The Pilgrimage Series
THE DICKENS COUNTRY

IN THE SAME SERIES

THE SCOTT COUNTRY
BY W. S. CROCKETT
Minister of Tweedsmuir

THE THACKERAY COUNTRY
BY LEWIS MELVILLE

THE INGOLDSBY COUNTRY
BY CHAS. G. HARPER

THE BURNS COUNTRY
BY C. S. DOUGALL

THE HARDY COUNTRY
BY CHAS. G. HARPER

THE BLACKMORE COUNTRY
BY F. J. SNELL

PUBLISHED BY
ADAM AND CHARLES BLACK, SOHO SQUARE, LONDON

CHARLES DICKENS IN 1857.
From a hitherto unpublished photograph by Mason.

THE DICKENS COUNTRY

BY
FREDERIC G. KITTON

AUTHOR OF
“CHARLES DICKENS BY PEN AND PENCIL,” “DICKENS AND HIS ILLUSTRATORS,” “CHARLES DICKENS: HIS LIFE, WRITINGS, AND PERSONALITY,” “DICKENSIANA,” ETC.

WITH
FORTY-EIGHT FULL-PAGE ILLUSTRATIONS
MOSTLY FROM PHOTOGRAPHS
BY T. W. TYRRELL

LONDON
ADAM AND CHARLES BLACK
1911

First published February, 1905
Reprinted September, 1911

INTRODUCTION

It seems but a week or two ago that Frederic Kitton first mentioned to me the preparation of the volume to which I have now the melancholy privilege of prefixing a few words of introduction and valediction. It was in my office in Covent Garden, where he used often to drop in of an afternoon and talk, for a spare half-hour at the end of the day, of Dickens and Dickensian interests. We were speaking of a book which had just been published, somewhat similar in scope to the volume now in the reader’s hand, and Kitton, with that thoroughly genial sympathy which always marked his references to other men’s work, praised warmly and heartily the good qualities which he had found in its composition. Then, quite quietly, and as though he were alluding to some entirely unimportant side-issue, he added: “I have a book rather on the same lines on the stocks myself, but I don’t know when it will get finished.” That was a little more than a year ago, and in the interval how much has happened! The book has, indeed, “got finished” in the pressure of that indefatigable industry which his friends knew so well, but its author was never to see it in type. Almost before it had received his finishing touches, the bright, kindly, humane spirit of Frederic Kitton was “at rest and forever.” He died on Saturday, September 10, 1904, and left the world appreciably poorer by the loss of a sincere and zealous student, a true and generous man.

As I turned over the pages of the book in proof, and recalled this passing conversation, it seemed to me that the whole character of its author was displayed, as under a sudden light, in that quite unconscious attitude of his towards the two books—the one his friend’s, the other his own. For no one that I ever met was freer from anything like literary jealousy or the spirit of rivalry in art; no one was ever more modest concerning his own achievements. And in this case, it must be remembered, he was speaking of a particular piece of work for which no writer in England was so well qualified as himself. His work had its limitations, and he knew them well enough himself. For treatment of a subject on a broad plane, critically, he had little taste; indeed, many of his friends may remember that at times, when they may have indulged too liberally in a wide literary generalization, he was inclined, quietly and almost deprecatingly, to suggest some single contrary instance which seemed to throw the generalization out of gear at once. He saw life and literature like a mosaic; his eye was on the pieces, not upon the piece; and this microscopic view had its inevitable drawbacks and hindrances. On the other hand, when it came to a subject like that of the present volume, his method was not only a good one, but positively the best and only certain method possible. His laborious care for detail, his unfailing accuracy—never satisfied till he had traced the topic home under his own eye—his loving accumulation of little facts that contribute to the general impression—all these conspicuous traits made him the one man qualified to speak upon such a subject with confidence and authority. One sometimes felt that he knew everything there was to know about Dickens and the circle in which Dickens lived. The minuteness of his knowledge could only be appreciated by those who had occasion to test it in actual conversation, in that give-and-take of question and answer by which showy, shallow information and pretentious ignorance are so quickly discomfited and exposed. He had not only, for example, traced almost every published line and letter of Dickens himself, but he could tell you, in turning over old numbers of Household Words, the author of every single inconsiderable contribution to that journal; he was familiar with the manner and the production of all the infusoria of Wellington Street. It was a wonderful wealth of information, and his habit of acquiring and fostering it was born and bred in his very nature. In this, as in many other respects, he was essentially his father’s son.

