Channel Crossing, 1838

Extract

“London was a bumper,” wrote old General Dyott in his diary for 1838, “foreigners in abundance.” Here are some of them. Dr. Mathew starts with Queen Adelaide, 677 tons, a Deptford built schooner-rigged paddle-wheeler with the new feathering floats, riding alongside the stone quay at Calais, and tells of her passengers, most of them crossing to attend Queen Victoria’s coronation. In previous works his treatment has been admired of the little Carthusian world before the Reformation, of the Celtic peoples about Queen Elizabeth, of the English Catholic minority in the seventeenth century. Now he evokes the decade after the Reform Bill: chokers and oysters and muffins and grog, fretwork iron verandahs, the London and Greenwich viaduct railway —“the enginemen are most judicious and the carriages are accompanied by guards in the livery of the company”— steamers so new-fangled that in rough weather it was feared the machinery might break loose.

The book is a delicate and allusive study of the different conventions and temperaments displayed when the vessel runs aground in a fog. Serene round the whist table sits privilege, the Austrian Ambassador, the Russian Envoy Extraordinary, the Minister of the brand-new Hellenic kingdom, and Lady Augusta born a Somerset. A shabby Carlist courtier is less assured, though he stands for a polity older than the Holy Alliance and Badminton House, more defined than the bourgeois monarchy of Louis-Philippe represented in the first-class saloon by M. Gratry. For a European order more ancient and secure, Mgr. Beccaria is writing in his cabin, “in an even light he could see his reports and their weaknesses and their passage through the Congregations in Rome, the venerable prelates and the gradual and sometimes retarded victory of balanced argument.”