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[Illustration: CHALK, HOUSE WHERE DICKENS SPENT HIS HONEYMOON]
DICKENS-LAND
Described by J. A. NICKLIN
Pictured by E. W. HASLEHUST
[Illustration]
BLACKIE AND SON LIMITED LONDON GLASGOW AND BOMBAY 1911
Beautiful England
_Volumes Ready_
OXFORD
THE ENGLISH LAKES
CANTERBURY
SHAKESPEARE-LAND
THE THAMES
WINDSOR CASTLE
CAMBRIDGE
NORWICH AND THE BROADS
THE HEART OF WESSEX
THE PEAK DISTRICT
THE CORNISH RIVIERA
DICKENS-LAND
WINCHESTER
THE ISLE OF WIGHT
CHESTER AND THE DEE
YORK
_Uniform with this Series_
Beautiful Ireland
LEINSTER
ULSTER
MUNSTER
CONNAUGHT
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
Page
Chalk, House where Dickens spent his honeymoon _Frontispiece_
Gadshill Place from the Gardens 8
Rochester from Strood 14
Restoration House, Rochester 20
Cobham Park 26
Cooling Church 32
Aylesford 38
Maidstone, All Saints' Church and the Palace 42
Jasper's Gateway 46
Chalk Church 50
Shorne Church 54
The Leather Bottle, Cobham 58
[Illustration]
The central shrine of a literary cult is at least as often its hero's
home of adoption as his place of birth. To the Wordsworthian,
Cockermouth has but a faint, remote interest in comparison with Grasmere
and Rydal Mount. Edinburgh, for all its associations with the life and
the genius of Scott, is not as Abbotsford, or as that beloved Border
country in which his memory has struck its deepest roots. And so it is
with Dickens. The accident of birth attaches his name but slightly to
Landport in South-sea. The Dickens pilgrim treads in the most palpable
footsteps of "Boz" amongst the landmarks of a Victorian London, too
rapidly disappearing, and through the "rich and varied landscape" on
either side of the Medway, "covered with cornfields and pastures, with
here and there a windmill or a distant church", which Dickens loved from
boyhood, peopled with the creatures of his teeming fancy, and chose for
his last and most-cherished habitation.
What Abbotsford was to Scott, that, almost, to Dickens in his later
years was Gadshill Place. From his study window in the "grave red-brick
house" "on his little Kentish freehold"--a house which he had "added to
and stuck bits upon in all manner of ways, so that it was as pleasantly
irregular and as violently opposed to all architectural ideas as the
most hopeful man could possibly desire"--he looked out, so he wrote to a
friend, "on as pretty a view as you will find in a long day's English
ride.... Cobham Park and Woods are behind the house; the distant Thames
is in front; the Medway, with Rochester and its old castle and
cathedral, on one side." On every side he could not fail to reach, in
those brisk walks with which he sought, too strenuously, perhaps, health
and relaxation, some object redolent of childish dreams or mature
achievement, of intimate joys and sorrows, of those phantoms of his
brain which to him then, as to hundreds of thousands of his readers
since, were not less real than the men and women of everyday encounter.
On those seven miles between Rochester and Maidstone, which he
discovered to be one of the most beautiful walks in England, he might be
tempted to strike off at Aylesford for a short stroll to such a
pleasant old Elizabethan mansion as Cobtree Hall, the very type, it may
be, of Manor Farm, Dingley Dell, or for a longer tramp to Town Malling,
from which he may well have borrowed many strokes for the picture of
Muggleton, that town of sturdy Kentish cricket. Sometimes he would walk
across the marshes to Gravesend, and returning through the village of
Chalk, would pause for a retrospective glance at the house where his
honeymoon was spent and a good part of _Pickwick_ planned. In the latter
end of the year, when he could take a short cut through the stubble
fields from Higham to the marshes lying further down the Thames, he
would often visit the desolate churchyard where little Pip was so
terribly frightened by the convict. Or, descending the long slope from
Gadshill to Strood, and crossing Rochester Bridge--over the balustrades
of which Mr. Pickwick leaned in agreeable reverie when he was accosted
by Dismal Jemmy--the author of _Great Expectations_ and _Edwin Drood_
would pass from Rochester High Street--where Mr. Pumblechook's seed shop
looks across the way at Miss Twinkleton's establishment--into the Vines,
to compare once more the impression on his unerring "inward eye" with
the actual features of that Restoration House which, under another name,
he assigned to Miss Havisham, and so round by Fort Pitt to the Chatham
lines. And there--who can doubt?--if he seemed to hear the melancholy
wind that whistled through the deserted fields as Mr. Winkle took his
reluctant stand, a wretched and desperate duellist, his thoughts would
also stray to the busy dockyard town and "a blessed little room" in a
plain-looking plaster-fronted house from which dated all his early
readings and imaginings.
Between the "very small and not-over-particularly-taken-care-of boy" and
the strong, self-reliant man whose fame had filled two continents,
Gadshill Place was an immediate link. Everyone knows the story which
Dickens tells of a vision of his former self meeting him on the road to
Canterbury.
"So smooth was the old high road, 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?' say 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 Gadshill 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.
