IN THE WEST COUNTRY.
Dickens first made acquaintance with many provincial towns during his
early newspaper days, when, as a reporter, he galloped by road in
post-chaises, both by day and night, to remote parts of the country,
meeting with strange adventures, sometimes experiencing awkward
predicaments, from which he invariably succeeded in extricating himself
and in reaching his destination in good time for publication, his
carefully-prepared notes being transcribed, not infrequently, during
“the smallest hours of the night in a swift-flying carriage and pair,”
by the light of a blazing wax-candle. In 1845, when recalling his
reporting days, he informed Forster that he “had to charge for all sorts
of breakages fifty times in a journey without question,” as the ordinary
results of the pace he was compelled to travel. He had charged his
employers for everything but a broken head, “which,” he naïvely added,
“is the only thing they would have grumbled to pay for.” One of the
foremost of these expeditions took place in 1835, when he and a
colleague, Thomas Beard, journeyed by express coach to Bristol to
report, for the _Morning Chronicle_, the political speeches in
connection with Lord John Russell’s Devon contest. He lodged at the Bush
Inn, where that “ill-starred gentleman,” Mr. Winkle, took up his
quarters when fleeing from the wrath of the infuriated Dowler, as set
forth in the thirty-eighth chapter of “Pickwick.” We are told that Mr.
Winkle found Bristol “a shade more dirty than any place he had ever
seen”; that, at the time referred to (nearly eighty years ago), the
pavements of that city were “not the widest or cleanest upon earth,” its
streets were “not altogether the straightest or least intricate,” and
their “manifold windings and twistings” greatly puzzled Mr. Winkle, who,
when exploring them, lost his way, with the result that he unexpectedly
came upon his old acquaintances, Bob Sawyer and Ben Allen, the former
occupying a newly-painted tenement (not identified), which had been
recently converted into “something between a shop and a private house,”
with the word “Surgery” inscribed above the window of what had been the
front parlour. At the Bush tavern the fugitive was discovered by Sam
Weller, who had received peremptory orders from “the governor” to follow
and keep him in sight until Mr. Pickwick arrived on the scene. The Bush
no longer exists; it stood in Corn Street, near the Guildhall, and was
taken down in 1864, the present Wiltshire Bank marking the site. It will
be remembered that it was to Clifton, on the outskirts of Bristol, where
Arabella Allen was sent by her brother (who regarded himself as “her
natural protector and guardian”) to spend a few months at an old aunt’s,
“in a nice dull place,” in order to break her to his will that she
should marry Bob Sawyer (“late Nockemorf”). Hither Sam Weller went in
quest of her, walking (as we are told) “up one street and down
another—we were going to say, up one hill and down another, only it’s
all uphill at Clifton”—and, after struggling across the Downs, “against
a good high wind,” eventually arrived at “several little villas of quiet
and secluded appearance,” at one of which he, too, met a familiar
acquaintance in “the pretty housemaid from Mrs. Nupkins’s,” who proved a
valuable guide to the whereabouts of Miss Allen. In 1866 and 1869
Dickens gave public readings at Clifton, staying on the former occasion
at the Down Hotel. The suspension bridge across the Avon is the old
Hungerford Bridge, removed in 1863, and the sight of it at the time of
his later visits to Clifton must have recalled to Dickens the troubled
period of his boyhood at the blacking factory.
The occasion of the Bristol reporting expedition in 1835 is also
memorable for the fact that it marks the date of Dickens’s first visit
to the contiguous city of Bath, which plays a still more important part
in the Transactions of the Pickwick Club. At Bath he had to prepare a
report of a political dinner given there by Lord John Russell, and to
despatch it “by Cooper Company’s Coach, leaving the Bush (Bristol) at
half-past six next morning.” It was sharp work, as Russell’s speech at
the banquet had to be transcribed by Dickens for the printers while
travelling by the mail-coach viâ Marlborough for London; this
necessitated for himself and Thomas Beard the relinquishment of sleep
and rest during two consecutive days and nights. It is fair to suppose
that on one of his early reporting expeditions to the West of England
Dickens put up for a night at the quaint little roadside inn near
Marlborough Downs, which he so carefully describes in the Bagman’s Story
in “Pickwick.”
