“When we got into the street (which was strange enough to me), and smelt the fish, and pitch, and oakum, and tar, and saw the sailors walking about, and the carts jingling up and down over the stones, I felt that I had done so busy a place an injustice, and said as much to Peggotty, who ... told me it was well known ... that Yarmouth was, upon the whole, the finest place in the universe.”
David, as Ham carried him on his broad back from the carrier’s cart to the boathouse, gazed upon the dreary amplitude of the Denes in anxious expectation of catching a glimpse of the romantic abode for which they were destined. “We turned down lanes,” he says, “bestrewn with bits of chips and little hillocks of sand, and went past gasworks, rope-walks, boat-builders’ yards, shipwrights’ yards, ship-breakers’ yards, caulkers’ yards, riggers’ lofts, smiths’ forges, and a great litter of such places, until we came out upon the dull waste I had already seen at a distance.... I looked in all directions, as far as I could stare over the wilderness, and away at the sea, and away at the river, but no house could I make out”—nothing except a “ship-looking thing,” which presently resolved itself into the identical house for which they were bound, and proved to be—in the boy’s estimation, at least—as charming and delightful as Aladdin’s palace, “roc’s egg and all.” It is pointed out by Dr. Bately that the description given by Dickens (as above quoted) of the various objects seen on the way from Yarmouth to the South Denes really reverses their order, just as he noted them when walking in the contrary direction. There are not many boat-builders’ yards now remaining hereabouts.
CHAPTER VII.
IN THE NORTH.
In 1837 Dickens’s thoughts were concentrated upon a new serial story, “Nicholas Nickleby,” in which he determined to expose the shortcomings of cheap boarding-schools then flourishing in Northern England, his first impressions of which were picked up when, as a child, he sat “in by-places, near Rochester Castle, with a head full of Partridge, Strap, Tom Pipes, and Sancho Panza.” The time had arrived (he thought) when, by means of his writings, he could secure a large audience, to whom he might effectively present the actual facts concerning the alleged cruelties customarily practised at those seminaries of which he had heard so much. Having thus resolved to punish the culprits by means of his powerful pen, and, if possible, to suppress the evils of the system they favoured, the novelist and his illustrator, “Phiz,” departed from London by coach on a cold winter’s day in January, 1838, for Greta Bridge, in the North Riding, with the express intention of obtaining authoritative information regarding the subject of the schools, for in that locality were situated some of the most culpable of those institutions. Greta Bridge takes its name from a lofty bridge of one arch, erected on the line of Watling Street, upon the site of a more ancient structure, over the river Greta, a little above its junction with the Tees.
The parish of Rokeby, in the petty sessional division of Greta Bridge, is celebrated as the scene of Sir Walter Scott’s poem, “Rokeby,” which was written on the spot, and does no more than justice to the beautiful scenery of the neighbourhood.
Dickens and “Phiz” broke their journey at Grantham, at which town they arrived late on the night of January 30, and put up at the George—“the very best inn I have ever put up at.” Early the next morning they continued their journey by the Glasgow mail, “which charged us the remarkably low sum of £6 fare for two places inside.” Snow began to fall, and the drifts grew deeper, until there was “no vestige of a track” over the wild heaths as the coach approached the destination of the two fellow-travellers, who were half frozen on their arrival at Greta Bridge. In the story the author gives the name of the hostelry where Squeers and his party alighted from the coach as the George and New Inn; but, in so doing, he indulges in an artistic license, for he thus bestows upon one house the respective signs of two distinct inns at Greta Bridge, situated about half a mile from each other. The George stands near the bridge already referred to, the public portion of the premises having since been converted into a private residence. The New Inn has also been changed, and is now a farmhouse called Thorpe Grange; built before the railway era for Mr. Morrit, the landlord of the George, it not only rivalled the older establishment, but absorbed its custom, the owner claiming it as the veritable inn of Dickens’s story.[67] It seems very probable that the novelist himself put up at the New Inn during his brief tour of investigation in 1838; writing thence to his wife at this date, he said that at 11 p.m. the mail reached “a bare place with a house standing alone in the midst of a dreary moor, which the guard informed us was Greta Bridge. I was in a perfect agony of apprehension, for it was fearfully cold, and there were no outward signs of anybody being up in the house. But to our great joy we discovered a comfortable room, with drawn curtains and a most blazing fire. In half an hour they gave us a smoking supper and a bottle of mulled port (in which we drank your health), and then we retired to a couple of capital bedrooms, in each of which there was a rousing fire halfway up the chimney. We have had for breakfast toast, cakes, a Yorkshire pie, a piece of beef about the size and much the shape of my portmanteau, tea, coffee, ham and eggs, and are now going to look about us....”