[Illustration: GADSHILL PLACE FROM THE GARDENS]
"'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 now I am nine I come by myself 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 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."
As the queer small boy in the _Uncommercial Traveller_ said, Gadshill
Place is at the very top of Falstaff's hill. It stands on the south side
of the Dover road;--on the north side, but a little lower down, is "a
delightfully oldfashioned inn of the old coaching days", the "Sir John
Falstaff";--surrounded by a high wall and screened by a row of limes.
The front view, with its wooden and pillared porch, its bays, its dormer
windows let into the roof, and its surmounting bell turret and vane,
bears much the same appearance as it did to the queer small boy. But
amongst the many additions and alterations which Dickens was constantly
making, the drawing-room had been enlarged from a smaller existing one,
and the conservatory into which it opens was, as he laughingly told his
younger daughter, "positively the last improvement at Gadshill"--a jest
to prove sadly prophetic, for it was uttered on the Sunday before his
death. The little library, too, on the opposite side of the porch from
the drawing-room and conservatory, was a converted bedroom. Its aspect
is familiar to most Dickens-lovers from Sir Luke Fildes's famous picture
of "The Empty Chair". In summer, however, Dickens used to do his work
not in the library but in a Swiss chalet, presented to him by Fechter,
the great actor, which stood in a shrubbery lying on the other side of
the highroad, and entered by a subway that Dickens had excavated for the
purpose. The chalet now must be sought in the terrace garden of Cobham
Hall. When Dickens sat at his desk in a room of the chalet, "up among
the branches of the trees", the five mirrors which he had put in
reflected "the leaves quivering at the windows, and the great fields of
waving corn, and the sail-dotted river". The birds and butterflies flew
in and out, the green branches shot in at the open windows, and the
lights and shadows of the clouds and the scent of flowers and of
everything growing for miles had the same free access. No imaginative
artist, whether in words or colour, could have desired a more inspiring
environment. The back of the house, looking southward, descends by one
flight of steps upon a lawn, where one of the balustrades of the old
Rochester Bridge had, when this was demolished, been fitted up as a
sundial. The lawn, in turn, communicates with flower and vegetable
gardens by another flight of steps. Beyond is "the much-coveted meadow"
which Dickens obtained, partly by exchange, from the trustees--not of
Watts's Charity, as Forster has stated, but of Sir Joseph Williamson's
Free School at Rochester. It was in this field that the villagers from
neighbouring Higham played cricket matches, and that, just before
Dickens went to America for the last time, he held those quaint
footraces for all and sundry, described in one of his letters to
Forster. Though the landlord of the Falstaff, from over the way, was
allowed to erect a drinking booth, and all the prizes were given in
money; though, too, the road from Chatham to Gadshill was like a fair
all day, and the crowd consisted mainly of rough labouring men, of
soldiers, sailors, and navvies, there was no disorder, not a flag, rope,
or stake displaced, and no drunkenness whatever. As striking a tribute,
if rightly considered, as ever was exacted by a strong and winning
personality! One of those oddities in which Dickens delighted was
elicited by a hurdle race for strangers. The man who came in second ran
120 yards and leaped over ten hurdles with a pipe in his mouth and
smoking it all the time. "If it hadn't been for your pipe," said the
Master of Gadshill Place, clapping him on the shoulder at the
winning-post, "you would have been first." "I beg your pardon, sir," he
answered, "but if it hadn't been for my pipe, I should have been
nowhere."
To the hospitable hearth of Gadshill Place were drawn, by the fame of
the "Inimitable Boz", a long succession of brilliant men and women,
mostly of the Anglo-Saxon race, whether English or American; and if not
in the throngs for which at Abbotsford open house was kept, yet with a
frequency which would have made literary work almost impossible for the
host without remarkable steadiness of purpose and regularity of habits.
For Longfellow and his daughters he "turned out", that they might see
all of the surrounding country which could be seen in a short stay, "a
couple of postilions in the old red jackets of the old red royal Dover
road, and it was like a holiday ride in England fifty years ago".
In his study in the late and early months, and his Swiss chalet through
the summer, Dickens would write such novels as _Great Expectations_, and
the unfinished _Mystery of Edwin Drood_, taking his local colour from
spots which lay within the compass of a reasonable walk; and others,
such as _A Tale of Two Cities_ and _Our Mutual Friend_, to which the
circumstances of time and place furnished little or nothing except their
influence on his mood. Some of the occasional papers which, in the
character of "The Uncommercial Traveller", he furnished to _All the
Year Round_, have as much of the _genius loci_ as any of his romances.
Even to-day the rushing swarm of motor cars has not yet driven from the
more secluded nooks of Kent all such idylls of open-air vagabondage as
this:--
"I have my eyes upon a piece of Kentish road, bordered on either
side by a wood, and having on one hand, between the road dust and
the trees, a skirting patch of grass. Wild flowers grow in
abundance on this spot, and it lies high and airy, with a distant
river stealing steadily away to the ocean, like a man's life. To
gain the milestone here, which the moss, primroses, violets,
bluebells and wild roses would soon render illegible but for
peering travellers pushing them aside with their sticks, you must
come up a steep hill, come which way you may. So, all the tramps
with carts or caravans--the gipsy tramp, the show tramp, the Cheap
Jack--find it impossible to resist the temptations of the place,
and all turn the horse loose when they come to it, and boil the
pot. Bless the place, I love the ashes of the vagabond fires that
have scorched its grass!"
