The Dickens Country

The same year found him again at Edinburgh, and giving, for charitable purposes, a public Reading of the “Carol” in the Music Hall there, at the conclusion of which the Lord Provost presented him with a massive silver wassail-cup, which he bequeathed to his eldest son, and which is now in the possession of Mr. W. H. Lever, of Port Sunlight, Cheshire. His paid Readings subsequently took him to the leading cities in Scotland, and in 1868 he wrote from the Royal Hotel, Glasgow (his customary quarters there): “The atmosphere of this place, compounded of mists from the Highlands and smoke from the town factories, is crushing my eyebrows as I write, and it rains as it never does rain anywhere else, and always does rain here. It is a dreadful place, though much improved, and possessing a deal of public spirit.”[90]

CHAPTER VIII.
IN THE MIDLANDS AND HOME COUNTIES.

The year 1838, in which Charles Dickens, accompanied by “Phiz,” hazarded that bitter coach-ride to the northern wilds of Yorkshire, is memorable also for another “bachelor excursion,” the two friends travelling by road through the Midlands in the late autumn, en route for Warwickshire. They started from the coach office near Hungerford Street, Strand, having booked seats to Leamington, where, on arrival, after a very agreeable (but very cold) journey, they found “a roaring fire, an elegant dinner, a snug room, and capital beds” awaiting them. The “capital inn” affording these creature comforts to the two benumbed passengers was Copps’s Royal Hotel, to which reference is made in “Dombey and Son” as the establishment favoured by Mr. Dombey during his stay at Leamington, the scene of his introduction to the lady who became his second wife.

The next morning Dickens and “Phiz” drove in a post-chaise to Kenilworth, “with which we were both enraptured” (the novelist observed in a letter to his wife), “and where I really think we must have lodgings next summer, please God that we are in good health and all goes well. You cannot conceive how delightful it is. To read among the ruins in fine weather would be perfect luxury.”[91] A similar opinion is recorded in his private diary: “Away to Kenilworth—delightful—beautiful beyond expression. Mem.: What a summer resort!—three months lie about the ruins—books—thinking—seriously turn this over next year.” Thence they proceeded to Warwick Castle, to which Dickens referred with less enthusiasm in the same epistle as “an ancient building, newly restored, and possessing no very great attraction beyond a fine view and some beautiful pictures”; thence to Stratford-on-Avon, where both novelist and artist “sat down in the room where Shakespeare was born, and left our autographs and read those of other people, and so forth.” Dickens’s entry in the diary recording this circumstance is reminiscent of Alfred Jingle’s staccato style; thus: “Stratford—Shakespeare—the birthplace, visitors, scribblers, old woman—Qy. whether she knows what Shakespeare did, etc.” The secretary and librarian of Shakespeare’s birthplace (Mr. Richard Savage) informs me that he has understood that these signatures of Dickens and “Phiz” were written upon one of the plaster panels in the birth-room, but have since been destroyed; the church albums for the years 1848 and 1852 contain signatures of Dickens and of the members of his amateur theatrical company, then touring to raise funds for charitable purposes.[92]

It is evident that Dickens’s first impressions of Stratford were recalled in “Nicholas Nickleby,” where Mrs. Nickleby remarks, in her usual inconsequent manner, upon the visit of herself and her husband to the birthplace, and their lodging at a hostelry in the town. Warwick, Kenilworth, and the neighbourhood the author remembered when writing the twenty-seventh chapter of “Dombey and Son,” in the description of that “most enchanting expedition” to the castle: “Associations of the Middle Ages, and all that, which is so truly exquisite,” exclaimed Cleopatra with rapture; “such charming times! So full of faith! So vigorous and forcible! So picturesque! So perfectly removed from the commonplace!... Pictures at the castle, quite divine!” “Those darling bygone times,” she observed to Mr. Carker, bent upon showing him the beauties of that historic pile, “with their delicious fortresses, and their dear old dungeons, and their delightful places of torture, and their romantic vengeances, and their picturesque assaults and sieges, and everything that makes life truly charming! How dreadfully we have degenerated!” Cleopatra and the rest of the little party “made the tour of the pictures, the walls, crow’s nest, and so forth,” and the castle “being at length pretty well exhausted,” and Edith Grainger having completed a sketch of the exterior of the ancient building (concerning which sketch Mr. Carker fawningly avowed that he was unprepared “for anything so beautiful, and so unusual altogether”), a stroll among the haunted ruins of Kenilworth, “and more rides to more points of view ... brought the day’s expedition to a close.”

Quitting Stratford the next day, Dickens and his companion intended to proceed to Bridgnorth; but were dismayed to find there were no coaches, which fact compelled them to continue their journey to Shrewsbury and Chester by way of Birmingham and Wolverhampton, “starting by eight o’clock through a cold, wet fog, and travelling, when the day had cleared up, through miles of cinder-paths, and blazing furnaces, and roaring steam-engines, and such a mass of dirt, gloom, and misery, as I never before witnessed.”[93] His impressions of the Black Country are vividly portrayed in the forty-third and succeeding chapters of “The Old Curiosity Shop,” and there is good reason to suppose that a portion at least of the itinerary of the pilgrimage of little Nell and her grandfather, after their flight from London to escape from the evil influence of Quilp, was based upon his own tour, undertaken two years previously. Indeed, so far as the above-mentioned chapter is concerned, there is evidence of this in a letter to Forster, apropos of the story, where the novelist says: “You will recognise a description of the road we travelled between Birmingham and Wolverhampton; but I had conceived it so well in my mind that the execution does not please me so well as I expected.”

With regard to the depressing effect wrought upon the mind of the traveller through the Black Country, it is gratifying to know that a project is seriously contemplated by which this scene of waste and desolation may be restored to its original condition by reafforestation. Sir Oliver Lodge recently presided at an important meeting held in Birmingham to consider the question, and it was agreed that, now that the mineral wealth of the locality had been exhausted, it was only right that the surface of the land should be altered for good by a system of tree-planting, the land itself being rendered useless for mining, agriculture, and habitation.

Birmingham is mentioned frequently throughout the works of Dickens, who visited the city on several occasions, staying at one time at the old Hen and Chickens Inn. He must have known this important manufacturing centre in his journalistic days, for he made it the scene of that well-remembered incident recorded in the fiftieth chapter of “The Pickwick Papers,” where Mr. Pickwick calls upon Mr. Winkle, senior, with a difficult and delicate commission. When the post-coach conveying Mr. Pickwick and his friends drew near it was quite dark, “the straggling cottages by the roadside; the dingy hue of every object visible; the murky atmosphere; the paths of cinders and brick-dust; the deep red glow of furnace fires in the distance; the volumes of dense smoke issuing heavily forth from high, toppling chimneys, blackening and obscuring everything around; the glare of distant lights; the ponderous waggons which toiled along the road laden with clashing rods of iron, or piled with heavy goods—all betokened their rapid approach to the great working town of Birmingham. As they rattled through the narrow thoroughfares leading to the heart of the turmoil, the sights and sounds of earnest occupation struck more forcibly on the senses. The streets were thronged with working people. The hum of labour resounded from every house, lights gleamed from the long casement windows in the attic stories, and the whirl of wheels and noise of machinery shook the trembling walls. The fires, whose lurid, sullen light had been visible for miles, blazed fiercely up in the great works and factories of the town. The din of hammers, the rushing of steam, and the dead, heavy clanking of engines, was the harsh music which arose from every quarter.” The postboy, driving briskly through the open streets and past the “handsome and well-lighted shops” on the outskirts of the town, drew up at the Old Royal Hotel, where they were shown to a comfortable apartment. The Old Royal survives in name only, the present building having been so altered and modernized as to bear no resemblance to the three-storied structure, with its plain, square front and Georgian porch, which temporarily sheltered Mr. Pickwick. The residence of the elder Mr. Winkle (“a wharfinger, Sir, near the canal”), whose name is a familiar one in Birmingham, is believed to be a certain red-brick building in Easy Row, in close proximity to the Old Wharf, a house which, with its white steps leading to the doorway, answers fairly well to the description given in the book.

