Great Yarmouth Nonconformists—Intellectual life—Dawson Turner—Astley Cooper—Hudson Gurney—Mrs. Bendish.
When David Copperfield, Dickens tells us, first caught sight of Yarmouth, it seemed to him to look rather spongy and soppy. As he drew nearer, he remarks, ‘and saw the whole adjacent prospect, lying like a straight, low line under the sky, I hinted to Peggotty that a mound or so might have improved it, and also that if the land had been a little more separated from the sea, and the town and the tide had not been quite so much mixed up, like toast-and-water, it would have been much nicer.’ He adds: ‘When we got into the street, which was strange to me, and smelt the fish, and pitch, and oakum, and tallow, and saw the sailors walking about, and the carts jingling up and down over the stones, I felt that I had done so busy a place injustice.’ In this opinion his readers who know
Yarmouth will agree. Brighton and Hastings and Eastbourne might envy Yarmouth its sandy beach, where you can lead an amphibious life, watching the fishing-smacks as they come to shore with cargoes often so heavy as to be sold for manure; watching the merchant-ships and yachts that lie securely in the Roads, or the long trail of black smoke of Scotch or northern steamers far away; watching the gulls ever skimming the surface of the waves; or the children, as they build little forts and dwellings in the sand to be rudely swept to destruction by the advancing tide. In the golden light of summer, how blue is the sky, how green the sea, how yellow the sand, how jolly look the men and handsome the women! What health and healing are in the air, as it comes laden with ozone from the North Sea! You have the sea in front and on each side to look at, to walk by, to splash in, to sail on. The danger is, that you grow too fat, too ruddy, too hearty, too boisterous. As we all know, Venus was born out of the sea, and out there on that eastern peninsula, of which Yarmouth is the pride and ornament, there used to flourish bonny lasses, as if to show that the connection between the ocean and lovely woman is as intimate as of yore. Yarmouth and Lowestoft owe a great
deal to the Great Eastern Railway, which has made them places of health-resort from all parts of England; and truly the pleasure-seeker or the holiday-maker may go farther and fare worse.
I was a proud boy when first I set foot in Yarmouth. How I came to go there I can scarcely remember, but it is to be presumed I accompanied my father on one of those grand occasions—as far as Nonconformist circles are concerned—when the brethren met together for godly comfort and counsel. It is true Wrentham was in Suffolk, and Yarmouth was in Norfolk, but the Congregational Churches of that quarter had always been connected by Christian fellowship and sympathy, and hence I was taken to Yarmouth—at that time far more like a Dutch than an English town—and wonderful to me was the Quay, with its fine houses on one side and its long line of ships on the other—something like the far-famed Bompjes of Rotterdam—and the narrow rows in which the majority of the labouring classes were accustomed to live. ‘A row,’ wrote Charles Dickens, ‘is a long, narrow lane or alley, quite straight, or as nearly so as may be, with houses on each side, both of which you can sometimes touch with the finger-tips of each hand by stretching out your arms to their full extent.
Many and many a picturesque old bit of domestic architecture is to be hunted up among the rows. In some there is little more than a blank wall for the double boundary. In others the houses retreat into busy square courts, where washing and clear-starching are done, and wonderful nasturtiums and scarlet-runners are reared from green boxes filled with that scarce commodity, vegetable mould. Most of these rows are paved with pebbles from the beach, and to traverse them a peculiar form of low cart, drawn by a single horse, is employed.’ This to me was a great novelty, as with waggons and carts I was familiar, but not with a Yarmouth cart—now, I find, replaced by wheelbarrows. In Amsterdam, at the present day, you may see many such quaint old rows. But in Amsterdam you have an evil-smelling air, while in Yarmouth it is ever fresh and crisp, and redolent, as it were, of the neighbouring sea. The market-place and the big church were at the back of this congeries of quays and rows, and the sea and the old pier were at quite a respectable distance from the town. I fancy the Yarmouth of the London bathers has now extended down to the sandy beach, and the rough and rude old pier has given place to one better adapted to the wants and requirements of an
increasingly well-to-do community. Far more Dutch than English was the Yarmouth of half a century ago, I again say.
As to the Yarmouth Independent parson, I shall never forget him. He was a very big man, with great red cheeks that hung over his collar like blown bladders, and was always on stilts. He preached in a big meeting-house, now no more, the pillars of which intercepted alike the view and the sound. One winter evening he was holding forth, in his usual heavy style, to a few good people—with whom, evidently, all pleasure was out of the question—who came there, as in duty bound, and sat like martyrs all the while, and all were as grave as the preacher, when a wicked boy rushed in and, in a hurried manner, called out, ‘Fire! fire!’ The effect, I am told, was electrical. For once the good parson was in a hurry, and moved as quickly and spoke as rapidly as his fellows; but never had there been so much excitement in his chapel since he had been its pastor. Once, I remember, he came to town, and dropped in at the close of a party rather convivially inclined, in the Old London Coffee House. As the reverend gentleman advanced to greet his friends, a London lawyer, with all the impudence of his class, muttered,
in a whisper intended to be heard, and which was heard, by everyone, ‘Yarmouth bloater.’ The good man said nothing, but it was evident he thought all the more, as the group were more or less tittering over the fitness of the comparison. The lawyer who made the remark was also the son of a London minister, and, therefore, might have been expected to have known better. I fear the Yarmouth minister never forgave him. Well, it only served him right, as he had a horrible way of making young people very uncomfortable. ‘Well, Master James,’ said he to me on one occasion, when all the brethren had come to dine at Wrentham, and when I was admitted, in conformity with the golden maxim in all well-regulated family circles, that little children were to be seen and not heard (perhaps in our day the fault is too much in an opposite direction), ‘can you inform me which is the more proper form of expression—a pair of new gloves, or a new pair of gloves?’ Of course I gave the wrong answer, as I blushed up to the ears at finding myself the smallest personage in the room, publicly appealed to by the biggest. He meant well, I dare say. His only object was to draw me out; but the question and the questioner gave me a bad quarter of an hour, and I never got
over the unpleasant sensation of which he had unconsciously been the originator in my youthful breast.