When I ventured, a page further back, to call his method “microscopic,” the word slipped naturally from my pen, but in a moment its indisputable propriety asserted itself. Frederic George Kitton was trained in the school of microscopy. He was born at Norwich on May 5, 1856, and his father, who had then only just completed his twenty-ninth year, was already known among his associates as a scientist of much research and no little originality of observation. Frederic Kitton the elder was the son of a Cambridge ironmonger, and had been intended for the legal profession; but his father’s business did not prosper, and the whole family was obliged to remove to Norwich, there to take up work in a wholesale tobacco business, the proprietor of which was one Robert Wigham, a botanist of some repute. This Mr. Wigham soon saw that Kitton was a clever lad, and, finding him interested in the studies which were his own diversion, trained him in botany and other scientific branches of research. The young man soon surpassed his tutor in knowledge and resource, and by the time that he was married and the father of our own friend, Frederic George Kitton, he had made a name among the leading diatomists of his time, and was reputed to be more successful in finding rare specimens than any other man in the country. His reputation and his industry increased together, with the result that the son grew up in an atmosphere of unsparing research and conscientious accuracy of observation which never failed him as an example for life. We may fairly attribute the general outlines of F. G. Kitton’s method to the inspiration he received at his father’s desk.

This inspiration found its first expression upon the lines of art. The boy showed great ability with his pencil, and was apprenticed to wood engraving, joining the staff of the Graphic, and contributing any number of pencil drawings and woodcuts to its columns, in the days before the cheap processes of reproduction had supplanted these genuine forms of art-workmanship. His landscapes and his pictures of old buildings and romantic architecture were full of breadth and feeling, and some of the best of them were devoted to an early book of travel in the Dickens country, in which he collaborated with the late William R. Hughes. Indeed, much of the most picturesque work of his life was done in the way of black and white.

At the age of twenty-six, however, he decided to be less of an artist and more of a writer, and retired finally from the ranks of illustrated journalism. He settled about this time at St. Albans in Hertfordshire, and began his long series of books, most of them dedicated to his lifelong study of Dickens and his contemporaries. His first books of the kind treated, not unnaturally, of the various illustrators of Dickens’s novels, and monographs on Hablot K. Browne and John Leech attracted attention for their fidelity and sympathetic taste. Following these came “Dickensiana: a Bibliography of the Literature relating to Charles Dickens and His Writings” (1886); “Charles Dickens by Pen and Pencil” (1890); “Artistic London: from the Abbey to the Tower with Dickens” (1891); “The Novels of Charles Dickens: a Bibliography and a Sketch” (1897); “Dickens and His Illustrators” (1899); “The Minor Writings of Charles Dickens” (1900); “Charles Dickens: His Life, Writings, and Personality” (1902); and innumerable editorial works, among which must be mentioned his notes to the Rochester Edition of Dickens, his recension of Dickens’s verse, and his general conduct of the Autograph Edition now in course of publication in America—a laborious undertaking, which included a series of bibliographical notes from his pen of the very first value to all students of “Dickensiana.” He had also in MS. a valuable dictionary of Dickens topography, illustrated by descriptive quotations from the novels themselves; and, finally, he left the “copy” for the present book, which will rank among the most useful and characteristic of all his contributions to the study of the author whom he so much admired and so sincerely served.

Kitton was only forty-eight when he died, and the work which he had done was large in bulk and rich in testimony to his industry; but he was far from accomplishing the volume of work which he had already set before himself. It is no secret that the short “Life of Dickens” which he published two and a half years ago was only regarded by himself as the framework upon which he proposed to construct a much more elaborate biography, to be at least as long as Forster’s “Life,” fortified by a vast array of facts which Forster had not been disposed, or careful enough, to collect. The book would have been full of material and value; but there were some of us who believed that Kitton’s talent might be even better employed in a work which none but himself could have satisfactorily accomplished—the preparation of an elaborate annotated edition of Forster, constructed upon the scale of Birkbeck Hill’s monumental Boswell, and illustrated by all the fruits of Kitton’s profitable research. We talked the matter over together, and he was enthusiastically willing to essay the task. But obstacles arose at the moment, and now the work can never be done as he would have done it. His talent was peculiarly adapted to annotation; his knowledge of the subject was unparalleled. If the work is ever done (and I suppose it is bound to be done some day), it can never be done now with that surety and deliberate finality which he would have had at his disposal.