In 1844 Dickens presided at a meeting of the Polytechnic Institution at Birmingham, and delivered a powerful oration upon the subject of education, comprehensive and unsectarian.

“A better and quicker audience,” he afterwards remarked, “never listened to man”; and, in honour of the event, the large hall was profusely decorated with artificial flowers, these also forming the words “Welcome, Boz,” in letters about 6 feet high, while about the great organ were immense transparencies bearing designs of an allegorical character. In 1857 he was elected one of the first honorary members of the Birmingham and Midland Institute, in which institution he had always taken an active interest. In January, 1853, at the rooms of the Society of Artists, Temple Row, a large company assembled to witness the presentation to Dickens of a silver-gilt salver and diamond ring, in recognition of valuable services rendered in aid of the fund then being raised for the establishment of the Institute, and as a token of appreciation of his “varied literary acquirements, genial philosophy, and high moral teaching.” At the great banquet which followed this interesting function, he offered to give Readings from his books in further aid, and the promise was fulfilled in December, 1853, with the result that nearly £500 were added to the fund; to commemorate these first public Readings, Mrs. Dickens became the recipient of a silver flower-basket.

Other Readings were given in Birmingham in the sixties. In September, 1869, he opened the session of the Midland Institute, the ceremony being rendered memorable by a powerful speech, in which he thus briefly declared his political creed:

“My faith in the people governing is, on the whole, infinitesimal; my faith in the people governed is, on the whole, illimitable.” In 1870, as President of the Institute, he distributed at the Town Hall the prizes and certificates awarded to the most successful students; one of the prize-winners was a Miss Winkle, whose name (so reminiscent of “Pickwick”) was received with good-humoured laughter, and it is recorded that the novelist, after making some remarks to the lady in an undertone, observed to the audience that he had “recommended Miss Winkle to change her name!”

If a brief note in the diary (under date October 31, 1838) may be accepted as evidence, the travellers stayed at the White Lion in Factory Road, Wolverhampton. Twenty years later (August and November, 1858) Dickens gave public Readings here, and on the first occasion there was a performance of “Oliver Twist” at the local theatre, “in consequence (he opined) of the illustrious author honouring the town with his presence.” Writing at this time of the appearance of the country through which he had then passed, he said that it “looked at its blackest”; “all the furnaces seemed in full blast, and all the coal-pits to be working.... It is market-day here (Wolverhampton), and the ironmasters are standing out in the street (where they always hold high change), making such an iron hum and buzz that they confuse me horribly. In addition there is a bellman announcing something—not the Readings, I beg to say—and there is an excavation being made in the centre of the open place, for a statue, or a pump, or a lamppost, or something or other, round which all the Wolverhampton boys are yelling and struggling.”[94]

Reverting to the tour of 1838, Dickens and “Phiz” left Wolverhampton for Shrewsbury (the next stage), making their quarters at the old-fashioned Lion Hotel, which establishment the novelist revisited during the provincial Reading tour of 1858, when he thus described the inn to his elder daughter:

“We have the strangest little rooms (sitting-room and two bedrooms altogether), the ceilings of which I can touch with my hand. The windows bulge out over the street, as if they were little stern windows in a ship. And a door opens out of the sitting-room on to a little open gallery with plants in it, where one leans over a queer old rail, and looks all downhill and slantwise at the crookedest black and yellow old houses, all manner of shapes except straight shapes. To get into this room we come through a china closet; and the man in laying the cloth has actually knocked down, in that repository, two geraniums and Napoleon Bonaparte.” This quaint establishment, alas! has been modernized (if not entirely rebuilt) since those days, and presents nothing of the picturesqueness that attracted the author of “Pickwick.” Shrewsbury, however, still retains and cherishes several of its “black and yellow” (i.e., half-timbered) houses, and it is probably this town which we find thus portrayed in the forty-sixth chapter of “The Old Curiosity Shop”: “In the streets were a number of old houses, built of a kind of earth or plaster, crossed and re-crossed in a great many directions with black beams, which gave them a remarkable and very ancient look. The doors, too, were arched and low, some with oaken portals and quaint benches, where the former inhabitants had sat on summer evenings. The windows were latticed in little diamond panes, that seemed to wink and blink upon the passengers as if they were dim of sight.” On the night of their arrival at Shrewsbury, Dickens and “Phiz” were present at a “bespeak” at the theatre, and witnessed a performance of “The Love Chase,” a ballet (“with a phenomenon!”),[95] followed by divers songs, and the play of “A Roland for an Oliver.” “It is a good theatre,” was the novelist’s comment, “but the actors are very funny. Browne laughed with such indecent heartiness at one point of the entertainment that an old gentleman in the next box suffered the most violent indignation. The bespeak party occupied two boxes; the ladies were full-dressed, and the gentlemen, to a man, in white gloves with flowers in their button-holes. It amused us mightily, and was really as like the Miss Snevellicci business as it could well be.”[96]

From the diary we learn that the friends journeyed by post-coach from Shrewsbury over the Welsh border to Llangollen, passing two aqueducts by the way—“beautiful road between the mountains—old abbey at the top of mountain, Denis Brien or Rook Castle—Hand Hotel—Mrs. Phillips—Good.” The parish of Llangollen is intersected by the celebrated aqueduct of Pont-y-Lycylltan, and contiguous thereto stands Valle Crucis Abbey. Thence the itinerary included Bangor, Capel Curig, Conway, Chester, Birkenhead, Manchester (Adelphi Hotel), and Cheadle. There is good reason for supposing that Dickens, during this tour, availed himself of the opportunity of visiting the peaceful and picturesque village of Tong, on the north-eastern borders of the county of Salop, and that he probably posted there from Shrewsbury; for he assured the late Archdeacon Lloyd that Tong Church is the veritable church described in “The Old Curiosity Shop” as the scene of little Nell’s death.

