The Dickens Country

Dickens, as already intimated, originally conceived the idea of opening the tale of “Martin Chuzzlewit” on the coast of Cornwall. Instead of this, however, we find, in the initial chapter of that story, that the scene is laid in a village near Salisbury. That he had previously made himself acquainted with Wiltshire is indicated in his correspondence with Forster in 1842, where he declared (for instance) that in beholding an American prairie for the first time he felt no such emotions as he experienced when crossing Salisbury Plain. “I would say to every man who can’t see a prairie,” he remarked, “go to Salisbury Plain, Marlborough Downs, or any of the broad, high, open lands near the sea. Many of them are fully as impressive, and Salisbury Plain is decidedly more so.”

Six years later he and Forster, with John Leech and Mark Lemon, procured horses at Salisbury, and “passed the whole of a March day in riding over every part of the plain, visiting Stonehenge, and exploring Hazlitt’s hut at Winterslow, the birthplace of some of his finest essays.”[57]

There are persons still living in the neighbourhood of Salisbury who remember Dickens’s quest for local colour with which to give a semblance of reality to his topographical descriptions in “Chuzzlewit.” “The fair old town of Salisbury” figures prominently in that story, and we must believe that his allusion (in the fifth chapter) to the grand cathedral derived inspiration from personal observation: “The yellow light that streamed in through the ancient windows in the choir was mingled with a murky red. As the grand tones (of the organ) resounded through the church, they seemed to Tom to find an echo in the depth of every ancient tomb, no less than in the deep mystery of his own heart.” He makes a curious mistake in the twelfth chapter when speaking of the “towers” of the old cathedral; but, of course, he knew perfectly well that the venerable fane is surmounted by a beautifully tapering spire, immortalized in one of Constable’s most remarkable pictures. The scene in Salisbury Market, so vividly portrayed in chapter v., could not have been penned except by an acute observer like Dickens; nothing escaped him, and he noted all the details of that busy scene, and stored them in his retentive memory in readiness for the pen-picture which he afterwards delineated so faithfully and so picturesquely.

The “little Wiltshire village,” described as being within an easy journey of Salisbury, has not been absolutely identified. Certain commentators opine that Amesbury is intended, while others consider it more probable that the novelist had in his mind the village of Alderbury, and that its principal inn, the Green Dragon, was the original of Mrs. Lupin’s establishment, concerning which that unprincipled adventurer, Montague Tigg, spoke with undisguised disparagement and contempt.

CHAPTER V.
IN SOUTHERN ENGLAND.

Portsmouth is justly proud of the fact that it is the native place of certain distinguished men—to wit, Charles Dickens, Sir Walter Besant, and Brunel the great engineer.

In 1838, when engaged upon “Nicholas Nickleby,” Dickens renewed acquaintance with the town, of which it is fair to suppose he could remember but little, seeing that he was only about two years of age when his father was recalled to London, taking with him wife and family. He, however, astonished Forster (who accompanied him thither) by readily recalling memories of his childhood there, and distinctly remembering such details as the exact shape of the military parade.

Dickens’s particular object in then journeying to Portsmouth (not on foot, as did Nicholas and Smike) was doubtless for the express purpose of obtaining local colour for “Nickleby,” as presented in chapters xxiii. and xxiv. He succeeded in finding suitable lodging for Vincent Crummles at Bulph the pilot’s in St. Thomas’s Street (conjectured to be No. 78), for Miss Snevellicci at a tailor’s in Lombard Street, while Nickleby and his companion were quartered at a tobacconist’s on the Common Hard, which he describes as “a dirty street leading down to the dockyard.” The old Portsmouth Theatre, the scene of Nicholas’s early triumphs on the stage, plays a prominent part in the tale. This primitive building, which stood in the High Street, was destroyed many years ago; it occupied the site of the Cambridge Barracks; the present house is styled “The New Theatre Royal.” The story is current in Portsmouth that Dickens, on the occasion just referred to, called upon the manager at the old theatre and actually asked for a small part. Whether this tradition be true or false, we are justified in assuming that he and Forster went behind the scenes and chatted with the players, the result being the portrayal of those inimitable descriptions which treat of the company of Mr. Vincent Crummles, and of the “great bespeak” for Miss Snevellicci. Apropos of the theatre itself, as it appeared to the hero of the story, we read: “It was not very light, but Nicholas found himself close to the first entrance on the prompter’s side, among bare walls, dusty scenes, mildewed clouds, heavily daubed draperies, and dirty floors. He looked about him; ceiling, pit, boxes, gallery, orchestra, fittings, and decorations of every kind—all looked coarse, cold, gloomy, and wretched. ‘Is this a theatre?’ whispered Smike in amazement. ‘I thought it was a blaze of light and finery.’ ‘Why, so it is,’ replied Nicholas, hardly less surprised; ‘but not by day, Smike—not by day!’” Matters theatrical have improved vastly since then, and provincial theatres now vie with those in the Metropolis in regard to the comfort and magnificence of their appointments.

