well that Muggleton is a corporate town, with a mayor, burgess and
freemen, and anybody who has consulted the addresses of the mayor
to the freemen, or the freemen to the mayor, or both to the
corporation, or all three to Parliament, will learn from thence
what they ought to have known before, that Muggleton is an ancient
and loyal borough, mingling a zealous advocacy of Christian
principles with a devoted attachment to commercial rights; in
demonstration whereof, the mayor, corporation, and other
inhabitants have presented, at divers times, no fewer than one
thousand four hundred and twenty petitions against the continuance
of negro slavery abroad, and an equal number against any
interference with the factory system at home; sixty-eight in favour
of the sale of livings in the Church, and eighty-six for abolishing
Sunday trading in the street."
[Illustration: AYLESFORD]
If Town Malling has not had so distinguished a political history as that
which Dickens assigned to Muggleton, it has a pretty cricket ground,
not far removed from the High Street, and the reputation of having in
past years distinguished itself in the local cricket of this district of
Kent. It is not difficult to believe, then, that Dumkins and Podder here
made their gallant stand for All Muggleton against the Dingley Dellers,
and that at the Swan--otherwise the Blue Lion--the Pickwick fellowship
shared the conviviality of the rival teams, until Mr. Snodgrass's notes
of the evening's transactions faded away into a blur in which there was
an indistinct reference to "broiled bones" and "cold without". The
stately ruins of a Benedictine Abbey, founded by Bishop Gundulf, give to
the town an attraction of a severer kind.
From Town Malling to Cobtree Hall, supposing the double identification
to be correct, should be a walk of not above two miles "through shady
lanes and sequestered footpaths", the delightful scenery of which made
Mr. Pickwick feel regret to arrive in the main street of "Muggleton".
The distance, however, is in fact something more than two miles as the
crow flies. Cobtree Hall is a green-muffled Elizabethan mansion, of red
brick, faced with stone, and looks out over an undulating country of
orchards and hop fields. It has been altered and enlarged since the days
of _Pickwick_, but the kitchen is just such another large, oldfashioned
kitchen as befits the Christmas games and wassail that had been kept up
at Manor Farm, Dingley Dell, "by old Wardle's forefathers from time
immemorial". The dining-room, though modernized, has a massive marble
mantlepiece not unsuited to that "capacious chimney up which you could
have driven one of the new patent cabs, wheels and all", and in which a
blazing fire used to roar every evening, not only when its warmth was
grateful, but for a symbol, as it were, of old Wardle's attachment to
his fireside. This was the kind of antiquity which made the most direct
appeal to Dickens's sentiment and imagination--not a remote and historic
antiquity, but the furthest extent of a living link between the Present
and the Past. In many an old house of Kentish yeoman or squire Dickens
would have seen some such long, dark-panelled room as the best
sitting-room at Manor Farm, with four-branched, massive silver
candlesticks in all sorts of recesses and on all kinds of brackets; with
samplers and worsted landscapes of ancient date on the walls; with a
very old lady in lofty cap and faded silk gown in the chimney corner,
where she had sat on her little stool as a girl more than half a century
before, and with a hearty, rubicund host presiding over a mighty bowl of
wassail, something smaller than an ordinary washhouse copper, in which
the hot apples would "hiss and bubble with a rich look and a jolly sound
that were perfectly irresistible". Or when the carpet was up, the
candles burning brightly, and family, guests, and servants were all
ranged in eager lines, longing for the signal to start an oldfashioned
country dance as, from a shady bower of holly and evergreens at the
upper end of the room, the two best fiddles and only harp of the nearest
market town prepared to strike up, it is no wonder that such a lover of
unspoilt, natural manners as Boz declared, "If any of the old English
yeomen had turned into fairies when they died, it was just the place in
which they would have held their revels."
