The Temple, practically unchanged since Dickens’s day, ever remained a favourite locality with him. When quite a young man, and popularly known as “Boz,” he entered his name among the students of the Inn of the Middle Temple, though he did not eat dinners there until many years later, and was never called to the Bar. The Daily News offices (the old building, not the existing ornate structure) in Bouverie Street are remembered chiefly by the fact that this Liberal newspaper was founded by Dickens, its first editor, in 1846, and a bust-portrait of him may be seen in a niche in the façade of the new building. John Forster’s residence, No. 58, Lincoln’s Inn Fields, is specially memorable on account of the novelist’s associations therewith. Here he was ever a welcome guest, and here, in 1844, he read “The Chimes” from the newly-completed manuscript to an assembled group of friends, the germ of those public readings to which he subsequently devoted so much time and energy. The two houses, Nos. 57 and 58, Lincoln’s Inn Fields, were once the town mansion of the Earl of Lindsey. Dickens made Forster’s residence the home of Tulkinghorn, the old family lawyer in “Bleak House,” whose room with the painted ceiling depicting “fore-shortened allegory” faces the large forecourt, and is now in the occupation of a solicitor; the painting, however, was obliterated some years ago.
CHAPTER IV.
IN THE WEST COUNTRY.
Dickens first made acquaintance with many provincial towns during his early newspaper days, when, as a reporter, he galloped by road in post-chaises, both by day and night, to remote parts of the country, meeting with strange adventures, sometimes experiencing awkward predicaments, from which he invariably succeeded in extricating himself and in reaching his destination in good time for publication, his carefully-prepared notes being transcribed, not infrequently, during “the smallest hours of the night in a swift-flying carriage and pair,” by the light of a blazing wax-candle. In 1845, when recalling his reporting days, he informed Forster that he “had to charge for all sorts of breakages fifty times in a journey without question,” as the ordinary results of the pace he was compelled to travel. He had charged his employers for everything but a broken head, “which,” he naïvely added, “is the only thing they would have grumbled to pay for.” One of the foremost of these expeditions took place in 1835, when he and a colleague, Thomas Beard, journeyed by express coach to Bristol to report, for the Morning Chronicle, the political speeches in connection with Lord John Russell’s Devon contest. He lodged at the Bush Inn, where that “ill-starred gentleman,” Mr. Winkle, took up his quarters when fleeing from the wrath of the infuriated Dowler, as set forth in the thirty-eighth chapter of “Pickwick.” We are told that Mr. Winkle found Bristol “a shade more dirty than any place he had ever seen”; that, at the time referred to (nearly eighty years ago), the pavements of that city were “not the widest or cleanest upon earth,” its streets were “not altogether the straightest or least intricate,” and their “manifold windings and twistings” greatly puzzled Mr. Winkle, who, when exploring them, lost his way, with the result that he unexpectedly came upon his old acquaintances, Bob Sawyer and Ben Allen, the former occupying a newly-painted tenement (not identified), which had been recently converted into “something between a shop and a private house,” with the word “Surgery” inscribed above the window of what had been the front parlour. At the Bush tavern the fugitive was discovered by Sam Weller, who had received peremptory orders from “the governor” to follow and keep him in sight until Mr. Pickwick arrived on the scene. The Bush no longer exists; it stood in Corn Street, near the Guildhall, and was taken down in 1864, the present Wiltshire Bank marking the site. It will be remembered that it was to Clifton, on the outskirts of Bristol, where Arabella Allen was sent by her brother (who regarded himself as “her natural protector and guardian”) to spend a few months at an old aunt’s, “in a nice dull place,” in order to break her to his will that she should marry Bob Sawyer (“late Nockemorf”). Hither Sam Weller went in quest of her, walking (as we are told) “up one street and down another—we were going to say, up one hill and down another, only it’s all uphill at Clifton”—and, after struggling across the Downs, “against a good high wind,” eventually arrived at “several little villas of quiet and secluded appearance,” at one of which he, too, met a familiar acquaintance in “the pretty housemaid from Mrs. Nupkins’s,” who proved a valuable guide to the whereabouts of Miss Allen. In 1866 and 1869 Dickens gave public readings at Clifton, staying on the former occasion at the Down Hotel. The suspension bridge across the Avon is the old Hungerford Bridge, removed in 1863, and the sight of it at the time of his later visits to Clifton must have recalled to Dickens the troubled period of his boyhood at the blacking factory.
The occasion of the Bristol reporting expedition in 1835 is also memorable for the fact that it marks the date of Dickens’s first visit to the contiguous city of Bath, which plays a still more important part in the Transactions of the Pickwick Club. At Bath he had to prepare a report of a political dinner given there by Lord John Russell, and to despatch it “by Cooper Company’s Coach, leaving the Bush (Bristol) at half-past six next morning.” It was sharp work, as Russell’s speech at the banquet had to be transcribed by Dickens for the printers while travelling by the mail-coach viâ Marlborough for London; this necessitated for himself and Thomas Beard the relinquishment of sleep and rest during two consecutive days and nights. It is fair to suppose that on one of his early reporting expeditions to the West of England Dickens put up for a night at the quaint little roadside inn near Marlborough Downs, which he so carefully describes in the Bagman’s Story in “Pickwick.”
