THE COMMON HARD, PORTSMOUTH. ([Page 102].)
Nickleby and Snipe lodged “at a tobacconist’s shop on the Common Hard,” now known as “The Old Curiosity Shop.”
We can readily conceive that the description of the coach journey to Ipswich, starting from the Bull Inn, Whitechapel, and rattling along the Whitechapel and Mile End Roads, “to the admiration of the whole population of that pretty densely-populated quarter,” and so to Suffolk’s county town (as duly set forth in the twenty-second chapter of “Pickwick”), is a personal reminiscence of Dickens himself when fulfilling his engagement with the Suffolk Chronicle.
While busy with newspaper responsibilities, to which he had pledged himself, he evidently made the best use of the opportunities thus afforded of noting certain topographical details of the town, finding “in a kind of courtyard of venerable appearance,” near St. Clement’s Church, a suitable locale for the incident of the unexpected meeting of Sam Weller and Job Trotter; the “green gate,” which Job was seen to open and close after him, is locally believed to be one that adjoins the churchyard a few yards from Church Street, the inhabitants taking great pride in pointing it out as the precise spot where Alfred Jingle’s body-servant embraced Sam “in an ecstasy of joy.” In regard to these scenes Ipswich is mentioned by name, but it has been conjectured that the town also figures in “Pickwick” under the successful disguise of “Eatanswill,” although Norwich has been mentioned in this connection. Certainly the weight of such evidence as that proffered by the Suffolk Times and Mercury favours the belief that Ipswich stood for the unflattering portrait, and, but for the facts as averred by that journal, we should possibly never have had Mr. Pickwick’s nocturnal misadventure, nor heard of the rival editors of the Eatanswill Gazette and the Eatanswill Independent.
Dickens’s reporting expedition in Suffolk during the electoral campaign of 1835 doubtless compelled him to include in his itinerary several of the leading towns in the county, where political meetings would naturally be held, and among them Bury St. Edmunds, where, according to tradition, he put up at the Angel Inn, his room being No. 11. In describing this hostelry, Mr. Percy Fitzgerald says that it is “a solemn, rather imposing, and stately building, of a gloomy slate colour, and of the nature of a family hotel.... It has yards and stabling behind it, which must have flourished in the old posting times.” Standing in Market Square, it continues to this day to be the principal hotel in the place, and remains in much the same condition as when the novelist knew it about seventy years ago. Bury St. Edmunds, like Ipswich, has won immortality in the pages of “Pickwick,” where it is referred to as “a handsome little town of thriving and cleanly appearance,” its well-paved streets being specially commended. In one of “The Uncommercial Traveller” papers he calls it “a bright little town.”
We are told that the coach, with Mr. Pickwick among the passengers newly arrived from Eatanswill, pulled up at the “large inn, situated in a wide, open street, nearly facing the old abbey.” “And this,” said Mr. Pickwick, “is the Angel. We alight here, Sam...;” whereupon a private room was ordered, and then dinner, everything being arranged with caution, for it will be remembered that Mr. Pickwick and his faithful attendant were in quest of that thorough-paced adventurer Alfred Jingle, Esq., “of No Hall, Nowhere,” intent upon frustrating probable intentions on his part of practising further deceptions. Here, at Bury, the “Mulberry man” (otherwise Job Trotter) was found by Sam in the pious act of reading a hymn-book, a discovery which proved to be the initial stage of Mr. Pickwick’s adventure at the boarding-school for young ladies—Westgate House—which, we are told, is a well-known residence called Southgate House, although there are other antique-looking schools for girls on the Westgate side of the town that seem more or less to answer the description.
More than two decades later—i.e., in 1861—Dickens again visited both Ipswich and Bury St. Edmunds, when he gave readings from his works, beginning the series at Norwich, where, writing from the recently-demolished Royal Hotel in the Market Place, he spoke of his audience in that city as “a very lumpish audience indeed ... an intent and staring audience. They laughed, though, very well, and the storm made them shake themselves again. But they were not magnetic, and the great big place (St. Andrew’s Hall) was out of sorts somehow.”[65]
On the last day of the year 1848, Dickens contemplated an excursion with Leech, Lemon, and Forster to some old cathedral city then unfamiliar to him, believing the sight of “pastures new” would afford him the necessary mental refreshment. “What do you say to Norwich and Stanfield Hall?” he queried of Forster, and it was decided forthwith that the three friends should depart thence. Stanfield Hall had just gained unenviable notoriety as the scene of a dreadful tragedy—the murder of Jeremy, the Recorder of Norwich, by Rush, afterwards executed at Norwich Castle. They arrived between the Hall and Potass Farm as the search was going on for the pistol, and the novelist was fain to confess that the place had nothing attractive about it, unless such a definition might be applied to a “murderous look that seemed to invite such a crime.”
Quaint old Norwich, as it has been justly termed (although its quaintness and picturesqueness have suffered woefully in recent years through commercial innovations), did not appeal to Dickens, who declared it to be “a disappointment”—everything there save the ancient castle, “which we found fit for a gigantic scoundrel’s exit,” alluding, of course, to Rush. The castle no longer serves as the county prison, and its gruesome associations are practically obliterated by the wholesome use to which the massive Norman structure is devoted, that of museum and art gallery under civic control.
Without doubt Dickens’s principal motive in journeying to Norfolk and Suffolk in 1848 was to obtain “local colour” for “David Copperfield,” the writing of which he was then meditating. He stayed for a time at Somerleyton Hall, near Lowestoft, as the guest of Sir Morton Peto, the well-known civil engineer and railway contractor, under whose guidance he first made acquaintance with that portion of Suffolk, studying it carefully, and afterwards portraying it in the story with characteristic exactitude. Two miles from Somerleyton Hall (now the residence of Sir Saville Crossley, M.P.) is Blundeston, a typical English village, which, thinly disguised as Blunderstone, appears in the book as the birthplace of David. The novelist afterwards confessed that he noticed the name on a direction-post between Lowestoft and Yarmouth, and at once adapted it because he liked the sound of the word; the actual direction-post still standing as he saw it.