A triangular piece of ground, with a sprinkling of elms about it, is all
that is left of the rookery in which Mr. Tupman met with an accident
from the unskilful marksmanship of Winkle. At the back of the house is
the pond where Mr. Winkle's reputation as a sportsman led him into
another catastrophe, and his skating exposed itself as of anything but a
graceful and "swan-like" style; where, too, Mr. Pickwick revived the
sliding propensities of his boyhood with infinite zest until the ice
gave way with a "sharp, smart crack", and Mr. Pickwick's hat, gloves,
and handkerchief, floating on the surface, were all of Mr. Pickwick that
anyone could see.
Cobtree Hall, it has been mentioned, divides the parishes of Boxley and
Allington, the initials of which are carved on a beam in the kitchen
that suggests Phiz's plate of "Christmas Eve at Mr. Wardle's". In
Aylesford the tomb of the prototype, according to local tradition, of
"Mr. Wardle" bears the inscription, "Also to the memory of Mr. W. Spong,
late of Cobtree, in the Parish of Boxley, who died November 15th, 1839".
Boxley village is near the ancient Pilgrims' Road to Canterbury, and
here Alfred Tennyson stayed in 1842. Park House, nearer the Medway, was
the home of Edward Lushington, who married Tennyson's sister Cecilia,
and in its grounds Tennyson found the setting for the prologue to the
"Princess". The "happy faces" of "the multitude, a thousand heads", by
which the "sloping pasture" was "sown", under "broad ambrosial aisles of
lofty lime", had probably come from Maidstone on the annual jaunt of
that town's Mechanics' Institute. The village of Allington stands on the
other side of the Medway, though the boundaries of the parish extend
beyond the right bank of the river. Allington Castle, which the Medway
half-encircles with a sweeping bend, was one of the seven chief castles
of Kent. It was here that Sir Thomas Wyatt, the elder, diplomatist,
poet, and lover of Anne Boleyn, who with the gallant and ill-fated
Surrey "preluded", in a more exact sense than it could be said of
Chaucer, "those melodious bursts that fill the spacious times of great
Elizabeth", was able to proclaim, in an epistle to "Mine own John
Poins":
[Illustration: MAIDSTONE, ALL SAINTS' CHURCH AND THE PALACE]
"I am here in Kent and Christendome,
Among the Muses where I read and rhyme".
Hither there comes, in Tennyson's "Queen Mary", to Sir Thomas Wyatt, the
younger, his man William, with news of "three thousand men on Penenden
heath all calling after you, and your worship's name heard into
Maidstone market, and your worship the first man in Kent". And Wyatt
sets out to lead a rising which will end on Tower Hill, and setting out,
looks back and cries:
"Ah, grey old castle of Allington, green field
Beside the brimming Medway, it may chance
That I shall never look upon you more".
"The brimming Medway."--the epithet is as just as Tennyson's descriptive
epithet almost invariably proves to be. For at Allington the Medway,
which from Aylesford Bridge to Allington Lock has dwindled to a narrow
stream, swells out into a broad expanse, where many boats can easily
move abreast. If the Cloisterham Weir of _Edwin Drood_ were really the
nearest weir on the Medway to Rochester, then Allington Lock would be
the place. But it has been pointed out on an earlier page that the
distances do not tally in the novel and in actuality, and Dickens may
have had in mind the weir on Snodland Brook.
The country round Maidstone abounds in the "happy valleys" portrayed in
the epilogue to the "Princess", with "grey halls alone among their
massive groves", and "here and there a rustic tower Half lost in belts
of hop and breadths of wheat". The gyres and loops of the Medway, too,
afford through the screen of woodlands and orchards "the shimmering
glimpses of a stream". To the credulous enthusiasm of an early
eighteenth-century native of Strood, that Anne Pratt who did for English
wild flowers what White of Selborne did for English wild birds,
"travellers who have beheld in other lands the various scenes of
culture--the olive grounds of Spain or Syria, the vineyards of Italy,
the cotton plantations of India, or the rose fields of the East--have
generally agreed that not one of them all equals in beauty our English
hop gardens". To Dickens himself such a panegyric of the Kentish hop
gardens would have scarcely seemed exaggeration, but he would have
hastened to add the dismal antithesis of the missionary bishop--"Only
man is vile". He had barely settled-in at Gadshill Place when he
wrote:--
"Hop-picking is going on, and people sleep in the garden, and
breathe in at the keyhole of the house door. I have been amazed,
before this year, by the number of miserable base wretches, hardly
able to crawl, who go hop-picking. I find it is a superstition that
the dust of the newly picked hop, falling freshly into the throat,
is a cure for consumption. So the poor creatures drag themselves
along the roads, and sleep under wet hedges, and get cured soon and
finally."