“It was a very aged, ghostly place; the church had been built many hundreds of years ago, and had once had a convent or monastery attached; for arches in ruins, remains of oriel windows, and fragments of blackened walls, were yet standing; while other portions of the old building, which had crumbled away and fallen down, were mingled with the churchyard earth and overgrown with grass, as if they too claimed a burying-place and sought to mix their ashes with the dust of men.” Tong Church was erected about the year 1411, and is a fine specimen of Gothic architecture of the Early Perpendicular period. Owing to its fine monuments it is called “The Westminster Abbey of the Midlands.” There yet remain the original oak choir-stalls with the miserere seats and carved poppy-heads; the old oak roof with its sculptured bosses; the painted screens in the aisles, of very rich workmanship; and the beautiful Vernon Chantry, called “The Golden Chapel,” from its costly ornamentation, referred to in the story as the “baronial chapel.” The sacred edifice underwent various reparations during the period between 1810 and 1838, still presenting, however, an exceedingly picturesque aspect when the novelist beheld it in the latter year. Although a more thorough restoration took place in 1892, we are assured that no old features have been destroyed, but doubtless much of the halo of antiquity, which imparts a poetical charm to such structures, is not so evident as of yore. That Dickens derived inspiration from Tong and its environment for the “local colouring” in chap. xlvi. and later chapters of “The Old Curiosity Shop” it is impossible to doubt.

In December, 1858, Dickens was entertained at a public dinner at the Castle Hotel, Coventry, on the occasion of receiving a gold repeater watch of special construction by the watchmakers of the town. This gift was tendered as a mark of gratitude for his Reading of the “Christmas Carol,” given a year previously in aid of the funds of the Coventry Institute. In acknowledging this testimonial the recipient said:

“This watch, with which you have presented me, shall be my companion in my hours of sedentary working at home and in my wanderings abroad. It shall never be absent from my side, and it shall reckon off the labours of my future days.... And when I have done with time and its measurement, this watch shall belong to my children; and as I have seven boys, and as they have all begun to serve their country in various ways, or to elect into what distant regions they shall roam, it is not only possible, but probable, that this little voice will be heard scores of years hence—who knows?—in some yet unfounded city in the wilds of Australia, or communicating Greenwich time to Coventry Street, Japan.... From my heart of hearts I can assure you that the memory of to-night, and of your picturesque and ancient city, will never be absent from my mind, and I can never more hear the lightest mention of the name of Coventry without having inspired in my breast sentiments of unusual emotion and unusual attachment.” The novelist bequeathed the watch (and the chain and seals worn with it) to his “dear and trusty friend” John Forster.

In 1849 Dickens was an honoured guest at Rockingham Castle, Northamptonshire, the home of his friends the Hon. Richard Watson and Mrs. Watson. Writing thence to Forster, he said: “Picture to yourself, my dear F., a large old castle, approached by an ancient keep (gateway), portcullis, etc., filled with company, waited on by six-and-twenty servants ... and you will have a faint idea of the mansion in which I am at present staying....” His visits to Rockingham were often repeated, and in the winter of 1850 he there supervised the construction of “a very elegant little theatre,” of which he constituted himself the manager, and early in the following year the theatre opened with performances of “Used Up,” and “Animal Magnetism,” with the novelist himself and members of his family in the cast of both plays. Charles Dickens the younger considered that Rockingham Castle bears much more than an accidental resemblance to Chesney Wold, the Lincolnshire mansion of Sir Leicester Dedlock in “Bleak House,” upon which story his father was engaged at the period here referred to. Indeed, the author himself confessed as much to Mrs. Watson when he said: “In some of the descriptions of Chesney Wold I have taken many bits, chiefly about trees and shadows, from observations made at Rockingham.”

The castle is situated on a breezy eminence overlooking the valley of the Welland, which river overflows occasionally and floods the surrounding country, suggesting the watery Lincolnshire landscape described in the second chapter of “Bleak House.” At the end of the terrace is the Yew Walk, corresponding with the Ghost’s Walk at Chesney Wold, and there is a sundial in the garden, also referred to in the story. After passing under the archway, flanked by ancient bastion towers (the remains of a former castle), a general view is obtained of the north front of the mansion, one of the principal apartments in which is the long drawing-room, the veritable drawing-room of Chesney Wold, except that the fireplace is surmounted by a carved overmantel instead of a portrait, while the family presentments at Rockingham are in the hall, and not in the drawing-room, as related of those at Chesney Wold. The village of Rockingham consists of one street, which ascends the hill in the direction of the castle lodge; on the right as we enter the village stands “a small inn” called the Sondes Arms, the prototype of the Dedlock Arms, which bears the date 1763. The “solemn little church” in the park, with its old carved oak pulpit, has been restored and enlarged within the last thirty years. A footpath leading to the church from the village street undoubtedly answers to Lawrence Boythorn’s disputed right-of-way, concerning which that impulsive gentleman waxes eloquent in the ninth chapter of “Bleak House.”

Of the county of Hertford Dickens always retained agreeable memories; he frequently followed the advice once offered by him to W. H. Wills, to “take a cheery flutter into the air of Hertfordshire.” During the early years of his literary career he indulged a fondness for horse exercise, and, generally accompanied by Forster, would ride to some destination a few miles out of London, take luncheon at some favourite hostelry, and thus enjoy a day’s recreation. Their usual refreshment-house on the Great North Road was the Red Lion at High Barnet, in which town Oliver Twist, footsore and weary, found a temporary resting-place on a cold doorstep, and wondered at the great number of taverns there existing, for (as related in the story) “every other house in Barnet was a tavern, large or small.” We read in the same story that the infamous Bill Sikes, in his flight after the murder of Nancy, eventually reached Hatfield, turning down “the hill by the church of the quiet village, and, plodding along the little street, crept into a small public-house....” It is evident that Dickens knew Hatfield intimately, the topography of which has since undergone considerable alteration in consequence of the invasion of the Great Northern Railway. The “small public-house” entered by Sikes was in all probability that quaint little ale-house the Eight Bells, still flourishing at the bottom of the main street, while the “little post-office,” where he recognised the mail from London, at that time adjoined the Salisbury Arms (now a private residence), at which establishment Dickens himself doubtless stayed on the night of October 27, 1838, when he and “Phiz” made their “bachelor excursion” to the West Country.[97] Hatfield is introduced in “Mrs. Lirriper’s Lodgings,”[98] for here, in the rural churchyard, Mr. Lirriper was buried; not that Hatfield was his native place (explains the bereaved widow pathetically), “but that he had a liking for the Salisbury Arms, where we went upon our wedding-day, and passed as happy a fortnight as ever happy was.” In after-years she “put a sandwich and a drop of sherry in a little basket and went down to Hatfield churchyard, outside the coach, and kissed my hand and laid it with a kind of a proud and swelling love on my husband’s grave, though, bless you! it had taken me so long to clear his name that my wedding-ring was worn quite fine and smooth when I laid it on the green, green, waving grass.”

Mr. Lirriper’s youngest brother, by the way, who was something of a scapegrace, also retained a sneaking affection for the Salisbury Arms, derived from less sentimental reasons; here he enjoyed himself for the space of a fortnight, and left without paying his bill, an omission speedily rectified by the kind-hearted Mrs. Lirriper, in the innocent belief that it was fraternal affection which induced her unprincipled brother-in-law to favour Hatfield with his presence.

In 1859 Dickens became much interested in a working men’s club established at Rothamsted by the late Sir John Bennet Lawes, the renowned scientist, the purpose of this club being to enable all agricultural labourers of the parish to enjoy their ale and pipes independently of the public-house. The novelist, accompanied by his brother-in-law, Henry Austin, drove to Rothamsted for the express purpose of inspecting this novel institution, which numbers to-day nearly 200 members, and was so delighted with what he saw and heard respecting it that he not only published an article on the subject,[99] but eagerly recommended the formation of such clubs in other country neighbourhoods. Sir John Lawes is, of course, the prototype of Friar Bacon in the article aforesaid, where the worthy baronet’s beautiful manor-house (in which his son and heir now resides) is thus described: “The sun burst forth gaily in the afternoon, and gilded the old gables, and old mullioned windows, and old weathercock, and old clock-face, of the quaint old house which is the dwelling of the man we sought. How shall I describe him? As one of the most famous practical chemists of the age? That designation will do as well as another—better, perhaps, than most others. And his name? Friar Bacon.... We walked on the trim garden terrace before dinner, among the early leaves and blossoms; two peacocks, apparently in very tight new boots, occasionally crossing the gravel at a distance. The sun shining through the old house-windows now and then flashed out some brilliant piece of colour from bright hangings within, or upon the old oak panelling; similarly, Friar Bacon, as we paced to and fro, revealed little glimpses of his good work.”

In “Bleak House” Hertfordshire plays a conspicuous part, and it is generally believed that the original of John Jarndyce’s residence, which gives its name to the story, is to be discovered in or near St. Albans, as mentioned in the book itself. Indeed, a picturesque Early Georgian building at the top of Gombards Road (on the northern outskirts of the city) has been christened “Bleak House” in the supposition that it was the veritable home of Mr. Jarndyce; and there appears to be some justification for this, as the position of the house in its relation to the abbey church, and the characteristics of the locality, are in harmony with the details particularized in the story. There is evidence, too, that Dickens lodged in St. Albans when engaged upon the early chapters of his novel; he and Douglas Jerrold stayed at the Queen’s Hotel in Chequer Street, and it was then rumoured in the town that the object of Dickens’s visit was to obtain “local colour.” His younger brother Frederick and his friend Peter Cunningham lived for a while in St. Albans, and it is remembered by some of the older inhabitants that the author of “Pickwick” occasionally journeyed to St. Albans, when opportunities arose, for a gossip with those boon companions in their country retreat.

Of all Hertfordshire localities with which Dickens formed an acquaintance, that claiming the most intimate association with him is the pretty little village of Knebworth, the ancestral home of the Lyttons. A warm friendship existed between Lord Lytton and his brother novelist, and when, in 1850, some private theatricals were arranged for performance in the grand banqueting-hall, with “Boz” and his goodly company of amateurs in the cast (including Leech, Lemon, Tenniel, Stanfield, Forster, and others), mirth and jollity reigned supreme. The plays went off “in a whirl of triumph” (wrote Dickens at the time), “and fired the whole length and breadth of Hertfordshire,” which is not surprising when the circumstances are recalled. At Knebworth originated that unfortunate scheme known as the “Guild of Literature and Art,” formulated by Dickens and Lord Lytton for the amelioration of the hardships of impecunious authors and artists, the funds in aid of the project being augmented by the proceeds derived from the theatrical entertainments. It was intended to erect and endow a retreat for such necessitous persons, and a block of houses (in the Gothic style) was actually built upon ground near the main road at Stevenage, given by Lord Lytton for the purpose. Unhappily, these praiseworthy efforts failed to appeal to those for whose benefit they were designed, and the guild houses, after remaining unoccupied for nearly twenty years, were converted into “suburban villas,” the rents being available for the relief of such applicants as were qualified to receive it. It was generally believed that the failure to secure tenants for the guild houses under the special regulations was due chiefly to the fact of their being regarded as little better than almshouses, and too remote from London to be easily accessible; it must not be forgotten, too, that true genius looks askance at acts of charity performed in its behalf, the spirit of independence which usually characterizes it rebelling at anything that appears to assume the form of patronage, although it must be admitted that the guild rules give no cause for suspicion on that score. Dickens, in a speech delivered in 1865, after a survey of the newly-completed and attractive domiciles, said: “The ladies and gentlemen whom we shall invite to occupy the houses we have built will never be placed under any social disadvantage. They will be invited to occupy them as artists, receiving them as a mark of the high respect in which they are held by their fellow-workers. As artists, I hope they will often exercise their calling within those walls for the general advantage; and they will always claim, on equal terms, the hospitality of their generous neighbour.” But it was not to be, and probably nothing proved so disappointing to Dickens as the almost contemptuous indifference with which this philanthropic proposal was received both by the press and the public, who ridiculed it unmercifully. As a memento of the scheme, there may be seen nearly opposite the guild houses a roadside tavern rejoicing in the sign of Our Mutual Friend, intended as a delicate compliment to the author of the story so entitled, then in course of publication.

During a visit to Knebworth in 1861, Dickens and Mr. (afterwards Sir) Arthur Helps—sometime Queen’s Secretary—called upon a most extraordinary character, locally known as “Mad Lucas,” who lived in an extremely miserly fashion in the kitchen of his house (Elmwood House, at Redcoats Green, near Stevenage). This strange recluse died of apoplexy in 1874, and was buried in Hackney Churchyard; his house, with its boarded-up windows, shored-up walls, and dilapidated roof, continued to remain an object of interest for many years afterwards, until in 1893 it was razed to the ground and the materials sold by public auction. James Lucas, “the Hertfordshire Hermit,” was really a well-educated and highly intellectual man, who inherited the estate of his father, a prosperous West India merchant, and it is conjectured that his distress at the death of his widowed mother (who lived with him) was primarily the cause of that mental aberration which assumed such an eccentric form; he even refused to bury her corpse, so that the local authorities were compelled to resort to a subterfuge in order to perform themselves the last rites. He objected to furnish his rooms, and, attired simply in a loose blanket fastened with a skewer, preferred to eat and sleep amidst the cinders and rubbish-heaps (a sanctuary for rats) which accumulated in the kitchen. Although his diet consisted of bread and cheese, red herrings, and gin, there were choice wines available for friendly visitors, a special vintage of sherry being reserved for ladies who thus honoured him. The hermit’s penchant for tramps attracted all the vagabonds in the neighbourhood, so that it became necessary for him to protect himself from insult by retaining armed watchmen and barricading the house.

In “Tom Tiddler’s Ground”[100] Dickens has depicted a miserly recluse named Mopes, and it is easy to discern that Lucas sat for the portrait—indeed, it is said that in reading the number he recognised the presentment, and expressed great indignation at what he considered to be a much exaggerated account of himself and his environment. In the chapter devoted to Mr. Mopes, the novelist tells us that he found his strange abode in “a nook in a rustic by-road, down among the pleasant dales and trout-streams of a green English county.” He does not think it necessary for the reader to know what county; suffice it to say that one “may hunt there, shoot there, fish there, traverse long grass-grown Roman roads there, open ancient barrows there, see many a mile of richly-cultivated land there, and hold Arcadian talk with a bold peasantry, their country’s pride, who will tell you (if you want to know) how pastoral housekeeping is done on nine shillings a week.”

Those familiar with this portion of Hertfordshire cannot fail to recognise in these allusions the neighbourhood of Stevenage, and a clue to its identity is afforded by the allusion to “ancient barrows,” for at Stevenage there are some remarkable tumuli known as the “Six Hills,” which are believed to be ancient sepulchral barrows, or repositories of the dead. If further evidence be required, it is forthcoming in the following delightful portrayal of Stevenage itself, as it appeared to Dickens over forty years ago:

“The morning sun was hot and bright upon the village street. The village street was like most other village streets: wide for its height, silent for its size, and drowsy in the dullest degree. The quietest little dwellings with the largest of window-shutters (to shut up Nothing as carefully as if it were the Mint or the Bank of England) had called in the Doctor’s house so suddenly that his brass doorplate and three stories stood among them as conspicuous and different as the Doctor himself in his broadcloth among the smock frocks of his patients. The village residences seem to have gone to law with a similar absence of consideration, for a score of weak little lath-and-plaster cabins clung in confusion about the Attorney’s red-brick house, which, with glaring doorsteps and a most terrific scraper, seemed to serve all manner of ejectments upon them. They were as various as labourers—high-shouldered, wry-necked, one-eyed, goggle-eyed, squinting, bow-legged, knock-kneed, rheumatic, crazy; some of the small tradesmen’s houses, such as the crockery shop and the harness-maker’s, had a Cyclops window in the middle of the gable, within an inch or two of its apex, suggesting that some forlorn rural Prentice must wriggle himself into that apartment horizontally, when he retired to rest, after the manner of the worm. So bountiful in its abundance was the surrounding country, and so lean and scant the village, that one might have thought the village had sown and planted everything it once possessed to convert the same into crops. This would account for the bareness of the little shops, the bareness of the few boards and trestles designed for market purposes in a corner of the street, the bareness of the obsolete inn and inn yard, with the ominous inscription, ‘Excise Office,’ not yet faded out from the gateway, as indicating the very last thing that poverty could get rid of....” The village alehouse, mentioned in the first chapter of “Tom Tiddler’s Ground,” and there called the Peal of Bells, is the White Hart, Stevenage, where Dickens called on his way to see Lucas to inquire of the landlord, old Sam Cooper, the shortest route to the “ruined hermitage of Mr. Mopes the hermit,” some five miles distant. He found Tom Tiddler’s Ground to be “a nook in a rustic by-road, which the genius of Mopes had laid waste as completely as if he had been born an Emperor and a Conqueror. Its centre object was a dwelling-house, sufficiently substantial, all the window-glass of which had been long ago abolished by the surprising genius of Mopes, and all the windows of which were barred across with rough-split logs of trees nailed over them on the outside. A rick-yard, hip high in vegetable rankness and ruin, contained out-buildings, from which the thatch had lightly fluttered away ... and from which the planks and beams had heavily dropped and rotted.” After noting the fragments of mildewed ricks and the slimy pond, the traveller encountered the hermit himself, as well as he could be observed between the window-bars, “lying on a bank of soot and cinders, on the floor, in front of a rusty fireplace,” when presently began the interview with “the sooty object in blanket and skewer,” as related in the narrative with approximate exactitude.

CHAPTER IX.
IN DICKENS LAND.

“Kent, sir! Everybody knows Kent. Apples, cherries, hops, and women.” Thus did Alfred Jingle briefly summarize for the behoof of Tracy Tupman the principal characteristics of the county which, by general consent, is termed “the Garden of England,” a designation richly merited through its sylvan charms and other natural beauties.

This division of south-eastern England is rightly considered as the very heart of Dickens land, for the reason that no other locality (excepting, of course, the great Metropolis) possesses such numerous associations with the novelist and his writings. He himself practically admitted as much when, in 1840, he said: “I have many happy recollections connected with Kent, and am scarcely less interested in it than if I had been a Kentish man bred and born, and had resided in the county all my life.” It was in Kent, too, where he made his last home and where he drew his last breath.

As already narrated in the opening chapter of this volume, some of Dickens’s earliest years were spent at Chatham, and the locality within the radius of a few miles became familiar to him by means of pedestrian excursions with his father; indeed, it was during one of these delightful jaunts that he first saw the house at Gad’s Hill which subsequently became his own property, and the incident is thus faithfully recorded (although thinly disguised) in one of “The Uncommercial Traveller” papers:

“So smooth was the old highroad, and so fresh were the horses, and so fast went I, that it was midway between Gravesend and Rochester, and the widening river was bearing the ships, white-sailed or black-smoked, out to sea, when I noticed by the wayside a very queer small boy.

“‘Halloa!’ said I to the very queer small boy. ‘Where do you live?’

“‘At Chatham,’ says he.

“‘What do you do there?’ says I.

“‘I go to school,’ says he.

“I took him up in a moment, and we went on. Presently the very queer small boy says: ‘This is Gad’s Hill we are coming to, where Falstaff went out to rob those travellers, and ran away.’

“‘You know something about Falstaff, eh?’ said I.

“‘All about him,’ said the very queer small boy. ‘I am old (I am nine), and I read all sorts of books. But do let us stop at the top of the hill, and look at the house there, if you please.’

“‘You admire that house?’ said I.

“‘Bless you, sir!’ said the very queer small boy, ‘when I was not more than half as old as nine it used to be a treat for me to be brought to look at it. And ever since I can recollect my father, seeing me so fond of it, has often said to me: “If you were to be very persevering, and were to work hard, you might some day come to live in it,” though that’s impossible,’ said the very queer small boy, drawing a low breath, and now staring at the house out of the window with all his might.

“I was rather amazed to be told this by the very queer small boy, for that house happens to be my house, and I have reason to believe that what he said was true.”[101]

In another “Uncommercial” paper Dickens recorded his impressions of a later visit to this neighbourhood: “I will call my boyhood’s home ... Dullborough,” he says, and further observes that he found himself rambling about the scenes among which his earliest days were passed—“scenes from which I departed when a child, and which I did not revisit until I was a man,” when he found the place strangely altered, for the railway had since disfigured the land. The railway-station “had swallowed up the playing-field, the two beautiful hawthorn-trees, the hedge, the turf, and all those buttercups and daisies had given place to the stoniest of roads; while, beyond the station, an ugly dark monster of a tunnel kept its jaws open, as if it had swallowed them and were ravenous for more destruction.” He confesses that he was not made happy by the disappearance of the old familiar landmarks of his boyhood, but adds reflectively: “Who was I that I should quarrel with the town for being so changed to me, when I myself had come back, so changed, to it? All my early readings and early imaginations dated from this place, and I took them away so full of innocent construction and guileless belief, and I brought them back so worn and torn, so much the wiser and so much the worse.”

In the same paper reference is made to the Dullborough (i.e., Chatham) Mechanics’ Institute—“There had been no such thing in the town in my young days”—which he found with some difficulty, for the reason that “it led a modest and retired existence up a stable-yard.” He learned, however, that it was “a most flourishing institution, and of the highest benefit to the town, two triumphs which I was glad to understand were not at all impaired by the seeming drawbacks that no mechanics belonged to it, and that it was steeped in debt to the chimney-pots. It had a large room, which was approached by an infirm stepladder, the builder having declined to construct the intended staircase without a present payment in cash, which Dullborough (though profoundly appreciative of the Institution) seemed unaccountably bashful about subscribing.” In aid of the funds Dickens soon afterwards gave some public Readings in this very building, with the result that its financial position was considerably improved.

