Idle Employment and Dickens’s Uncommercial Ruse: The Narratorial Entity in “The Uncommercial Traveller”

Charles Dickens’s narratorial entity in “The Uncommercial Traveller” represents a dramatic shift away from the more traditional narrators Dickens deployed in earlier sketches. By consciously and unequivocally blending his established editorial and authorial personae in the “uncommercial” narrator, Dickens sought to close the distance between his performed selves and his audiences. These sketches seek to position Dickens in the literary marketplace through explicit and implicit disavowals of commerciality. Readers were not necessarily taken in, but the tongue-in-cheek rejection of financially motivated writing works to create an implicit understanding between the narratorial persona and his audience: that entertainment and leisure are the author’s business.