The county town of Kent is situated not only on the Medway, but on the
pilgrim road to Canterbury, and of a monastic hospital for pilgrims and
other poor travellers there still survive some relics. Overlooking the
river stand some fine old houses, and the conspicuous grey square tower
of All Saints, built by the proud Archbishop Courtenay, the enemy of
Wicliffe, in the fourteenth century. Here is the tomb of Grocyn, that
"lord of splendid lore Orient from old Hellas' shore", who was appointed
master of the collegiate church in 1506. One of the sixteen palaces that
the Archbishops of Canterbury could boast in days gone by is preserved
as the local school of science and art, a dedication to public use which
commemorates the Jubilee of Queen Victoria in 1887. The Corporation
Museum is an even more interesting and beautiful structure. It was
Chillington Manor House, a seat of the Cobham family, and, though it has
had a new wing annexed to it, it is an exceptionally well preserved and
beautiful example of Elizabethan domestic architecture, with its
latticed windows, jutting gables, elaborately moulded timber, and
pillared chimneys. In the panel of an oak fireplace is a carved head of
Dickens, by a local carver named Hughes, who was employed at Gadshill
Place. To Maidstone Jail Dickens proposed to carry Sir Luke Fildes, in
order that he might make a picture of Jasper in the condemned cell, and
do something which would surpass Cruikshank's illustration to _Oliver
Twist_, in which Fagin's terror-stricken vigil in the murderer's cell is
portrayed.
At Maidstone the southern limit may be considered to have been reached
of the district of Kent which can be distinguished as "Dickens-land" in
the most intimate sense, as lying within the radius of the novelist's
habitual walks and drives from his residence at Gadshill. It does not
enter into the scope of this brief essay to describe topographically
other parts of Kent. But it will be excusable to glance very slightly at
Dickens's associations with Canterbury--though this is the subject of a
separate monograph in this series--Broadstairs, Deal, Dover, and the
famous London-to-Dover road through Rochester, Chatham, and Canterbury.
[Illustration: JASPER'S GATEWAY]
No one, perhaps, who has ever read _Little Dorrit_, whatever else in the
novel may slip the memory, fails to recall the oracular utterance of
Mr. F.'s aunt that "There's milestones on the Dover road". To the
opening of _A Tale of Two Cities_ the colour and atmosphere of the time
in which it is set, and of the drama which is to be developed, are given
at once by the alarm of the passengers of the Dover coach as they walk
up Shooter's Hill to ease the horses, when the furious galloping of a
horseman is heard behind them--the supposed highwayman proving to be,
however, Jerry Cruncher, messenger at Tellson's Bank by day, and at
night an "agricooltural character" of ghoulish avocations. David
Copperfield trudged the Dover road, footsore and hungry, when he left
Murdstone and Grinby's blacking warehouse to throw himself on the
compassion of Betsy Trotwood, "and got through twenty-three miles on the
straight road" to Rochester and Chatham on a certain Sunday. Afterwards,
when he had found a home and a protecting providence with his aunt, he
met with his "first fall in life" on the Canterbury coach, being asked
by the coachman to resign the box seat to a seedy gentleman, who
proclaimed that "'Orses and dogs is some men's fancy. They're wittles
and drink to me."
"I have always considered this as the first fall I had in life.
When I booked my place at the coach office, I had had 'Box Seat'
written against the entry, and had given the bookkeeper half a
crown. I was got up in a special greatcoat and shawl, expressly to
do honour to that distinguished eminence; had glorified myself upon
it a good deal; and had felt that I was a credit to the coach. And
here, in the very first stage, I was supplanted by a shabby man
with a squint, who had no other merit than smelling like a livery
stables, and being able to walk across me, more like a fly than a
human being, while the horses were at a canter."
