Latterly it is becoming a pleasant hobby, notably in the case of the Americans, to diligently follow in the footsteps of Dickens, and visit and identify all the scenes he placed in his novels. Year by year these are disappearing. Numerous pleasant articles have appeared in American magazines, with pretty illustrations, and carried out in a very fond and tender spirit. Indeed, this culte of Dickens is growing every day; but it will be a serious loss when all his houses and haunts have been pulled down. There will be a link lost then between him and us.[9] We have only to walk to the Marble Arch, and there we see his last town residence, No. 5, Hyde Park Place, a solemnly genteel, if not monotonous, residence, that belonged to Mr. Gibson. It is astonishing, indeed, how every step, turn, and corner in London is somehow associated with this great master of fiction—chambers, old streets, slums, etc. The secret is, he delighted himself to associate his fancies with some particular locality, and this feeling inspired him. There is a remarkable passage in his life where he deplores the difficulty of writing, when far away from the bustle and motion of London streets. It will be remembered how he set off to “choose a house” for Sampson Brass in Bevis Marks. It is impossible to look at Bevis Marks now without calling up that strange character. You feel he must have lived there. So with Lant Street, Borough, the residence of Mr. Sawyer, and which has the suitable dinginess: all this is pleasant to the pedestrian, the scenery being so much in keeping. In a few years, when everything is altered and pulled down, we shall have only the site left by which to recall old associations.
Near the bottom of Parliament Street, and almost opposite the Home Office, is a narrow lane leading into Cannon Row, whence could be long seen the rear of the unfinished Opera house. At the corner stands a third-rate public-house, suggesting one of the extraordinary incidents in London, where meanness and opulence are ever side by side. This public-house is associated with the hardships of Dickens’s boyhood, in a very characteristic recollection, which he relates himself. “I remember, one evening (I had been somewhere for my father, and was going back to the Borough over Westminster Bridge), that I went into a public-house in Parliament Street, which is still there, though altered, at the corner of the short street leading into Cannon Row, and said to the landlord behind the bar, ‘What is your very best—the very best—ale, a glass?’ For the occasion was a festive one, for some reason: I forget why. It may have been my birthday, or somebody else’s. ‘Twopence,’ says he. ‘Then,’ says I, ‘just draw me a glass of that, if you please, with a good head to it.’ The landlord looked at me in return, over the bar, from head to foot, with a strange smile on his face; and instead of drawing the beer, looked round the screen and said something to his wife, who came out from behind it, with her work in her hand, and joined him in surveying me. Here we stand, all three, before me now, in my study in Devonshire Terrace. The landlord in his shirt-sleeves, leaning against the bar window-frame; his wife, looking over the little half-door; and I, in some confusion, looking up at them from outside the partition. They asked me a good many questions, as what my name was, how old I was, where I lived, how I was employed, etc., etc. To all of which, that I might commit nobody, I invented appropriate answers. They served me with the ale, though I suspect it was not the strongest on the premises; and the landlord’s wife, opening the little half-door and bending down, gave me a kiss that was half-admiring and half-compassionate, but all womanly and good, I am sure.”
When a bachelor, he lived in Furnival’s Inn, No. 15, on the right as you enter, but on his marriage removed to 48, Doughty Street. In this clean little street there is a prim monotony, every house being of the same cast—small, and suited for a clerk and his family. These seem indeed miniature Wimpole Street houses; but they have a snug, comfortable air, and it is something to pause before No. 48 and think of “Oliver Twist” and “Nicholas Nickleby” written in this study. With increasing prosperity he moved from this humble but snug quarter to a more pretentious mansion, “Tavistock House,” where he lived for ten years. There are three houses standing together in this rather forlorn-looking waste, which stands in a cul de sac, and his is the first. “In Tavistock Square,” says Hans Andersen, “stands Tavistock House. This and the strip of garden in front of it are shut out from the thoroughfare by an iron railing. A large garden, with a grass plat and high trees, stretches behind the house and gives it a countrified look in the midst of this coal and gas steaming London. In the passage from street to garden hung pictures and engravings. Here stood a marble bust of Dickens, so like him, so youthful and handsome; and over a bedroom door were inserted the bas-reliefs of Night and Day, after Thorwaldsen. On the first floor was a rich library, with a fireplace and a writing table, looking out on the garden; and here it was that in winter Dickens and his friends acted plays.” Turning out of the road one is struck by the rather stately air of the mansion. During these ten years he made it re-echo with his gaiety and cheery spirit. It had, however, a damp or dampish air, which all such edifices seem to contract. The trees and the verdure generally do not flourish. Later it become the residence of Mrs. Georgina Weldon, née the beautiful Miss Treherne.
DOUGHTY STREET.
Where the last portion of “Pickwick” was written.
A mile or two away is Devonshire Terrace, No. 1, a later residence of the novelist, where he wrote “Master Humphrey’s Clock,” “David Copperfield,” and other works. It is found near the Marylebone Road. This, too, is in an inclosure set back from the road, and was humorously described by its tenant as “a house of great promise (and great premium), undeniable situation and excessive splendour”; while it struck his friend Forster as a handsome house with a garden of considerable size, shut out from the New Road by a brick wall, facing the York Gate in Regent’s Park.
In Gower Street is a house associated with some scenes in the boy Dickens’s life, full of pain and misery. At No. 4 (it was then) Mrs. Dickens set up a school, or tried to do so. Mr. Allbut has found that, owing to a change in the numbering, the present No. 145 is the former No. 4. It is a strange feeling to stand before it and recall his own disastrous, even tragic account of this early misery:—“A house was soon found at No. 4, Gower Street North; a large brass plate on the door announced Mrs. Dickens’s establishment; and the result I can give in the exact words of the then small actor in the comedy, whose hopes it had raised so high. ‘I left at a great many other doors a great many circulars, calling attention to the merits of the establishment. Yet nobody ever came to school, nor do I recollect that anybody ever proposed to come, or that the least preparation was made to receive anybody. But I know that we got on very badly with the butcher and baker; that very often we had not too much for dinner; and that at last my father was arrested.’”... “Almost everything by degrees was pawned or sold, little Charles being the principal agent in these sorrowful transactions ... until at last, even of the furniture of Gower Street, No. 4, there was nothing left except a few chairs, a kitchen table, and some beds. Then they encamped, as it were, in the two parlours of the emptied house, and lived there night and day.”