ANOTHER MAN 117in the dark, they reached a “Watercourse, thundering and roaring.” Dickens
insisted they follow it down, “subject to all gymnastic hazards.” After two
hours of that, Collins fell and sprained his ankle badly. He was somehow
brought down, and Dickens crowed: “C. D. carrying C. melo-dramatically
(Wardour to the life!) everywhere; into and out of carriages; up and down
stairs; to bed every step” (8.440). To Georgina Hogarth, who now received
letters to the family that did not mention Catherine, Dickens repeated his
obvious pleasure in having “enacted Wardour over again.” He expressed no
remorse about having subjected Collins to an ordeal he had sensibly resisted
in the first place. A few days later, Dickens reported, Collins was walking
“with two thick sticks, like an admiral in a farce”; he managed the rest of the
tour with very little choice but to stay at their inns and write (8.444).
In his letters, Dickens played his usual role as the comedian of disaster.
The charm of “The Lazy Tour” is quite different: its most amusing sections
are dialogues or contrasts between the two “idlers,” called, after William
Hogarth’s 1747 engravings “Industry and Idleness,” Mr. Thomas Idle and
Mr. Francis Goodchild. In his portion of the first chapter, Dickens claims
that “there was not a moral pin to choose between them, and they were both
idle in the last degree.” But there are distinctions to be made: “Goodchild
was laboriously idle, and would take upon himself any amount of pains and
labour to assure himself that he was idle; in short, had no better idea of idle-
ness than that it was useless industry.” Thomas Idle, however, is “an idler of
the unmixed Irish or Neapolitan type, a passive idler, a born-and-bred idler,
a consistent idler, who practiced what he would have preached if he had not
been too idle to preach; a one entire and perfect chysolite of idleness” (Dent
3.422). The national stereotypes betray the actual moral difference between
the two in Dickens’s mind; yet, as he wrote, he went on worrying the dif-
ference as if it offered a genuine attempt to see himself through the eyes of
another.
As Thomas Idle sings “Annie Laurie,” Goodchild revolts against the notion
that a man would “lay him doon and dee” for a woman—better to “get up,
and punch somebody’s head.” For him—Wardour again—love and violence
go hand in hand. For Idle, it’s not worth the trouble to fall in love, and Good-
child would be better off keeping out of it. “Mr Goodchild, who is always in
love with somebody, and not unfrequently with several objects at once, made
no reply” (Dent 3.423). The unusually autobiographical back-and-forth of
such dialogues creates the freshness of a work otherwise filled with travel
journalism and Gothic dream stories. As chapter four opens, Goodchild
returns to the lame Idle after a day exploring the country and visiting a
lunatic asylum (perhaps an in-joke about Forster’s new position or Dickens’s