Brief as his stay in Bath undoubtedly was in the capacity of reporter for the Morning Chronicle in 1835, he, nevertheless, made excellent use of his abnormal powers of observation in spite of professional activities, his retentive memory enabling him to reproduce in “The Pickwick Papers” a few months afterwards those typical scenes in the social life of Bath of that period, which has since undergone many changes, Mr. Pickwick being almost the last to witness the peculiarities of Bath society as described by the novel-writers of a century or so ago. Dickens noticed, among other topographical features, the steepness of Park Street, which (he said) “was very much like the perpendicular streets a man sees in a dream, which he cannot get up for the life of him.” He remembered, too, that the White Hart Hotel (the proprietor of which establishment was the Moses Pickwick who owned the very coach on which Sam Weller saw inscribed “the magic name of Pickwick”) stood “opposite the great Pump Room, where the waiters, from their costume, might be mistaken for Westminster boys, only they destroy the illusion by behaving themselves so much better.”[52] The White Hart flourished in Stall Street, and until 1864 (when the house was given up) the waiters wore knee-breeches and silk stockings, and the women servants donned neat muslin caps. The old coaching inn, alas! no longer exists, and its site is indicated by the Grand Pump Room Hotel, the original carved sign of a white hart being preserved and still used over the door of an inn of the same name in Widcombe, a suburb of Bath.
The pen-pictures of scenes at the Assembly Rooms and Pump Rooms are admirably rendered in the pages of “Pickwick,” and we feel convinced that the author must have witnessed them.
“Bath being full, the company and the sixpences for tea poured in in shoals. In the ball-room, the long card-room, the octagonal card-room, the staircases, and the passages, the hum of many voices and the sound of many feet were perfectly bewildering. Dresses rustled, feathers waved, lights shone, and jewels sparkled. There was the music—not of the quadrille band, for it had not yet commenced, but the music of soft, tiny footsteps, with now and then a clear, merry laugh, low and gentle, but very pleasant to hear in a female voice, whether in Bath or elsewhere. Brilliant eyes, lighted up with pleasurable expectations, gleamed from every side; and look where you would, some exquisite form glided gracefully through the throng, and was no sooner lost than it was replaced by another as dainty and bewitching.
“In the tea-room, and hovering round the card-tables, were a vast number of queer old ladies and decrepit old gentlemen, discussing all the small-talk and scandal of the day, with a relish and gusto which sufficiently bespoke the intensity of the pleasure they derived from the occupation. Mingled with these groups were three or four matchmaking mammas, appearing to be wholly absorbed by the conversation in which they were taking part, but failing not from time to time to cast an anxious sidelong glance upon their daughters, who, remembering the maternal injunction to make the best of their youth, had already commenced incipient flirtations in the mislaying of scarves, putting on gloves, setting down cups, and so forth—slight matters apparently, but which may be turned to surprisingly good account by expert practitioners.
“Lounging near the doors, and in remote corners, were various knots of silly young men, displaying various varieties of puppyism and stupidity, amusing all sensible people near them with their folly and conceit, and happily thinking themselves the objects of general admiration—a wise and merciful dispensation which no good man will quarrel with.
“And, lastly, seated on some of the back benches, where they had already taken up their positions for the evening, were divers unmarried ladies past their grand climacteric, who, not dancing because there were no partners for them, and not playing cards lest they should be set down as irretrievably single, were in the favourable situation of being able to abuse everybody without reflecting on themselves. In short, they could abuse everybody, because everybody was there. It was a scene of gaiety, glitter, and show, of richly-dressed people, handsome mirrors, chalked floors, girandoles, and wax-candles; and in all parts of the scene, gliding from spot to spot in silent softness, bowing obsequiously to this party, nodding familiarly to that, and smiling complacently on all, was the sprucely-attired person of Angelo Cyrus Bantam, Esquire, Master of the Ceremonies” (chap. xxxv.).