Dickens’s affection for Kent is indicated by the fact that he selected that county in which to spend his honeymoon, and in the village of Chalk (near Gravesend, on the main road to Dover) may still be seen the cottage where that happy period was spent, and in which he wrote some of the earlier pages of “Pickwick.”[102] It is a corner house on the southern side of the road, advantageously situated for commanding views of the river Thames and the far-stretching landscape beyond. In after-years, whenever his walks led him to this spot, he invariably slackened his pace on arriving at the house, and meditatively glanced at it for a few moments, mentally reviving the time when he and his bride found a pleasant home within its hospitable walls. Shortly after the birth of their eldest son, Dickens and his wife stayed at the honeymoon cottage, which, with its red-tiled roof and dormer windows, is a picturesque object on this famous coaching road. The walk to Chalk Church was much favoured by the novelist, where a quaint carved figure over the entrance porch interested him. This curious piece of sculpture, which he always greeted with a friendly nod, is supposed to represent an old priest grasping by the neck a large urn-like vessel, concerning which there is probably a legend. Another grotesque is seen above, and between the two is a niche, in which formerly stood an image of the virgin saint (St. Mary) to whom this thirteenth-century church is dedicated. About a mile distant, and a little south of the main road, is Shorne, another typical Kentish village, which, with its church and burial-ground, constituted for Dickens another source of attraction, and the latter was probably in his mind when he referred (in “Pickwick”) to “one of the most peaceful and secluded churchyards in Kent, where wild-flowers mingle with the grass, and the soft landscape around forms the fairest spot in the garden of England.” Shorne formerly boasted a celebrity, one Sir John Shorne, who achieved fame by the curing of ague and gained notoriety as the custodian of the devil, whom, it is alleged, he imprisoned in a boot, with the result that shrines were erected to his memory.[103]

Of the towns in Southern England associated with Dickens, perhaps none is more replete with memories of the novelist than Broadstairs. It was but a little Kentish watering-place when, in the autumn of 1837, he and his wife first passed a seaside holiday there, at No. 12 (now No. 31), High Street, a humble-looking tenement of two storeys in height, with a small parlour facing the narrow thoroughfare; the house survived until a few years ago, although in an altered form, and has since been rebuilt. In 1890 it was tenanted by a plumber and glazier, who apparently did not know of its literary associations, for here were written some of the later pages of “Pickwick.” Formerly of some importance, Broadstairs at this time had just emerged from the condition of a village into which it had lapsed, and in 1842 began to attain some celebrity as a place of fashionable resort for sea-bathing. Dickens delighted in the quietude of the spot, and Broadstairs became his favourite summer or autumn resort for many years. In 1839 we find him located at No. 40, Albion Street (two doors from the Albion Hotel), where he finished the writing of “Nicholas Nickleby,” and composed the dedication of that story to his cherished friend Macready. During the following year he went twice to Broadstairs, being then at work upon “The Old Curiosity Shop,” and in all probability found a lodgment in the Albion Street house; for, writing to Maclise the day after his arrival there, on June 1, he urged him to “come to the bower which is shaded for you in the one-pair front, where no chair or table has four legs of the same length, and where no drawers will open till you have pulled the pegs off, and then they keep open and won’t shut again.” In 1845 and his family engaged rooms for the month of August at the Albion Hotel, and again, apparently, in 1847, judging from an allusion to his “looking out upon a dark gray sea, with a keen north-east wind blowing it in shore.” The Albion was favoured by him in 1859,[104] when, suffering in health, he went for a week’s sea air and change, to prepare himself for the exacting labours of a provincial Reading tour. Dickens delighted to entertain his friends at the Albion, where, upon one of the walls, hangs an original letter containing a description of Broadstairs, penned by the novelist himself:

“A good sea—fresh breezes—fine sands—and pleasant walks—with all manner of fishing-boats, lighthouses, piers, bathing-machines, are its only attractions; but it is one of the freshest and freest little places in the world.” Here, too, is jealously preserved an ancient oak chest on which he was wont to sit while he and his intimates quaffed the old hostelry’s unrivalled milk-punch.

An amusing description of his mode of life at Broadstairs—of the mild distractions and innocent pleasures to be enjoyed there—is discoverable in a characteristic letter addressed by him to Professor Felton from that watering-place in 1843: “This is a little fishing-place; intensely quiet; built on a cliff, whereon, in the centre of a tiny semicircular bay, our house stands, the sea rolling and dashing under the windows. Seven miles out are the Goodwin Sands (you’ve heard of the Goodwin Sands?), whence floating lights perpetually wink after dark, as if they were carrying on intrigues with the servants. Also there is a big lighthouse called the North Foreland on a hill behind the village—a severe, parsonic light, which reproves the young and giddy floaters, and stares grimly out upon the sea. Under the cliff are rare good sands, where all the children assemble every morning and throw up impossible fortifications, which the sea throws down again at high-water. Old gentlemen and ancient ladies flirt after their own manner in two reading-rooms and on a great many scattered seats in the open air. Other old gentlemen look all day through telescopes and never see anything. In a bay-window in a one-pair sits, from nine o’clock to one, a gentleman with rather long hair and no neckcloth, who writes and grins as if he thought he were very funny indeed. His name is Boz. At one he disappears, and presently emerges from a bathing-machine, and may be seen—a kind of salmon-coloured porpoise—splashing about in the ocean. After that he may be seen in another bay-window on the ground-floor eating a strong lunch; after that walking a dozen miles or so, or lying on his back in the sand reading a book. Nobody bothers him unless they know he is disposed to be talked to, and I am told he is very comfortable indeed. He’s as brown as a berry, and they do say is a small fortune to the innkeeper, who sells beer and cold punch. But this is mere rumour. Sometimes he goes up to London (eighty miles or so away), and then, I’m told, there is a sound in Lincoln’s Inn Fields (Forster’s residence) at night as of men laughing, together with a clinking of knives and forks and wineglasses.”[105] Again, in 1850: “You will find it the healthiest and freshest of places, and there are Canterbury, and all varieties of what Leigh Hunt calls ‘greenery,’ within a few minutes’ railroad ride. It is not very picturesque ashore, but extremely so seaward, all manner of ships continually passing close inshore.” Writing to the Earl of Carlisle in 1851, he jocularly said: “The general character of Broadstairs as to size and accommodation was happily expressed by Miss Eden, when she wrote to the Duke of Devonshire (as he told me), saying how grateful she felt to a certain sailor, who asked leave to see her garden, for not plucking it bodily up and sticking it in his buttonhole. You will have for a night-light,” he added, “in the room we shall give you, the North Foreland lighthouse. That and the sea and air are our only lions. It is a rough little place, but a very pleasant one, and you will make it pleasanter than ever to me.”[106] To Forster at this time he remarked of his Broadstairs environment: “It is more delightful here than I can express. Corn growing, larks singing, garden full of flowers, fresh air on the sea—oh, it is wonderful!” One of his minor writings is wholly devoted to a description of “Our Watering-Place” (for so the paper is entitled), in which there are many happy touches recalling Broadstairs of more than fifty years ago. Here is the beach as seen at low tide: “The ocean lies winking in the sunlight like a drowsy lion; its glassy waters scarcely curve upon the shore; the fishing-boats in the tiny harbour are all stranded in the mud. Our two colliers ... have not an inch of water within a quarter of a mile of them, and turn exhausted on their sides, like faint fish of an antediluvian species. Rusty cables and chains, ropes and rings, undermost parts of posts and piles, and confused timber defences against the waves, lie strewn about in a brown litter of tangled seaweed and fallen cliff.... The time when this pretty little semicircular sweep of houses, tapering off at the end of the wooden pier into a point in the sea, was a gay place, and when the lighthouse overlooking it shone at daybreak on company dispersing from public balls, is but dimly traditional now.” The following depicts, with the skill of a master hand, the same scene at high-water: “The tide has risen; the boats are dancing on the bubbling water; the colliers are afloat again; the white-bordered waves rush in.... The radiant sails are gliding past the shore and shining on the far horizon; all the sea is sparkling, heaving, swelling up with life and beauty this bright morning.” To the parish church the author refers disrespectfully as “a hideous temple of flint, like a great petrified haystack,” and of the pier, built in 1809, he says: “We have a pier—a queer old wooden pier, fortunately—without the slightest pretensions to architecture, and very picturesque in consequence. Boats are hauled up upon it, ropes are coiled all over it; lobster-pots, nets, masts, oars, spars, sails, ballast, and rickety capstans, make a perfect labyrinth of it.” In the same paper he observes: “You would hardly guess which is the main street of our watering-place,[107] but you may know it by its being always stopped up with donkey-chaises. Whenever you come here, and see harnessed donkeys eating clover out of barrows drawn completely across a narrow thoroughfare, you may be quite sure you are in our High Street.”[108] The reference here to donkeys prompts the statement that at Broadstairs lived the original of Betsy Trotwood in “David Copperfield.” She was a Miss Strong, who occupied a double-fronted cottage in the middle of Nuckell’s Place, on the sea-front, and who, like the admirable Betsy, was firmly convinced of her right to stop the passage of donkeys along the road opposite her door, deterring their proprietors by means of hostile demonstrations with a hearth-broom. Close by there is a cottage which has been christened Dickens House, and in Broadstairs there is a Dickens Road.

