the radiant sails are gliding past the shore, and shining on the far horizon; all the sea is sparkling, heaving, swelling up with life and beauty, this bright morning." ("Our Watering-Place.")
Another reference of Dickens to the Kent coast was in one of the Household Words articles, entitled "Out of Season." The Watering-Place "out of season" was Dover, and the place without a cliff was Deal.
Writing to his wife of his stay there, he says:
"I did nothing at Dover (except for Household Words), and have not begun 'Little Dorrit,' No. 8, yet. But I took twenty-mile walks in the fresh air, and perhaps in the long run did better than if I had been at work."
One can hardly think of Deal or Dover without calling to mind the French coast opposite, often, of a clear day, in plain view.
In spite of Dickens' intimacies with the land of his birth, he had also a fondness for foreign shores, as one infers from following the scope of his writings.
Of Boulogne, he writes in "Our French Watering-Place" (Household Words, November 4, 1854):
"Once solely known to us as a town with a very long street, beginning with an abattoir and ending with a steamboat, which it seemed our fate to behold only at daybreak on winter mornings, when (in the days before continental railroads), just sufficiently awake to know that we were most uncomfortably asleep, it was our destiny always to clatter through it, in the coupé of the diligence from Paris, with a sea of mud behind, and a sea of tumbling waves before."
An apt and true enough description that will be recognized by many. Continuing, he says, also truly enough:
"But our French watering-place, when it is once got into, is a very enjoyable place."