Plymouth, in a much less degree, is also associated with Dickens. There are slight references to the town in “David Copperfield” and “Bleak House.” He visited Plymouth in 1858 and in 1861, staying at the West Hoe Hotel on the first occasion, when he gave public readings in a handsome room at Stonehouse, “on the top of a windy and muddy hill, leading (literally) to nowhere; and it looks (except that it is new and mortary) as if the subsidence of the waters after the Deluge might have left it where it is.”[58] In 1861 we find Plymouth again included in the itinerary of an Autumn Reading tour. Dickens’s connection with Brighton was of a more intimate character, his acquaintance with “the Queen of watering-places” beginning as early as 1837, when he resumed the writing of “Oliver Twist.” “We have a beautiful bay-windowed sitting-room here, fronting the sea,” he informed Forster; “but I have seen nothing of B.’s brother who was to have shown me the lions, and my notions of the place are consequently somewhat confined, being limited to the pavilion, the chain pier, and the sea. The last is quite enough for me....” During his stay he attended a performance at the theatre of a comedy entitled “No Thoroughfare,” this being, curiously enough, the exact title of the only story he ever took part himself in dramatizing three years before his death. In 1841 he again journeyed by coach, the Brighton Era, to Brighton, and busied himself there with “Barnaby Rudge,” making his temporary home at the Old Ship Hotel at No. 38, King’s Road—not the more modern establishment of that name in Ship Street.[59] In May, 1847, Dickens lodged for some weeks at No. 148, King’s Road, for the recovery of his wife’s health after the birth of a son, christened Sydney Smith Haldemand. He went there first with Mrs. Dickens and her sister and the eldest boy (the latter just recovered from an attack of scarlet fever), and was joined at the latter part of the time by his two little daughters. In the spring of 1850 he was again at the King’s Road lodgings, his thoughts being then concentrated upon the new weekly journal, Household Words, the first number of which appeared in March of that year.

In March, 1848, Dickens and his wife, accompanied by Mrs. Macready, spent three weeks in Brighton at Junction House, where they were “very comfortably (not to say gorgeously) accommodated”; and for a short time during the spring of 1853, when engaged upon “Bleak House,” he rented rooms at No. 1, Junction Parade. Of all his Brighton residences, however, that which justly claims priority is the celebrated Bedford Hotel, whence (in November, 1848) we find letters addressed to his friends Frank Stone, A.R.A. (who was then designing illustrations for “The Haunted Man”) and Mark Lemon. To the artist he said: “The Duke of Cambridge is staying at this house, and they are driving me mad by having Life Guards bands under our windows playing our overtures (i.e., the overtures in connection with the amateur performances by Dickens and his friends)!... I don’t in the abstract approve of Brighton. I couldn’t pass an autumn here, but it is a gay place for a week or so; and when one laughs or cries, and suffers the agitation that some men experience over their books, it’s a bright change to look out of window, and see the gilt little toys on horseback going up and down before the mighty sea, and thinking nothing of it.”[60] In February, 1849, Dickens spent another holiday at Brighton, accompanied by his wife and sister-in-law and two daughters, and they were joined by the genial artist John Leech and his wife. They had not been in their lodgings a week when both his landlord and his landlord’s daughter went raving mad, this untoward circumstance compelling the lodgers to seek quarters elsewhere—at the Bedford Hotel. “If,” wrote Dickens, when relating the adventure to Forster, “you could have heard the cursing and crying of the two; could have seen the physician and nurse quoited out into the passage by the madman at the hazard of their lives; could have seen Leech and me flying to the doctor’s rescue; could have seen our wives pulling us back; could have seen the M.D. faint with fear; could have seen three other M.D.’s come to his aid; with an atmosphere of Mrs. Gamps, strait-waistcoats, struggling friends and servants, surrounding the whole, you would have said it was quite worthy of me, and quite in keeping with my usual proceedings.” The Reading tour in 1861 again took him to Brighton and the Bedford, and one of his audiences included the Duchess of Cambridge and a Princess. “I think they were pleased with me, and I am sure I was with them.”

