"Long time I've courted you, miss,
And now I've come from sea;
We'll make no more ado, miss,
But quickly married be.
Sing Fal-de-ral," &c.
The worthy alderman is also stated to have had in his possession a card of invitation to spend the evening at Ordnance Terrace, addressed from Master and Miss Dickens to Master and Miss Tribe, which was dated about this time.
In consequence of the elder Dickens being recalled from Chatham to Somerset House, to comply with official requirements, the family removed to London in 1823,[22] "and took up its abode in a house in Bayham Street, Camden Town." Dickens thus describes his journey to London in "Dullborough Town," one of the sketches in The Uncommercial Traveller:—
"As I left Dullborough in the days when there were no railroads in the land, I left it in a stage-coach. Through all the years that have since passed, have I ever lost the smell of the damp straw in which I was packed—like game—and forwarded, carriage paid, to the Cross Keys, Wood Street, Cheapside, London? There was no other inside passenger, and I consumed my sandwiches in solitude and dreariness, and it rained hard all the way, and I thought life sloppier than I had expected to find it. . . ."
Mr. W. T. Wildish, the proprietor of the Rochester and Chatham Journal, kindly favours us with some interesting information which has recently appeared in his journal, relating to Charles Dickens's nurse—the Mary Weller of his boyhood (and perhaps the Peggotty as well), but known to later generations as Mrs. Mary Gibson of Front Row, Ordnance Place, Chatham, who died in the spring of the year 1888, at the advanced age of eighty-four. Very touchingly, but unknowingly, did Dickens write from Gad's Hill, 24th September, 1857, being unaware that she was still living:—
"I feel much as I used to do when I was a small child, a few miles off, and somebody—who, I wonder, and which way did she go when she died?—hummed the evening hymn, and I cried on the pillow—either with the remorseful consciousness of having kicked somebody else, or because still somebody else had hurt my feelings in the course of the day."
Mrs. Gibson, when Mary Weller (what a host of pleasant recollections does the married name of the "pretty housemaid" bring up of the Pickwickian days!), lived with the family of Mr. John Dickens, at No. 11, Ordnance Terrace, Chatham, and afterwards when they moved to the House on the Brook. Her recollections were most vivid and interesting. According to the testimony of her son, communicated to Mr. Wildish, Mrs. Gibson "used to be very fond of talking of the time she passed with the Dickens family, and one of her highest satisfactions in her later years was to hear Charles Dickens's works read by her son Robert; and while listening to the descriptions of characters read to her, his mother would detect likenesses unsuspected by other persons whom Dickens must have known when a boy; and she also agreed in thinking, with Dickens's biographer, that in Mr. Micawber's troubles were related some of the experiences of the elder Dickens, who is believed for a time to have occupied a debtor's prison. She, however, would never bring herself to believe that her hero was himself ever reduced to such great hardships as the blacking-bottle period in David Copperfield would suggest if taken literally. She used to speak of the future author as always fond of reading, and said he was wont to retire to the top room of the House on the Brook, and spend what should have been his play-hours in poring over his books, or in acting to the furniture of the room the creatures that he had read about."
Mr. Langton, who had a personal interview with Mrs. Gibson herself, has recorded the fact that she well remembered singing the Evening Hymn to the children of John Dickens, and seemed very much surprised at being asked such a question. She lived with the family when Dickens's little sister, Harriet Ellen, died—a circumstance that no doubt in after years inspired the Child's Dream of a Star already referred to. When the family removed to London, Mary Weller was pressed to accompany them, but was not in a position to accept the offer, in consequence of her promise to marry Mr. Thomas Gibson, a shipwright of the Chatham Dockyard, with whom she lived happily until his death, in 1886, at the age of eighty-two.
Mrs. Gibson modestly declined, on her son Robert's suggestion, to seek an introduction to Charles Dickens, when he read some of his works at the old Mechanics' Institute at Chatham, fearing that he had forgotten her. It is certain, however, that, from the reproduction of her name as the pretty housemaid at Mr. Nupkins's at Ipswich, and from the extract from the letter above referred to, she had a kindly place in his recollections.