The Kentish road that Dickens thus describes is certainly the Dover Road
at Gadshill, from which, of course, there is a steep declivity whether
the route is westward to Gravesend or eastwards to Strood and Rochester.
In Strood itself Dickens found little to interest him, though the view
of Rochester from Strood Hill is an arresting one, with the stately
mediaevalism of Castle and Cathedral emerging from a kind of haze in
which it is hard to distinguish what is smoke-wreath and what a mass of
crowding roofs. The Medway, which divides Strood from the almost
indistinguishably overlapping towns of Rochester, Chatham, and
Brompton, is crossed by an iron bridge, superseding the old stone
structure commemorated in _Pickwick_. Mr. Pickwick's notes on "the four
towns" do not require very much modification to apply to their present
state.
"The principal productions", he wrote, "appear to be soldiers,
sailors, Jews, chalk, shrimps, officers, and dockyard men. The
commodities chiefly exposed for sale in the public streets are
marine stores, hard-bake, apples, flat-fish, and oysters. The
streets present a lively and animated appearance, occasioned
chiefly by the conviviality of the military.... The consumption of
tobacco in these towns must be very great, and the smell which
pervades the streets must be exceedingly delicious to those who are
extremely fond of smoking. A superficial traveller might object to
the dirt, which is their leading characteristic, but to those who
view it as an indication of traffic and commercial prosperity, it
is truly gratifying."
[Illustration: ROCHESTER FROM STROOD]
This description is much less true of Rochester than of its three
neighbours, and does no justice to the aspects which Dickens himself
presented in the Market Town of _Great Expectations_, and the
Cloisterham of _Edwin Drood_. Amid the rather sordid encroachments of a
modern industrialism, Rochester still keeps something of the air of an
old-world country town, and in the precincts of its Cathedral there
still broods a cloistral peace. The dominating feature of the town, from
whatever side approached, is the massive ruin of the Norman Keep of
Bishop Gundulf, the architect also of London's White Tower. Though
the blue sky is its only roof, and on the rugged staircase the dark
apertures in the walls, where rafters and floors were once, show like
gaping sockets from which the ravens and daws have picked out the eyes,
it seems to stand with all the immovable strength of some solid rock on
which the waves of rebellion or invasion would have dashed and broken.
It is easy to believe the saying of Lambarde, in his _Perambulation of
Kent_, that "from time to time it had a part in almost every tragedie".
But the grimness of its grey walls is relieved by a green mantle of
clinging ivy, and though it can no longer be said of the Castle that it
is "bathed, though in ruins, with a flush of flowers", the beautiful
single pink grows wild on its ramparts.
From the Castle to the "Bull" in the High Street is a transition which
seems almost an anachronism. It is but to follow in the traces of the
Pickwick Club. The covered gateway, the staircase almost wide enough for
a coach and four, the ballroom on the first floor landing, with
card-room adjoining, and the bedroom which Mr. Winkle occupied inside
Mr. Tupman's--all are there, just as when the club entertained Alfred
Jingle to a dinner of soles, a broiled fowl and mushrooms, and Mr.
Tupman took him to the ball in Mr. Winkle's coat, borrowed without
leave, and Dr. Slammer of the 97th sent his challenge next morning to
the owner of the coat. The Guildhall, with its gilt ship for a vane, and
its old brick front, supported by Doric stone columns, is not so
memorable because Hogarth played hop-scotch in the colonnade during his
_Five Days' Peregrination by Land and Water_, as for the day when
Pumblechook bundled Pip off to be bound apprentice to Jo before the
Justices in the Hall, "a queer place, with higher pews in it than a
church ... and with some shining black portraits on the walls". This was
the Town Hall, too, which Dickens has told us that he had set up in his
childish mind "as the model on which the genie of the lamp built the
palace for Aladdin", only to return and recognize with saddened,
grown-up eyes--exaggerating the depreciation a little, for the sake of
the contrast--"a mere mean little heap of bricks, like a chapel gone
demented". Close by the Guildhall is the Town Clock, "supposed to be the
finest clock in the world", which, alas! "turned out to be as moon-faced
and weak a clock as a man's eyes ever saw".
On the north side of the High Street, not many yards from the Bull, is a
Tudor two-storied, stone-built house, with latticed windows and gables.
This is the Charity founded by the will of Richard Watts in 1579, to
give lodging and entertainment for one night, and fourpence each, to
"six poor travellers, not being rogues or proctors". It furnished the
theme to the Christmas cycle of stories, _The Seven Poor Travellers_,
the narrator, who treats the waifs and strays harboured one Christmas
eve at the Charity to roast turkey, plum pudding, and "wassail",
bringing up the number to seven, "being", as he says, "a traveller
myself, though an idle one, and being withal as poor as I hope to be".
