Chatham, on the river Medway, derives its name from the Saxon word Ceteham or Cættham, meaning “village of cottages.” It is anything but a “village” now, having since that remote age developed into a river port and a populous fortified town. Remains of Roman villas have been found in the neighbourhood, thus testifying to its antiquity. Chatham is one of the principal royal shipbuilding establishments in the kingdom. The dockyard was founded by Elizabeth before the threatened invasion of the Spanish Armada, and removed to its present site in 1662; it is now nearly two miles in length, and controlled by an Admiral-Superintendent, with a staff of artisans and labourers numbering about five thousand. Dickens describes and mentions Chatham in several of his writings, and in one of the earliest he refers to it by the name of “Mudfog.”[2]
In “The Seven Poor Travellers” he says of Chatham: “I call it this town because if anybody present knows to a nicety where Rochester ends and Chatham begins, it is more than I do.”[3]
Mr. Pickwick’s impressions of Chatham and the neighbouring towns of Rochester, Strood, and Brompton were that the principal productions “appear to be soldiers, sailors, Jews, chalk, shrimps, officers, and dockyard men,” and that “the commodities chiefly exposed for sale in the public streets are marine stores, hard-bake, apples, flat-fish, and oysters.” He observed that the streets presented “a lively and animated appearance, occasioned chiefly by the conviviality of the military.” “The consumption of tobacco in these towns,” Mr. Pickwick opined, “must be very great, and the smell which pervades the streets must be exceedingly delicious to those who are extremely fond of smoking. A superficial traveller might object to the dirt, which is their leading characteristic, but to those who view it as an indication of traffic and commercial prosperity it is truly gratifying.” Were Mr. Pickwick to revisit Chatham, he would find many of these characteristics still prevailing, and could not fail to note, also, that during the interval of more than sixty years the town had undergone material changes in the direction of modern improvements. When poor little David Copperfield fled from his distressing experiences at Murdstone and Grinby’s, hoping to meet with a welcome from Betsy Trotwood at Dover, he wended his weary way through Rochester; and as he toiled into Chatham, it seemed to him in the night’s aspect “a mere dream of chalk, and drawbridges, and mastless ships in a muddy river, roofed like Noah’s arks.”[4]
NORFOLK (NOW CLEVELAND) STREET, FITZROY SQUARE. ([Page 7].)
Dickens and his parents resided in Norfolk Street in 1816, after their removal from Hawke Street, Portsea.
Dickens himself, when a boy, must have seen the place frequently under similar conditions. The impressions he then received of Chatham and the neighbourhood were permanently fixed upon the mental retina, to be recalled again and again when penning his stories and descriptive pieces. In an article written by him in collaboration with Richard Hengist Horne, he supplies a picture of Chatham as it subsequently appeared when the military element on the main thoroughfares seemed paramount: “Men were only noticeable by scores, by hundreds, by thousands, rank and file, companies, regiments, detachments, vessels full for exportation. They walked about the streets in rows or bodies, carrying their heads in exactly the same way, and doing exactly the same thing with their limbs. Nothing in the shape of clothing was made for an individual, everything was contracted for by the millions. The children of Israel were established in Chatham, as salesmen, outfitters, tailors, old clothesmen, army and navy accoutrement makers, bill discounters, and general despoilers of the Christian world, in tribes rather than in families.”[5]
John Dickens’s official connection with the Navy Pay Department offered facilities for little Charles to roam unchecked about the busy dockyard, where he experienced delight in watching the ropemakers, anchor-smiths, and others at their labours, and in gazing with curious awe at the convict hulks (or prison ships), and where he found constant delight in observing the innumerable changes and variety of scenes; on one day witnessing the bright display of military tactics on Chatham “Lines,” on another enjoying a sail on the Medway with his father, when on duty bound for Sheerness in the Commissioners’ yacht, a quaint, high-sterned sailing-vessel, pierced with circular ports, and dating from the seventeenth century; she was broken up at Chatham in 1868.
The boy unconsciously stored up the pictures of life, and character, and scenery thus brought to his notice, to be recalled and utilized as valuable material by-and-bye. Of the great dockyard he afterwards wrote: “It resounded with the noise of hammers beating upon iron, and the great sheds or slips under which the mighty men-of-war are built loomed business-like when contemplated from the opposite side of the river.... Great chimneys smoking with a quiet—almost a lazy—air, like giants smoking tobacco; and the giant shears moored off it, looking meekly and inoffensively out of proportion, like the giraffe of the machinery creation.”[6]
The famous Chatham Lines (constituting the fortifications of the town), are immortalized in “Pickwick” as the scene of the review at which Mr. Pickwick and his friends were present and got into difficulties; and the field adjacent to Fort Pitt (now the Chatham Military Hospital, standing on high ground near the railway station), was the locality selected for the intended duel between the irate Dr. Slammer and the craven (but innocent) Mr. Winkle, both field and the contiguous land surrounding Fort Pitt being now a public recreation ground, whence is obtainable a fine panoramic view of Chatham and Rochester. The “Lines” are today locally understood as referring to an open space near Fort Pitt, which is used as an exercising ground for the soldiers at the barracks near by. All this portion of the country possessed great attractions for Dickens in later years; it was rendered familiar to him when, as a lad, he accompanied his father in walks about the locality, thus hallowed by old associations.
Ordnance Terrace, Chatham, retains much the same aspect it possessed at the time of John Dickens’s residence there (1817-1821)—a row of three-storied houses, prominently situated on high ground within a short distance of the Chatham railway station. The Dickens abode was the second house in the terrace (now No. 11), whose front is now overgrown with a Virginia creeper, and so redeems its bareness. In describing the place, the late Mr. W. R. Hughes says: “It has the dining-room on the left-hand side of the entrance and the drawing-room on the first floor, and is altogether a pleasantly-situated, comfortable and respectable dwelling.” At Ordnance Terrace, we are assured by Forster, it was that little Charles (“a very queer, small boy,” as he afterwards described himself at this period) lived with his parents from his fifth to his ninth year; the child’s “first desire for knowledge, and his greatest passion for reading, were awakened by his mother, who taught him the first rudiments, not only of English, but also, a little later, of Latin.” The same authority states that he and his sister Fanny presently supplemented these home studies by attending a preparatory day-school in Rome Lane (now Railway Street), and that when revisiting Chatham in his manhood he tried to discover the place, found it had been pulled down “ages” before to make room for a new street; but there arose, nevertheless, “a not dim impression that it had been over a dyer’s shop, that he went up steps to it, that he had frequently grazed his knees in doing so, and that, in trying to scrape the mud off a very unsteady little shoe, he generally got his leg over the scraper.” Other recollections of the Ordnance Terrace days flashed upon him when engaged upon his “Boz” sketches; for example, the old lady in the sketch entitled “Our Parish” was drawn from a Mrs. Newnham who lived at No. 5 in the Terrace, and the original of the Half-Pay Captain (in the same sketch) was another near neighbour: at No. 1 there resided a winsome, golden-haired maiden named Lucy Stroughill, whom he regarded as his little sweetheart, and who figures as “Golden Lucy” in one of his Christmas stories,[7] while her brother George, “a frank, open, and somewhat daring boy,” is believed to have inspired the creation of James Steerforth in “David Copperfield.”