Apart from these personal associations, Brighton derives particular interest from the fact that it figures largely in “Dombey and Son.” It was at the Bedford where Mr. Dombey stayed during his weekend visits to Brighton for the purpose of seeing his children, and where Major Bagstock enjoyed the privilege of dining with that purse-proud City merchant. It was to Brighton that Little Paul was sent to school, first as a pupil of the austere and vinegary Mrs. Pipchin. “The castle of this ogress and child-queller was in a steep by-street at Brighton, where the soil was more than usually chalky, flinty, and sterile, and the houses were more than usually brittle and thin; where the small front-gardens had an unaccountable property of producing nothing but marigolds, whatever was sown in them; and where snails were constantly discovered holding on to the street doors, and other public places they were not expected to ornament, with the tenacity of cupping-glasses.” Here also was the superior and “very expensive” establishment of Dr. Blimber—“a great hot-house, in which there was a forcing apparatus incessantly at work,” where, we are told, “mental green peas were produced at Christmas, and intellectual asparagus all the year round. Mathematical gooseberries (very sour ones, too) were common at untimely seasons, and from mere sprouts of bushes, under Dr. Blimber’s cultivation. Every description of Greek and Latin vegetable was got off the driest twigs of boys under the frostiest circumstances.” We learn on excellent authority that Dr. Blimber and his school really existed at Brighton, the prototype of the worthy pedagogue being Dr. Everard, whose celebrated seminary was familiarly called the “Young House of Lords,” from the aristocracy of the pupils. It seems that during the Christmas holidays it became customary with Dr. Everard to organize dances for the boys (such as that so delightfully described in the fourteenth chapter of “Dombey and Son”). In those days, curly locks were considered an indispensable accessory to full dress, and the whole of the afternoon preceding the ball Dr. Everard’s house was pervaded by a strong smell of singed hair and curling-tongs.[61] “There was such ... a smell of singed hair that Dr. Blimber sent up the footman with his compliments, and wished to know if the house was on fire.”

In the summer and autumn of 1849 Dickens went with his family, for the first time, to Bonchurch, Isle of Wight, where he hired for six months the attractive villa, Winterbourne, belonging to the Rev. James White (an author of some repute and a keen lover of books), with whom his intimacy, already begun, now ripened into a lifelong friendship. The novelist had in June of that year passed a brief period at Shanklin, whence he wrote to his wife: “I have taken a most delightful and beautiful house, belonging to White, at Bonchurch—cool, airy, private bathing; everything delicious. I think it is the prettiest place I ever saw in my life at home or abroad.... A waterfall in the grounds, which I have arranged with a carpenter to convert into a perpetual shower-bath.”[62]

He liked the place exceedingly at first, and considered that the views from the summit of the highest downs “are only to be equalled on the Genoese shore of the Mediterranean.” The variety of walks in the neighbourhood struck him as extraordinary; the people were civil, and everything was cheap, while he fully appreciated the fact that the place was certainly cold rather than hot in the summertime, and the sea-bathing proved “delicious.” Here at Bonchurch he was joined by John Leech, and soon settled down to work, being then engaged upon the early portion of “David Copperfield,” varying his literary occupations by taking part, with his customary zest, in dinners at Blackgang and picnics of “tremendous success” on Shanklin Down. One of these festivities he particularly remembered, when he expressly stipulated that the party should be provided with materials for a fire and a great iron pot to boil potatoes in, these, with the comestibles, being conveyed to the ground in a cart. Doubtless this was the veritable function described by the late Mrs. Phœbe Lankester (“Penelope”). Her husband, Dr. Lankester (to whom Dickens referred as “a very good, merry fellow”), and other distinguished men of science then staying at Sandown, belonged to a select and notable club founded originally by the younger members of the British Association, and called the “Red Lions.” The Bonchurch party, headed by Dickens, constituted themselves into a temporary rival club, called the “Sea Serpents,” and picnics were arranged between the two factions, the meetings usually taking place at Cook’s Castle. “Well do I recollect,” observes Mrs. Lankester, “the jolly procession from Sandown as it moved across the Downs, young and old carrying aloft a banner bearing the device of a noble red lion painted in vermilion on a white ground. Wending up the hill from the Bonchurch side might be seen the ‘Sea Serpents,’ with their ensign floating in the wind—a waving, curling serpent, cut out of yards and yards of calico, and painted of a bronzy-green colour with fiery red eyes, its tail being supported at the end by a second banner-holder. Carts brought up the provisions on either side, and at the top the factions met to prepare and consume the banquet on the short, sweet grass under shadow of a rock or a tree. Charles Dickens delighted in the fun. He usually boiled the potatoes when the fire had been lighted by the youngsters, and handed them round in a saucepan, and John Leech used to make sketches of us, one of which is still to be seen in the collection from Punch, and is called ‘Awful Appearance of a “Wopps” at a Picnic.’[63] I was very young then, and did not fully realize what it was to eat potatoes boiled by Charles Dickens, or to make a figure in a sketch by Leech.” On one of these jovial occasions a race was run, after the repast, between Mark Lemon and Dr. Lankester, both competitors of abnormal stoutness, Macready officiating as judge, after which the merry party adjourned to Dickens’s villa for tea and music.

His stay at Bonchurch was enlivened, too, by visits from such cherished friends as Justice Talfourd, Frank Stone, and Augustus Egg, social intercourse with whom formed agreeable interludes between severe spells of literary work. Unhappily, the enervating effect of the climate presently began to prostrate him, and after a few weeks’ residence he complained of insomnia, extreme mental depression, and a “dull, stupid languor.” Commenting upon his physical condition, he remarked: “It’s a mortal mistake—that’s the plain fact. Of all the places I ever have been in, I have never been in one so difficult to exist in pleasantly. Naples is hot and dirty, New York feverish, Washington bilious, Genoa exciting, Paris rainy; but Bonchurch—smashing. I am quite convinced that I should die here in a year.” His wife, sister-in-law, and the Leeches were also affected, but not to the same extent, and, finding it impossible to endure much longer the distressing symptoms, he determined to leave Bonchurch at the end of September and “go down to some cold place,” such as Ramsgate, for a week or two, hoping thus to shake off the effects. In the interval he completed the fifth number of “Copperfield,” after which, during the remainder of the holiday, he and his party (by way of relaxation) indulged in such amusements as “great games of rounders every afternoon, with all Bonchurch looking on.” These revels were disagreeably interrupted by a serious accident to John Leech, who, while bathing in a rough sea, was knocked over by an immense wave, which resulted in congestion of the brain, and necessitated, first, the placing of “twenty of his namesakes on his temple,” and then, as the illness developed, the continuous application of ice to the head, with blood-letting from the arm. The unfortunate artist becoming gradually worse, Dickens essayed the effect of mesmerism, in the virtue of which he apparently had faith, and succeeded in obtaining a period of much-needed sleep for the relief of the invalid, whose condition thenceforth improved until complete restoration of his customary health became assured, enabling him for many subsequent years to delight the world with his inimitable pencil. As already intimated, Dickens remained in the Island until the expiration of the time originally planned for this seaside holiday; but although he brought away many happy associations, he never renewed acquaintance with Bonchurch.

CHAPTER VI.
IN EAST ANGLIA.

Dickens must have become first acquainted with Eastern England during his reporting days, as many of the scenes in “Pickwick” are laid in the chief town of Suffolk. The merging, in 1899, of the Suffolk Chronicle into the Suffolk Times and Mercury revived an incident in Dickens’s career as a reporter, in stating that it was the Suffolk Chronicle which, in 1835, brought him down to Ipswich for the purpose of assisting in reporting the speeches in connection with the Parliamentary election at that time being contested in the county. We are further assured by the same authority that “Boz” (then actually engaged upon the opening chapters of “Pickwick”) stayed at the Great White Horse in Tavern Street for two or three weeks, and it has been reasonably surmised that the night adventure with “the middle-aged lady in the yellow curl-papers,” ascribed to Mr. Pickwick, was a veritable experience of the young author himself. It is said that, in consequence of this embarrassing mischance, Dickens entertained a feeling of prejudice against the house, and never liked the place afterwards. If this be correct, it accounts for the somewhat disparaging remarks in “Pickwick” concerning the hotel: “Never were such labyrinths of uncarpeted passages, such clusters of mouldy, badly-lighted rooms, such huge numbers of small dens for eating or sleeping in, beneath any one roof, as are collected together between the four walls of the Great White Horse at Ipswich.” Nevertheless, the famous hostelry still flourishes, and makes the most of its Pickwickian associations, even to the extent of revealing to visitors the identical bedroom (No. 16), where the adventure occurred. Over the principal hotel entrance we may yet see the stone presentment of a “rampacious” white horse, “distantly resembling an insane cart-horse”; but the building generally has since been altered in the direction of certain improvements necessitated by the requirements of present-day travellers.[64]

We can readily conceive that the description of the coach journey to Ipswich, starting from the Bull Inn, Whitechapel, and rattling along the Whitechapel and Mile End Roads, “to the admiration of the whole population of that pretty densely-populated quarter,” and so to Suffolk’s county town (as duly set forth in the twenty-second chapter of “Pickwick”), is a personal reminiscence of Dickens himself when fulfilling his engagement with the Suffolk Chronicle.

