"I am here in Kent and Christendome,
Among the Muses where I read and rhyme".
Hither there comes, in Tennyson's "Queen Mary", to Sir Thomas Wyatt, the younger, his man William, with news of "three thousand men on Penenden heath all calling after you, and your worship's name heard into Maidstone market, and your worship the first man in Kent". And Wyatt sets out to lead a rising which will end on Tower Hill, and setting out, looks back and cries:
"Ah, grey old castle of Allington, green field
Beside the brimming Medway, it may chance
That I shall never look upon you more".
"The brimming Medway."—the epithet is as just as Tennyson's descriptive epithet almost invariably proves to be. For at Allington the Medway, which from Aylesford Bridge to Allington Lock has dwindled to a narrow stream, swells out into a broad expanse, where many boats can easily move abreast. If the Cloisterham Weir of Edwin Drood were really the nearest weir on the Medway to Rochester, then Allington Lock would be the place. But it has been pointed out on an earlier page that the distances do not tally in the novel and in actuality, and Dickens may have had in mind the weir on Snodland Brook.
MAIDSTONE, ALL SAINTS' CHURCH AND THE PALACE
The country round Maidstone abounds in the "happy valleys" portrayed in the epilogue to the "Princess", with "grey halls alone among their massive groves", and "here and there a rustic tower Half lost in belts of hop and breadths of wheat". The gyres and loops of the Medway, too, afford through the screen of woodlands and orchards "the shimmering glimpses of a stream". To the credulous enthusiasm of an early eighteenth-century native of Strood, that Anne Pratt who did for English wild flowers what White of Selborne did for English wild birds, "travellers who have beheld in other lands the various scenes of culture—the olive grounds of Spain or Syria, the vineyards of Italy, the cotton plantations of India, or the rose fields of the East—have generally agreed that not one of them all equals in beauty our English hop gardens". To Dickens himself such a panegyric of the Kentish hop gardens would have scarcely seemed exaggeration, but he would have hastened to add the dismal antithesis of the missionary bishop—"Only man is vile". He had barely settled-in at Gadshill Place when he wrote:—
"Hop-picking is going on, and people sleep in the garden, and breathe in at the keyhole of the house door. I have been amazed, before this year, by the number of miserable base wretches, hardly able to crawl, who go hop-picking. I find it is a superstition that the dust of the newly picked hop, falling freshly into the throat, is a cure for consumption. So the poor creatures drag themselves along the roads, and sleep under wet hedges, and get cured soon and finally."
The county town of Kent is situated not only on the Medway, but on the pilgrim road to Canterbury, and of a monastic hospital for pilgrims and other poor travellers there still survive some relics. Overlooking the river stand some fine old houses, and the conspicuous grey square tower of All Saints, built by the proud Archbishop Courtenay, the enemy of Wicliffe, in the fourteenth century. Here is the tomb of Grocyn, that "lord of splendid lore Orient from old Hellas' shore", who was appointed master of the collegiate church in 1506. One of the sixteen palaces that the Archbishops of Canterbury could boast in days gone by is preserved as the local school of science and art, a dedication to public use which commemorates the Jubilee of Queen Victoria in 1887. The Corporation Museum is an even more interesting and beautiful structure. It was Chillington Manor House, a seat of the Cobham family, and, though it has had a new wing annexed to it, it is an exceptionally well preserved and beautiful example of Elizabethan domestic architecture, with its latticed windows, jutting gables, elaborately moulded timber, and pillared chimneys. In the panel of an oak fireplace is a carved head of Dickens, by a local carver named Hughes, who was employed at Gadshill Place. To Maidstone Jail Dickens proposed to carry Sir Luke Fildes, in order that he might make a picture of Jasper in the condemned cell, and do something which would surpass Cruikshank's illustration to Oliver Twist, in which Fagin's terror-stricken vigil in the murderer's cell is portrayed.
At Maidstone the southern limit may be considered to have been reached of the district of Kent which can be distinguished as "Dickens-land" in the most intimate sense, as lying within the radius of the novelist's habitual walks and drives from his residence at Gadshill. It does not enter into the scope of this brief essay to describe topographically other parts of Kent. But it will be excusable to glance very slightly at Dickens's associations with Canterbury—though this is the subject of a separate monograph in this series—Broadstairs, Deal, Dover, and the famous London-to-Dover road through Rochester, Chatham, and Canterbury.