“It was a strange old place, built of a kind of shingle, inlaid, as it
were, with cross-beams, with gable-topped windows projecting over the
pathway, and a low door with a dark porch, and a couple of steep steps
leading down into the house, instead of the modern fashion of half a
dozen shallow ones leading up to it.” Like Tom Smart, the hero of the
story, he doubtless slept in the selfsame apartment, with its “big
closets, and a bed which might have served for a whole boarding-school,
to say nothing of a couple of oaken presses that would have held the
baggage of a small army.” Nay, he may even have experienced Tom Smart’s
strange hallucination in regard to the ancient armchair, apparently
assuming in the uncertain light of the chamber fire the outlines of a
strangely-formed specimen of humanity, although probably he did not go
so far as to enter into conversation with this remarkable bedroom
companion, as did the Bagman, whose vivid imagination, aided by the
narcotic effects of his noggins of whisky, enabled him to impart a
spiciness to his narrative. From the detailed manner in which Dickens
portrays this old-fashioned alehouse, we are justified in conjecturing
that such a place really existed during the thirties, and attempts have
been made to identify it, for we need not take for granted the statement
in “Pickwick” that the place had been pulled down. From inquiries which
I instituted on the subject, a local correspondent informs me that the
Marquis of Ailesbury’s Arms at Clatford somewhat answered to the
description prior to extensive structural alterations effected about
twenty years ago.
Another investigator considers that the inn at Beckhampton, the
Catherine Wheel, fulfils most of the requirements. With this conclusion,
however, the Rev. W. H. Davies, of Avebury, is not disposed to agree,
and the late Rev. A. C. Smith, in his “British and Roman Antiquities,”
tells us that the inn which formerly existed at Shepherd’s Shord (or
Shore) was the one referred to by Dickens, and that at the time of the
publication of “Pickwick” everybody in Wiltshire so identified it.
Another suggestion is that the original of Tom Smart’s house of call was
the Kennett Inn at Beckhampton, which, according to a drawing of the
place, answers the descriptions even better than those already
mentioned, although it stood upon the wrong side of the road. We ought,
I think, to accept the local opinion of Pickwickian days, and fix the
scene of the Bagman’s adventure at Shepherd’s Shore.[48]
Remembering what little leisure he must have had in the midst of
political turmoil and journalistic responsibilities while at Bath, it is
indeed surprising to find how truthful a presentment of that delightful
city is achieved in “Pickwick.” On the occasion in question he put up at
a small hotel, the Saracen’s Head, a quaint-looking, unpretentious
building still existing in Broad Street, its two red-tiled gables and
stuccoed front facing that thoroughfare. The landlady relates that
Dickens, owing to the fact that all the bedrooms of the house were
occupied on his arrival at a late hour, had to be accommodated with a
room over some stables or outbuildings at the farther end of the inn
yard, overlooking Walcot Street.[49] Visitors are shown a curious
two-handled mug which the novelist is believed to have used, and the
bedroom once occupied by him, and containing the old four-post bedstead
upon which he slept; while in another room, low and raftered, is to be
seen the stiff wooden armchair in which he sat!—relics that are
deservedly cherished and handed down as heirlooms.
Bath is frequently referred to in the novelist’s writings, and, judging
by a particular allusion to the historic town, it seems not to have left
a very favourable impression on his mind, for he there mentions it as
“that grass-grown city of the ancients.”[50] At a subsequent date he
remarked: “Landor’s ghost goes along the silent streets here before
me.... The place looks to me like a cemetery which the dead have
succeeded in rising and taking. Having built streets of their old
gravestones, they wander about scantly trying to ‘look alive.’ A dead
failure.”[51] He had a pleasant remembrance of Walter Savage Landor at
No. 35, St. James’s Square, upon which a tablet was fixed in 1903
recording the fact of a visit paid to him by the novelist on the
latter’s birthday, February 7, 1840, on which occasion he was
accompanied by Mrs. Dickens, Maclise, and Forster, the party remaining
there until the end of the month. We are assured by his biographer that
it was during this visit to Bath “that the fancy which was shortly to
take the form of Little Nell first occurred to its author.” The
girl-heroine of “The Old Curiosity Shop” was an immense favourite with
Landor, who in after-years emphatically declared that the one mistake of
his life was that he had not purchased the house in which the conception
of her dawned upon Dickens, and then and there burned it to the ground,
so that no meaner associations should desecrate it.
[Illustration: MILE END COTTAGE, ALPHINGTON. (_Page 94._)
Taken by Dickens in 1839 for his parents’ use. “The house is on the
high road to Plymouth, and the situation is charming” (letter to Mr.
Thomas Mitton).]
