sense of there being a want of something tender, which would apply to
some universal household knowledge", he composed a little paper about "a
child's dream of a star". It was the story of a brother and sister,
constant child companions, who used to make friends of a star, watching
it together until they knew when and where it would rise, and always
bidding it good-night, so that when the sister dies, the lonely brother
still connects her with the star, which he then sees opening as a sea
of light, and its rays making a shining pathway from earth to heaven. It
was his sister Fanny, who had often wandered with him at night in St.
Mary's Churchyard, near their home at Chatham, looking up at the stars,
and her death, shortly before the paper was written, had revived the
fancy of childhood. In _The Uncommercial Traveller_ he revisits
"Dullborough", and the first discovery he makes is that the station has
swallowed up the playing field of the school to which he went during his
last two years at Chatham.
[Illustration: SHORNE CHURCH]
"It was gone. The two beautiful hawthorn trees, the hedge, the
turf, and all those buttercups and daisies, had given place to the
stoniest of jolting 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. The coach that had carried
me away, was melodiously called Timpson's Blue-eyed Maid [it was
really called the 'Commodore'], and belonged to Timpson, at the
coach office up street; the locomotive engine that had brought me
back was called severely No. 97, and belonged to S.E.R., and was
spitting ashes and hot water over the blighted ground.... Here, in
the haymaking time, had I been delivered from the dungeons of
Seringapatam, an immense pile (of haycock), by my countrymen, the
victorious British (boy next door and his two cousins), and had
been recognized with ecstasy by my affianced one (Miss Green), who
had come all the way from England (second house in the terrace) to
ransom me and marry me."
In playful vein Dickens professes to record his disappointment at
failing to receive any recognition from a "native", in the person of a
phlegmatic greengrocer, when he revisits Rochester, and revives the
associations of haunts beloved in childhood.
"Nettled by his phlegmatic conduct, I informed him that I had left
the town when I was a child. He slowly returned, quite unsoftened,
and not without a sarcastic kind of complacency, Had I? Ah! and did
I find it had got on tolerably well without me? Such is the
difference (I thought when I had left him a few hundred yards
behind, and was by so much in a better temper) between going away
from a place and remaining in it. I had no right, I reflected, to
be angry with the greengrocer for his want of interest; I was
nothing to him; whereas he was the town, the cathedral, the bridge,
the river, my childhood, and a large slice of my life, to me."
That is one side of the medal, but the other is displayed in _David
Copperfield_, when little Mr. Chillip, the doctor, welcomes David back
to England:
"'We are not ignorant, sir,' said Mr. Chillip, slowly shaking his
little head again, 'down in our part of the country, of your fame.
There must be great excitement here, sir,' said Mr. Chillip,
tapping himself on the forehead with his forefinger. 'You must find
it a trying occupation, sir!'"
A feature of Dickens's literary manner, so insistent that the most
superficial reader cannot miss it, is the individual and almost human
aspect which a street or a landscape, a house or a room, takes on in his
description. A typical example may be selected in Mr. Wickfield's
house--
"A very old house bulging out over the road; a house with long, low
lattice windows bulging out still farther, and beams with carved
heads on the ends bulging out too, so that I fancied the whole
house was leaning forward, trying to see who was passing on the
narrow pavement below."
It was the outcome of an acute nervous sensibility, amounting at times
to an almost neurotic irritability, such as peeps out from his
confession that the shape of Earl Grey's head, when he was a
Parliamentary reporter in the Gallery, "was misery to me and weighed
down my youth". This peculiarity of temperament had established itself
when, a little delicate and highly strung child, he used to transfer the
scenes and happenings of the novels to which he stole away from the
other boys at their play, into the setting of his own existence, and
"every barn in the neighbourhood, every stone in the church, and every
foot of the churchyard, had some association of its own connected with
these books, and stood for some locality made famous in them".