“It was a strange old place, built of a kind of shingle, inlaid, as it were, with cross-beams, with gable-topped windows projecting over the pathway, and a low door with a dark porch, and a couple of steep steps leading down into the house, instead of the modern fashion of half a dozen shallow ones leading up to it.” Like Tom Smart, the hero of the story, he doubtless slept in the selfsame apartment, with its “big closets, and a bed which might have served for a whole boarding-school, to say nothing of a couple of oaken presses that would have held the baggage of a small army.” Nay, he may even have experienced Tom Smart’s strange hallucination in regard to the ancient armchair, apparently assuming in the uncertain light of the chamber fire the outlines of a strangely-formed specimen of humanity, although probably he did not go so far as to enter into conversation with this remarkable bedroom companion, as did the Bagman, whose vivid imagination, aided by the narcotic effects of his noggins of whisky, enabled him to impart a spiciness to his narrative. From the detailed manner in which Dickens portrays this old-fashioned alehouse, we are justified in conjecturing that such a place really existed during the thirties, and attempts have been made to identify it, for we need not take for granted the statement in “Pickwick” that the place had been pulled down. From inquiries which I instituted on the subject, a local correspondent informs me that the Marquis of Ailesbury’s Arms at Clatford somewhat answered to the description prior to extensive structural alterations effected about twenty years ago.
Another investigator considers that the inn at Beckhampton, the Catherine Wheel, fulfils most of the requirements. With this conclusion, however, the Rev. W. H. Davies, of Avebury, is not disposed to agree, and the late Rev. A. C. Smith, in his “British and Roman Antiquities,” tells us that the inn which formerly existed at Shepherd’s Shord (or Shore) was the one referred to by Dickens, and that at the time of the publication of “Pickwick” everybody in Wiltshire so identified it. Another suggestion is that the original of Tom Smart’s house of call was the Kennett Inn at Beckhampton, which, according to a drawing of the place, answers the descriptions even better than those already mentioned, although it stood upon the wrong side of the road. We ought, I think, to accept the local opinion of Pickwickian days, and fix the scene of the Bagman’s adventure at Shepherd’s Shore.[48]
Remembering what little leisure he must have had in the midst of political turmoil and journalistic responsibilities while at Bath, it is indeed surprising to find how truthful a presentment of that delightful city is achieved in “Pickwick.” On the occasion in question he put up at a small hotel, the Saracen’s Head, a quaint-looking, unpretentious building still existing in Broad Street, its two red-tiled gables and stuccoed front facing that thoroughfare. The landlady relates that Dickens, owing to the fact that all the bedrooms of the house were occupied on his arrival at a late hour, had to be accommodated with a room over some stables or outbuildings at the farther end of the inn yard, overlooking Walcot Street.[49] Visitors are shown a curious two-handled mug which the novelist is believed to have used, and the bedroom once occupied by him, and containing the old four-post bedstead upon which he slept; while in another room, low and raftered, is to be seen the stiff wooden armchair in which he sat!—relics that are deservedly cherished and handed down as heirlooms.
Bath is frequently referred to in the novelist’s writings, and, judging by a particular allusion to the historic town, it seems not to have left a very favourable impression on his mind, for he there mentions it as “that grass-grown city of the ancients.”[50] At a subsequent date he remarked: “Landor’s ghost goes along the silent streets here before me.... The place looks to me like a cemetery which the dead have succeeded in rising and taking. Having built streets of their old gravestones, they wander about scantly trying to ‘look alive.’ A dead failure.”[51] He had a pleasant remembrance of Walter Savage Landor at No. 35, St. James’s Square, upon which a tablet was fixed in 1903 recording the fact of a visit paid to him by the novelist on the latter’s birthday, February 7, 1840, on which occasion he was accompanied by Mrs. Dickens, Maclise, and Forster, the party remaining there until the end of the month. We are assured by his biographer that it was during this visit to Bath “that the fancy which was shortly to take the form of Little Nell first occurred to its author.” The girl-heroine of “The Old Curiosity Shop” was an immense favourite with Landor, who in after-years emphatically declared that the one mistake of his life was that he had not purchased the house in which the conception of her dawned upon Dickens, and then and there burned it to the ground, so that no meaner associations should desecrate it.
MILE END COTTAGE, ALPHINGTON. ([Page 94].)
Taken by Dickens in 1839 for his parents’ use. “The house is on the high road to Plymouth, and the situation is charming” (letter to Mr. Thomas Mitton).