Cooling Church.
Forster says in the Life:—"It is strange as I transcribe the words, with what wonderful vividness they bring back the very spot on which we stood when he said he meant to make it the scene of the opening of this story—Cooling Castle ruins and the desolate Church, lying out among the marshes seven miles from Gad's Hill!"
Beyond where the river runs to the sea, we conjure up the chase and recapture of Pip's convict, while poor Pip himself, assisted by his friend Herbert Pocket, is straining every nerve to get him away. As illustrative of the wonderfully careful way in which Dickens did all his work, we also read in Forster's Life:—
"To make himself sure of the actual course of a boat in such circumstances, and what possible incidents the adventure might have, Dickens hired a steamer for the day from Blackwall to Southend. Eight or nine friends, and three or four members of his family, were on board, and he seemed to have no care, the whole of that summer day (22nd of May, 1861), except to enjoy their enjoyment and entertain them with his own in shape of a thousand whims and fancies; but his sleepless observation was at work all the time, and nothing had escaped his keen vision on either side of the river. The fifteenth chapter of the third volume is a masterpiece."
Speaking generally of this fascinating story, which possesses a thousand-fold greater interest to us now we visit the country there described (not formerly very accessible, but now readily approached by the railway from Gravesend to Sheerness, alighting at Cliffe, the nearest station to Cooling), Forster says:—
"It may be doubted if Dickens could better have established his right to the front rank among novelists claimed for him, than by the ease and mastery with which, in these two books of Copperfield and Great Expectations, he kept perfectly distinct the two stories of a boy's childhood, both told in the form of autobiography."
The marshes are also alluded to twice in Bleak House—first, in chapter one—"Fog on the Essex marshes, fog on the Kentish heights;" and secondly, in the twenty-sixth chapter, in the dialogue between Trooper George and his odd but kind-hearted attendant Phil Squod, the original of which, by the bye, was a Chatham character.
"'And so, Phil,' says George of the shooting gallery, after several turns in silence; 'you were dreaming of the country last night.'
"Phil, by the bye, said as much, in a tone of surprise, as he scrambled out of bed.