"I got frost-bitten by walking continually in the snow, and getting wet in the feet daily. My boots hardened and softened, hardened and softened, my left foot swelled, and I still forced the boot on; sat in it to write, half the day; walked in it through the snow, the other half; forced the boot on again next morning; sat and walked again; and being accustomed to all sorts of changes in my feet, took no heed. At length, going out as usual, I fell lame on the walk, and had to limp home dead lame, through the snow, for the last three miles—to the remarkable terror, by the way, of the two big dogs."
It is hardly necessary to say that Dickens never so absorbed the local spirit and genius of that part of rural England which he knew and loved best as the Brontës absorbed the spirit of the Yorkshire moorlands, or Mr. Hardy the spirit of Wessex, or Mr. Eden Phillpotts the spirit of Dartmoor, or Sir A. Quiller-Couch the spirit of the "Delectable Duchy". He was too busy and preoccupied a man for this, and had too much of his life and work behind him, when he made his permanent home in "Dickens-land". And Gadshill was too near to the bustle and stir of Chatham to furnish a purely idyllic environment or entirely unsophisticated rusticity. But it is not unduly fanciful to discover the influence of Kentish scenery, with its bright, clear atmosphere, its undulating slopes of green woodland and green hop fields, pink-and-white orchards, and golden harvests—the prettiest though not the most beautiful scenery in England—upon his conception of a typical
"English home—grey twilight pour'd
On dewy pastures, dewy trees,
Softer than sleep—all things in order stored,
A haunt of ancient Peace".
Though no local name is attached to it, and no local tradition identifies it with any particular spot, there is no difficulty in fixing in the very heart of "Dickens-land" the picture upon which the "Battle of Life" is opened: the joyous dance of two girls, "quite unconstrained and careless", "in one little orchard attached to an old stone house with a honeysuckle porch", "while some half-dozen peasant women standing on ladders, gathering the apples from the trees, stopped in their work to look down, and share their enjoyment".
"As they danced among the orchard trees, and down the groves of stems and back again, and twirled each other lightly round and round, the influence of their airy motion seemed to spread and spread, in the sunlighted scene, like an expanding circle in the water. Their streaming hair and fluttering skirts, the elastic grass beneath their feet, the boughs that rustled in the morning air—the flushing leaves, their speckled shadows on the soft green ground—the balmy wind that swept along the landscape, glad to turn the distant windmill, cheerily—everything between the two girls, and the man and team at plough upon the ridge of land, where they showed against the sky as if they were the last things in the world—seemed dancing too."
Something, too, of the love of good cheer, quaint old Christmas customs, of junketings in ancient farmhouse kitchens and the parlours of ancient hostelries, which has made Dickens the early Victorian apostle of Yuletide "wassail", can be derived from his having "powlert up and down" in a county abounding with comfortable manor houses and cosy inns. It is a ripe and mellow tradition of good cheer, that is quite distinct from the bovine stolidity of a harvest home in George Eliot's Loamshire or the crude animalism of Meredith's Gaffer Gammon. For Kent, even from the time of Cæsar's Commentaries, has been "the civil'st place of all the isle".
That is the aspect of Dickens's country on the one side—the side which, some years before he established himself at Gadshill, he mapped out, already knowing it intimately, to show to Forster in a brief excursion:
"You will come down booked for Maidstone (I will meet you at Paddock-wood), and we will go thither in company over a most beautiful little line of railroad. The eight miles walk from Maidstone to Rochester, and a visit to the Druidical altar on the wayside, are charming. This could be accomplished on the Tuesday; and Wednesday we might look about us at Chatham, coming home by Cobham on Thursday."
The other side—the dreary marshes lying between the Medway and the Thames, a dark, flat wilderness intersected by dykes and mounds and gates—had associations not less intimate. In David Copperfield Dickens transferred the dreams and the events of his childhood to an alien setting. In Great Expectations he invents a fictitious story in harmony with scenes in which he delighted to retrace his childish memories. Again, the amphibian creatures which he lightly sketches in Great Expectations, and more elaborately in Our Mutual Friend, had first impressed themselves on his imagination as he rambled, a tiny, eager-eyed boy, about the dockyards and waterside alleys of Chatham, or made trips to Sheerness with "Mr. Micawber", that is to say, his father, in the Navy Pay yacht, though he long afterwards pursued his studies of them more exhaustively at Wapping and the Isle of Dogs, and in expeditions with the Thames police. It was from a walk with Leech through Chatham by-streets that he gathered the hint of Charley Hexam and his father, for Our Mutual Friend, from the sight of "the uneducated father in fustian and the educated boy in spectacles".