The Long Voyage

"The Long Voyage" is a New Year's Eve short story by Charles Dickens. It was originally published in the 31 December 1853 issue of Household Words magazine.

Plot summary

The story concerns a man alone on New Year's Eve, who loves to "sit by the fire, thinking of what I have read in books of voyage and travel" while he himself has never been "around the world, never has been shipwrecked, ice-environed, tomahawked, or eaten."

Some of the books he has read concern

leaving Bligh to fend for himself on the open sea.

He then reads about the sad fate of the

, an English-bound Mercantile ship that ran aground on 4 August 1782 in South Africa. Of the 125 who made it to shore, only 13 survived the trip back to civilization.

After meditating on these stories he comes to a startling realization about The Long Voyage, looking into the fire on that first of January 1853.

References

External links

• The Long Voyage public domain audiobook at LibriVox