[68] After exploring the immediate neighbourhood, Dickens, accompanied by “Phiz,” went by post-chaise to Barnard Castle, four miles from Greta Bridge, and just over the Yorkshire border, there to deliver a letter given to him by Mr. Smithson (a London solicitor, who had a Yorkshire connection), and to visit the numerous schools thereabouts. This letter of introduction bore reference (as the author explains in his preface to “Nicholas Nickleby”) to a supposititious little boy who had been left with a widowed mother who didn’t know what to do with him; the poor lady had thought, as a means of thawing the tardy compassion of her relations on his behalf, of sending him to a Yorkshire school. “I was the poor lady’s friend, travelling that way; and if the recipient of the letter could inform me of a school in his neighbourhood, the writer would be very much obliged.” The result of this “pious fraud” (as Dickens himself termed it) has become a matter of history. The person to whom the missive was addressed was a farmer (since identified as John S——, of Broadiswood), who appears in the story as honest John Browdie. Not being at home when the novelist called upon him, he journeyed through the snow to the inn where Dickens was staying, and entreated him to advise the widow to refrain from sending her boy to any of those wretched schools “while there’s a harse to hoold in a’ Lunnun, or a goother to lie asleep in!” The old coaching-house where this memorable interview is believed to have taken place was the still existing Unicorn at Bowes. Another inn associated with this tour of inspection is the King’s Head, Barnard Castle,[69] where Dickens made a brief stay, and where he observed, across the way, the name of “Humphreys, clockmaker,” over a shop door, this suggesting the title of his next work, “Master Humphrey’s Clock.”
It was at Bowes where he obtained material which served him for depicting the “internal economy” of Dotheboys Hall, in the school presided over by William Shaw, who, it has since transpired, was by no means the worst of his tribe. As a matter of fact, he won respect from his neighbours, and is remembered by many of his pupils (some of whom attained high positions in various professions) as a worthy and much injured man. In “Nicholas Nickleby,” however, he became a scapegoat for others who thoroughly deserved the punishment inflicted upon Shaw. Even to-day many of the people at Bowes regard Dickens’s attack as unjust so far as that particular schoolmaster is concerned, and visitors to the place are advised to refrain from alluding to Dotheboys Hall.
There is no lack of evidence to prove the general accuracy of the novelist’s description, and to him we owe a deep debt of gratitude for so successful an attempt to annihilate those terrible “Caves of Despair.” Bowes is situated high up on the moorland, and may now be reached by railway from Barnard Castle. The village consists principally of one street nearly three-quarters of a mile in length, running east to west, and is lighted with oil lamps, under a village lighting committee. Shaw’s house (known generally as Dotheboys Hall until recent times) stands at the western extremity of Bowes. The present tenants have altered somewhat the original appearance of the house by attempting to convert it into a kind of suburban villa—in fact, it is now called “The Villa.” Prior to these structural changes it was a long, low building of two storeys. The classroom and dormitories were demolished a few years ago, but the original pump, at which Shaw’s pupils used to wash, is still in the yard at the back of the house, and an object of great interest to tourists.
Nearly all provincial towns in England were visited by Dickens during his acting and reading tours, and many can boast of more intimate relations with the novelist. It was from Liverpool, on January 4, 1842, that he embarked on board the Britannia for the United States—his first memorable visit to Transatlantic shores—and in 1844 he presided at a great public meeting held in the Mechanics’ Institution, then sadly in need of funds, on which occasion he delivered a powerful speech in support of the objects of that foundation. Referring to the building, he said: “It is an enormous place. The lecture-room ... will accommodate over thirteen hundred people.... I should think it an easy place to speak in, being a semicircle with seats rising one above another to the ceiling.”
Respecting this function, we learn from a contemporary report that long before the hour appointed for the opening of the doors the street was crowded with persons anxious to obtain admission, so anxious were they to see and hear the young man (then only in his thirty-third year) who had given them “Pickwick,” “Oliver Twist,” and “Nicholas Nickleby.” At the termination of his speech a vote of thanks was accorded to the novelist, who, in replying thereto, concluded his acknowledgments by quoting the words of Tiny Tim, “God bless us every one.” An interesting incident lay in the fact that the young lady who presided at the pianoforte was Miss Christina Weller, who, with her father, was introduced to the author of “Pickwick,” thus causing considerable merriment.