“The great pump-room is a spacious saloon, ornamented with Corinthian pillars, and a music gallery, and a Tompion clock, and a statue of Nash, and a golden inscription, to which all the water-drinkers should attend, for it appeals to them in the cause of a deserving charity. There is a large bar with a marble vase, out of which the pumper gets the water; and there are a number of yellow-looking tumblers, out of which the company gets it; and it is a most edifying and satisfactory sight to behold the perseverance and gravity with which they swallow it. There are baths near at hand, in which a part of the company wash themselves; and a band plays afterwards to congratulate the remainder on their having done so. There is another pump-room, into which infirm ladies and gentlemen are wheeled, in such an astonishing variety of chairs and chaises that any adventurous individual who goes in with the regular number of toes is in imminent danger of coming out without them; and there is a third, into which the quiet people go, for it is less noisy than either. There is an immensity of promenading, on crutches and off, with sticks and without, and a great deal of conversation, and liveliness, and pleasantry.... At the afternoon’s promenade ... all the great people, and all the morning water-drinkers, meet in grand assemblage. After this, they walked out or drove out, or were pushed out in bath-chairs, and met one another again. After this, the gentlemen went to the reading-rooms and met divisions of the mass. After this, they went home. If it were theatre night, perhaps they met at the theatre; if it were assembly night, they met at the rooms; and if it were neither, they met the next day. A very pleasant routine, with perhaps a slight tinge of sameness” (chap. xxxvi.).
The citizens of Bath are naturally proud of its Pickwickian associations; Mr. Pickwick’s lodging in the Royal Crescent is pointed out, as well as the actual spot in the Assembly Rooms where he played whist, while the veritable rout seats of that time are preserved and cherished. The Royal Hotel, whence Mr. Winkle hurriedly departed by coach for Bristol, has shared the fate of the White Hart; indeed, Mr. Snowden Ward avers that there was no Royal Hotel in Bath in Dickens’s time, and that he probably refers to the York House Hotel, frequently patronized by royalty, and once at least by the novelist himself. We may still look, however, upon the “small greengrocer’s shop” where Bath footmen used to hold their social evenings, and memorable as the scene of the “leg-o’-mutton swarry.” It is now the Beaufort Arms, in a narrow street out of Queen’s Square, Bath, and within a short distance of No. 12 in the Square, the residence of Angelo Cyrus Bantam, Esq., Master of the Ceremonies, who welcomed Mr. Pickwick to Ba-ath.
In the course of an interesting speech delivered in 1865 at the second annual dinner of the Newspaper Press Fund, Dickens made an interesting allusion to the Devonshire political contest of thirty years previously, and to the part he took in it as a Chronicle reporter. “The very last time I was at Exeter,” he said, “I strolled into the Castle yard, there to identify, for the amusement of a friend, the spot on which I once ‘took,’ as we used to call it, an election speech of Lord John Russell ... in the midst of a lively fight maintained by all the vagabonds in that division of the county, and under such a pelting rain that I remember two good-natured colleagues, who chanced to be at leisure, held a pocket-handkerchief over my note-book, after the manner of a state canopy in an ecclesiastical procession.” In 1839 a mission of a very different character caused him to journey to “the capital of the West” (as that city has been denominated), his object being to arrange a new home for his parents in that locality. Making his headquarters at the New London Inn (where he had Charles Kean’s sitting-room), he soon discovered a suitable residence about a mile south from the city boundary on the highroad to Plymouth, Mile End Cottage, which is really divided into two portions, one-half being then occupied by the landlady, and the other being available for the new tenants. Dickens, when writing to Forster, described the place as “two white cottages,” and respecting the accommodation here provided for his parents, he said: “I almost forget the number of rooms, but there is an excellent parlour, which I am furnishing as a drawing-room, and there is a splendid garden.” In a letter to his friend Thomas Mitton he dilates more fully upon the attractions of the cottage and its environment. “I do assure you,” he observed, “that I am charmed with the place and the beauty of the country round about, though I have not seen it under very favourable circumstances.... It is really delightful, and when the house is to rights and the furniture all in, I shall be quite sorry to leave it.... The situation is charming; meadows in front, an orchard running parallel to the garden hedge, richly-wooded hills closing in the prospect behind, and, away to the left, before a splendid view of the hill on which Exeter is situated, the cathedral towers rising up into the sky in the most picturesque manner possible. I don’t think I ever saw so cheerful and pleasant a spot....”[53] It will be remembered that “Nicholas Nickleby” opens with a reference to “a sequestered part of the county of Devonshire” (sic), where lived one Mr. Godfrey Nickleby, the grandfather of the hero of the story; and there is no doubt that the home of Mrs. Nickleby’s friends, the Dibabses, as pictured by that lady in the fifty-fifth chapter, was identical with the tenement in which Mr. and Mrs. John Dickens found a temporary lodgment—“the beautiful little thatched white house one story high, covered all over with ivy and creeping plants, with an exquisite little porch with twining honeysuckle, and all sorts of things.”