While busy with newspaper responsibilities, to which he had pledged himself, he evidently made the best use of the opportunities thus afforded of noting certain topographical details of the town, finding “in a kind of courtyard of venerable appearance,” near St. Clement’s Church, a suitable locale for the incident of the unexpected meeting of Sam Weller and Job Trotter; the “green gate,” which Job was seen to open and close after him, is locally believed to be one that adjoins the churchyard a few yards from Church Street, the inhabitants taking great pride in pointing it out as the precise spot where Alfred Jingle’s body-servant embraced Sam “in an ecstasy of joy.” In regard to these scenes Ipswich is mentioned by name, but it has been conjectured that the town also figures in “Pickwick” under the successful disguise of “Eatanswill,” although Norwich has been mentioned in this connection. Certainly the weight of such evidence as that proffered by the Suffolk Times and Mercury favours the belief that Ipswich stood for the unflattering portrait, and, but for the facts as averred by that journal, we should possibly never have had Mr. Pickwick’s nocturnal misadventure, nor heard of the rival editors of the Eatanswill Gazette and the Eatanswill Independent.

Dickens’s reporting expedition in Suffolk during the electoral campaign of 1835 doubtless compelled him to include in his itinerary several of the leading towns in the county, where political meetings would naturally be held, and among them Bury St. Edmunds, where, according to tradition, he put up at the Angel Inn, his room being No. 11. In describing this hostelry, Mr. Percy Fitzgerald says that it is “a solemn, rather imposing, and stately building, of a gloomy slate colour, and of the nature of a family hotel.... It has yards and stabling behind it, which must have flourished in the old posting times.” Standing in Market Square, it continues to this day to be the principal hotel in the place, and remains in much the same condition as when the novelist knew it about seventy years ago. Bury St. Edmunds, like Ipswich, has won immortality in the pages of “Pickwick,” where it is referred to as “a handsome little town of thriving and cleanly appearance,” its well-paved streets being specially commended. In one of “The Uncommercial Traveller” papers he calls it “a bright little town.”

We are told that the coach, with Mr. Pickwick among the passengers newly arrived from Eatanswill, pulled up at the “large inn, situated in a wide, open street, nearly facing the old abbey.” “And this,” said Mr. Pickwick, “is the Angel. We alight here, Sam...;” whereupon a private room was ordered, and then dinner, everything being arranged with caution, for it will be remembered that Mr. Pickwick and his faithful attendant were in quest of that thorough-paced adventurer Alfred Jingle, Esq., “of No Hall, Nowhere,” intent upon frustrating probable intentions on his part of practising further deceptions. Here, at Bury, the “Mulberry man” (otherwise Job Trotter) was found by Sam in the pious act of reading a hymn-book, a discovery which proved to be the initial stage of Mr. Pickwick’s adventure at the boarding-school for young ladies—Westgate House—which, we are told, is a well-known residence called Southgate House, although there are other antique-looking schools for girls on the Westgate side of the town that seem more or less to answer the description.

More than two decades later—i.e., in 1861—Dickens again visited both Ipswich and Bury St. Edmunds, when he gave readings from his works, beginning the series at Norwich, where, writing from the recently-demolished Royal Hotel in the Market Place, he spoke of his audience in that city as “a very lumpish audience indeed ... an intent and staring audience. They laughed, though, very well, and the storm made them shake themselves again. But they were not magnetic, and the great big place (St. Andrew’s Hall) was out of sorts somehow.”[65]

On the last day of the year 1848, Dickens contemplated an excursion with Leech, Lemon, and Forster to some old cathedral city then unfamiliar to him, believing the sight of “pastures new” would afford him the necessary mental refreshment. “What do you say to Norwich and Stanfield Hall?” he queried of Forster, and it was decided forthwith that the three friends should depart thence. Stanfield Hall had just gained unenviable notoriety as the scene of a dreadful tragedy—the murder of Jeremy, the Recorder of Norwich, by Rush, afterwards executed at Norwich Castle. They arrived between the Hall and Potass Farm as the search was going on for the pistol, and the novelist was fain to confess that the place had nothing attractive about it, unless such a definition might be applied to a “murderous look that seemed to invite such a crime.”

Quaint old Norwich, as it has been justly termed (although its quaintness and picturesqueness have suffered woefully in recent years through commercial innovations), did not appeal to Dickens, who declared it to be “a disappointment”—everything there save the ancient castle, “which we found fit for a gigantic scoundrel’s exit,” alluding, of course, to Rush. The castle no longer serves as the county prison, and its gruesome associations are practically obliterated by the wholesome use to which the massive Norman structure is devoted, that of museum and art gallery under civic control.

Without doubt Dickens’s principal motive in journeying to Norfolk and Suffolk in 1848 was to obtain “local colour” for “David Copperfield,” the writing of which he was then meditating. He stayed for a time at Somerleyton Hall, near Lowestoft, as the guest of Sir Morton Peto, the well-known civil engineer and railway contractor, under whose guidance he first made acquaintance with that portion of Suffolk, studying it carefully, and afterwards portraying it in the story with characteristic exactitude. Two miles from Somerleyton Hall (now the residence of Sir Saville Crossley, M.P.) is Blundeston, a typical English village, which, thinly disguised as Blunderstone, appears in the book as the birthplace of David. The novelist afterwards confessed that he noticed the name on a direction-post between Lowestoft and Yarmouth, and at once adapted it because he liked the sound of the word; the actual direction-post still standing as he saw it.

