The honeymoon over, Dickens and his bride returned to London, and made their home at No. 15, Furnival’s Inn, where their eldest child, Charles, was born. Here his favourite sister-in-law, Mary Hogarth, sometimes stayed with the youthful couple, her amiable and delightful disposition proving a very joy in the little household; her premature death in 1837, in Doughty Street, at the age of seventeen, so unnerved her admiring brother-in-law that the course of “Pickwick” and “Oliver Twist” (produced almost simultaneously) was temporarily interrupted, and writing presently to Mrs. Hogarth from his next abode, he said: “I wish you could know how I weary now for the three rooms in Furnival’s Inn, and how I miss that pleasant smile and those sweet words which, bestowed upon our evening’s work, on our merry banterings round the fire, were more precious to me than the applause of a whole world would be.” Here, too (as already mentioned), lived John Westlock when visited by Tom Pinch, and it was the scene, also, of certain incidents in “The Mystery of Edwin Drood.” Does not Mr. Grewgious (whose chambers were “over the way” at Staple Inn) tell us that “Furnival’s is fireproof and specially watched and lighted,” and did he not escort Rosa Bud to her rooms there, at Wood’s Hotel in the Square, afterwards confiding her to the care of the “Unlimited head chambermaid”?[26]
It was once an Inn of Chancery attached to Lincoln’s Inn, deriving its name from Sir William Furnivall, who owned much property hereabouts. About 1818 it became a series of chambers wholly unconnected with any Inn of Court, and in that year was entirely rebuilt by Peto. On the right-hand side of the Square, as immediately entered from Holborn, the house (No. 15) containing the bright little rooms once tenanted by Dickens was easily identified in later years by the medallion above the ground-floor windows which notified the fact; this house and its neighbour were more ornate than the rest, by reason of the series of Ionic pilasters between the windows. The whole of Furnival’s Inn was swept away in 1898, and the site covered by an extension of the premises of the Prudential Insurance Company; thus, alas! disappears an extremely interesting Dickens landmark, so intimately associated with the novelist and his writings.
Dickens must have relinquished his tenancy of the chambers in Furnival’s Inn before the actual term had expired, the assumption being that he had taken them on a short lease, as, according to the official record, he continued to pay rent until February 1839. Two years previously, finding this accommodation inadequate, and realizing that his literary labours had already begun to yield a good income, he determined to take a house, No. 48, Doughty Street, Mecklenburgh Square—a locality not otherwise unknown to literary fame; for Shirley Brooks (a former editor of Punch) was born in this street, while both Sydney Smith and Edmund Yates lived there, the latter at No. 43,[27] opposite Tegg, the publisher of the “Peter Parley” series of juvenile books.
Yates, in his “Recollections and Experiences,” recalls the Doughty Street of his day (and of Dickens’s) as “a broad, airy, wholesome street; none of your common thoroughfares, to be rattled through by vulgar cabs and earth-shaking Pickford vans, but a self-included property, with a gate at each end, and a lodge with a porter in a gold-laced hat and the Doughty arms[28] on the buttons of his mulberry-coloured coat, to prevent anyone, except with a mission to one of the houses, from intruding on the exclusive territory.” The lodges and gates have been removed since this was written, and the porter in official garb disappeared with that exclusiveness and quietude which doubtless attracted Dickens to the spot more than sixty years ago.
No. 48, Doughty Street (where his daughters Mary and Kate were born) is situated on the east side of the street, and contains twelve rooms—a single-fronted, three-storied house, with a railed-in area in front and a small garden at the rear. A tiny little room on the ground-floor, facing the garden, is believed to have been the novelist’s study, in which he wrote the latter portion of “Pickwick,” and practically the whole of “Oliver Twist” and “Nicholas Nickleby.” The summer months he customarily spent away from home, taking his work with him, and thus a few chapters of these books were penned at Broadstairs, at Twickenham Park, and at Elm Cottage (now called Elm Lodge), Petersham, a pretty little rural retreat rented by him in the summer of 1839, a locality to which he then referred as “those remote and distant parts, with the chain of mountains formed by Richmond Hill presenting an almost insurmountable barrier between me and the busy world.”
15 FURNIVAL’S INN, HOLBORN. ([Page 50].)
From a sketch by the late F. G. Kitton. Reproduced by kind permission of Messrs. T. C. and E. C. Jack.
At Elm Cottage he frequently enjoyed the society of his friends—Maclise, Landseer, Ainsworth, Talfourd, and the rest—many of whom joined in athletic competitions organized by their energetic host in the extensive grounds, among other frivolities being a balloon club for children, of which Forster was elected president on condition that he supplied all the balloons. Elm Cottage (Lodge) is now a school, screened from the public road by a high wooden fence and a barrier of elm-trees; it is a heavy-looking structure, roofed with red tiles, and at the rear is Sudbrook Lane. The novelist’s first country home, however, was at No. 4, Ailsa Park Villas, Twickenham, still standing in the Isleworth Road,[29] near St. Margaret’s railway-station, described in a recent issue of the Richmond and Twickenham Times as “a building on regular lines, shut in from the world by a plenitude of trees, silent and quiet, an ideal cottage for a mind seeking rest and repose;” not a picturesque edifice by any means, but having a quaint entablature with a circular window in the centre thereof, the house having since undergone little or no change, except, perhaps, in the enlargement of the balcony over the main entrance. There are several references in Dickens’s early letters to this region of the Thames Valley (to the Star and Garter, at Richmond, Eel Pie Island, etc.), and much local colouring is employed in certain of his novels—“Nicholas Nickleby,” “Little Dorrit,” and especially in “Oliver Twist.”[29] It is interesting to know that the Old Coach and Horses at Isleworth, where Sikes and Oliver halted during the burglary expedition to Chertsey, remains almost intact to this day, opposite Syon Lane, and contiguous to Syon House, the residence of that popular writer of fiction, Mr. George Manville Fenn.[29]
It was during the Doughty Street days that Dickens, in order to relieve the mental tension, indulged in many enjoyable jaunts into the country with Forster, these acting as a stimulant to fresh exertion. He either rode on horseback or walked to such outlying districts as Hampstead, Barnet, or Richmond, his favourite haunt in the northern suburb being Jack Straw’s Castle on the Heath, famous also for its associations with Thackeray, Du Maurier, and Lord Leighton, and commemorated a generation before by Washington Irving in his “Tales of a Traveller.” Here the Dickens traditions are still cherished, a small upper apartment in front being pointed out as the bedroom which he occasionally occupied. “I knows a good ’ous there,” he said to Forster when imploring his companionship on a bout to Hampstead, “where we can have a red-hot chop for dinner and a glass of wine”; and the notification resulted in many happy meetings there in the coming years.[30] A writer in the Daily Graphic (July 18, 1903) avers that Hampstead possesses other Dickensian associations—that the novelist had lodgings at Wylde’s Farm, and, it is said, wrote some chapters of “Bleak House” in the picturesque cottage, which, with the farmhouse and land, it is proposed to acquire for the use and enjoyment of the public. Wylde’s Farm is situated on the north-west boundary of Hampstead Heath, close to North End, Hampstead; it formerly consisted of two farms, one known as Collins’s and the other as Tooley’s, and it was at Collins’s that John Linnell, the artist, lived for some years, and there welcomed, as visitors, William Blake, Mulready, Flaxman, George Morland, and others distinguished in Art and Literature.
