"The stroll I mentioned in my third volume was through Lord Darnley's park, but after that I remember nothing. As the time spent in walking was four hours at least, we must have covered ground far beyond the length of the park.
"On another occasion,—Dickens, Miss Hogarth, and I went to Rochester to see the Castle, and the famous Pickwickian inn. On another day we went to the Leather Bottle at Cobham, where Dickens was eloquent on the subject of the Dadd parricide, showing us the place where the body was found, with many startling and interesting details of the discovery."
The subject of the Dadd parricide alluded to by Mr. Frith was a very horrible case; the son—an artist—was a lunatic, and was subsequently confined in Bethlehem Hospital, London. There are two curious pictures by him in the Dyce and Forster collection at South Kensington; one is inscribed "Sketches to Illustrate the Passions—Patriotism. By Richard Dadd, Bethlehem Hospital, London, May 30, 1857, St. George's-in-the-Fields." It has much minute writing on it. The other is "Leonidas with the Wood-cutters," and illustrates Glover's poem, Leonidas. It is inscribed, "Rd. Dadd, 1873." He died in Bethlehem Hospital in 1887.
The Dover Road! What a magic influence it has over us, as we tramp along it in the quiet summer evening, and recall an incident that happened nearly a hundred years ago, what time the Dover mail struggled up Shooter's Hill on that memorable Friday night, and Jerry Cruncher, who had temporarily suspended his "fishing" operations, and being free from the annoyances of the "Aggerawayter," caused consternation to the minds of coachman, guard, and passengers of the said mail, by riding abruptly up, à la highwayman, and demanding to speak to a passenger named Mr. Jarvis Lorry, then on his way to Paris,—as faithfully chronicled in A Tale of Two Cities. Again, in the early part of the present century, when a certain friendless but dear and artless boy, named David Copperfield,—who having been first robbed by a "long-legged young man with a very little empty donkey-cart, which was nothing but a large wooden-tray on wheels," of "half a guinea and his box," under pretence of "driving him to the pollis," and subsequently defrauded by an unscrupulous tailor named one Mr. Dolloby ("Dolloby was the name over the shop-door at least") of the proper price of "a little weskit," for which he, Dolloby, gave poor David only ninepence,—trudged along that same Dover road footsore and hungry, "and got through twenty-three miles on the straight road" to Rochester and Chatham on a certain Sunday; all of which is duly recorded in The Personal History of David Copperfield.
In after years, when happier times came to him, David made many journeys over the Dover road, between Canterbury and London, on the Canterbury Coach. Respecting the earliest of these (readers will remember Phiz's illustration, "My first fall in life"), he says:—
"The main object on my mind, I remember, when we got fairly on the road, was to appear as old as possible to the coachman, and to speak extremely gruff. The latter point I achieved at great personal inconvenience; but I stuck to it, because I felt it was a grown-up sort of thing."
In spite of this assumption, he is impudently chaffed by "William the coachman" on his "shooting"—on his "county" (Suffolk), its "dumplings," and its "Punches," and finally, at William's suggestion, actually resigns his box-seat in favour of his (William's) friend, "the gentleman with a very unpromising squint and a prominent chin, who had a tall white hat on with a narrow flat brim, and whose close-fitting drab trousers seemed to button all the way up outside his legs from his boots to his hips." In reply to a remark of the coachman this worthy says:—"There ain't no sort of 'orse that I 'ain't bred, and no sort of dorg. 'Orses and dorgs is some men's fancy. They're wittles and drink to me—lodging, wife, and children—reading, writing, and 'rithmetic—snuff, tobacker, and sleep."
"That ain't a sort of man to see sitting behind a coach-box, is it, though?" says William in David's ear. David construes this remark into an indication of a wish that "the gentleman" should have his place, so he blushingly offers to resign it.
"Well, if you don't mind," says William, "I think it would be more correct."
Poor David, "so very young!" gives up his box-seat, and thus moralizes on his action:—