There is a little uncertainty respecting the identity of the “Rookery” where David first saw the light, the Rectory being regarded by some careful students of the topography of “Copperfield” as the possible original, whence can be obtained a fairly distinct view of the church porch and the gravestones in the churchyard. Local tradition, however, favours Blundeston Hall, the present tenant-owner of which (Mr. T. Hardwich Woods) remembers that when very young he was taken by the old housekeeper down the “long passage ... leading from Peggotty’s kitchen to the front entrance,” and shown the “dark storeroom” opening out of it. While staying in the neighbourhood Dickens visited Blundeston Hall, which presented a weird and gloomy appearance before its recent restoration, and the fact is recalled that for a brief space he contemplated the prospect from one of the side windows facing the church, then plainly visible from this point, but the view is now obstructed by trees.

“In no other residence hereabouts,” observes Mr. Woods, “do rooms and passages coincide so exactly with the descriptions given in the novel.” In the garden we may still behold the “tall old elm-trees” in which there were formerly some rooks’ nests, but no rooks. (“David Copperfield all over!” cried Miss Betsey. “David Copperfield from head to foot! Calls a house a rookery when there’s not a rook near it, and takes the birds on trust because he sees the nests!”)

The roadside tavern referred to in the fourth chapter as “our little village alehouse” may be recognised in the Plough at Blundeston, to the recently-stuccoed front of which are affixed the initials “R. E. B.” and the date “1701” in wrought-iron.

Blundeston Church, like many others in East Anglia, has a round tower (probably Norman), but no spire, as mentioned in the story; the high-backed pews and quaint pulpit have since been replaced by others of modern workmanship, but happily the ancient rood-screen with its painted panels has survived such sacrilegious treatment. The porch, with a sun-dial above the entrance, is still intact. “There is nothing,” says little David, “half so green that I know anywhere as the grass of that churchyard; nothing half so shady as its trees; nothing half so quiet as its tombstones. The sheep are feeding there when I kneel up, early in the morning, in my little bed in a closet within my mother’s room to look out at it; and I see the red light shining on the sun-dial, and I think within myself, ‘Is the sun-dial glad, I wonder, that it can tell the time again?’” It is interesting to know that it was at Blundeston House (now called The Lodge) where the poet Gray stayed with his friend the Rev. Norton Nicholls (rector of the adjoining parishes of Lound and Bradwell), and here he found that sublime quietude which his soul loved.

That popular seaside resort, Great Yarmouth, was first seen by Dickens at the close of 1848, and he thought it “the strangest place in the wide world, one hundred and forty-six miles of hill-less marsh between it and London”; substituting the word “country” for “marsh,” the statement would be practically correct. Strongly impressed by the exceptional and Dutch-like features of this flat expanse, on the eastern margin of which stands the celebrated seaport, he forthwith decided to “try his hand” at it, with the result (as everyone knows) that he placed there, on the open Denes, the home of Little Em’ly and the Peggottys. In all probability the idea of causing them to live in a discarded boat arose from his having seen a humble abode of this character when perambulating the outskirts of Yarmouth, for such domiciles were not uncommon in those days, and might be met with both in Yarmouth and Lowestoft; indeed, we are told that even now the little village of Carracross, on the west coast of Ireland, consists of seventeen superannuated fishing-boats, one of which dates from about 1740. Apropos of Peggotty’s boat, it may be remarked that the old inverted boat, bricked up and roofed in, which revealed itself in 1879 during the process of demolition, has hitherto been considered as the veritable domicile immortalized in “Copperfield”; but the cherished belief is not worthy of credence, being unsupported by trustworthy evidence, an important point antagonistic to that conjecture being the fact that Peggotty’s boat stood on the open Denes upon its keel (“Phiz” notwithstanding), whereas that discovered in Tower Road was put keel uppermost, by a shrimper, on garden ground in the midst of a noisome locality called by the inappropriate name “Angel’s Piece,” with no “sandy waste” surrounding it.[66]

At Yarmouth Dickens made his headquarters at the Royal Hotel, on the sea-front, having John Leech and Mark Lemon as congenial companions, for illness prevented Forster from remaining with them. The old town, and the flat, sandy expanse of uncultivated land between river and sea, already alluded to as the Denes, deeply imprinted itself upon Dickens’s mental retina, and he conveys his impressions thereof through the medium of his boy-hero:

“It looked rather spongy and sloppy, I thought, as I carried my eye over the great dull waste that lay across the river; and I could not help wondering, if the world were really as round as my geography book said, how any part of it came to be so flat. But I reflected that Yarmouth might be situated at one of the poles, which would account for it.