Charles Dickens’s return to England at the end of his triumphant progress through the United States in 1842 was the occasion for a special celebration, which assumed the form of a holiday trip in Cornwall with his cherished friends Stanfield, Maclise, and Forster. They chose Cornwall for the excursion because it transpired that this “desolate region,” as Dickens termed it, was unfamiliar to them, and would therefore enhance their enjoyment. The decision to make Cornwall their destination suggested to Dickens the idea of opening his new book, “Martin Chuzzlewit,” on that rugged coast, “in some terrible dreary, iron-bound spot,” and to select the lantern of a lighthouse (probably the Longship’s, off Land’s End) as the opening scene; but he changed his mind. This expedition in the late summer lasted nearly three weeks, it proving a source of such unexpected and unabated attraction that the merry party felt loath to return to town. Railways were not of much use to them, as they did not penetrate to the remote districts which the travellers desired to visit. Post-horses were therefore requisitioned, and when the roads proved inaccessible to these, pedestrianism was perforce resorted to. They visited Tintagel, and explored every part of mountain and sea “consecrated by the legends of Arthur.” They ascended to the cradle of the highest pinnacle of Mount St. Michael,[54] and descended in several mines; but above all the marvels of land and sea, that which yielded the most lasting impression was a sunset at Land’s End, concerning which Forster says: “There was something in the sinking of the sun behind the Atlantic that autumn afternoon, as we viewed it together from the top of the rock projecting farthest into the sea, which each in his turn declared to have no parallel in memory.” The famous Logan Stone, too, was not forgotten. Writing subsequently to Forster, the novelist said: “Don’t I still see the Logan Stone, and you perched on the giddy top, while we, rocking it on its pivot, shrank from all that lay concealed below!” For Forster possessed the necessary courage and agility (lacking in the rest) to mount the huge swaying stone, the feat being immortalized by Stanfield in a sketch bequeathed to the Victoria and Albert Museum.[55] Lastly, the waterfall at St. Wighton was visited, memorable for the fact that a painting of it (from a sketch made on this occasion) appears as the background to Maclise’s picture of “A Girl at a Waterfall,” the figure being depicted from a sister-in-law of Dickens. The novelist, while the glow of enjoyment was yet upon him, could not resist dilating upon the exhilarating effect induced by this glorious holiday in the midst of natural scenery, then witnessed by the joyous quartette for the first time; and the following letter, addressed to his American friend, Professor Felton, fittingly concludes these references to the event which he ever recalled with delight: “Blessed star of the morning, such a trip as we had into Cornwall, just after Longfellow went away!... We went down into Devonshire by the railroad, and there we hired an open carriage from an innkeeper, patriotic in all Pickwick matters, and went on with post-horses. Sometimes we travelled all night, sometimes all day, sometimes both. I kept the joint-stock purse, ordered all the dinners, paid all the turnpikes, conducted facetious conversations with the post-boys, and regulated the pace at which we travelled. Stanfield (an old sailor) consulted an enormous map on all disputed points of wayfaring, and referred, moreover, to a pocket-compass and other scientific instruments. The luggage was in Forster’s department, and Maclise, having nothing particular to do, sang songs. Heavens! if you could have seen the necks of bottles—distracting in their immense varieties of shape—peering out of the carriage pockets! If you could have witnessed the deep devotion of the post-boys, the wild attachment of the hostlers, the maniac glee of the waiters! If you could have followed us into the earthy old churches we visited, and into the strange caverns on the gloomy seashore, and down into the depths of mines, and up to the tops of giddy heights, where the unspeakably green water was roaring I don’t know how many hundred feet below! If you could have seen but one gleam of the bright fires by which we sat in the big rooms of ancient inns at night until long after the small hours had come and gone, or smelt but one steam of the hot punch,... which came in every evening in a huge, broad, china bowl! I never laughed in my life as I did on this journey. It would have done you good to hear me. I was choking and gasping and bursting the buckle off the back of my stock all the way, and Stanfield ... got into such apoplectic entanglements that we were often obliged to beat him on the back with portmanteaus before we could recover him. Seriously, I do believe that there never was such a trip. And they made such sketches, those two men, in the most romantic of our halting-places, that you could have sworn we had the Spirit of Beauty with us, as well as the Spirit of Fun....”[56]