DICKENS
It was here, then, that Dickens lived from 1856 to his death, on June 9, 1870, and thus Gad’s Hill is, for many, doubly a place of pilgrimage. And, truly, the whole course of the Dover Road is rich in memories of him and of the characters he drew with such a flow of sentimentality; and sentiment is more to the Englishman than is generally supposed. Hence that amazing popularity which is only just now being critically inquired into, weighed and appraised. Dickens was a man of commanding genius. His observation was acute, and he reproduced with so photographic a fidelity the life and times of his early years that the “manners and customs of the English,” during the first third of the nineteenth century, find no such luminous exponent as he. When, if indeed ever, the Pickwick Papers cease to amuse, they will still afford by far the most valuable evidence that could possibly exist as to the ways and thoughts, the social life and the conditions of travel, that immediately preceded the railway era. Superficial critics may hold that the most humorous book of the century is but a succession of scenes, with little real sequence and no plot; they may also say that Mr. Pickwick, Messrs. Tupman, Snodgrass, Winkle, and the rest of that glorious company, were “idiots,” but for genuine fun and frolic that book is still pre-eminent, and none of the “new humorists,” with their theories and criticisms of the “old humour,” have approached within a continent or so of it. Not that Dickens’ methods were irreproachable. It was his pleasure in all his books to give his characters allusive names by which you were supposed to recognise their attributes at once. It is thus upon the stage, in pantomime or farce, that the clown’s painted grin and the low-comedian’s ill-fitting clothes, red hair, and redder nose, proclaim their qualities before a word is spoken, and when Dickens calls a pompous fraud “Pecksniff,” a vulgar Cockney clerk “Guppy,” or a shifty, irresponsible, resourceful person “Swiveller,” we know at once, before we read any further, pretty much what their characters will be like. This, of course, is not art; it is an entirely indefeasible attempt to claim your sympathies or excite your aversions at the outset, independently of the greater or less success with which the author portrays their habits afterwards. We must, however, do Dickens the justice both to allow that he needed no such adventitious aids to the understanding of his characters, and to recognise that this kind of nomenclature was not peculiarly his own, but very largely the literary fashion of his time.
The pranks of Falstaff and Prince Hal, whose doings were to be “argument for a week, laughter for a month, and a good jest for ever,” are commemorated, in a fashion, by a large roadside inn, the “Falstaff,” standing nearly opposite Gad’s Hill Place, the successor, built in the time of Queen Anne, of a lonely beerhouse, the resort of characters more than questionable; more than kin to highwaymen, and much less than kind to unprotected wayfarers.
THE “FALSTAFF,” GAD’S HILL.
From here the road goes steeply all the way to Strood, over Coach and Horses’ Hill, and through a deep cutting made by the Highway Board about 1830, in order to ease the heavy pull up from Rochester; a cutting known at that time as “Davies’ Straits,” from the name of the chairman of the Board, the Rev. George Davies. The view here, over house-tops toward the Medway, framed in on either side by this hollow road, is particularly fine, and I think I cannot come through Strood into Rochester without quoting a certain lieutenant who, with a captain and an “ancient” (by which last we understand “ensign” to be meant), travelled in these parts in 1635. “I am to passe,” says he, “to Rochester, and in the midway I fear’d no robbing, although I passed that woody, and high old robbing Hill (Gadds Hill), on which I alighted, and tooke a sweet and delightfull prospect of that faire streame, with her pleasant meads she glides through.” The lieutenant’s description is delightful, and if he drew the sword to such good purpose as he wielded the pen, why, I think he must have been a warrior of no little distinction. He says nothing of Strood; and, indeed, I think Strood has through the centuries been entreated in quite a shabby and inadequate manner. The reason of this, of course, is that Strood is over the water and suburban to Rochester; a kind of poor relation so to speak, and treated accordingly.
But the place is old and historic, and celebrated not only for the great fight which the barons made in the thirteenth century against the king, when they fought their way across the bridge, and, taking possession of Rochester, sacked town, castle, and cathedral, but also for that exploit of the townsfolk who cut off the tail of one of Becket’s sumpter-mules, whereupon that wrathful prelate cursed them, and caused them and their descendants to go with tails for ever. Thus the story which accounts for the county nickname of “Kentish long-tails,” but I do not perceive that the Strood folks are so unusually decorated. Perhaps they are at pains to hide their shame.
XIX
STROOD