“As we drew a little nearer, and saw the whole adjacent prospect lying a straight low line under the sky, I hinted to Peggotty that a mound or so might improve it, and also that if the land had been a little more separated from the sea, and the town and the tide had not been quite so much mixed up, like toast-and-water, it would have been nicer....

“When we got into the street (which was strange enough to me), and smelt the fish, and pitch, and oakum, and tar, and saw the sailors walking about, and the carts jingling up and down over the stones, I felt that I had done so busy a place an injustice, and said as much to Peggotty, who ... told me it was well known ... that Yarmouth was, upon the whole, the finest place in the universe.”

David, as Ham carried him on his broad back from the carrier’s cart to the boathouse, gazed upon the dreary amplitude of the Denes in anxious expectation of catching a glimpse of the romantic abode for which they were destined. “We turned down lanes,” he says, “bestrewn with bits of chips and little hillocks of sand, and went past gasworks, rope-walks, boat-builders’ yards, shipwrights’ yards, ship-breakers’ yards, caulkers’ yards, riggers’ lofts, smiths’ forges, and a great litter of such places, until we came out upon the dull waste I had already seen at a distance.... I looked in all directions, as far as I could stare over the wilderness, and away at the sea, and away at the river, but no house could I make out”—nothing except a “ship-looking thing,” which presently resolved itself into the identical house for which they were bound, and proved to be—in the boy’s estimation, at least—as charming and delightful as Aladdin’s palace, “roc’s egg and all.” It is pointed out by Dr. Bately that the description given by Dickens (as above quoted) of the various objects seen on the way from Yarmouth to the South Denes really reverses their order, just as he noted them when walking in the contrary direction. There are not many boat-builders’ yards now remaining hereabouts.

CHAPTER VII.
IN THE NORTH.

In 1837 Dickens’s thoughts were concentrated upon a new serial story, “Nicholas Nickleby,” in which he determined to expose the shortcomings of cheap boarding-schools then flourishing in Northern England, his first impressions of which were picked up when, as a child, he sat “in by-places, near Rochester Castle, with a head full of Partridge, Strap, Tom Pipes, and Sancho Panza.” The time had arrived (he thought) when, by means of his writings, he could secure a large audience, to whom he might effectively present the actual facts concerning the alleged cruelties customarily practised at those seminaries of which he had heard so much. Having thus resolved to punish the culprits by means of his powerful pen, and, if possible, to suppress the evils of the system they favoured, the novelist and his illustrator, “Phiz,” departed from London by coach on a cold winter’s day in January, 1838, for Greta Bridge, in the North Riding, with the express intention of obtaining authoritative information regarding the subject of the schools, for in that locality were situated some of the most culpable of those institutions. Greta Bridge takes its name from a lofty bridge of one arch, erected on the line of Watling Street, upon the site of a more ancient structure, over the river Greta, a little above its junction with the Tees.

The parish of Rokeby, in the petty sessional division of Greta Bridge, is celebrated as the scene of Sir Walter Scott’s poem, “Rokeby,” which was written on the spot, and does no more than justice to the beautiful scenery of the neighbourhood.

