastern chimney with a cord': from the story of 'The Little Hunchback' in The Arabian Nights ('Kashgar' is the more common form in English);
• 'a piece of Mr Carlyle's own Dead-Sea Fruit': the so-called 'Apples of Sodom' which, though of fair appearance, turn to ashes when grasped or tasted, are mentioned by Carlyle in 'Stump-Orator' (Latter Day Pamphlets, No. V, May 1850);
• 'every schoolboy knows that': 'Every schoolboy knows who imprisoned Montezuma, and who strangled Atahualpa', Thomas Babington Macaulay's essay 'Lord Clive', Essays Critical and Historical (1843 etc.) Vol. III;
• 'A Promethean Tommy, bound; and he is the vulture that gorges itself upon the liver...' alludes to the title of Aeschylus's tragedy Prometheus Bound (date uncertain) and the myth concerning Prometheus's punishment by Zeus.

Author: John Drew; © J. M. Dent/Orion Publishing Group, Dickens' Journalism Volume IV: 'The Uncommercial Traveller' and Other Papers, 1859-1870, 2000.

DJO gratefully acknowledges permission to reproduce this material.

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