But one must not speak of Kitton only as a student of literature and an artist; any picture of him that seemed to suggest that he was rooted to his desk and his desk-work, to the exclusion of outside interests and social activities, would give a very false impression of his energetic and amiable temperament. There are many books standing to Kitton’s name in the catalogue of the British Museum, and innumerable articles of his writing in the files of the reviews, magazines, and newspapers of the last twenty years, but his work extended far beyond the limits of print and paper. He was not only an industrious man of letters, but a most helpful and self-sacrificing citizen. His adopted town of St. Albans, and the county of Hertfordshire at large, had no little cause for gratitude in all he did in their interests. Despite the amount of literary work he got through, there was scarcely a day that passed without finding him at work at the Hertfordshire County Museum, where he took sole charge of the prints and books, a collection which his care and judgment made both exhaustive and invaluable. He was continually at work, arranging and adding to the books and prints, and outside the walls of the museum he did inestimable service in preserving the ancient buildings of the town of St. Albans. Had it not been for his intervention, many of the most interesting old houses in the town would have been pulled down; he argued with callous owners and vandal jerry-builders, and managed to retain for the town those characteristic and historic buildings around the abbey which in days to come will be the chief attraction of the picturesque county town he loved to serve.

And so, with hard work at his desk and unsparing energy out of doors, his bright, unselfish spirit wore itself out. He never looked strong, but I do not think he seemed actually ill when one spring morning in this last year he came in to see me at my office, and told me, with his easy, unapprehensive smile, that he was about to undergo an operation. “It is only a small matter,” he said, “but the doctors say I ought to have it done. I hope I shall soon be back again, and we will have a further talk over that book you know about.” We parted, as men part at the cross-roads, feeling sure of meeting on the morrow. But I never saw him again. The operation he had made so light of proved too much for a constitution already undermined by hard, unselfish work. He lingered on, but never really rallied, and the end came very quietly, to close a life that had always brought with it a sense of peace and gentle will, wherever it had touched, whomsoever it had influenced.

For, when other shifting recollections of Frederic Kitton fade away—accidents of a common interest, chances of a brief and busy acquaintanceship—the impression that remains, and will always remain with those who knew him, is the haunting impression of a sweet and winning simplicity, an absolute sincerity of life and word, that knew no use for the thing he said but that it should be the thing he thought, and that never (so it seemed) thought anything of man, or woman, or child but what was kind and Christian and noble-hearted. He looked you in the eyes in a fearless, open fashion, as a man who had nothing to conceal and nothing to pretend; he smiled with a peculiarly sunny and unhesitating smile, as one who had tried life and found it good. And yet, as the common rewards of life go, he had less cause to be thankful than many who complain; he had to work hard (how hard it is not ours to say) for the ordinary daily gifts of homely comfort. He had little time to rest or play, and little means of recreation. Yet no friend of his, I believe, however intimate, ever heard him grumble about work and the badness of the times. He had a happy home, bright and blithe with the carol of the cricket on the hearth, and brighter and blither for his own affectionate nature; and his happy spirit seemed to ask for nothing that lay outside the four walls of his plain contentment. He knew the secret of life—a simple secret, but hard to find, and harder to remember. He had no touch of self in all his composition, no taint of self-interest or self-care. He lived for others: and in their memory he will survive so long as earthly recollections and earthly examples return to encourage and to inspire. Arthur Waugh.

PUBLISHERS’ NOTE.

Owing to the untimely death of the author, the page proofs were not revised by him for the press, though Mr. Kitton corrected proofs at an earlier stage.

Mr. Kitton’s friends—Mr. B. W. Matz, Mr. T. W. Tyrrell, and Mr. H. Snowden Ward—have kindly read the final proofs, without, however, making any material alterations.