Tired of the discomforts of seaside lodgings, Dickens began to search for a house at Broadstairs which he could hire for the period of his annual visits. He discovered in Fort House a residence that seemed to fulfil his requirements; but it was not yet available, and he was fain to content himself for a while with Lawn House, a smaller villa, the garden of which adjoins the western boundary of the grounds of Fort House. Abutting upon the south side of Lawn House, whence a good view of the German Ocean is obtainable, is the archway referred to in one of the published letters,[109] spanning the narrow road approached from Harbour Street and leading to the coastguard station, this road passing the front of Fort House between it and the sea-wall. Not until the autumn of 1850 did he succeed in obtaining possession of Fort House, situated on the Kingsgate Road, perched upon the summit of a bold headland of the Thanet cliffs, with a superb panorama of sea and country. At that time there was a cornfield between the house and the harbour. Alas! a cornfield no longer, but land upon which some cottages and stables have since been built, these partly obstructing the view southward.

Fort House, to which were attached pleasure grounds of about an acre in extent, was approached by a carriage drive, and the rental value in 1883 was £100 a year. This “airy nest” (as he described his Broadstairs home) formed a conspicuous landmark in the locality, and proved a constant source of attraction to visitors by reason of its associations. Edmund Yates thus describes it as seen by him at a subsequent period: “It is a small house without any large rooms, but such a place as a man of moderate means, with an immoderate family of small children, might choose for a summer retreat. The sands immediately below afford a splendid playground; there is an abundant supply of never-failing ozone; there is a good lawn, surrounded by borders well-stocked with delicious-smelling common English flowers, and there is, or was in those days, I imagine, ample opportunity for necessary seclusion. The room in which Dickens worked is on the first floor, a small, three-cornered slip, ‘about the size of a warm bath,’ as he would have said, but with a large expansive window commanding a magnificent sea-view. His love for the place, and his gratitude for the good it always did him, are recorded in a hundred letters.” In 1889 the late Mr. W. R. Hughes and the present writer were privileged to examine Fort House, and our impressions have been duly recorded. We approached the study by a little staircase leading from the first floor, and from the veranda-shaded window witnessed a lovely view of the sea. Perhaps it was nothing more than coincidence, but Dickens seemed to prefer, as places of residence, houses having semicircular frontages, and Fort House proved no exception, his study being in the bowed front facing the ocean. Here he wrote the concluding lines of what the author himself regarded as the best of all his books, “David Copperfield.” Let it be distinctly averred that not a line of “Bleak House” was penned in this abode (as is generally supposed), and that it is quite an erroneous idea to associate Fort House with the home of Mr. Jarndyce, so minutely described in that story. This being the case, it is unfortunate that a later owner of the property committed the indiscretion of changing the name of the building to Bleak House, by which misleading designation it has been known for a considerable period.

After a good many years of disuse, Bleak House fell into a lamentable state of decay, and it is much to be deplored that the local authorities did not avail themselves of the opportunity afforded them of acquiring (for the sake of preservation) the residence which so frequently became the favourite seaside dwelling of the genius of the place. They, however, did not rise to the occasion, with the result that, in consequence of remaining so long uninhabited, the house suffered seriously from dilapidation, and the garden (containing the old swing where the novelist used to swing his children) became a wilderness of weeds. Recently the property was sold, and the owner thought fit to restore, alter, and extend the premises, converting the building into a pretentious-looking mansion of Tudor design, with castellated eaves and other “improvements,” by which it is changed beyond all recognition.

In 1847 Broadstairs commenced to grow out of favour with the novelist, for it then began to attract large numbers of holiday folks, with an attendant train of outdoor entertainers, who deprived him of that quietude and seclusion so indispensable for his work. “Vagrant music is getting to that height here,” he said, “and is so impossible to be escaped from, that I fear Broadstairs and I must part company in time to come. Unless it pours of rain, I cannot write half an hour without the most excruciating organs, fiddles, bells, or glee-singers. There is a violin of the most torturing kind under the window now (time, ten in the morning), and an Italian box of music on the steps, both in full blast.” Dickens did not desert the town just yet, however, as in 1851 (in order to escape the excitement in London caused by the Great Exhibition) he decided to let the town house (Devonshire Terrace) for a few months, and engaged Fort House from the beginning of May until November, his longest sojourn at Broadstairs. This was not the last visit (as stated in a note in the published “Letters”), as he spent a week there in the summer of 1859 for sea air and change, thus to assist recovery from a slight illness, and prepare for the severe ordeal of a provincial Reading tour. After 1859 Broadstairs knew him no more, although we are assured that he ever retained an affectionate interest in that “pretty little watering-place.” Mr. Hughes has recorded an interview with an “old salt,” one Harry Ford, who well remembered the novelist when, in early days, he (Dickens) went with his family to stay at Broadstairs. “Bless your soul!” he said, “I can see ‘Old Charley’ (as we used to call him among ourselves here) a-coming flying down from the cliff with a hop, step, and jump, with his hair all flying about. He used to sit sometimes on that rail”—pointing to the one surrounding the harbour—“with his legs lolling about, and sometimes on the seat that you’re a-sitting on now” (adjoining the old look-out house opposite the Tartar Frigate Inn), “and he was very fond of talking to us fellows and hearing our tales; he was very good-natured, and nobody was liked better. And if you’ll read that story that he wrote and printed about ‘Our Watering-Place,’ I was the man who’s mentioned there as mending a little ship for a boy. I held that child between my knees. And, what’s more, I took ‘Old Charley,’ on the very last time that he came over to Broadstairs (he wasn’t living here at the time), round the Foreland to Margate, with a party of four friends. I took ’em in my boat, the Irene”—pointing to a clinker-built, strong boat lying in the harbour, capable of holding twenty people. “The wind was easterly, the weather was rather rough, and it took me three or four hours to get round. There was a good deal of chaffing going on, I can tell you.”[110]