There has seldom, perhaps, been such an absence of complexity in genius
of a high order as there was in Dickens's character. But though there
was no complexity, there were two very different aspects--acute
sensibility was not incompatible with a virile and buoyant spirit. And
so Dickens's associations with the country which he loved best and knew
most intimately were, on the one side, those of a dreamy childhood, on
the other, of a lusty zest in outdoor life and the rustic jollity of an
old-world "Merry England". The sports and revels of Manor Farm, Dingley
Dell, have all the exuberance of Lever's Irish novels. Dickens must have
often taken part in merry-makings such as he describes, on flying visits
that are not recorded in Forster, before he sat down to write about them
during his honeymoon at Chalk. As the Master of Gadshill, his lithe,
upright figure, clad in loose-fitting garments, and rather dilapidated
shoes, was a familiar sight to all the country neighbours, as he swung
along the shady lanes, banked high with hedges that were full of
violets, purple and white, ferns, and lichens, and mosses. Often he
would call at the oldfashioned "Crispin and Crispianus", on the north
side of the London road just out of Strood, for a glass of ale, or a
little cold brandy and water, and sit in the corner of the settle
opposite the fireplace, looking at nothing but seeing everything. In the
chapter on "Tramps" in _The Uncommercial Traveller_, he imagines himself
to be the travelling clockmaker, who sees to something wrong with the
bell of the turret stable clock up at Cobham Hall, and after being
regaled in the enormous servants' hall with beef and bread, and powerful
ale, sets off through the woods till the town lights appear right in
front, and lies for the night at the ancient sign of Crispin and
Crispianus. The floating population of the roads,--the travelling
showman, the cheap jack, the harvest and hopping tramps, the young
fellows who trudge along barefoot, their boots slung over their
shoulders, their shabby bundles under their arms, their sticks newly cut
from some roadside wood, and the truculently humorous tramp, who tells
the Beadle: "Why, blow your little town! who wants to be in it? Wot does
your dirty little town mean by comin' and stickin' itself in the road to
anywhere?"--all are closely scanned and noted, as they mount or descend
Strood Hill in perennial procession. Dickens was himself a sturdy and
inveterate pedestrian. When he suffered from insomnia he would think
nothing of rising in the middle of the night and taking a thirty miles'
spin before breakfast.
[Illustration: THE LEATHER BOTTLE, COBHAM]
"Coming in just now," he wrote in his third year at Gadshill,
"after twelve miles in the rain, I was so wet that I have had to
change and get my feet into warm water before I could do anything."
In February, 1865, he wrote:
"I got frost-bitten by walking continually in the snow, and getting
wet in the feet daily. My boots hardened and softened, hardened and
softened, my left foot swelled, and I still forced the boot on; sat
in it to write, half the day; walked in it through the snow, the
other half; forced the boot on again next morning; sat and walked
again; and being accustomed to all sorts of changes in my feet,
took no heed. At length, going out as usual, I fell lame on the
walk, and had to limp home dead lame, through the snow, for the
last three miles--to the remarkable terror, by the way, of the two
big dogs."
It is hardly necessary to say that Dickens never so absorbed the local
spirit and genius of that part of rural England which he knew and loved
best as the Brontes absorbed the spirit of the Yorkshire moorlands, or
Mr. Hardy the spirit of Wessex, or Mr. Eden Phillpotts the spirit of
Dartmoor, or Sir A. Quiller-Couch the spirit of the "Delectable Duchy".
He was too busy and preoccupied a man for this, and had too much of his
life and work behind him, when he made his permanent home in
"Dickens-land". And Gadshill was too near to the bustle and stir of
Chatham to furnish a purely idyllic environment or entirely
unsophisticated rusticity. But it is not unduly fanciful to discover the
influence of Kentish scenery, with its bright, clear atmosphere, its
undulating slopes of green woodland and green hop fields, pink-and-white
orchards, and golden harvests--the prettiest though not the most
beautiful scenery in England--upon his conception of a typical
"English home--grey twilight pour'd
On dewy pastures, dewy trees,
Softer than sleep--all things in order stored,
A haunt of ancient Peace".
Though no local name is attached to it, and no local tradition
identifies it with any particular spot, there is no difficulty in fixing
in the very heart of "Dickens-land" the picture upon which the "Battle
of Life" is opened: the joyous dance of two girls, "quite unconstrained
and careless", "in one little orchard attached to an old stone house
with a honeysuckle porch", "while some half-dozen peasant women standing
on ladders, gathering the apples from the trees, stopped in their work
to look down, and share their enjoyment".
"As they danced among the orchard trees, and down the groves of
stems and back again, and twirled each other lightly round and
round, the influence of their airy motion seemed to spread and
spread, in the sunlighted scene, like an expanding circle in the
water. Their streaming hair and fluttering skirts, the elastic
grass beneath their feet, the boughs that rustled in the morning
air--the flushing leaves, their speckled shadows on the soft green
ground--the balmy wind that swept along the landscape, glad to turn
the distant windmill, cheerily--everything between the two girls,
and the man and team at plough upon the ridge of land, where they
showed against the sky as if they were the last things in the
world--seemed dancing too."
Something, too, of the love of good cheer, quaint old Christmas customs,
of junketings in ancient farmhouse kitchens and the parlours of ancient
hostelries, which has made Dickens the early Victorian apostle of
Yuletide "wassail", can be derived from his having "powlert up and down"
in a county abounding with comfortable manor houses and cosy inns. It is
a ripe and mellow tradition of good cheer, that is quite distinct from
the bovine stolidity of a harvest home in George Eliot's Loamshire or
the crude animalism of Meredith's Gaffer Gammon. For Kent, even from
the time of Caesar's Commentaries, has been "the civil'st place of all
the isle".
That is the aspect of Dickens's country on the one side--the side which,
some years before he established himself at Gadshill, he mapped out,
already knowing it intimately, to show to Forster in a brief excursion:
"You will come down booked for Maidstone (I will meet you at
Paddock-wood), and we will go thither in company over a most
beautiful little line of railroad. The eight miles walk from
Maidstone to Rochester, and a visit to the Druidical altar on the
wayside, are charming. This could be accomplished on the Tuesday;
and Wednesday we might look about us at Chatham, coming home by
Cobham on Thursday."
The other side--the dreary marshes lying between the Medway and the
Thames, a dark, flat wilderness intersected by dykes and mounds and
gates--had associations not less intimate. In _David Copperfield_
Dickens transferred the dreams and the events of his childhood to an
alien setting. In _Great Expectations_ he invents a fictitious story in
harmony with scenes in which he delighted to retrace his childish
memories. Again, the amphibian creatures which he lightly sketches in
_Great Expectations_, and more elaborately in _Our Mutual Friend_, had
first impressed themselves on his imagination as he rambled, a tiny,
eager-eyed boy, about the dockyards and waterside alleys of Chatham, or
made trips to Sheerness with "Mr. Micawber", that is to say, his
father, in the Navy Pay yacht, though he long afterwards pursued his
studies of them more exhaustively at Wapping and the Isle of Dogs, and
in expeditions with the Thames police. It was from a walk with Leech
through Chatham by-streets that he gathered the hint of Charley Hexam
and his father, for _Our Mutual Friend_, from the sight of "the
uneducated father in fustian and the educated boy in spectacles".
But when Dickens took Rochester once more for the background of a story
in _Edwin Drood_ there seems, to us in our knowledge of the event,
something almost ominous. It suggests Waller's famous simile of the stag
that returns to die where it was roused. Dickens's last visit to the
town was to stimulate his imagination for the conference between
Datchery and the Princess Puffer at the entrance to the "Monks'
Vineyard". On the last day of his life he was busy, in the chalet in the
garden at Gadshill Place, embodying the fancies which he had gathered
and fused on that last visit. On the last page which he was to write he
endeavoured to record--for the last time--his sense of the atmosphere of
the old city.
"A brilliant morning shines on the old city. Its antiquities and
ruins are surpassingly beautiful, with the lusty ivy gleaming in
the sun, and the rich trees waving in the balmy air. Changes of
glorious light from moving boughs, songs of birds, scents from
gardens, woods, and fields--or, rather, from the one great garden
of the whole of the cultivated island in its yielding
time--penetrate into the Cathedral, subdue its earthy odour, and
preach the Resurrection and the Life. The cold stone tombs of
centuries ago grow warm, and flecks of brightness dart into the
sternest marble corners of the building, fluttering there like
wings."
On the eve of that last day he had more than once expressed his
satisfaction at having finally abandoned all intention of exchanging
Gadshill for London. He had done this still more impressively a few days
before.
"While he lived, he said, he should wish his name to be more and
more associated with the place; and he had a notion that when he
died, he should like to lie in the little graveyard belonging to
the Cathedral at the foot of the Castle wall."
Half of his wish had to go unfulfilled; the other half has been realized
in a different but a profounder sense than that in which it is
conceived. While he lives, in the creations of his humour and pathos,
airy things of fun and frolic, tenderness and tears, his name is more
and more associated "with the scenes"--to borrow the words of the
memorial tablet in Rochester Cathedral--"in which his earliest and his
latest years were passed", scenes that "from the associations ... which
extended over all his life" have the best right to be known as
"Dickens-land".
_Printed by Blackie & Son, Ltd., Glasgow_
* * * * *
Transcriber's note
The following changes have been made to the text:
Page 19: "by an unbridgable chasm" changed to "by an unbridgeable
chasm".