If a brief note in the diary (under date October 31, 1838) may be accepted as evidence, the travellers stayed at the White Lion in Factory Road, Wolverhampton. Twenty years later (August and November, 1858) Dickens gave public Readings here, and on the first occasion there was a performance of “Oliver Twist” at the local theatre, “in consequence (he opined) of the illustrious author honouring the town with his presence.” Writing at this time of the appearance of the country through which he had then passed, he said that it “looked at its blackest”; “all the furnaces seemed in full blast, and all the coal-pits to be working.... It is market-day here (Wolverhampton), and the ironmasters are standing out in the street (where they always hold high change), making such an iron hum and buzz that they confuse me horribly. In addition there is a bellman announcing something—not the Readings, I beg to say—and there is an excavation being made in the centre of the open place, for a statue, or a pump, or a lamppost, or something or other, round which all the Wolverhampton boys are yelling and struggling.”[94]
Reverting to the tour of 1838, Dickens and “Phiz” left Wolverhampton for Shrewsbury (the next stage), making their quarters at the old-fashioned Lion Hotel, which establishment the novelist revisited during the provincial Reading tour of 1858, when he thus described the inn to his elder daughter:
“We have the strangest little rooms (sitting-room and two bedrooms altogether), the ceilings of which I can touch with my hand. The windows bulge out over the street, as if they were little stern windows in a ship. And a door opens out of the sitting-room on to a little open gallery with plants in it, where one leans over a queer old rail, and looks all downhill and slantwise at the crookedest black and yellow old houses, all manner of shapes except straight shapes. To get into this room we come through a china closet; and the man in laying the cloth has actually knocked down, in that repository, two geraniums and Napoleon Bonaparte.” This quaint establishment, alas! has been modernized (if not entirely rebuilt) since those days, and presents nothing of the picturesqueness that attracted the author of “Pickwick.” Shrewsbury, however, still retains and cherishes several of its “black and yellow” (i.e., half-timbered) houses, and it is probably this town which we find thus portrayed in the forty-sixth chapter of “The Old Curiosity Shop”: “In the streets were a number of old houses, built of a kind of earth or plaster, crossed and re-crossed in a great many directions with black beams, which gave them a remarkable and very ancient look. The doors, too, were arched and low, some with oaken portals and quaint benches, where the former inhabitants had sat on summer evenings. The windows were latticed in little diamond panes, that seemed to wink and blink upon the passengers as if they were dim of sight.” On the night of their arrival at Shrewsbury, Dickens and “Phiz” were present at a “bespeak” at the theatre, and witnessed a performance of “The Love Chase,” a ballet (“with a phenomenon!”),[95] followed by divers songs, and the play of “A Roland for an Oliver.” “It is a good theatre,” was the novelist’s comment, “but the actors are very funny. Browne laughed with such indecent heartiness at one point of the entertainment that an old gentleman in the next box suffered the most violent indignation. The bespeak party occupied two boxes; the ladies were full-dressed, and the gentlemen, to a man, in white gloves with flowers in their button-holes. It amused us mightily, and was really as like the Miss Snevellicci business as it could well be.”[96]
THE CORN EXCHANGE, ROCHESTER. ([Page 214].)
“It is oddly garnished with a queer old clock that projects over the pavement ... as if Time carried on business there and hung out his sign” (“Seven Poor Travellers”).
From the diary we learn that the friends journeyed by post-coach from Shrewsbury over the Welsh border to Llangollen, passing two aqueducts by the way—“beautiful road between the mountains—old abbey at the top of mountain, Denis Brien or Rook Castle—Hand Hotel—Mrs. Phillips—Good.” The parish of Llangollen is intersected by the celebrated aqueduct of Pont-y-Lycylltan, and contiguous thereto stands Valle Crucis Abbey. Thence the itinerary included Bangor, Capel Curig, Conway, Chester, Birkenhead, Manchester (Adelphi Hotel), and Cheadle. There is good reason for supposing that Dickens, during this tour, availed himself of the opportunity of visiting the peaceful and picturesque village of Tong, on the north-eastern borders of the county of Salop, and that he probably posted there from Shrewsbury; for he assured the late Archdeacon Lloyd that Tong Church is the veritable church described in “The Old Curiosity Shop” as the scene of little Nell’s death.
“It was a very aged, ghostly place; the church had been built many hundreds of years ago, and had once had a convent or monastery attached; for arches in ruins, remains of oriel windows, and fragments of blackened walls, were yet standing; while other portions of the old building, which had crumbled away and fallen down, were mingled with the churchyard earth and overgrown with grass, as if they too claimed a burying-place and sought to mix their ashes with the dust of men.” Tong Church was erected about the year 1411, and is a fine specimen of Gothic architecture of the Early Perpendicular period. Owing to its fine monuments it is called “The Westminster Abbey of the Midlands.” There yet remain the original oak choir-stalls with the miserere seats and carved poppy-heads; the old oak roof with its sculptured bosses; the painted screens in the aisles, of very rich workmanship; and the beautiful Vernon Chantry, called “The Golden Chapel,” from its costly ornamentation, referred to in the story as the “baronial chapel.” The sacred edifice underwent various reparations during the period between 1810 and 1838, still presenting, however, an exceedingly picturesque aspect when the novelist beheld it in the latter year. Although a more thorough restoration took place in 1892, we are assured that no old features have been destroyed, but doubtless much of the halo of antiquity, which imparts a poetical charm to such structures, is not so evident as of yore. That Dickens derived inspiration from Tong and its environment for the “local colouring” in chap. xlvi. and later chapters of “The Old Curiosity Shop” it is impossible to doubt.
THE GUILDHALL, ROCHESTER. ([Page 214].)
Where Pip was bound prentice to Joe Gargery. Hogarth and his friends played hopscotch under the colonnade in 1732.
In December, 1858, Dickens was entertained at a public dinner at the Castle Hotel, Coventry, on the occasion of receiving a gold repeater watch of special construction by the watchmakers of the town. This gift was tendered as a mark of gratitude for his Reading of the “Christmas Carol,” given a year previously in aid of the funds of the Coventry Institute. In acknowledging this testimonial the recipient said: