One morning from his head we bore With every stitch of sail, And going at ten knots an hour In six months came to his tail.
Three of the songs in the _Pickwick Papers_ (referred to elsewhere) are original, while Blandois' song in _Little Dorrit_, 'Who passes by this road so late,' is a translation from the French. This was set to music by R.S. Dalton.
In addition to these we find here and there impromptu lines which have no connexion with any song. Perhaps the best known are those which 'my lady Bowley' quotes in _The Chimes_, and which she had 'set to music on the new system':
Oh let us love our occupations, Bless the squire and his relations, Live upon our daily rations, And always know our proper stations.
The reference to the 'new system' is not quite obvious. Dickens may have been thinking of the 'Wilhem' method of teaching singing which his friend Hullah introduced into England, or it may be a reference to the Tonic Sol-fa system, which had already begun to make progress when _The Chimes_ was written in 1844.[7]
There are some well-known lines which owners of books were fond of writing on the fly-leaf in order that there might be no mistake as to the name of the possessor. The general form was something like this:
John Wigglesworth is my name, And England is my nation; London is my dwelling-place, And Christ is my salvation.
(See _Choir_, Jan., 1912, p. 5.) Dickens gives us at least two variants of this. In _Edwin Drood_, Durdles says of the Mayor of Cloisterham:
Mister Sapsea is his name, England is his nation, Cloisterham's his dwelling-place, Aukshneer's his occupation.
And Captain Cuttle thus describes himself, ascribing the authorship of the words to Job--but then literary accuracy was not the Captain's strong point:
Cap'en Cuttle is my name, And England is my nation, This here is my dwelling-place, And blessed be creation.
It is said that there appeared in the _London Singer's Magazine_ for 1839 'The Teetotal Excursion, an original Comic Song by Boz, sung at the London Concerts,' but it is not in my copy of this song-book, nor have I ever seen it.
Dickens was always very careful in his choice of names and titles, and the evolution of some of the latter is very interesting. One of the many he conceived for the magazine which was to succeed _Household Words_ was _Household Harmony_, while another was _Home Music_. Considering his dislike of bells in general, it is rather surprising that two other suggestions were _English Bells_ and _Weekly Bells_, but the final choice was _All the Year Round_. Only once does he make use of a musician's name in his novels, and that is in _Great Expectations_. Philip, otherwise known as Pip, the hero, becomes friendly with Herbert Pocket. The latter objects to the name Philip, 'it sounds like a moral boy out of a spelling-book,' and as Pip had been a blacksmith and the two youngsters were 'harmonious,' Pocket asks him: