Tonight, we’ll read the opening to “The Lazy Tour of Two Idle Apprentices”, written in collaboration by Charles Dickens and Wilkie Collins. Snoozecast first read this story back in the year 2020.

An instrumental event in Wilkie Collins’s career was an introduction in 1851 when he was in his late twenties, to Charles Dickens by a mutual friend. They became lifelong friends and collaborators. For example, first, Collins acted with Dickens in a play together. Among the audience were Queen Victoria and Prince Albert. Then one of Collins's stories was published in Dickens's magazine the next year. Later that year Collins went on tour with Dickens's company of amateur actors.

“The Lazy Tour” reads as an autobiographical tour taken by the two of them in the north of Britain. What resulted is extremely whimsical, occasionally absurd, and it has to be said, very much of its time. The book takes place in the year 1857 and provides insight into the friendship and adventures of the pair of titans of Victorian literature.

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