Titled 'Travelling Abroad' in collected editions of the series

The 'German chariot' which conveys the narrator on his dreamy journey is modelled on the coach in which Dickens and his household made their trips to Italy (1844–45), Switzerland and France (1846–47). In May 1844 Dickens related to Forster how he hoped to find 'some good old shabby devil of a coach – one of those vast phantoms that hide themselves in a corner of the Pantechnicon' and how he had bought such a one for £45. 'As for comfort...' he continued, 'it is about the size of your library; with night-lamps and day-lamps and pockets and imperials and leathern cellars, and the most extraordinary contrivances'; sitting inside it, he felt 'a perfect Sentimental Traveller' (Pilgrim, IV, p. 127&n.). In Pictures from Italy this same carriage is described as 'an English travelling carriage of considerable proportions, fresh from the shady halls of the Pantechnicon' (1846; 'Going through France'). As in the travel book, Dickens here displays a tendency to give comically literal translations of common French expressions ('ordinary wine'; 'It is well'); 'the British Boaxe' appears to be an imitation of how the concept of boxing might be rendered in a French accent.

      According to Charles Dickens the Younger, the narrator's description of meeting with 'a very queer small boy' on the high road between Gravesend and Rochester 'has been more extensively quoted, it may be fairly assumed, than anything he ever wrote' (UT 4, p. xviii). The description transforms an anecdote which Dickens liked to tell concerning his acquisition of Gad's Hill Place. Although he did not set up house there permanently until October 1860, he had bought it in 1856, and known of it since his time as a child in Chatham. Writing to M. de Cerjat in January 1857, Dickens relates (with embellishments) how, in 1855, he had walked past it with W.H. Wills and said to him

[the] house has always had a curious interest for me, because, when I was a small boy down in these parts, I thought it the most beautiful house... ever seen. And my poor father used to bring me to look at it, and used to say that if I ever grew up to be a clever man, perhaps I might own that house, or such another house. In remembrance of which, I have always in passing, looked to see if it was to be sold or let; and it has never been to me like any other house, and it has never changed at all." (Pilgrim, Vol. VIII, pp. 265-66&nn.)

Later that day, the anecdote continues, Wills dined by chance with the owner's daughter, from whom he discovered that the house was for sale, and lost no time in informing Dickens. In fact, Dickens's letter to Wills of 9 February 1855 suggests a different sequence of events (see Alan S. Watts, Dickens at Gad's Hill, 1989, p. 20). Nevertheless, Dickens clearly felt that a section of his readers would be familiar enough with some version of the anecdote to make his allusion to it in the present paper intelligible.
      Forster comments that on arrival in Paris in the winter of 1846, Dickens 'went at first rather frequently to the Morgue, until shocked by something so repulsive that he had not courage for a long time to go back' (Forster, Book 5, Ch. 7). This experience may lie behind Dickens's account here of a 'haunting,' while the remarks concerning the susceptibility of children to nightmares seem to echo opinions in one of Charles Lamb's Essays of Elia, a work which Dickens knew well ('Witches and Other Night-Fears'; see Pilgrim, Vol. II, p. 139&n.). More certainly, the mention of an 'old grey man lying all alone' seen in the Morgue 'one Christmas Day' relates to the 'old man with a grey head' seen by Dickens there on 31 December 1846; 'he lay there, all alone, like an impersonation of the wintry eighteen hundred and forty-six', Dickens wrote later to Forster (Pilgrim, Vol V, p. 3). Other visits to the Morgue are recounted in ['The Uncommercial Traveller [xviii]', AYR, Vol. XVIII, 16 May 1863; titled 'Some Recollections of Morality' in collected editions of the series], and Items 13 ['Lying Awake', HW, Vol. VI, 30 October 1852] and 49 ['Railway Dreaming', HW, Vol. XIII, 10 May 1856] of Vol. 3 of [the Dent Uniform Edition of Dickens' Journalism]. Harry Stone considers in depth the nature of Dickens's continuing interest, in The Night Side of Dickens, 1994, pp. 86–100, 564–6.

Literary allusions

• 'Where Falstaff went out to rob those travellers, and ran away': Shakespeare, I Henry IV Act 2, Sc. 2; 
• 'Blow, blow, thou winter wind': Amiens's song, Shakespeare, As You Like It, Act 2, Sc. 7; 
• 'Sterne's Maria': the crazed country girl sentimentally described both in The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Vol. 9 (1767), Ch. 24, and in A Sentimental Journey through France and Italy (1768), sequence titled 'Maria—Moulines' et. seq.; 'France stood where I had left it', paraphrase of 'Stands Scotland where it did?', Shakespeare, Macbeth, Act 4, Sc. 3; 
• 'the nursery rhyme about Banbury Cross': traditional rhyme beginning 'Ride a cock horse to Banbury Cross', collected in J. G. Rusher's Banbury List and Directory (1812 etc.); 
• 'Don Quixote on the back of the wooden horse': Cervantes' Don Quixote, Part II (1615), Ch. 41.