THE ALBION HOTEL, BROADSTAIRS. ([Page 189].)
Dickens stayed at this hotel on several occasions, and in 1839 lodged at a house “two doors from the Albion,” and there “Nickleby” was finished.

The Ship still flourishes as a “family and commercial hotel and posting-house, commanding extensive views of the Solway Firth and the Scottish hills.” Dickens thought Allonby the dullest place he ever entered, rendered additionally dull by “the monotony of an idle sea,” and in sad contrast to the expectations formed of it. “A little place with fifty houses,” said Dickens in a letter home, “five bathing-machines, five girls in straw hats, five men in straw hats, and no other company. The little houses are all in half-mourning—yellow stone or white stone, and black; and it reminds me of what Broadstairs might have been if it had not inherited a cliff, and had been an Irishman.”

In the opinion of Mr. Francis Goodchild, Allonby was the most “delightful place ever seen.” “It was what you might call a primitive place. Large? No, it was not large. Who ever expected it would be large? Shape? What a question to ask! No shape. Shops? Yes, of course (quite indignant). How many? Who ever went into a place to count the shops? Ever so many. Six? Perhaps. A library? Why, of course (indignant again). Good collection of books? Most likely—couldn’t say—had seen nothing in it but a pair of scales. Any reading-room? Of course there was a reading-room! Where? Where! Why, over there. Where was over there? Why, there! Let Mr. Idle carry his eye to that bit of waste ground above high-water mark, where the rank grass and loose stones were most in a litter, and he could see a sort of a long ruinous brick loft, next door to a ruinous brick outhouse, which loft had a ladder outside to get up by. That was the reading-room, and if Mr. Idle didn’t like the idea of a weaver’s shuttle throbbing under a reading-room, that was his look-out. He was not to dictate, Mr. Goodchild supposed (indignant again), to the company.” In short, he declared that “if you wanted to be primitive, you could be primitive here, and if you wanted to be idle, you could be idle here,” as were the local fishermen, who (apparently) never fished, but “got their living entirely by looking at the ocean.” The “public buildings” at Allonby were the two small bridges over the brook “which crawled or stopped between the houses and the sea.” As if to make amends for these shortcomings, Nature provided fine sunsets at Allonby, “when the low, flat beach, with its pools of water and its dry patches, changed into long bars of silver and gold in various states of burnishing,” “and there were fine views, on fine days, of the Scottish coast.”[79]

From Allonby the two apprentices proceeded to the county town, Carlisle, putting up at “a capital inn,” kept by a man named Breach.

LAWN HOUSE, BROADSTAIRS. ([Page 193].)
Dickens occupied Lawn House in the summer of 1840, and the archway is mentioned in a letter to his wife dated September 3, 1850.