Farther up the High Street towards Chatham, about a quarter of a mile
from Rochester Bridge, are two sixteenth-century houses, with fronts of
carved oak and gables, facing each other across the street. One has
figured in both _Great Expectations_ and _Edwin Drood_, for it is the
house of Mr. Pumblechook, the pompous and egregious corn and seedsman,
and of Mr. Sapsea, the auctioneer, still more pompous and egregious. The
other--Eastgate House, now converted into a museum--is the "Nun's
House", where Miss Twinkleton kept school, and had Rosa Bud and Helen
Landless for pupils.
From the hum and traffic of the cheerfully frequented High Street to the
calm and hush of the Cathedral precincts entrance is given by Chertsey's
or College Yard Gate, which abuts on the High Street about a hundred
yards north of the Cathedral. It was this Gate which Sir Luke Fildes
sketched, as he has recorded in an interesting letter published in _A
Week's Tramp in Dickens-Land_, by W. R. Hughes, for the background of
his drawing of "Durdles Cautioning Sapsea". There are, however, two
other gatehouses, the "Prior's", a tower over an archway, containing a
single room approached by a "postern stair", and "Deanery Gate", a
quaint old house adjoining the Cathedral which has ten rooms, some of
them beautifully panelled. Its drawing-room on the upper floor bears a
strong resemblance to the room--as depicted by Sir Luke Fildes--in which
Jasper entertained his nephew and Neville Landless, but the artist
believes that he never saw the interior. It is not unlikely that Dickens
took some details from each of the gatehouses to make a composite
picture of "Mr. Jasper's own gatehouse", which seemed so to stem the
tide of life, that while the murmur of the tide was heard beyond, not a
wave would pass the archway.
Rochester Cathedral, which overshadows, though in a less insistent and
tragic manner, the whole human interest of _Edwin Drood_ almost as much
as Notre Dame overshadows the human interest in Victor Hugo's romance,
preserves some remains of the original Saxon and Norman churches on the
site of which it was erected. Its Early English and Decorated Gothic
came off lightly from three restorations, but the tower is
nineteenth-century vandalism. The Norman west front enshrines in the
riches of its sculptured portal, with its five receding arches, figures
of the Saviour and his twelve apostles, and on two shafts are carved
likenesses of Henry I and his Queen. Freeman has pronounced it to be far
the finest example of Norman architecture of its kind. The Chapter House
door, a magnificent example of Decorated Gothic, is adorned with
effigies representing the Christian and Jewish Churches, which are
surrounded by Holy Fathers and Angels who pray for the soul,
emblematically represented as a small nude form above them. But it is
about the stone-vaulted crypt, where even by daylight "the heavy pillars
which support the roof engender masses of black shade", with "lanes of
light" between, and about the winding staircase and belfry of the great
tower that the spells of the Dickens magic especially cling, and Jasper
and Durdles revisit these haunts by the glimpses of the moon as
persistently as Quasimodo and the sinister Priest beset with their
ghostly presences the belfry of the great Paris minster.
Of the historic imagination Dickens had little or none. He could not
evoke, and never had the faintest desire to evoke, a Past that was
divided from the Present by an unbridgeable chasm. Thus Rochester
Castle, though he seldom failed to bring his guests to view it,
affected him only with a remote sense of antiquity such as he would have
experienced, no more and no less, amongst the Pyramids. But he was
keenly sensitive to the influences of a Past which still survived and,
by the continuity of a corporate life, made an integral part in the
Present. The Cathedral life, in which by virtue of their office canons
and dean were living relics of antiquity, and as much the contemporaries
as the successors of the ecclesiastics who lay crumbling in the crypt,
stirred this sense in him as it had been stirred by the ancient Inns of
London. Almost the last words that he wrote were a tribute to the beauty
of the venerable fane in which, beneath the monument of the founder of
that quaint Charity rendered so famous by his story of _The Seven Poor
Travellers_, a simple brass records his birth, death, and burial-place,
"To connect his memory with the scenes in which his earliest and his
latest years were passed, and with the associations of Rochester
Cathedral and its neighbourhood which extended over all his life".
[Illustration: RESTORATION HOUSE, ROCHESTER]
In the old cemetery of St. Nicholas' Church, on the north side of the
Cathedral, it was Dickens's desire to be buried, and his family would
have carried out his wishes had it not been that the burial-ground had
been closed for years and no further interments were allowed. On the
south side of the Cathedral is the delightfully oldfashioned terrace
known as Minor Canon Row--Dickens's name for it is Minor Canon
Corner--where the Reverend Septimus Crisparkle kept house with the
"china shepherdess" mother. The "Monks' Vineyard" of _Edwin Drood_
exists as "The Vines". Here under a group of elms called "The Seven
Sisters" Edwin Drood and Rosa sat when they decided to break their
engagement, and opposite "The Seven Sisters" is the "Satis House" of
_Great Expectations_, where the lonely and embittered Miss Havisham
taught Estella the cruel lessons of a ruined life. It is really
Restoration House--Satis House is on the site of the mansion of Master
Richard Watts, to whose apologies for no better entertainment of his
Sovereign, Queen Elizabeth answered "Satis"--and it takes its name from
having received the restored Merry Monarch under its roof on his way to
London and the throne. Pepys, who was terrified by the steepness of the
castle cliff and had no time to stay to service at the Cathedral, when
he had been inspecting the defences at Chatham, found something more to
his mind in a stroll by Restoration House, and into the Cherry Garden,
where he met a silly shopkeeper with a pretty wife, "and did kiss her".
Dickens would often follow this route of Pepys, but in the reverse
direction, that is, through the Vines to Chatham and its lines of
fortification, where Mr. Pickwick, Mr. Winkle, and Mr. Snodgrass became
so hopelessly entangled in the sham fight which they had gone over from
Rochester to see. At No. 11 Ordnance Terrace the little Charles Dickens
lived from 1817 to 1821, and at No. 18 St. Mary's Place from 1821 to
1823, the financial troubles, which eventually drove the family into the
Marshalsea debtors' prison, and Charles himself into the sordid drudgery
of the blacking-shop by Hungerford Stairs, having already enforced a
migration to a cheaper and meaner house. In Clover Street (then Clover
Lane) the little Dickens went to a school kept by a Mr. William Giles,
who years afterwards sent to him, when he was halfway through with
_Pickwick_, a silver snuff-box inscribed to the "Inimitable Boz". To the
Mitre Inn, in the Chatham High Street, where Nelson had many times put
up, Dickens was often brought by his father to recite or sing, standing
on a table, for the amusement of parties of friends. He speaks of it in
the "Holly Tree Inn" as
"The inn where friends used to put up, and where we used to go to
see parents, and to have salmon and fowls, and be tipped. It had an
ecclesiastical sign--the 'mitre'--and a bar that seemed to be the
next best thing to a bishopric, it was so snug. I loved the
landlord's youngest daughter to distraction--but let that pass. It
was in this inn that I was cried over by my little rosy sister,
because I had acquired a black eye in a fight."
When the little Charles Dickens was taken away to London inside the
stage-coach Commodore--his kind master on the night before having come
flitting in among the packing-cases to give him Goldsmith's _Bee_ as a
keepsake--he was leaving behind for ever, in the playing-field near
Clover Lane and the grounds of Rochester Castle and the green drives of
Cobham Park, the untroubled dreams of happy childhood. And though he
could not know this, yet, as he sat amongst the damp straw piled up
round him in the inside of the coach, he "consumed his sandwiches in
solitude and dreariness" and thought life sloppier than he had expected
to find it. And in _David Copperfield_ he has thrown back into those
earlier golden days the shadow of his London privations by bringing the
little Copperfield, footsore and tired, toiling towards dusk into
Chatham, "which, in that night's aspect is a mere dream of chalk and
drawbridges and mastless ships in a muddy river, roofed like Noah's
arks". No doubt the terrible old Jew in the marine-stores shop, who
rated and frightened David with his "Oh, my eyes and limbs, what do you
want? Oh, my lungs and liver, what do you want? Oh--goroo,
goroo!"--until the helpless little fellow was obliged to close with an
offer of a few pence instead of half a crown for his waistcoat, is the
portrait of some actual Jew dealer whom, in one of the back streets of
Chatham, the keen eyes of the precocious child, seeming to look at
nothing, had curiously watched hovering like a hideous spider on the
pounce behind his grime-encrusted window.
It was old associations that led Dickens so often in his walks from
Gadshill Place to Chatham. But the neighbourhood which gave him most
pleasure, combining as it did with similar associations an exquisite
beauty, was, Forster tells us, the sylvan scenery of Cobham Park. The
green woods and green shades of Cobham would recur to his memory even in
far-off Lausanne, and the last walk that he ever enjoyed--on the day
before his fatal seizure--was through these woods, the charm of which
cannot be better defined than in his own description in _Pickwick_:
"A delightful walk it was; for it was a pleasant afternoon in June,
and their way lay through a deep and shady wood, cooled by the
light wind which gently rustled the thick foliage, and enlivened by
the songs of the birds that perched upon the boughs. The ivy and
the moss crept in thick clusters over the old trees, and the soft
green turf overspread the ground like a silken mat. They emerged
upon an open park, with an ancient hall, displaying the quaint and
picturesque architecture of Elizabeth's time. Long vistas of
stately oaks and elm trees appeared on every side; large herds of
deer were cropping the fresh grass; and occasionally a startled
hare scoured along the ground with the speed of the shadows thrown
by the light clouds, which swept across a sunny landscape like a
passing breath of summer."
The mission on which Mr. Pickwick and his two disciples were engaged
was, it will be remembered, to convert Mr. Tupman from his resolution
to forsake the world in a fit of misanthropy, induced by the
faithlessness of Rachel Wardle.
"'If this,' said Mr. Pickwick, looking about him--'If this were the
place to which all who are troubled with our friend's complaint
came, I fancy their old attachment to this world would very soon
return.'"
Mr. Pickwick was right, for when they arrived at the village, and
entered that "clean and commodious village alehouse", the "Leather
Bottle", they found Mr. Tupman set down at a table "well covered with a
roast fowl, bacon, ale, and et ceteras", and "looking as unlike a man
who had taken leave of the world as possible".
