The most salient feature in the Medway valley between Rochester and Maidstone is the height of Blue Bell, or Upper Bell. Here Dickens, who, as he said, had come to realize that the Rochester to Maidstone road passed through some of the most beautiful scenery in England, would often picnic with his visitors. Undulating slopes of pasture and cornfields, hop gardens, orchards, and woodlands, with many a deep-sunk lane embowered in overarching trees that rise from hedgerow clusters of dog-rose, ivy, and honeysuckle, and with snugly nestling homesteads and quaintly-cowled "oast-houses" sprinkled here and there, sweep across the valley, through which the river winds in sinuous curves, onwards to a long range of hills upon the skyline.
Somewhere in this district Dickens came across the types of the oldfashioned and jovially comfortable home of the English yeoman, represented by his Manor Farm, Dingley Dell, and of the little country town, represented by the Muggleton of Pickwick, in which local enthusiasm for cricket was ardent, if the standard of skill was somewhat low. The most plausible identification of the home of Mr. Wardle is with Cobtree Hall, which divides the parishes of Boxley and Allington, and it is probable that the original of Muggleton was Town Malling, which is also known as West Malling.
In the Jubilee Edition of Pickwick Mr. Charles Dickens the Younger introduced a woodcut of High Street, Town Malling, with a note to the following effect:—
"Muggleton, perhaps, is only to be taken as a fancy sketch of a small country town; but it is generally supposed, and probably with sufficient accuracy, that, if it is in any degree a portrait of any Kentish town, Town Malling, a great place for cricket in Mr. Pickwick's time, sat for it."
Town Malling does not correspond with the description of Muggleton in its distance from Rochester. It is only seven and a half, instead of fifteen miles, from Rochester. And it is not a corporate town. But:
"Everybody whose genius has a topographical bent knows perfectly well that Muggleton is a corporate town, with a mayor, burgess and freemen, and anybody who has consulted the addresses of the mayor to the freemen, or the freemen to the mayor, or both to the corporation, or all three to Parliament, will learn from thence what they ought to have known before, that Muggleton is an ancient and loyal borough, mingling a zealous advocacy of Christian principles with a devoted attachment to commercial rights; in demonstration whereof, the mayor, corporation, and other inhabitants have presented, at divers times, no fewer than one thousand four hundred and twenty petitions against the continuance of negro slavery abroad, and an equal number against any interference with the factory system at home; sixty-eight in favour of the sale of livings in the Church, and eighty-six for abolishing Sunday trading in the street."
If Town Malling has not had so distinguished a political history as that which Dickens assigned to Muggleton, it has a pretty cricket ground, not far removed from the High Street, and the reputation of having in past years distinguished itself in the local cricket of this district of Kent. It is not difficult to believe, then, that Dumkins and Podder here made their gallant stand for All Muggleton against the Dingley Dellers, and that at the Swan—otherwise the Blue Lion—the Pickwick fellowship shared the conviviality of the rival teams, until Mr. Snodgrass's notes of the evening's transactions faded away into a blur in which there was an indistinct reference to "broiled bones" and "cold without". The stately ruins of a Benedictine Abbey, founded by Bishop Gundulf, give to the town an attraction of a severer kind.
From Town Malling to Cobtree Hall, supposing the double identification to be correct, should be a walk of not above two miles "through shady lanes and sequestered footpaths", the delightful scenery of which made Mr. Pickwick feel regret to arrive in the main street of "Muggleton". The distance, however, is in fact something more than two miles as the crow flies. Cobtree Hall is a green-muffled Elizabethan mansion, of red brick, faced with stone, and looks out over an undulating country of orchards and hop fields. It has been altered and enlarged since the days of Pickwick, but the kitchen is just such another large, oldfashioned kitchen as befits the Christmas games and wassail that had been kept up at Manor Farm, Dingley Dell, "by old Wardle's forefathers from time immemorial". The dining-room, though modernized, has a massive marble mantlepiece not unsuited to that "capacious chimney up which you could have driven one of the new patent cabs, wheels and all", and in which a blazing fire used to roar every evening, not only when its warmth was grateful, but for a symbol, as it were, of old Wardle's attachment to his fireside. This was the kind of antiquity which made the most direct appeal to Dickens's sentiment and imagination—not a remote and historic antiquity, but the furthest extent of a living link between the Present and the Past. In many an old house of Kentish yeoman or squire Dickens would have seen some such long, dark-panelled room as the best sitting-room at Manor Farm, with four-branched, massive silver candlesticks in all sorts of recesses and on all kinds of brackets; with samplers and worsted landscapes of ancient date on the walls; with a very old lady in lofty cap and faded silk gown in the chimney corner, where she had sat on her little stool as a girl more than half a century before, and with a hearty, rubicund host presiding over a mighty bowl of wassail, something smaller than an ordinary washhouse copper, in which the hot apples would "hiss and bubble with a rich look and a jolly sound that were perfectly irresistible". Or when the carpet was up, the candles burning brightly, and family, guests, and servants were all ranged in eager lines, longing for the signal to start an oldfashioned country dance as, from a shady bower of holly and evergreens at the upper end of the room, the two best fiddles and only harp of the nearest market town prepared to strike up, it is no wonder that such a lover of unspoilt, natural manners as Boz declared, "If any of the old English yeomen had turned into fairies when they died, it was just the place in which they would have held their revels."
A triangular piece of ground, with a sprinkling of elms about it, is all that is left of the rookery in which Mr. Tupman met with an accident from the unskilful marksmanship of Winkle. At the back of the house is the pond where Mr. Winkle's reputation as a sportsman led him into another catastrophe, and his skating exposed itself as of anything but a graceful and "swan-like" style; where, too, Mr. Pickwick revived the sliding propensities of his boyhood with infinite zest until the ice gave way with a "sharp, smart crack", and Mr. Pickwick's hat, gloves, and handkerchief, floating on the surface, were all of Mr. Pickwick that anyone could see.
Cobtree Hall, it has been mentioned, divides the parishes of Boxley and Allington, the initials of which are carved on a beam in the kitchen that suggests Phiz's plate of "Christmas Eve at Mr. Wardle's". In Aylesford the tomb of the prototype, according to local tradition, of "Mr. Wardle" bears the inscription, "Also to the memory of Mr. W. Spong, late of Cobtree, in the Parish of Boxley, who died November 15th, 1839". Boxley village is near the ancient Pilgrims' Road to Canterbury, and here Alfred Tennyson stayed in 1842. Park House, nearer the Medway, was the home of Edward Lushington, who married Tennyson's sister Cecilia, and in its grounds Tennyson found the setting for the prologue to the "Princess". The "happy faces" of "the multitude, a thousand heads", by which the "sloping pasture" was "sown", under "broad ambrosial aisles of lofty lime", had probably come from Maidstone on the annual jaunt of that town's Mechanics' Institute. The village of Allington stands on the other side of the Medway, though the boundaries of the parish extend beyond the right bank of the river. Allington Castle, which the Medway half-encircles with a sweeping bend, was one of the seven chief castles of Kent. It was here that Sir Thomas Wyatt, the elder, diplomatist, poet, and lover of Anne Boleyn, who with the gallant and ill-fated Surrey "preluded", in a more exact sense than it could be said of Chaucer, "those melodious bursts that fill the spacious times of great Elizabeth", was able to proclaim, in an epistle to "Mine own John Poins":