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.
The picturesque and charming city of Canterbury, as portrayed in “David
Copperfield,” has changed in a much less degree than many other English
cathedral towns within the last twenty years or so. In that delightful
story, so replete with the autobiographical element, we read: “The sunny
street of Canterbury, dozing, as it were, in the hot light; ... its old
houses and gateways, and the stately gray cathedral, with the rooks
sailing round the towers” (chap. xiii.). “Coming into Canterbury, I
loitered through the old streets with a sober pleasure that calmed my
spirits and eased my heart.... The venerable cathedral towers and the
old jackdaws and rooks, whose airy voices made them more retired than
perfect silence would have done; the battered gateways, once stuck full
with statues, long thrown down, and crumbled away, like the reverential
pilgrims who had gazed upon them; the still nooks, where the ivied
growth of centuries crept over gabled ends and ruined walls; the ancient
houses; the pastoral landscape of field, orchard, and garden—everywhere,
on everything, I felt the same serener air, the same calm, thoughtful,
softening spirit” (chap. xxxix.). In 1861, when giving a public Reading
at Canterbury, Dickens stayed at the Fountain Hotel, in St. Margaret’s
Street, which is recognised locally as “the County Inn” where Mr. Dick
slept when visiting David Copperfield. The “little inn” where Mr.
Micawber put up is probably the Sun Hotel in Sun Street; Dr. Strong’s
school is the still-flourishing King’s School in the cathedral
precincts, its Norman staircase being an object of great antiquarian
interest.
[Illustration: EASTGATE HOUSE, ROCHESTER. (_Page 217._)
The original of the Nuns’ House in “Edwin Drood.”]
[Illustration: SAPSEA’S HOUSE, ROCHESTER. (_Page 217._)
“The silent High Street of Rochester is full of gables with old
beams and timbers” (“Seven Poor Travellers”).]
An ancient and picturesque house near the old west gate (No. 71, St.
Dunstan’s Street) is regarded as the probable original of Mr.
Wickfield’s residence; while the home of Dr. Strong is identified with
the old building at the corner (No. 1) of Lady Wootton’s Green.