In 1841 he contributed three political squibs in verse to the Examiner, one being the ‘Quack Doctor's Proclamation,’ to the tune of ‘A Cobbler there was,’ and another called ‘The fine old English Gentleman.’
For the Daily News (of which he was the first editor) he wrote ‘The British Lion, a new song but an old story,’ which was to be sung to the tune of the ‘Great Sea Snake.’ This was a very popular comic song of the period, which described a sea monster of wondrous size:
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: