And so, as Mr. Samuel Pepys might say, into Rochester.
Rochester was to Dickens variously “Mudfog,” “Great Winglebury,” “Dullborough,” and “Cloisterham.” It cannot be said that any of these names form anything like an adequate word-picture of the place. As names, they vary from good to indifferent, and very bad, but none of them shadow forth the real Rochester, which is rather a busy place than otherwise: none, for instance, are so happily descriptive as that under which a waggish fellow introduced a wealthy distiller to an assemblage of Polish notables—as “Count Caskowisky.” I might pluck a feather from Dickens’ wing with which to furnish forth a wounding shaft, and say of Rochester, under any of those pseudonyms, as Trabbs’ boy said in another connection (and yet not deserve the title of “unlimited miscreant,”) “Don’t know yah!”
The somnolent place which Dickens drew—its High Street a narrow lane, its houses abodes of gloom and mystery—has not much existence in fact. It is, of course, heresy to say so (but it is none the less true), that although no other place was probably so well known to Dickens, and that from his youth upward, yet he never caught the true note of Rochester. That he loved the place seems obvious enough, but his was not the Gothic, mediæval temperament that could really appreciate it aright. The test of this is found in the fact that although Dickens has written many glowing pages on Rochester, and apparently yielded to none in his admiration for the old city, yet its appearance is far more beautiful to the stranger learned in Dickens-lore than anything he is prepared to see.
Busy, beautiful Rochester, and none the less beautiful because busy. The traveller who first sees the old place, its castle and cathedral and the turbid Medway, from Strood, is fortunate in his approach, and will never forget the grand picture it makes. To his right stretches away for miles the broad valley of the Medway, with bold hills crowned with windmills, above, and the stream, diminishing in long perspective, below; with jutting promontories where the factory-chimneys of Borstal and Wouldham stand up, clustered like the stalks of monstrous vegetables, and the red-sailed barges that drop down with wind and tide. Before him rise the great keep, the cathedral, and the clustered red roofs of the city, with a glimpse of the High Street, the Town Hall and its great vane—a full-rigged ship—at the other end of the bridge. And all the while to his left is the shrieking and the screaming of the trains, rolling in thunder over the two railway bridges that absolutely shut out and ruin the view down the stream. The bustle, roar, and rattle of the trains, the busy, yet silent, traffic of the river, the smoke rising in wreaths from those distant chimneys of Wouldham and Borstal, all bespeak labour and commerce, and all these rumours of a busy community blend finely with the shattered majesty of that ancient Castle, the solemnity of the Cathedral, and the noisy, yet restful, cawing of the raucous rooks who circle round about those lofty battlements, their outcry mingled with the sobbing, moaning voices of the pigeons, and the shrill piping of querulous sea-birds.
The bridge over which Mr. Pickwick leaned and meditated while waiting for breakfast has gone the way of many another old building referred to in that book which will presently have a quite unique archæological value, so changed are the varied haunts of the Pickwickians. Necessity, they say, the call of progress, demanded the removal of the fine stone bridge of eleven arches that had spanned the Medway so efficiently for five centuries, and it was removed in 1856; but how cruel the necessity, and how heavy a toll we pay for our progression perhaps only those who had stood upon the ancient ways can tell. The masonry was so strong that it was found necessary to blow it up.
Meanwhile, we must clear our minds from a very reasonable prejudice, and acknowledge that, as an example of modern engineering, the new Rochester Bridge is very fine. It is of iron, broad and graceful as its iron construction will allow, and it spans the river in three great arches. It cost £160,000, exclusive of approaches, to build, and was opened in 1856. The old bridge had a protecting balustrade which more or less effectually saved the lieges from being blown by furious winds into the water. Before the balustrade there were high iron railings, which were fixed according to the French Ambassador, the Duc de Nivernais, “so that drunkards, not uncommon here, may not mix water with their wine.”
That the balustrade was not very greatly to be relied upon, and that Mr. Pickwick, bulky man as he was, ran a considerable risk when he leaned over the parapet, may be gathered when we read that on a night in 1836 a storm demolished a great stretch of it, and that the Princess Victoria, who was coming up the road from Dover, was content to be advised to stay overnight at the “Bull,” rather than attempt to cross over to Strood. The riverside wore a somewhat different aspect then. Low and broken cliffs picturesquely shelved down to the water’s edge where a neat embankment now runs, and the balustrades of the old bridge serve their old purpose on this new river-wall. The embankment is an improvement from an utilitarian point of view, but its long straight line hurts the artistic sense.
The stranger should come into Rochester preferably on the evening of a summer’s day, and, as first impressions must ever remain the most distinct, he should walk in over the bridge. At such times a golden haze spreads over the city and the river, and renders both a dream of beauty. The gilt ship on the Town Hall blazes like molten metal; the “moon-faced clock” of the Corn Exchange is correspondingly calm, and the wide entrance-halls of the older inns begin to glow with light. You should have walked a good fifteen miles or more on the day of your first coming into Rochester, and then you will appreciate aright the mellow comforts of its old inns. But not at once will the connoisseur of antiquity and first impressions who thus enters the old city repair him to his inn. He will turn into the Cathedral precincts underneath the archway of Chertsey’s Gate, and I hope he will not already have read Edwin Drood, because an acquaintance with that tale quite spoils one’s Rochester, and leaves an ineffaceable mark of a modern sordid tragedy upon the hoary stones of Cathedral, Castle, and Close. It is as though one had come to the place after reading the unrelieved brutality of a newspaper report. Rochester demands a romance of the Ivanhoe type; chivalry or necessities of State should have ennobled slaughter here, but a tale of secret murder for private ends vulgarises and tarnishes the place, especially when it is told with all Dickens’ wealth of local allusion. He had no comprehension of tragedy and romance other than those of the street and the police-court; which is to say that he had better have left Rochester alone, so far as the Mystery of Edwin Drood is concerned.
If my imaginary traveller comes to Rochester without having read that tale he will be singularly fortunate. Otherwise he will have an uneasy feeling as he stands and gazes a moment upon the west front of the Cathedral, or peeps into the nave, that it ought to be re-consecrated. This, of course, is a tribute to Dickens’ descriptive and narrative powers that clothe the doings of his characters with so great an air of reality; but how unfortunate for those who like their murders to be decently old and historical that he should have brought the atmosphere of the police-court into the grave and reverend air of this ancient city.
My traveller, happily unversed in all this, will gaze upon the Cathedral and the Castle Keep, where the rooks are circling to rest, and, coming again into the High Street, will turn to his inn, where appetite, sharpened by pedestrianism and fresh air, may be appeased as well now as in those days of heavy drinking and no less heavy eating, when seventy-two coaches passed through Rochester daily and the trains that thunder across the Medway were undreamt of.