Retitled 'Bound for the Great Salt Lake' in collected editions of the series.

The first thirty years of Victoria's reign saw the emigration of over 5 million British and Irish subjects, and while the British North American territories of what is now Canada were an increasingly popular destination for pioneers, the majority—over three and a half million—were bound for the United States, already an industrialised society.

Conditions on board emigrant ships were frequently appalling, and disease rife, as Lord Durham's controversial Report on the Affairs of British North America had made clear (Parliamentary Papers, House of Commons, Session 1839, Vol. 17, no. 3&c., repr. J. W. Southgate: London [1839]). Despite various legislative attempts to regulate conditions under sail, and the establishment of a supervisory Colonial Land and Emigration Commission, with offices at the chief ports of departure, regulations were frequently flouted, and emigrants remained prey to exploitation and trickery on land, both before and after embarkation (see Douglas Woodruff's 'Expansion and Emigration', Early Victorian England, ed. G.M. Young, 1935, Vol. 2, pp. 351-375). Dickens had depicted the perils and discomforts of the transatlantic journey for steerage passengers emigrating from Britain, in the sixth number of Martin Chuzzlewit (June 1843).

The first Mormon mission to Britain began operating in 1837, and between 1839 and 1841, some 70,000 converts emigrated to settlements in the United States. A second Mormon mission was undertaken in 1863, and had chartered the Amazon for the voyage of which Dickens writes. On 20 June 1863, a fortnight before the publication of the present item, an account of the same event was published in the Mormon paper Millennial Star, quoted at length by R. J. Dunn in 'The Unnoticed Uncommercial Traveller', The Dickensian, Vol. 60 (1964), p. 103-104. The report noted that the 'Amazon, Captain H K. Hovey... sailed from London on the 4th instant [i.e. June], with a company of 895 souls of the Saints on board...', and that the 'company passed the Government Emigration Officers on the 3rd, who eulogized their order, harmony, and general appearance...'. Also noted was the presence of various visitors witnessing the departure, and the 'deep impression' evidently made on them by the 'unanimity of feeling manifested by the Saints, and the deep interest with which they listened to the instructions given and took part in the proceedings ... displaying, as it did, a something so different from all their [i.e. the visitors'] conceptions of us as a people'.

The recollections of the artist George Dunlop Leslie confirm that Dickens was among a party of visitors who gathered to see the ship on Wednesday 3rd June before it embarked from 'London New Dock' basin, to the south of Shadwell Church. The party 'drove in an open carriage from the office of [AYR]... Dickens talked and laughed the whole way, and was in great form as we passed through Ratcliffe Highway' (Charles Dickens by Pen and Pencil, ed. F. G. Kitton, 1890, pp. 164-165). On 4th June, he attended a dinner in Westbourne Terrace organised by his German friend, Frederick Lehmann, and according to a fellow guest, the musicologist Sir George Grove, Dickens 'was full of a ship of Mormon emigrants which he had been seeing; 1200 of the cleanest, best conducted, most excellent looking people he ever saw. No doubt there will be an account of it in All the Year Round' ([6 June 1863]; Life and Letters of Sir George Grove, 1903, p. 978).

Dickens's footnote to his own article refers to Richard Monckton Milnes's review of Sir Richard F. Burton's The City of the Saints (1859), which had appeared in the Edinburgh Review for January 1862 (pp. 185-210). Among other things, the review confirms Dickens's observation that many Mormon emigrants were Welsh: '...the persons abducted are almost invariably Dissenters, and Wales supplies a larger proportion than any other part of Great Britain' (p. 198).

Textual note:

• copytext has 'the experience it describes to Mr. Monckton Milnes M.P.': Uncommercial Traveller, Charles Dickens Edition (1868) has '...to Lord Houghton'.

Literary allusions:

• 'the Standard of England': popular title for patriotic songs of the period, e.g. ´The Standard of England!' (1847), 'The Standard of England and the Banner of France' (1854?), 'The Standard of England' (1804);
• 'a flattering carver... not as they were': adapts Goldsmith's couplet from Retaliation (1774), 'A flattering painter, who made it his care/To draw men as they ought to be, not as they are';
• 'Geese, Villain?': Shakespeare, Macbeth, Act 5, Sc. 3.

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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