Pip, in _Great Expectations_, makes many expeditions to and fro on the
Dover road, between Rochester and London, and on one of them, riding
outside, has the two convicts, bound for the hulks moored off the
marshes, as fellow passengers on the back seat.
At Canterbury it is not possible to establish the identity of Dr.
Strong's house--"a grave building in a courtyard, with a learned air
about it that seemed very well suited to the stray rooks and jackdaws
who came down from the Cathedral towers, and walked with a clerkly
bearing on the grass plot"--but Canon Benham has asserted his conviction
that Mr. Wickfield's house--where David made the acquaintance of Agnes
and of Uriah Heap--is at the corner of Broad Street and Lady Wotton's
Green, though it is another residence, by the West Gate, which is
represented on the picture postcards.
The Royal Fountain Hotel in St. Margaret's Street (formerly the Watling
Street) is recognized as the County Inn at which Mr. Dick used to sleep
when he went over to Canterbury to visit David Copperfield at Dr.
Strong's school. All the little bills which he contracted there, it will
be remembered, were referred to Miss Trotwood before they were paid; a
circumstance which caused David to think "that Mr. Dick was only
allowed to rattle his money, and not to spend it". A less pretentious
establishment, the "little inn" where Mr. Micawber put up on his first
visit to Canterbury, and "occupied a little room in it partitioned off
from the commercial, and strongly flavoured with tobacco smoke", is
probably the Sun Inn in Sun Street. Here Mr. and Mrs. Micawber
entertained David to "a beautiful little dinner"--
"Quite an elegant dish of fish; the kidney end of a loin of veal
roasted; fried sausage meat; a partridge and a pudding. There was
wine, and there was strong ale; and after dinner Mrs. Micawber made
us a bowl of hot punch with her own hands."
Local tradition at Broadstairs used to point to Fort House, on the cliff
by the Coastguard Station, as the holiday residence at which Dickens
wrote most of _Bleak House_. But though it has been rechristened from
the title of the novel, by an owner who demolished Dickens's summer
home, and built the existing pseudo-Gothic structure on its foundations,
no part of _Bleak House_ was written at Broadstairs. Dickens, however,
for many summers, visited the little town on the curving bay between
Margate and Ramsgate; the Albion Hotel, where he notes that "the
landlord has delicious hollands", No. 12 (now 31) High Street, and Lawn
House, near Fort House, receiving him at different times. At Broadstairs
he wrote a portion of _Pickwick_, of _Nicholas Nickleby_, and _The Old
Curiosity Shop_, and he also stayed there while engaged on the _American
Notes_, _Dombey and Son_, and _David Copperfield_. He forsook it at
last, because it had become too noisy, but he has left an agreeable
picture of it in _Our Watering Place_; but a passage in a letter to
Forster invests it with still gayer colours:
"It is the brightest day you ever saw. The sun is sparkling on the
water so that I can hardly bear to look at it. The tide is in, and
the fishing boats are dancing like mad. Upon the green-topped
cliffs the corn is cut and piled in shocks; and thousands of
butterflies are fluttering about, taking the bright little red
flags at the mastheads for flowers, and panting with delight
accordingly."
To the characters and the _mise en scene_ of his novels, however,
Broadstairs appears to have contributed nothing, except that the lady
whose aversion to donkeys furnished so strong an idiosyncrasy to Miss
Betsy Trotwood's character was a native, not of Dover, as in the novel,
but of Broadstairs.
Dover, besides giving a local habitation to David's aunt, is associated
with _The Tale of Two Cities_, since it was here that Mr. Lorry made the
startling revelation to Miss Manette that her father had been "Recalled
to Life". The vignette of eighteenth-century Dover is executed with true
Dickensian verve:
[Illustration: CHALK CHURCH]
"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 lamplighter."
It was to Dover that Dickens went when he was labouring with unusual
difficulty over _Bleak House_, and lamenting his inability to "grind
sparks out of this dull anvil". At Dover, on his Second Series of
Readings, he found "the audience with the greatest sense of humour", and
"they laughed with such really cordial enjoyment, when Squeers read the
boy's letters, that the contagion" was irresistible even to Dickens
himself.
Deal, as it was in 1853, is rapidly but vigorously sketched in chapter
xlv of _Bleak House_. Esther Summerson arrives from a night journey by
coach, eager and anxious to help, if possible, Richard Carstone, the
unhappy victim of the fatal chancery lawsuit:
"At last we came into the narrow streets of Deal; and very gloomy
they were, upon a raw misty morning. The long flat beach, with its
little irregular houses, wooden and brick, and its litter of
capstans, and great boats, and sheds, and bare upright poles with
tackle and blocks, and loose gravelly waste places overgrown with
grass and weeds, wore as dull an appearance as any place I ever
saw. The sea was heaving under a thick white fog; and nothing else
was moving but a few early rope-makers, who, with the yarn twisted
round their bodies, looked as if, tired of their present state of
existence, they were twisting themselves into cordage. But when we
got into a warm room in an excellent hotel, and sat down,
comfortably washed and dressed, to an early breakfast (for it was
too late to think of going to bed), Deal began to look more
cheerful.... Then the fog began to rise like a curtain; and numbers
of ships, that we had had no idea were near, appeared. I don't know
how many sail the waiter told us were then lying in the Downs. Some
of these vessels were of grand size: one was a large Indiaman, just
come home; and when the sun shone through the clouds, making
silvery pools in the dark sea, the way in which these ships
brightened, and shadowed, and changed, amid a bustle of boats
putting off from the shore to them, and from them to the shore, and
a general life and motion in themselves and everything around them,
was most beautiful."
That Dickens was essentially a "Kentish Man", in spite of the absence of
a birth qualification, in spite, too, of his long residence in London,
and of his peculiarly intimate knowledge of the byways and nooks and
corners of London, ample proof has by this time been given. To this,
however, may be added Forster's significant statement that, "Excepting
always the haunts and associations of his childhood, Dickens had no
particular sentiment of locality, and any special regard for houses he
had lived in was not a thing noticeable in him". This was not
surprising. The conditions of life in a modern capital under most
circumstances, but especially for anyone who has made many removes, tend
to produce the impression that a man's rooftree only represents the
transient shelter of a caravanserai, rather than an abiding habitation
on which memory has stamped indelible traces. Nor can even the most
extended associations of maturity take the place of the imperishable
links forged in the most susceptible years of fresh and sensitive
childhood. For Dickens this vital distinction was emphasized both by
natural idiosyncrasy and by the pressure of events which shaped his
destiny.
"If it should appear," he says, speaking of himself under the mask
of David Copperfield, "from anything I may set down in this
narrative, that I was a child of close observation, or that as a
man I have a strong memory of my childhood, I undoubtedly lay claim
to both of these characteristics."
The change from Chatham and Rochester to London was indissolubly
connected in his mind with a change in the family fortunes that deprived
him of the ordinary advantages and pleasures open to any average boy of
even the lower middle classes. It ushered in a period of misery and
degradation that he could never recall without acute suffering. The few
years of happiness which he enjoyed before he was carried away to London
in the stage coach "Commodore", at the age of nine, were divided from a
strenuous and successful manhood by so dark a gulf as to concentrate all
the powers of recollection upon them with a desperate kind of intensity.
It was the realization of a childish ambition conceived in that halcyon
era which drew him to Gadshill, and he returned again and again to the
contemplation of his earliest dreams and imaginings. He wrote from
Gadshill of his old nurse--the original, it can hardly be doubted, of
Peggotty:--
"I feel much as I used to do when I was a small child, a few miles
off [i.e. at Ordnance Terrace, Chatham], and somebody--_who_, I
wonder, and which way did _she_ go when she died?--hummed the
evening hymn, and I cried on the pillow--either with the remorseful
consciousness of having kicked somebody else, or because still
somebody else had hurt my feelings in the course of the day".