The "ancient hall" of Cobham consists of two Tudor wings, with a central
block designed by Inigo Jones. It has a splendid collection of Old
Masters, and a music room which the Prince Regent pronounced to be the
finest room in England. In the terrace flower garden at the back of the
Hall, it may be mentioned again here, is the Swiss chalet from Gadshill
Place, which served Dickens for a study in the summer months. The
circuit of Cobham Park is about seven miles, and it is crossed by the
"Long Avenue", leading to Rochester, and the "Grand Avenue", which,
sloping down from the tenantless Mausoleum, opens into Cobham village.
The inn to which Mr. Tupman retired, in disgust with life, still
retains the title of the "Leather Bottle", but has mounted for its sign
a coloured portrait of Mr. Pickwick addressing the Club in
characteristic attitude. It was in Cobham village that Mr. Pickwick made
his notable discovery of the stone with the mysterious inscription--an
inscription which the envious Blotton maintained was nothing more than
BIL STUMPS HIS MARK. Local tradition suggests that Dickens intended the
episode for a skit upon archaeological theories about the dolmens known
as Kit's Coty House, and that a Strood antiquary keenly resented the
satire. However that may be, Kit's Coty House is not at Cobham, but some
miles away, near Aylesford. In Cobham church there is perhaps the finest
and most complete series of monumental brasses in this country, most of
them commemorating the Lords of Cobham.
[Illustration: COBHAM PARK]
Out of the Cobham woods it is not a long walk to the little village of
Shorne, where Dickens was fond of sitting on a hot summer afternoon in
its pretty, shaded churchyard. This is believed to be the spot which he
has described in _Pickwick_ as "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".
A picturesque lane leads into the road from Rochester to Gravesend, on
the outskirts of the village of Chalk. Here, in a corner house on the
south side of the road, Dickens spent his honeymoon, and many of the
earlier chapters of _Pickwick_ were written. In February of the
following year--1837--Dickens and his wife returned to the same
lodgings, shortly after the birth of his eldest son. Chalk church is
about a mile from the village. There was formerly above the porch the
figure of an old priest in a stooping attitude, holding an upturned jug.
Dickens took a strange interest in this quaint carving, and it is said
that, whenever he passed it, he took off his hat or gave it a nod, as to
an old acquaintance.
Very different to the soft and genial landscapes about Cobham is the
grey and desolate aspect of another haunt which Dickens loved to
frequent. This was the "meshes" around Cooling. In winter, when it was
possible to make a short cut across the stubble fields, he would visit
Cooling churchyard not less seldom than in summer he would go to sit in
the churchyard of Shorne. First, however, he would have to pass through
the village of Higham, where, too, was his nearest railway station,
though he often preferred to walk over and entrain at Gravesend or
Greenhithe. But the pleasant tinkle of harness bells was a familiar
sound in the night to the Higham villagers, as the carriage was sent
down from Gadshill Place to meet the master or his friends returning
from London by the ten o'clock train. Dickens took a kindly and active
interest in the affairs of the village, and the last cheque which he
ever drew was for his subscription to the Higham Cricket Club.
The flat levels that stretch away from beyond Higham towards the estuary
of the Thames are more akin to the characteristics of Essex than of
Kent. The hop gardens are dwarfed and stunted, and presently hops, corn,
and pasture give place to fields of turnips, which show up like masses
of jade on the chocolate-coloured soil. The bleak churchyard of Cooling,
overgrown with nettles, lies amongst these desolate reaches, which
resound at evening with the shrill, unearthly notes of sea-gulls,
plovers, and herons. Beyond the churchyard are the marshes, "a dark,
flat wilderness", as Dickens has described it in _Great Expectations_,
"intersected with dykes and mounds and gates, with scattered cattle
feeding on it"; still farther away is the "low, leaden line" of the
river, and the "distant, savage lair", from which the wind comes
rushing, is the sea. It was in this churchyard that the conception of
the story sprang into life, and there are actually not five but ten
little stone lozenges in one row, with three more at the back of them,
which suggested to Dickens the five little prematurely cut off brothers
of Pip. The grey ruins of Cooling Castle attracted him no less than the
grey and weather-beaten churchyard. Besides some crumbling and broken
walls there is a gate tower, with an inscription on fourteen copper
plates, the writing in black, the ground of white enamel, with a seal
and silk cords in their proper colours, which made known to all and
sundry the purpose for which Lord Cobham--whose granddaughter married,
for one of her five husbands, Sir John Oldcastle, the Lollard
martyr--had erected this castle.
"Knoweth that beth and schul be
That i am mad in help of the cuntre
In knowyng of whych thyng
This is chartre and witnessyng."
No forge stands now on the site of Joe Gargery's smithy, where, as the
hammer rang on the anvil to the refrain--
"Beat it out, beat it out--Old Clem!
With a clink for the stout--Old Clem!
Blow the fire, blow the fire--Old Clem!
