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    A Message from the Sea
    A Message from the Sea
    A Message from the Sea
    Ebook69 pages54 minutes

    A Message from the Sea

    By Charles Dickens

    3.5/5

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    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherArchive Classics
    Release dateJul 1, 1999
    A Message from the Sea
    Author

    Charles Dickens

    An international celebrity during his lifetime, Charles Dickens (1812­–1870) is widely regarded as the greatest novelist of the Victorian era. His classic works include A Christmas Carol, Oliver Twist, David Copperfield, Great Expectations, and A Tale of Two Cities, one of the bestselling novels of all time. When Dickens was twelve years old, his father was sent to debtors’ prison, and the boy was forced to work in a boot-blacking factory to support his family. The experience greatly shaped both his fiction and his tireless advocacy for children’s rights and social reform.

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    Reviews for A Message from the Sea

    3.5/5

    3 ratings3 reviews

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    • 4/5
      This was one of the more enjoyable of Dicken's collaborative works (in this case written with Wilkie Collins, Robert Buchanan, Charles Allston Collins, Amelia Edwards and Harriet Parr). A Message from the Sea is a single integrated novella that tells a nautical adventure story combined with a family mystery all resolved through some pretty epically implausible coincidences. Dickens wrote three of the five chapters, and they are clearly recognizable and better, but the other two chapters are perfectly finely executed--with one being an shipwreck/castaway story that puts two enemies together on a small deserted island.The story revolves around an American captain who delivers a message found in a bottle to a family in small English fishing village (lovingly described by Dickens). This sets off an unfortunate event followed by an attempt to figure out the truth, which leads to another trip, an extended flashback about the shipwreck, and a final classic Dickens resolution of a large, happy group where the wronged are vindicated and the wrong are suitably chastened (in this case in absetenia), and everyone is set to live happily ever after.
    • 4/5
      This was one of the more enjoyable of Dicken's collaborative works (in this case written with Wilkie Collins, Robert Buchanan, Charles Allston Collins, Amelia Edwards and Harriet Parr). A Message from the Sea is a single integrated novella that tells a nautical adventure story combined with a family mystery all resolved through some pretty epically implausible coincidences. Dickens wrote three of the five chapters, and they are clearly recognizable and better, but the other two chapters are perfectly finely executed--with one being an shipwreck/castaway story that puts two enemies together on a small deserted island.

      The story revolves around an American captain who delivers a message found in a bottle to a family in small English fishing village (lovingly described by Dickens). This sets off an unfortunate event followed by an attempt to figure out the truth, which leads to another trip, an extended flashback about the shipwreck, and a final classic Dickens resolution of a large, happy group where the wronged are vindicated and the wrong are suitably chastened (in this case in absetenia), and everyone is set to live happily ever after.
    • 3/5
      Fairly forgettable nautical yarn about stolen money. Better than Going into Society, though. Chapters 3 and 4 are omitted here as Dickens did not write them, this work being a multi-author collaboration with various others, including Wilkie Collins.

    Book preview

    A Message from the Sea - Charles Dickens

    A Message from the Sea, by Charles Dickens

    The Project Gutenberg eBook, A Message from the Sea, by Charles Dickens

    This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with

    almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or

    re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included

    with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.net

    Title: A Message from the Sea

    Author: Charles Dickens

    Release Date: April 3, 2005 [eBook #1407]

    Language: English

    Character set encoding: ISO-646-US (US-ASCII)

    ***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK A MESSAGE FROM THE SEA***

    Transcribed from the 1894 Chapman and Hall Christmas Stories edition by David Price, email ccx074@coventry.ac.uk

    A MESSAGE FROM THE SEA

    CHAPTER I—THE VILLAGE

    And a mighty sing’lar and pretty place it is, as ever I saw in all the days of my life! said Captain Jorgan, looking up at it.

    Captain Jorgan had to look high to look at it, for the village was built sheer up the face of a steep and lofty cliff.  There was no road in it, there was no wheeled vehicle in it, there was not a level yard in it.  From the sea-beach to the cliff-top two irregular rows of white houses, placed opposite to one another, and twisting here and there, and there and here, rose, like the sides of a long succession of stages of crooked ladders, and you climbed up the village or climbed down the village by the staves between, some six feet wide or so, and made of sharp irregular stones.  The old pack-saddle, long laid aside in most parts of England as one of the appendages of its infancy, flourished here intact.  Strings of pack-horses and pack-donkeys toiled slowly up the staves of the ladders, bearing fish, and coal, and such other cargo as was unshipping at the pier from the dancing fleet of village boats, and from two or three little coasting traders.  As the beasts of burden ascended laden, or descended light, they got so lost at intervals in the floating clouds of village smoke, that they seemed to dive down some of the village chimneys, and come to the surface again far off, high above others.  No two houses in the village were alike, in chimney, size, shape, door, window, gable, roof-tree, anything.  The sides of the ladders were musical with water, running clear and bright.  The staves were musical with the clattering feet of the pack-horses and pack-donkeys, and the voices of the fishermen urging them up, mingled with the voices of the fishermen’s wives and their many children.  The pier was musical with the wash of the sea, the creaking of capstans and windlasses, and the airy fluttering of little vanes and sails.  The rough, sea-bleached boulders of which the pier was made, and the whiter boulders of the shore, were brown with drying nets.  The red-brown cliffs, richly wooded to their extremest verge, had their softened and beautiful forms reflected in the bluest water, under the clear North Devonshire sky of a November day without a cloud.  The village itself was so steeped in autumnal foliage, from the houses lying on the pier to the topmost round of the topmost ladder, that one might have fancied it was out a bird’s-nesting, and was (as indeed it was) a wonderful climber.  And mentioning birds, the place was not without some music from them too; for the rook was very busy on the higher levels, and the gull with his flapping wings was fishing in the bay, and the lusty little robin was hopping among the great stone blocks and iron rings of the breakwater, fearless in the faith of his ancestors, and the Children in the Wood.

    Thus it came to pass that Captain Jorgan, sitting balancing himself on the pier-wall, struck his leg with his open hand, as some men do when they are pleased—and as he always did when he was pleased—and said,—

    A mighty sing’lar and pretty place it is, as ever I saw in all the days of my life!

    Captain Jorgan had not been through the village, but had come down to the pier by a winding side-road, to have a preliminary look at it from the level of his own natural element.  He had seen many things and places, and had stowed them all away in a shrewd intellect and a vigorous memory.  He was an American born, was Captain Jorgan,—a New-Englander,—but he was a citizen of the world, and a combination of most of the best qualities of most of

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