Dickens and “Phiz” broke their journey at Grantham, at which town they arrived late on the night of January 30, and put up at the George—“the very best inn I have ever put up at.” Early the next morning they continued their journey by the Glasgow mail, “which charged us the remarkably low sum of £6 fare for two places inside.” Snow began to fall, and the drifts grew deeper, until there was “no vestige of a track” over the wild heaths as the coach approached the destination of the two fellow-travellers, who were half frozen on their arrival at Greta Bridge. In the story the author gives the name of the hostelry where Squeers and his party alighted from the coach as the George and New Inn; but, in so doing, he indulges in an artistic license, for he thus bestows upon one house the respective signs of two distinct inns at Greta Bridge, situated about half a mile from each other. The George stands near the bridge already referred to, the public portion of the premises having since been converted into a private residence. The New Inn has also been changed, and is now a farmhouse called Thorpe Grange; built before the railway era for Mr. Morrit, the landlord of the George, it not only rivalled the older establishment, but absorbed its custom, the owner claiming it as the veritable inn of Dickens’s story.[67] It seems very probable that the novelist himself put up at the New Inn during his brief tour of investigation in 1838; writing thence to his wife at this date, he said that at 11 p.m. the mail reached “a bare place with a house standing alone in the midst of a dreary moor, which the guard informed us was Greta Bridge. I was in a perfect agony of apprehension, for it was fearfully cold, and there were no outward signs of anybody being up in the house. But to our great joy we discovered a comfortable room, with drawn curtains and a most blazing fire. In half an hour they gave us a smoking supper and a bottle of mulled port (in which we drank your health), and then we retired to a couple of capital bedrooms, in each of which there was a rousing fire halfway up the chimney. We have had for breakfast toast, cakes, a Yorkshire pie, a piece of beef about the size and much the shape of my portmanteau, tea, coffee, ham and eggs, and are now going to look about us....”[68] After exploring the immediate neighbourhood, Dickens, accompanied by “Phiz,” went by post-chaise to Barnard Castle, four miles from Greta Bridge, and just over the Yorkshire border, there to deliver a letter given to him by Mr. Smithson (a London solicitor, who had a Yorkshire connection), and to visit the numerous schools thereabouts. This letter of introduction bore reference (as the author explains in his preface to “Nicholas Nickleby”) to a supposititious little boy who had been left with a widowed mother who didn’t know what to do with him; the poor lady had thought, as a means of thawing the tardy compassion of her relations on his behalf, of sending him to a Yorkshire school. “I was the poor lady’s friend, travelling that way; and if the recipient of the letter could inform me of a school in his neighbourhood, the writer would be very much obliged.” The result of this “pious fraud” (as Dickens himself termed it) has become a matter of history. The person to whom the missive was addressed was a farmer (since identified as John S——, of Broadiswood), who appears in the story as honest John Browdie. Not being at home when the novelist called upon him, he journeyed through the snow to the inn where Dickens was staying, and entreated him to advise the widow to refrain from sending her boy to any of those wretched schools “while there’s a harse to hoold in a’ Lunnun, or a goother to lie asleep in!” The old coaching-house where this memorable interview is believed to have taken place was the still existing Unicorn at Bowes. Another inn associated with this tour of inspection is the King’s Head, Barnard Castle,[69] where Dickens made a brief stay, and where he observed, across the way, the name of “Humphreys, clockmaker,” over a shop door, this suggesting the title of his next work, “Master Humphrey’s Clock.”

It was at Bowes where he obtained material which served him for depicting the “internal economy” of Dotheboys Hall, in the school presided over by William Shaw, who, it has since transpired, was by no means the worst of his tribe. As a matter of fact, he won respect from his neighbours, and is remembered by many of his pupils (some of whom attained high positions in various professions) as a worthy and much injured man. In “Nicholas Nickleby,” however, he became a scapegoat for others who thoroughly deserved the punishment inflicted upon Shaw. Even to-day many of the people at Bowes regard Dickens’s attack as unjust so far as that particular schoolmaster is concerned, and visitors to the place are advised to refrain from alluding to Dotheboys Hall.

There is no lack of evidence to prove the general accuracy of the novelist’s description, and to him we owe a deep debt of gratitude for so successful an attempt to annihilate those terrible “Caves of Despair.” Bowes is situated high up on the moorland, and may now be reached by railway from Barnard Castle. The village consists principally of one street nearly three-quarters of a mile in length, running east to west, and is lighted with oil lamps, under a village lighting committee. Shaw’s house (known generally as Dotheboys Hall until recent times) stands at the western extremity of Bowes. The present tenants have altered somewhat the original appearance of the house by attempting to convert it into a kind of suburban villa—in fact, it is now called “The Villa.” Prior to these structural changes it was a long, low building of two storeys. The classroom and dormitories were demolished a few years ago, but the original pump, at which Shaw’s pupils used to wash, is still in the yard at the back of the house, and an object of great interest to tourists.

Nearly all provincial towns in England were visited by Dickens during his acting and reading tours, and many can boast of more intimate relations with the novelist. It was from Liverpool, on January 4, 1842, that he embarked on board the Britannia for the United States—his first memorable visit to Transatlantic shores—and in 1844 he presided at a great public meeting held in the Mechanics’ Institution, then sadly in need of funds, on which occasion he delivered a powerful speech in support of the objects of that foundation. Referring to the building, he said: “It is an enormous place. The lecture-room ... will accommodate over thirteen hundred people.... I should think it an easy place to speak in, being a semicircle with seats rising one above another to the ceiling.”

Respecting this function, we learn from a contemporary report that long before the hour appointed for the opening of the doors the street was crowded with persons anxious to obtain admission, so anxious were they to see and hear the young man (then only in his thirty-third year) who had given them “Pickwick,” “Oliver Twist,” and “Nicholas Nickleby.” At the termination of his speech a vote of thanks was accorded to the novelist, who, in replying thereto, concluded his acknowledgments by quoting the words of Tiny Tim, “God bless us every one.” An interesting incident lay in the fact that the young lady who presided at the pianoforte was Miss Christina Weller, who, with her father, was introduced to the author of “Pickwick,” thus causing considerable merriment.