Brief as his stay in Bath undoubtedly was in the capacity of reporter
for the _Morning Chronicle_ in 1835, he, nevertheless, made excellent
use of his abnormal powers of observation in spite of professional
activities, his retentive memory enabling him to reproduce in “The
Pickwick Papers” a few months afterwards those typical scenes in the
social life of Bath of that period, which has since undergone many
changes, Mr. Pickwick being almost the last to witness the peculiarities
of Bath society as described by the novel-writers of a century or so
ago. Dickens noticed, among other topographical features, the steepness
of Park Street, which (he said) “was very much like the perpendicular
streets a man sees in a dream, which he cannot get up for the life of
him.” He remembered, too, that the White Hart Hotel (the proprietor of
which establishment was the Moses Pickwick who owned the very coach on
which Sam Weller saw inscribed “the magic name of Pickwick”) stood
“opposite the great Pump Room, where the waiters, from their costume,
might be mistaken for Westminster boys, only they destroy the illusion
by behaving themselves so much better.”[52] The White Hart flourished in
Stall Street, and until 1864 (when the house was given up) the waiters
wore knee-breeches and silk stockings, and the women servants donned
neat muslin caps. The old coaching inn, alas! no longer exists, and its
site is indicated by the Grand Pump Room Hotel, the original carved sign
of a white hart being preserved and still used over the door of an inn
of the same name in Widcombe, a suburb of Bath.
The pen-pictures of scenes at the Assembly Rooms and Pump Rooms are
admirably rendered in the pages of “Pickwick,” and we feel convinced
that the author must have witnessed them.
“Bath being full, the company and the sixpences for tea poured in in
shoals. In the ball-room, the long card-room, the octagonal card-room,
the staircases, and the passages, the hum of many voices and the sound
of many feet were perfectly bewildering. Dresses rustled, feathers
waved, lights shone, and jewels sparkled. There was the music—not of the
quadrille band, for it had not yet commenced, but the music of soft,
tiny footsteps, with now and then a clear, merry laugh, low and gentle,
but very pleasant to hear in a female voice, whether in Bath or
elsewhere. Brilliant eyes, lighted up with pleasurable expectations,
gleamed from every side; and look where you would, some exquisite form
glided gracefully through the throng, and was no sooner lost than it was
replaced by another as dainty and bewitching.
“In the tea-room, and hovering round the card-tables, were a vast number
of queer old ladies and decrepit old gentlemen, discussing all the
small-talk and scandal of the day, with a relish and gusto which
sufficiently bespoke the intensity of the pleasure they derived from the
occupation. Mingled with these groups were three or four matchmaking
mammas, appearing to be wholly absorbed by the conversation in which
they were taking part, but failing not from time to time to cast an
anxious sidelong glance upon their daughters, who, remembering the
maternal injunction to make the best of their youth, had already
commenced incipient flirtations in the mislaying of scarves, putting on
gloves, setting down cups, and so forth—slight matters apparently, but
which may be turned to surprisingly good account by expert
practitioners.
“Lounging near the doors, and in remote corners, were various knots of
silly young men, displaying various varieties of puppyism and stupidity,
amusing all sensible people near them with their folly and conceit, and
happily thinking themselves the objects of general admiration—a wise and
merciful dispensation which no good man will quarrel with.
“And, lastly, seated on some of the back benches, where they had already
taken up their positions for the evening, were divers unmarried ladies
past their grand climacteric, who, not dancing because there were no
partners for them, and not playing cards lest they should be set down as
irretrievably single, were in the favourable situation of being able to
abuse everybody without reflecting on themselves. In short, they could
abuse everybody, because everybody was there. It was a scene of gaiety,
glitter, and show, of richly-dressed people, handsome mirrors, chalked
floors, girandoles, and wax-candles; and in all parts of the scene,
gliding from spot to spot in silent softness, bowing obsequiously to
this party, nodding familiarly to that, and smiling complacently on all,
was the sprucely-attired person of Angelo Cyrus Bantam, Esquire, Master
of the Ceremonies” (chap. xxxv.).
“The great pump-room is a spacious saloon, ornamented with Corinthian
pillars, and a music gallery, and a Tompion clock, and a statue of Nash,
and a golden inscription, to which all the water-drinkers should attend,
for it appeals to them in the cause of a deserving charity. There is a
large bar with a marble vase, out of which the pumper gets the water;
and there are a number of yellow-looking tumblers, out of which the
company gets it; and it is a most edifying and satisfactory sight to
behold the perseverance and gravity with which they swallow it. There
are baths near at hand, in which a part of the company wash themselves;
and a band plays afterwards to congratulate the remainder on their
having done so. There is another pump-room, into which infirm ladies and
gentlemen are wheeled, in such an astonishing variety of chairs and
chaises that any adventurous individual who goes in with the regular
number of toes is in imminent danger of coming out without them; and
there is a third, into which the quiet people go, for it is less noisy
than either. There is an immensity of promenading, on crutches and off,
with sticks and without, and a great deal of conversation, and
liveliness, and pleasantry.... At the afternoon’s promenade ... all the
great people, and all the morning water-drinkers, meet in grand
assemblage. After this, they walked out or drove out, or were pushed out
in bath-chairs, and met one another again. After this, the gentlemen
went to the reading-rooms and met divisions of the mass. After this,
they went home. If it were theatre night, perhaps they met at the
theatre; if it were assembly night, they met at the rooms; and if it
were neither, they met the next day. A very pleasant routine, with
perhaps a slight tinge of sameness” (chap. xxxvi.).
The citizens of Bath are naturally proud of its Pickwickian
associations; Mr. Pickwick’s lodging in the Royal Crescent is pointed
out, as well as the actual spot in the Assembly Rooms where he played
whist, while the veritable rout seats of that time are preserved and
cherished. The Royal Hotel, whence Mr. Winkle hurriedly departed by
coach for Bristol, has shared the fate of the White Hart; indeed, Mr.
Snowden Ward avers that there was no Royal Hotel in Bath in Dickens’s
time, and that he probably refers to the York House Hotel, frequently
patronized by royalty, and once at least by the novelist himself. We may
still look, however, upon the “small greengrocer’s shop” where Bath
footmen used to hold their social evenings, and memorable as the scene
of the “leg-o’-mutton swarry.” It is now the Beaufort Arms, in a narrow
street out of Queen’s Square, Bath, and within a short distance of No.
12 in the Square, the residence of Angelo Cyrus Bantam, Esq., Master of
the Ceremonies, who welcomed Mr. Pickwick to Ba-ath.
In the course of an interesting speech delivered in 1865 at the second
annual dinner of the Newspaper Press Fund, Dickens made an interesting
allusion to the Devonshire political contest of thirty years previously,
and to the part he took in it as a _Chronicle_ reporter. “The very last
time I was at Exeter,” he said, “I strolled into the Castle yard, there
to identify, for the amusement of a friend, the spot on which I once
‘took,’ as we used to call it, an election speech of Lord John Russell
... in the midst of a lively fight maintained by all the vagabonds in
that division of the county, and under such a pelting rain that I
remember two good-natured colleagues, who chanced to be at leisure, held
a pocket-handkerchief over my note-book, after the manner of a state
canopy in an ecclesiastical procession.” In 1839 a mission of a very
different character caused him to journey to “the capital of the West”
(as that city has been denominated), his object being to arrange a new
home for his parents in that locality. Making his headquarters at the
New London Inn (where he had Charles Kean’s sitting-room), he soon
discovered a suitable residence about a mile south from the city
boundary on the highroad to Plymouth, Mile End Cottage, which is really
divided into two portions, one-half being then occupied by the landlady,
and the other being available for the new tenants. Dickens, when writing
to Forster, described the place as “two white cottages,” and respecting
the accommodation here provided for his parents, he said: “I almost
forget the number of rooms, but there is an excellent parlour, which I
am furnishing as a drawing-room, and there is a splendid garden.” In a
letter to his friend Thomas Mitton he dilates more fully upon the
attractions of the cottage and its environment. “I do assure you,” he
observed, “that I am charmed with the place and the beauty of the
country round about, though I have not seen it under very favourable
circumstances.... It is really delightful, and when the house is to
rights and the furniture all in, I shall be quite sorry to leave it....
The situation is charming; meadows in front, an orchard running parallel
to the garden hedge, richly-wooded hills closing in the prospect behind,
and, away to the left, before a splendid view of the hill on which
Exeter is situated, the cathedral towers rising up into the sky in the
most picturesque manner possible. I don’t think I ever saw so cheerful
and pleasant a spot....”[53] It will be remembered that “Nicholas
Nickleby” opens with a reference to “a sequestered part of the county of
Devonshire” (_sic_), where lived one Mr. Godfrey Nickleby, the
grandfather of the hero of the story; and there is no doubt that the
home of Mrs. Nickleby’s friends, the Dibabses, as pictured by that lady
in the fifty-fifth chapter, was identical with the tenement in which Mr.
and Mrs. John Dickens found a temporary lodgment—“the beautiful little
thatched white house one story high, covered all over with ivy and
creeping plants, with an exquisite little porch with twining
honeysuckle, and all sorts of things.”
