When the BBC television first started screening ‘Mortimer and Whitehouse: Gone Fishing’ half a dozen years ago, I gave it a whirl and found that the Bob and Paul combo was not really my cup of caffeine. It reminded me of reviewing ‘Seinfeld’ when it was first broadcast in the UK 30 years for the local paper I then worked for, The Yorkshire Evening Press. I simply couldn’t see what all the fuss was about. A comedy show without jokes isn’t funny, was my hot take on Jerry’s ‘hilarious antics’.
Just as I inevitably became a huge fan of Seinfeld, so in the last few weeks I have returned to Gone Fishing and found it to be EXACTLY my drop of something warming, even though I’ve only fished twice in my life (both unsuccessfully). Perhaps it’s because I’m now a fiftysomething. Perhaps I was just being a bit of a grump before.
I’m about halfway through series three now, and it’s only just occurred to me what the show reminds me of…
“In the autumn month of September, eighteen hundred and fifty-seven… two idle apprentices, exhausted by the long, hot summer, and the long, hot work it had brought with it, ran away from their employer.”
So begins ‘The Lazy Tour of Two Idle Apprentices’, co-written by Charles Dickens and Wilkie Collins and published that same year in Dickens’ own magazine Household Words. The two great Victorian novelists met in 1851 and their friendship over the next two decades until Dickens’ death oscillated between mentor and protégé, rivals and relations (Collins’s brother Charles married Dickens’s daughter, Katey), and just good friends who enjoyed challenging each other to moustache-growing competitions. Another thing they liked to do together was get away from it all and just hang out.
The Lazy Tour is a slightly-fictionalised and gently humorous account of their 1857 walking tour of Cumberland, the Thomas Idle character (“a born-and-bred idler, who practised what he would have preached if he had not been too idle to preach”) inspired by Collins, and his fellow traveller Francis Goodchild (“laboriously idle”) by Dickens. Early on in Chapter One, their intent is clear: “They had no intention of going anywhere in particular; they wanted to see nothing, they wanted to know nothing, they wanted to learn nothing, they wanted to do nothing. They wanted only to be idle.” Who doesn’t?
Dickens wrote about an incident which features in The Lazy Tour in a letter to his sister-in-law Georgina Howarth in September that year - the pair ended up getting lost on a mountainside before ditching their guide and attempting a descent, during which Collins slid down into a river and injured his leg:
“We took our own way about coming down…and declared that the Guide might wander where he would, but we would follow a water-course we lighted upon, and which must come at last to the River. This necessitated amazing gymnastics. In the course of which performances, Collins fell into the said watercourse with his ankle sprained, and the great ligament of the foot and leg swollen I don't know how big.”
Later, as Thomas Idle recuperates on a sofa in Lazy Tour, he muses how everything bad that has happened to him throughout his life has been the consequence of being tempted into activity. It’s very much Mortimer and Whitehouse avant la lettre.
In another letter, Dickens writes from Bideford in Devon on a trip with Wilkie, this time to Cornwall:
“We had stinking fish for dinner, and have been able to drink nothing - though we have ordered wine, beer, and brandy and water. There is nothing in the house but Two Tarts and a pair of snuffers. The landlady is playing cribbage with the landlord in the next room (behind a thin partition), and they seem quite comfortable.”
Charles clearly enjoyed the company of Wilkie and in the P.S. of a December 1852 letter to him about the latter’s recent novel Basil, he added pointedly: “I am open to any proposal to go anywhere any day or days this week. Fresh air and change in any amount I am ready for. If only I could find an idle man (this is a general observation), he would find the warmest recognition in this direction.” And indeed it was not long before they put together a plan to visit Italy the following year. However, as he wrote to Georgia in 1853 about travelling together through Switzerland to Milan:
“We continue to get on very well indeed together, though I am rather confirmed in general suspicions I have long entertained that other men in general (and Collins in particular) spit and snort rather more than I have ever found it necessary to do - particularly in the early part of the day.”
These letters were recently on display at the excellent Charles Dickens Museum in London as part of an exhibition focusing on the friendship between the authors of The Woman in White and David Copperfield. Its curator Emma Harper told me that they were her favourite part of the display. “In their letters Charles invites Wilkie to spend his birthday with him in Brighton,” she said, “or just come out for dinner, and urges him to think of where they could next go on holiday to, all things that we do with our friends today.” It was their way of going fishing.
The Lazy Tour of Two Idle Apprentices is easily available for free online and also in traditional book format for ready money, most recently from Alma Classics.