CONTENTS

PAGE CHAPTER I [PORTSMOUTH AND CHATHAM] 1 CHAPTER II [BOYHOOD AND YOUTH IN LONDON] 23 CHAPTER III [THE LONDON AND SUBURBAN HOMES] 49 CHAPTER IV [IN THE WEST COUNTRY] 83 CHAPTER V [IN SOUTHERN ENGLAND] 101 CHAPTER VI [IN EAST ANGLIA] 112 CHAPTER VII [IN THE NORTH] 123 CHAPTER VIII [IN THE MIDLANDS AND HOME COUNTIES] 160 CHAPTER IX [IN DICKENS LAND] 183 CHAPTER X [THE GAD’S HILL COUNTRY] 204

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

From Photographs by T. W. Tyrrell, etc.

[1. CHARLES DICKENS IN 1857] Frontispiece FACING PAGE [2. 1 MILE END TERRACE, PORTSEA (NOW 393 COMMERCIAL ROAD PORTSMOUTH)] 1 [3. CLEVELAND STREET (LATE NORFOLK STREET), FITZROY SQUARE] 8 [4. 2 (NOW 11) ORDNANCE TERRACE, CHATHAM] 12 [5. 18 ST. MARY’S PLACE, THE BROOK, CHATHAM] 17 [6. FORT PITT, CHATHAM] 19 [7. THE GOLDEN CROSS, CHARING CROSS, CIRCA 1827] 22 [8. 16 (NOW 141) BAYHAM STREET, CAMDEN TOWN] 24 [9. DICKENS AT THE BLACKING WAREHOUSE] 33 [10. LANT STREET, BOROUGH] 35 [11. THE SIGN OF THE DOG’S HEAD IN THE POT, CHARLOTTE STREET, BLACKFRIARS] 38 [12. 29 (NOW 13) JOHNSON STREET, SOMERS TOWN] 40 [13. WELLINGTON HOUSE ACADEMY, HAMPSTEAD ROAD] 43 [14. 1 RAYMOND BUILDINGS, GRAY’S INN] 46 [15. CHARLES DICKENS IN 1830] 49 [16. YORK HOUSE, 15 BUCKINGHAM STREET, STRAND] 51 [17. 15 FURNIVAL’S INN, HOLBORN] 54 [18. 48 DOUGHTY STREET] 56 [19. JACK STRAW’S CASTLE, HAMPSTEAD, CIRCA 1835] 59 [20. 1 DEVONSHIRE TERRACE] 62 [21. 9 OSNABURGH TERRACE] 65 [22. TAVISTOCK HOUSE] 72 [23. 5 HYDE PARK PLACE] 75 [24. THE OFFICE OF “ALL THE YEAR ROUND,” WELLINGTON STREET, STRAND] 78 [25. THE OFFICE OF “HOUSEHOLD WORDS,” WELLINGTON STREET, STRAND] 81 [26. MILE END COTTAGE, ALPHINGTON] 88 [27. THE GEORGE INN, AMESBURY] 97 [28. AMESBURY CHURCH] 104 [29. THE COMMON HARD, PORTSMOUTH] 113 [30. THE GEORGE, GRETA BRIDGE] 120 [31. DOTHEBOYS HALL, BOWES] 129 [32. THE RED LION, BARNET] 136 [33. THE ALBION HOTEL, BROADSTAIRS] 145 [34. LAWN HOUSE, BROADSTAIRS] 147 [35. FORT HOUSE, BROADSTAIRS] 150 [36. 3 ALBION VILLAS, FOLKESTONE] 152 [ THE WOODEN LIGHTHOUSE, FOLKESTONE HARBOUR] ″ [37. THE AULA NOVO AND NORMAN STAIRCASE, PART OF THE KING’S SCHOOL, CANTERBURY] 155 [ HOUSE ON LADY WOOTTON’S GREEN, CANTERBURY] ″ [38. THE SUN INN, CANTERBURY] 158 [39. GAD’S HILL PLACE] 161 [40. THE LEATHER BOTTLE, COBHAM] 163 [41. THE HOUSE AT CHALK IN WHICH DICKENS SPENT HIS HONEYMOON] 166 [42. THE CORN EXCHANGE, ROCHESTER] 168 [43. THE GUILDHALL, ROCHESTER] 171 [44. ROCHESTER ABOUT 1810] 174 [45. EASTGATE HOUSE AND SAPSEA’S HOUSE, ROCHESTER] 203 [46. RESTORATION HOUSE, ROCHESTER] 206 [47. THE BULL HOTEL, ROCHESTER] 209 [48. CHARLES DICKENS IN 1868] 216

1 MILE END TERRACE, PORTSEA
(NOW 393 COMMERCIAL ROAD, PORTSMOUTH). ([Page 2].)
The birthplace of Charles Dickens.

THE DICKENS COUNTRY

CHAPTER I.
PORTSMOUTH AND CHATHAM.