Roaring drier, soaring higher--Old Clem!"--
Pip would see visions of Estella's face in the glowing fire or at the
wooden window of the forge, looking in from the darkness of the night,
and flitting away. But though the smithy has gone, the "Three Jolly
Bargemen", where Joe would smoke his pipe by the kitchen fire on a
Saturday night, still survives as the "Three Horseshoes"--the inn to
which the secret-looking man who stirred his rum and water with a file,
brought Magwitch's two one-pound notes for Pip, and the redoubtable
Jaggers, the autocrat of the Old Bailey, with his burly form, great
head, and huge, cross-examining forefinger announced to Pip his Great
Expectations. Down the river in the direction of yonder "distant savage
lair", from which the wind comes rushing, lie those long reaches,
between Kent and Essex, "where the river is broad and solitary, where
the waterside inhabitants are very few, and where lone public-houses are
scattered here and there"--the lonely riverside on which Pip and Herbert
sought a hiding-place for Magwitch until the steamer for Hamburg or the
steamer for Rotterdam could be boarded, as she dropped down the tide
from the Port of London. Whether on the Kent or the Essex side, the cast
of the scenery corresponds with equal closeness to Dickens's
description. Slimy stakes stick out of the mud, and slimy stones stick
out of the mud, and red landmarks and tide-marks stick out of the mud,
and old roofless buildings slip into the mud, and all about is
stagnation and mud! The desolate flat marshes look still more weird by
reason of the tall pollards that lean over them like spectres. Far away
are the rising grounds, between which and the marshes there appears no
sign of life except here and there in the foreground a melancholy gull.
The course which the boat bearing the hunted man took from Mill Pond
stairs through the crowded shipping of the Pool, past the floating
Custom House at Gravesend, and onwards, skirting the little creeks and
mudbanks where the Thames widens to the sea--when every sound of the
tide flapping heavily at irregular intervals against the shore, and
every ripple, were fraught with the terror of pursuit--exemplifies in
the most striking way the rapidity and instinctive ease of Dickens's
observation. Forster says:--
"To make himself sure of the actual course of a boat in such
circumstances, and what possible incidents the adventure might
have, Dickens hired a steamer for the day from Blackwall to
Southend. Eight or nine friends, and three or four members of his
family, were on board, and he seemed to have no care, the whole of
that summer day (22nd of May, 1861), except to enjoy their
enjoyment and entertain them with his own in shape of a thousand
whims and fancies; but his sleepless observation was at work all
the time, and nothing had escaped his keen vision on either side of
the river."
Scattered amongst the deserted reaches along the riverside may be seen
such lonely farmhouses or taverns as suggest the aspect of the alehouse,
"not unknown to smuggling adventurers"--for the "owling", that is, the
smuggling industry had flourished for centuries in these parts--to which
the fugitives were led by a twinkling light in the window up a little
cobbled causeway, and where Dickens placed that amphibious creature, "as
slimy and smeary as if he had been low-water mark too", who exhibited a
bloated pair of shoes "as interesting relics that he had taken from the
feet of a drowned seaman washed ashore". This type of the gruesome
long-shoremen whom Dickens had encountered in his waterside rambles, as
he collected the materials for _Great Expectations_, was afterwards
elaborated in the Rogue Riderhood of _Our Mutual Friend_.
"Swamp, mist, and mudbank"--if that is the dominant impression made by
the view of the Thames off the Cooling marshes, it is not the only and
the invariable impression. Even the bleak churchyard, at the foot of the
cold, grey tower, is sometimes strewn by the light and flying gust "with
beautiful shadows of clouds and trees". And from the Old Battery, where
Joe would smoke his pipe with a far more sagacious air than anywhere
else, as Pip strove to initiate him into the mysteries of reading and
writing by the aid of a broken slate and a short piece of slate pencil,
it is "pleasant and quiet" to watch the vessels standing out to sea with
their white sails spread, and the light struck aslant, afar off, upon a
cloud or sail or green hillside or silvery water line.
[Illustration: COOLING CHURCH]
To the west of Cooling Castle, beyond wide fields--turnips or
cabbages--of the colour of dark-green jade, the Church of Cliffe, with
its lichgate, standing out boldly from its ridge of chalk, overlooks a
straggling village of old and weather-boarded houses. It would be
into the road from Cliffe to Rochester, at a point about half a mile
from Cooling, that Uncle Pumblechook's chaise-cart would debouch when he
took Mrs. Joe to Rochester market "to assist him in buying such
household stuffs and goods as required a woman's judgment".
Between the scenery about Cooling and Cliffe and the scenery of the
valley of the Medway from Rochester to Maidstone there is all the
difference between a November fog and a brilliant summer's day. At the
foot of Rochester Castle, from which the long vista of the valley, lying
between two chalk ranges of hills that form the watershed of the Medway,
stretches far away to a distant horizon, the Esplanade extends along the
east side of the river, and there it was that Edwin Drood and Rosa met
for the last time and to speak of their separate plans. For a few miles
along the valley the natural beauty of the scene is spoilt by the cement
works of Borstal, Cuxton, and Wouldham, and the brickworks of Burham.
The piles of clay and chalk, the beehive furnaces, and the chimneys
vomiting smoke and flame, almost reproduce the characteristics of the
Black Country or of a northern manufacturing district. But, when Burham
has been left behind, the bright emerald pastures, the tender green of
springing corn or the gold of waving harvests, and the orchards, a
dazzling sight in May with the snowy clouds of pear and plum and cherry
blooms, and the delicate pink-and-white of the apple blossom, more than
justify the appellation claimed for Kent of the garden of England.
Opposite to Cuxton, on the western bank, the village of Snodland stands
at the junction of Snodland Brook with the Medway. It has been
conjectured that Snodland Weir, a mile or so up the brook, was in
Dickens's mind when he described Mr. Crisparkle's pilgrimages to
Cloisterham Weir in the cold rimy mornings, and his discovery, first of
Edwin Drood's watch in a corner of the weir, and then, after diving
again and again, of his shirt-pin "sticking in some mud and ooze" at the
bottom. The nearest weir on the Medway is at Allington, seven or eight
miles above Rochester, and Cloisterham Weir was but "full two miles"
away.
Before Allington can be reached, in ascending the Medway, the river is
spanned by an ancient stone bridge, of pointed arches and triangular
buttresses, at Aylesford. The ancient Norman church, and the red roofs
and crowding gables of the picturesque and historic village, are set in
a circle of elm trees, with a background of rising chalk downs beyond.
Those who have investigated with perhaps "an excess"--as Wordsworth
would say--"of scrupulosity" all the details of Pickwickian topography
are inclined to believe that the wooden bridge, upon which the chaise
hired by the Club to make the journey from Rochester to Dingley Dell
came hopelessly to grief, was Aylesford Bridge, transmuted for the nonce
from Kentish ragstone into timber. However that may be, there is a
matter of genuine history which has signalized in no common way this
old-world village. At this ford, the lowest on the Medway, the Jutes
under Hengist and Horsa routed the British in a battle which decided the
predominating strain of race in future Men of Kent and Kentish Men:
natives of Kent, that is, according as they dwell on the right or left
bank of the Medway. A farmhouse with the name of Horsted, at the point
farther back where the Rochester to Maidstone road is joined by the road
from Chatham, stands, it is believed, on the grave of Horsa. And about a
mile and a half north of Aylesford, a grey old cairn, set on a green
sward in the midst of a cornfield, is also closely associated with the
first great victory won by English people on the soil which they were
destined to make their own and distinguish with their name. In his
_Short History of the English People_ J. R. Green says of this
cromlech:--
"It was from a steep knoll on which the grey weather-beaten stones
of this monument are reared that the view of their first
battlefield would break on the English warriors; and a lane which
still leads down from it through peaceful homesteads, would guide
them across the ford which has left its name in the little village
of Aylesford. The Chronicle of the conquering people tells nothing
of the rush that may have carried the ford, or of the fight that
went straggling up through the village. It only tells that Horsa
fell in the moment of victory, and the flint heap of Horsted, which
has long preserved his name, and was held in after-time to mark his
grave, is thus the earliest of those monuments of English valour of
which Westminster is the last and noblest shrine. The victory of
Aylesford did more than give East Kent to the English; it struck
the keynote of the whole English conquest of Britain."
This cromlech, known as Kit's Coty House, consists of three upright
dolmens of sandstone, with a fourth, much larger, crossing them above
horizontally. In a neighbouring field there is another group of stones,
scattered in disarray amongst the brushwood, to which, as also to
Stonehenge and other so-called "Druidical" remains, there attaches the
local superstition that they cannot be counted. It would be pleasanter
to believe that the current story, to which reference has already been
made, that Dickens was poking fun at the antiquarian's reverence for
this hoary relic in his narrative of Mr. Pickwick's "BIL STUMPS"
inscription, is altogether erroneous. Certainly it is open to anyone who
wishes to be incredulous, for there is as much dissimilarity as possible
between the massive cromlech near Aylesford and the small slab that Mr.
Pickwick discovered at Cobham.
The most salient feature in the Medway valley between Rochester and
Maidstone is the height of Blue Bell, or Upper Bell. Here Dickens, who,
as he said, had come to realize that the Rochester to Maidstone road
passed through some of the most beautiful scenery in England, would
often picnic with his visitors. Undulating slopes of pasture and
cornfields, hop gardens, orchards, and woodlands, with many a deep-sunk
lane embowered in overarching trees that rise from hedgerow clusters of
dog-rose, ivy, and honeysuckle, and with snugly nestling homesteads and
quaintly-cowled "oast-houses" sprinkled here and there, sweep across the
valley, through which the river winds in sinuous curves, onwards to a
long range of hills upon the skyline.
Somewhere in this district Dickens came across the types of the
oldfashioned and jovially comfortable home of the English yeoman,
represented by his Manor Farm, Dingley Dell, and of the little country
town, represented by the Muggleton of _Pickwick_, in which local
enthusiasm for cricket was ardent, if the standard of skill was somewhat
low. The most plausible identification of the home of Mr. Wardle is with
Cobtree Hall, which divides the parishes of Boxley and Allington, and it
is probable that the original of Muggleton was Town Malling, which is
also known as West Malling.
In the Jubilee Edition of _Pickwick_ Mr. Charles Dickens the Younger
introduced a woodcut of High Street, Town Malling, with a note to the
following effect:--
"Muggleton, perhaps, is only to be taken as a fancy sketch of a
small country town; but it is generally supposed, and probably with
sufficient accuracy, that, if it is in any degree a portrait of any
Kentish town, Town Malling, a great place for cricket in Mr.
Pickwick's time, sat for it."
Town Malling does not correspond with the description of Muggleton in
its distance from Rochester. It is only seven and a half, instead of
fifteen miles, from Rochester. And it is not a corporate town. But: