Travelling
Source
The shorthand notebooks of Charles Dickens and Arthur P. Stone [ref: cdc5890009_11, cdc5890009_13 and cdc5890009_15], Free Library of Philadelphia, Philadelphia.
Description
A meditation on the benefits of travel, written in shorthand. Please be advised that this text includes discriminatory language.
Transcription
I suppose the mere act of travelling [is] not very likely to open a man’s mind or amend and enlarge his spirit if he be conceited and shut up within himself and his own good opinion of himself in the beginning. As it would be of small advantage to a man to live in a house with 10,000 windows if he never looked out of one of them, so a man who goes around the world constantly shut up in his own self-satisfactions and prejudices can get very little out of it. Indeed, it may be said of such people that they cannot see anything for themselves. They are always in their own way. They themselves are the obstacle always interposed between their own mental state and the sub/object. Without reflection and abstraction from self it may be questioned whether any tangible sub/object in the universe is capable of producing a very beneficial effect on the mind. Mount Vesuvio for example is a vast and always changing mass of fire and cinders. There is nothing much more remarkable in that ipso facto than there would be in a gigantic gas works. It is when a man […] himself to consider that an action he beholds in that mountain is the action of prodigious forces pent up in the recesses of the earth and heaving and working there from the dawn of creation to the present hour that the importance and beauty and grandeur of what he sees impress him adequately. The falls of Niagara are but so many thousand million gallons of water but the consideration that a great river is throwing itself over a certain rock and that in the course of ages it must weather/wear the rock away and change the whole face of the country thereabouts is quite another thing. We must all put something of ourselves into everything we see and if we do not so train ourselves so that we have something to put some bank to draw upon some capital to invest nothing can have the charms for us that it is meant/wont to have. Consequently it is always possible for civilised men to conceive how little interesting nature is to the savage and how very small an appreciation he has of her wonders and beauties distanced from his wants and appetites. But this is in fact one of the main reasons for his being the monotonous, indolent stupid brute he always is for any purpose other than his own immediate personal wants. There is yet another kind of man to whom travelling can be of little service. I allude to the kind of man who, when he sees a remarkable thing, thinks not of the thing itself but of what he shall/should say of it. A state of mind so excessively selfish and despicable that I think on the whole I would rather travel with a […] young Whig or even a prejudiced old one than with a person from whom so little improvement is to be got and from whom such constant annoyance is to be derived.
Source text
To date, no direct source text has been identified.
Transcription credits
With thanks to: Amy D, Carlotta Dell’Arte, Clarissa Parkinson, Elizabeth Agnew, Frances T, Jenn Fallon, Ken Cox, L. P. Wist, and Shane Baggs.
Rights
Courtesy of the Free Library of Philadelphia. Please seek further permission from the Free Library to reuse the image.