Of the neighbouring watering-place, Margate, but little can be said from the Dickensian point of view, for the novelist visited it so seldom, probably not more than twice—viz., in 1844 and 1847, writing thence on both occasions to Forster with particular reference to the theatre there, which he honoured with his patronage. In this respect Dover comes within the same category, for he said, in 1852: “It is not quite a place to my taste, being too bandy (I mean musical; no reference to its legs), and infinitely too genteel. But the sea is very fine, and the walks are quite remarkable. There are two ways of going to Folkestone, both lovely and striking in the highest degree, and there are heights and downs and country roads, and I don’t know what, everywhere.” Mention is frequently made of Dover in his books—of its castle, pier, cliffs, harbour, theatre, etc.; the latter, built in 1790, he described in 1856 as “a miserable spectacle—the pit is boarded over, and it is a drinking and smoking place.” Here is a pen-picture of the fortified town from “A Tale of Two Cities,” as it appeared more than a century ago: “The little narrow, crooked town of Dover hid itself away from the beach, and ran its head into the chalk cliffs, like a marine ostrich. The beach was a desert of heaps of sea and stones tumbling wildly about, and the sea did what it liked, and what it liked was destruction. It thundered at the town, and thundered at the cliffs, and brought the coast down, madly. The air among the houses was of so strong a piscatory flavour that one might have supposed sick fish went up to be dipped in it, as sick people went down to be dipped in the sea. A little fishing was done in the port, and a quantity of strolling about by night, and looking seaward, particularly at those times when the tide made, and was near flood. Small tradesmen, who did no business whatever, sometimes unaccountably realized large fortunes, and it was remarkable that nobody in the neighbourhood could endure a lamp-lighter.” In “The Uncommercial Traveller,” too, we find this pleasing fancy in alluding to Dover: “There the sea was tumbling in, with deep sounds, after dark, and the revolving French light on Cape Grisnez was seen regularly bursting out and becoming obscured, as if the head of a gigantic lightkeeper, in an anxious state of mind, were interposed every half-minute, to look how it was burning.”

Dover, as everyone remembers, was the destination of poor little ragged David Copperfield, who, tramping wearily from London, went thither in quest of his aunt, Betsy Trotwood. In 1852 Dickens stayed for three months at No. 10, Camden Crescent, and in 1861 he took apartments at the Lord Warden Hotel.

The autumn of 1855 was spent by Dickens and his family at No. 3, Albion Villas, Folkestone, “a very pleasant little house overlooking the sea,” whither he went, on the eve of the publication of “Little Dorrit,” to “help his sluggish fancy.” In “Reprinted Pieces” we find Folkestone disguised as “Pavilionstone,” thus named after the Pavilion Hotel, originally a modest-looking building erected on the sea-front in 1843, but recently transformed into a huge establishment in order to meet the requirements of modern-day travellers en route to and from Boulogne. Even at the time this article was written,[111] the hotel is described as containing “streets of rooms” and handsome salons. Folkestone of to-day differs considerably from Folkestone of fifty years ago, having developed during the interval into a fashionable watering-place of an almost resplendent character. Nevertheless, in Dickens’s presentment it is not impossible, even now, to detect the tone and colouring of old Folkestone, with its “crooked street like a crippled ladder,” etc. “Within a quarter of a century—circa 1830,” Dickens remarks, “it was a little fishing town, and they do say that the time was when it was a little smuggling town.... The old little fishing and smuggling town remains.... There are break-neck flights of ragged steps, connecting the principal streets by back-ways, which will cripple the visitor in half an hour.... In connection with these break-neck steps I observe some wooden cottages, with tumbledown outhouses, and backyards 3 feet square, adorned with garlands of dried fish.... Our situation is delightful, our air delicious, and our breezy hills and downs, carpeted with wild thyme, and decorated with millions of wild flowers, are, in the faith of the pedestrian, perfect.” He informs us that the harbour is a tidal one—“At low water we are a heap of mud, with an empty channel in it”—and delineates, with the sense of a keen observer, the effects of high and low tide upon the shipping, while the following is a typical example of Dickensian humour: “The very little wooden lighthouse shrinks in the idle glare of the sun. And here I may observe of the very little wooden lighthouse, that when it is lighted at night—red and green—it looks so like a medical man’s, that several distracted husbands have at various times been found, on occasions of premature domestic anxiety, going round it, trying to find the night-bell!”[112]

Strange to relate, Maidstone, the county town, is mentioned only twice in Dickens’s writings—namely, in “David Copperfield” and “The Seven Poor Travellers”; but there is a hint of his intention to give more prominence to it in “Edwin Drood” by making the county gaol the scene of Jasper’s imprisonment. It is conjectured that Maidstone is the Muggleton of “Pickwick,” there described as “a corporate town, with a mayor, burgesses, and freemen,” with “an open square for the market-place, and in the centre a large inn,” etc. That he knew the locality well, even at this date, there can be no doubt—indeed, it has been suggested that those remarkable Druidical stones near by, known as Kit’s Coty House, with names, initials, and dates scratched thereon, may have originated the idea of Mr. Pickwick’s immortal discovery of the stone inscribed by “Bill Stumps.” Another Pickwickian link with the neighbourhood is Cob-tree Hall, an Elizabethan house near Aylesford, justly regarded as the original of the Manor House at Dingley Dell, which, with its surroundings, answers admirably to the description in the fourth chapter of “Pickwick.”

We know that in later years he was fond of walking between Maidstone and Rochester, the seven miles constituting, in his opinion, “one of the most beautiful walks in England”; and not infrequently, when living at Gad’s Hill, he would drive there with friends for a picnic, the horses bestridden by “a couple of postillions in the old red jackets of the old red royal Dover road.” “It was like a holiday ride in England fifty years ago,” he said to Longfellow, commenting upon one of these delightful excursions. Pilgrims in Dickens land would do well to visit Kit’s Coty House and Blue Bell Hill, where, from the higher elevations, a prospect is revealed of enchanting beauty; from such a point of vantage we behold an extensive view of the valley, in which are seen little hamlets, cornfields, hop gardens, orchards, and spinneys, with the river Medway meandering in the direction of Rochester, and gradually widening as it approaches that ancient town.