Charles Dickens’s return to England at the end of his triumphant
progress through the United States in 1842 was the occasion for a
special celebration, which assumed the form of a holiday trip in
Cornwall with his cherished friends Stanfield, Maclise, and Forster.
They chose Cornwall for the excursion because it transpired that this
“desolate region,” as Dickens termed it, was unfamiliar to them, and
would therefore enhance their enjoyment. The decision to make Cornwall
their destination suggested to Dickens the idea of opening his new book,
“Martin Chuzzlewit,” on that rugged coast, “in some terrible dreary,
iron-bound spot,” and to select the lantern of a lighthouse (probably
the Longship’s, off Land’s End) as the opening scene; but he changed his
mind. This expedition in the late summer lasted nearly three weeks, it
proving a source of such unexpected and unabated attraction that the
merry party felt loath to return to town. Railways were not of much use
to them, as they did not penetrate to the remote districts which the
travellers desired to visit. Post-horses were therefore requisitioned,
and when the roads proved inaccessible to these, pedestrianism was
perforce resorted to. They visited Tintagel, and explored every part of
mountain and sea “consecrated by the legends of Arthur.” They ascended
to the cradle of the highest pinnacle of Mount St. Michael,[54] and
descended in several mines; but above all the marvels of land and sea,
that which yielded the most lasting impression was a sunset at Land’s
End, concerning which Forster says: “There was something in the sinking
of the sun behind the Atlantic that autumn afternoon, as we viewed it
together from the top of the rock projecting farthest into the sea,
which each in his turn declared to have no parallel in memory.” The
famous Logan Stone, too, was not forgotten. Writing subsequently to
Forster, the novelist said: “Don’t I still see the Logan Stone, and you
perched on the giddy top, while we, rocking it on its pivot, shrank from
all that lay concealed below!” For Forster possessed the necessary
courage and agility (lacking in the rest) to mount the huge swaying
stone, the feat being immortalized by Stanfield in a sketch bequeathed
to the Victoria and Albert Museum.[55] Lastly, the waterfall at St.
Wighton was visited, memorable for the fact that a painting of it (from
a sketch made on this occasion) appears as the background to Maclise’s
picture of “A Girl at a Waterfall,” the figure being depicted from a
sister-in-law of Dickens. The novelist, while the glow of enjoyment was
yet upon him, could not resist dilating upon the exhilarating effect
induced by this glorious holiday in the midst of natural scenery, then
witnessed by the joyous quartette for the first time; and the following
letter, addressed to his American friend, Professor Felton, fittingly
concludes these references to the event which he ever recalled with
delight: “Blessed star of the morning, such a trip as we had into
Cornwall, just after Longfellow went away!... We went down into
Devonshire by the railroad, and there we hired an open carriage from an
innkeeper, patriotic in all Pickwick matters, and went on with
post-horses. Sometimes we travelled all night, sometimes all day,
sometimes both. I kept the joint-stock purse, ordered all the dinners,
paid all the turnpikes, conducted facetious conversations with the
post-boys, and regulated the pace at which we travelled. Stanfield (an
old sailor) consulted an enormous map on all disputed points of
wayfaring, and referred, moreover, to a pocket-compass and other
scientific instruments. The luggage was in Forster’s department, and
Maclise, having nothing particular to do, sang songs. Heavens! if you
could have seen the necks of bottles—distracting in their immense
varieties of shape—peering out of the carriage pockets! If you could
have witnessed the deep devotion of the post-boys, the wild attachment
of the hostlers, the maniac glee of the waiters! If you could have
followed us into the earthy old churches we visited, and into the
strange caverns on the gloomy seashore, and down into the depths of
mines, and up to the tops of giddy heights, where the unspeakably green
water was roaring I don’t know how many hundred feet below! If you could
have seen but one gleam of the bright fires by which we sat in the big
rooms of ancient inns at night until long after the small hours had come
and gone, or smelt but one steam of the hot punch,... which came in
every evening in a huge, broad, china bowl! I never laughed in my life
as I did on this journey. It would have done you good to hear me. I was
choking and gasping and bursting the buckle off the back of my stock all
the way, and Stanfield ... got into such apoplectic entanglements that
we were often obliged to beat him on the back with portmanteaus before
we could recover him. Seriously, I do believe that there never was such
a trip. And they made such sketches, those two men, in the most romantic
of our halting-places, that you could have sworn we had the Spirit of
Beauty with us, as well as the Spirit of Fun....”[56]
[Illustration: THE GEORGE INN, AMESBURY. (_Page 100._)
“The Blue Dragon” of “Martin Chuzzlewit.”]
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.