Rest Cure
Whenever Charles Dickens felt his exhausting workload was starting to take its toll, he knew just what to do.
1864
Queen Victoria 1837-1901
‘Cabin Scene’, showing a passenger on a packet crossing the Channel.
By the Revd Thomas Streatfield (1777-1848), via Wikimedia Commons. Public domain.
Introduction
Charles Dickens corresponded regularly with a Swiss friend whom he had met in Lausanne, a M. de Cerjat. In one of his letters, written from his home near Rochester in Kent, Dickens shared with his friend the secret of his remarkably industrious working life — frequent trips to France.
Gad’s Hill Place,
Higham by Rochester,
Tuesday, Oct. 25th, 1864.
I have altered this place very much since you were here, and have made a pretty (I think an unusually pretty) drawing-room. I wish you would come back and see it. My being on the Dover line, and my being very fond of France, occasion me to cross the Channel perpetually. Whenever I feel that I have worked too much, or am on the eve of overdoing it, and want a change, away I go by the mail-train, and turn up in Paris or anywhere else that suits my humour, next morning. So I come back as fresh as a daisy,* and preserve as ruddy a face as though I never leant over a sheet of paper. When I retire from a literary life I think of setting up as a Channel pilot.
* The following December, Dickens wrote in a letter to Mr B. W. Procter that “I got rid of a touch of neuralgia in France (as I always do there)”.
