“They used to say to one another sometimes, Supposing all the children upon earth were to die, would the flowers and the water and the sky be sorry? They believed they would be sorry. For, said they, the buds are the children of the flowers, and the little playful streams that gambol down the hillsides are the children of the water, and the smallest bright specks playing at hide-and-seek in the sky all night must surely be the children of the stars; and they would all be grieved to see their playmates, the children of men, no more.
“There was one clear shining star that used to come out in the sky before the rest, near the church spire, above the graves. It was larger and more beautiful, they thought, than all the others, and every night they watched for it, standing hand in hand at a window. Whoever saw it first cried out, ‘I see the star!’ and often they cried out both together, knowing so well when it would rise, and where. So they grew to be such friends with it that, before lying down in their beds, they always looked out once again to bid it good-night; and when they were turning round to sleep they used to say, ‘God bless the star!’”
FORT PITT, CHATHAM. ([Page 18].)
The playground of Dickens in his childhood, and the scene of the duel in “Pickwick.”
The Chatham days were replete with innocent delights for little Charles, whose young life overflowed with the happiness resulting therefrom. He and his schoolfellows often went to see the sham fights and siege operations on the “Lines,” and he enjoyed many a ramble with his sister and nurse in the fields about Fort Pitt; and “the sky was so blue, the sun was so bright, the water was so sparkling, the leaves were so green, the flowers were so lovely, and they heard such singing birds and saw so many butterflies, that everything was beautiful.” In “The Child’s Story,” whence these extracts are culled, we find the following undoubted allusions to some of the juvenile pleasures in which the children indulged while at Chatham: “They had the merriest games that ever were played.... They had holidays, too, and ‘twelfth-cakes,’ and parties where they danced till midnight, and real theatres, where they saw palaces of real gold and silver rise out of the real earth, and saw all the wonders of the world at once. As to friends, they had such dear friends and so many of them that I want the time to reckon them up.”[12] At home there were picture-books and toys—“the finest toys in the world and the most astonishing picture-books”—and, above all, in the little room adjoining his bedchamber a small library, consisting of the works of Fielding, Smollett, Defoe, Goldsmith, the “Arabian Nights,” and “Tales of the Genii,” which the boy perused with avidity over and over again. “They kept alive my fancy,” he said, as David Copperfield, “and my hope of something beyond that place and time ... and did me no harm, for whatever harm was in some of them was not there for me; I knew nothing of it.”[13] In referring afterwards to the “readings” and “imaginations” which he described as brought away from Chatham, he again observes with David: “The picture always rises in my mind of a summer evening, the boys at play in the churchyard, and I, sitting on my bed, reading as if for life. Every barn in the neighbourhood, every stone in the church, and every foot of the churchyard, had some association of its own in my mind connected with these books, and stood for some locality made famous in them”[14]—words that were written down as fact some years before they found their way into the story.
Happily for the boy, he remained in ignorance of the changes impending at home, and unconscious of the fact that he was about to relinquish for ever the delectations afforded by those daily visions of his childhood; the ships on the Medway, the military paradings and manœuvres, the woods and pastures, the delightful walks with his father to Rochester and Cobham—all were to vanish, as Forster says, “like a dream”; for in 1822 John Dickens was recalled to Somerset House, and in the winter of that year he departed by coach for London, accompanied by his wife and children, excepting Charles, who was left behind for a few weeks longer in the care of the worthy schoolmaster, William Giles. Presently the day arrived when the lonesome lad followed his parents to the Metropolis, leaving behind him, alas! everything that gave his “ailing little life its picturesqueness or sunshine”; for he was really a very sickly boy, and for that reason unable to join with zest in the more vigorous sports of his playfellows, which explains his fondness for reading, so unusual in lads of his age.
Little Charles was only ten years old when he bade farewell to Chatham, and took his place as a passenger in the stage-coach “Commodore.” “There was no other inside passenger,” he afterwards observed, “and I consumed my sandwiches in solitude and dreariness, and it rained hard all the way, and I thought life sloppier than I expected to find it.” Like Philip Pirrip, he might with more justice have thought that henceforth he “was for London and greatness.” Undoubtedly he experienced the same sensations as those of that youthful hero who, under similar circumstances, realized that “all beyond was so unknown and great that in a moment with a strong heave and sob I broke into tears.”[15] Reminiscences of that memorable journey are recorded in one of that charming series of papers contributed by him to All the Year Round under the general title of “The Uncommercial Traveller.” Dickens here calls his boyhood’s home “Dullborough”—“most of us come from Dullborough who come from a country town”—informing us that as he left the place “in the days when there were no railways in the land,” he left it in a stage-coach, and further takes us into his confidence by saying that he had never forgotten, nor lost the smell of, the damp straw in which he was packed, “like game, and forwarded, carriage paid, to the Cross Keys, Wood Street, Cheapside, London.” These words were written in June, 1860, and a few months later, when penning the twentieth chapter of “Great Expectations,” he again recalled the episode: “The journey from our town to the Metropolis was a journey of about five hours. It was a little past mid-day when the four-horse stage-coach by which I was a passenger got into the ravel of traffic frayed out about the Cross Keys, Wood Street, Cheapside, London.... The coach that had carried me away was melodiously called ‘Timpson’s Blue-Eyed Maid,’ and belonged to Timpson, at the coach-office up-street.... Timpson’s was a moderate-sized coach-office (in fact, a little coach-office), with an oval transparency in the window, which looked beautiful by night, representing one of Timpson’s coaches in the act of passing a milestone on the London road with great velocity, completely full inside and out, and all the passengers dressed in the first style of fashion, and enjoying themselves tremendously.” He found, on a later visit to Rochester and Chatham, that Timpson’s had disappeared, for “Pickford had come and knocked Timpson’s down,” and “had knocked two or three houses down on each side of Timpson’s, and then had knocked the whole into one great establishment....”[16] The late Mr. Robert Langton states that Timpson was really Simpson (the coach proprietor at Chatham), and that the “Blue-Eyed Maid” was a veritable coach, to which reference is also made in the third chapter of “Little Dorrit.”
If, as Forster tells us, the “Commodore,” and not the “Blue-Eyed Maid,” conveyed little Charles to London, it was the identical vehicle by which Mr. Pickwick and his companions travelled from the Golden Cross at Charing Cross to Rochester, as duly set forth in the opening chapter of “The Pickwick Papers”; this coach was driven by old Cholmeley (or Chumley), who is said to have been the original of Tony Weller, and concerning whom some amusing anecdotes are related in “Nimrod’s Northern Tour.”
THE GOLDEN CROSS, CHARING CROSS, CIRCA 1827. ([Page 22].)
Showing the hotel as it was in the Pickwickian days.
From a print in the collection of Councillor Newton, Hampstead.