Carlisle “looked congenially and delightfully idle.... On market morning Carlisle woke up amazingly, and became (to the two idle apprentices) disagreeably and reproachfully busy. There were its cattle-market, its sheep-market, and its pig-market down by the river, with raw-boned and shock-headed Rob Roys hiding their Lowland dresses beneath heavy plaids, prowling in and out among the animals, and flavouring the air with fumes of whisky. There was its corn-market down the main street, with hum of chaffering over open sacks. There was its general market in the street, too, with heather brooms, on which the purple flower still flourished, and heather baskets primitive and fresh to behold. With women trying on clogs and caps at open stalls, and ‘Bible stalls’ adjoining. With ‘Dr. Mantle’s Dispensary for the Cure of all Human Maladies and no charge for advice,’ and with ‘Dr. Mantle’s Laboratory of Medical, Chemical, and Botanical Science,’ both healing institutions established on one pair of trestles, one board, and one sun-blind. With the renowned phrenologist from London begging to be favoured (at 6d. each) with the company of clients of both sexes, to whom, on examination of their heads, he would make revelations ‘enabling him or her to know themselves.’”[80] Maryport, a few miles south of Allonby, was also inspected, and is described as “a region which is a bit of waterside Bristol, with a slice of Wapping, a seasoning of Wolverhampton, and a garnish of Portsmouth”—in fact, a kind of topographical salad. To the supposititious query addressed to it by one of the apprentices, “Will you come and be idle with me?” busy Maryport metaphorically shakes its head, and sagaciously answers in the negative, for she declares: “I am a great deal too vaporous, and a great deal too rusty, and a great deal too muddy, and a great deal too dirty altogether; and I have ships to load, and pitch and tar to boil, and iron to hammer, and steam to get up, and smoke to make, and stone to quarry, and fifty other disagreeable things to do, and I can’t be idle with you.” Thus thrown upon his own resources, this idle apprentice goes “into jagged uphill and downhill streets, where I am in the pastry-cook’s shop at one moment, and next moment in savage fastnesses of moor and morass, beyond the confines of civilization, and I say to those murky and black-dusty streets: ‘Will you come and be idle with me?’ To which they reply: ‘No, we can’t indeed, for we haven’t the spirits, and we are startled by the echo of your feet on the sharp pavement, and we have so many goods in our shop-windows which nobody wants, and we have so much to do for a limited public which never comes to us to be done for, that we are altogether out of sorts, and can’t enjoy ourselves with anyone.’ So I go to the Post-office and knock at the shutter, and I say to the Postmaster: ‘Will you come and be idle with me?’ This invitation is refused in cynical terms: ‘No, I really can’t, for I live, as you may see, in such a very little Post-office, and pass my life behind such a very little shutter, that my hand, when I put it out, is as the hand of a giant crammed through the window of a dwarf’s house at a fair, and I am a mere Post-office anchorite in a cell made too small for him, and I can’t get in, even if I would.’”[81] Maryport of to-day differs considerably from Maryport of nearly half a century since, and it is doubtful if its inhabitants will recognise the presentment.

Hesket-New-Market, “that rugged old village on the Cumberland Fells,” was included in this itinerary of irresponsible travelling, and of the ancient inn where Idle and Goodchild sojourned, and of the contents of their apartments, we have quite a pre-Raphaelite picture:

“The ceiling of the drawing-room was so crossed and recrossed by beams of unequal lengths, radiating from a centre in the corner, that it looked like a broken star-fish.... It had a snug fireside, and a couple of well-curtained windows, looking out upon the wild country behind the house. What it most developed was an unexpected taste for little ornaments and nick-nacks, of which it contained a most surprising number.... There were books, too, in this room.... It was very pleasant to see these things in such a lonesome byplace; so very agreeable to find these evidences of taste, however homely, that went beyond the beautiful cleanliness and trimness of the house; so fanciful to imagine what a wonder the room must be to the little children born in the gloomy village—what grand impressions of it those of them who became wanderers over the earth would carry away; and how, at distant ends of the world, some old voyagers would die, cherishing the belief that the finest apartment known to man was once in the Hesket-New-Market Inn, in rare old Cumberland.”[82] Dickens does not give the name of the inn, but I have ascertained that it was the Queen’s Head, and that it is now a dwelling-house, having the curious-timbered ceiling intact, and still retaining its old-fashioned character. An enclosure, fronting the building, has been planted with shrubs by the present occupier, where it used to be paved and open to the street—“a sinuous and stony gutter winding uphill and round the corner,” as Dickens termed the roadway through the still quaint and interesting village of Hesket-New-Market.

On September 12, 1857, Dickens announced that he and his companion were on their way to Doncaster, en route for London. Breaking the journey at Lancaster, they stopped at another delightful hostelry, the King’s Arms in Market Street. “We are in a very remarkable old house here,” wrote Dickens to his sister-in-law, “with genuine old rooms and an uncommonly quaint staircase. I have a state bedroom, with two enormous red four-posters in it, each as big as Charley’s room at Gad’s Hill.”[83] A more detailed description, however, appears in the printed record, where we read that “the house was a genuine old house of a very quaint description, teeming with old carvings and beams, and panels, and having an excellent old staircase, with a gallery or upper staircase cut off from it by a curious fence-work of old oak, or of the old Honduras mahogany wood. It was, and is, and will be for many a long year to come, a remarkably picturesque house; and a certain grave mystery lurking in the depth of the old mahogany panels, as if they were so many deep pools of dark water—such, indeed, as they had been much among when they were trees—gave it a very mysterious character after nightfall.”[84]