The writer of an article in a well-known magazine conceived the idea of preparing a map of England that should indicate, by means of a tint, those portions especially associated with Charles Dickens and his writings. This map makes manifest the fact that the country thus most intimately connected with the novelist is the south-eastern portion of England, having London as the centre and Rochester as the “literary capital,” and including the counties of Norfolk, Suffolk, Essex, Kent, Surrey, Sussex, Hampshire, and Warwickshire, with an offshoot extending to the northern boundary of Yorkshire.

All literary pilgrims, and particularly the devotees of Charles Dickens, regard as foremost among literary shrines inviting special homage the scene of the nativity of “Immortal Boz.” Like the birthplaces of many an eminent personage who first saw the light in the midst of a humble environment, the dwelling in which Dickens was born is unpretentious enough, and remains unaltered. The modest abode rented shortly after marriage by John Dickens (the future novelist’s father), from June, 1809, to June, 1812, stands in Commercial Road, Portsmouth, the number of the house having been recently changed from 387 to 393. The district was then known as Landport, in the Island of Portsea, but is now incorporated with Portsmouth; a comparatively rural locality at that time, it has since developed into a densely populated neighbourhood, covered with houses and bisected by the main line of the municipal tramways.[1] It is, however, yet within the memory of middle-aged people when this area of brick and mortar consisted of pasture land in which trees flourished and afforded nesting-places for innumerable birds—a condition of things recalled by the names bestowed upon some of the streets hereabouts, such as Cherry Garden Lane and Elm Road—but now “only children flourish where once the daisies sprang.”

The birthplace of Charles Dickens, which less than half a century ago overlooked green fields, is an interesting survival of those days of arboreal delights; and the broad road, on the west side of which it is situated, leads to Cosham and the picturesque ruin of Porchester Castle. In 1809 John Dickens was transferred from Somerset House to the Navy Pay-Office at Portsmouth Dockyard, and, with his young wife, made his home here, in which were born their first child (Frances Elizabeth) in 1810, and Charles on February 7, 1812. This domicile is a plain, red-brick building containing four rooms of moderate size and two attics, with domestic offices; in front there is a small garden, separated from the public roadway by an iron palisading; and a few steps, with a hand-rail, lead from the forecourt to the hooded doorway of the principal entrance. The front bedroom is believed to be the room in which Dickens was born. From the apartments in the rear there is still a pleasant prospect, overlooking a long garden, where flourishes an eminently fine specimen of the tree-mallow. On the death of Mrs. Sarah Pearce, the owner and occupier (and last surviving daughter of John Dickens’s landlord), the house was offered for sale by public auction on Michaelmas Day, 1903, when, much to the delight of the townspeople as well as of all lovers of the great novelist, it was purchased by the Portsmouth Town Council for preservation as a Dickens memorial, and with the intention of adapting it for the purposes of a Dickens Museum. The purchase price was £1,125, a sum exceeding by five hundred pounds the amount realized on the same occasion by the adjoining freehold residence (No. 395), which is identical in character—an interesting and significant testimony as to the sentimental value attaching to the birthplace of “Boz.”

Charles Dickens, like David Copperfield, was ushered into the world “on a Friday,” and, when less than a month old, underwent the ordeal of baptism at the parish church of Portsea, locally and popularly known as St. Mary’s, Kingston, and dating from the reign of Edward III. In 1882 a plan for its restoration and enlargement was proposed, but a few years later the authorities resolved to demolish it altogether and build a larger parochial church from designs by Sir Arthur Blomfield, A.R.A., the foundation stone of which was laid by Queen Victoria early in the spring of 1887, one half of the estimated cost being defrayed by an anonymous donor. On its completion the people of Portsmouth expressed a desire to perpetuate the memory of Charles Dickens by inserting in the new building a stained-glass window, but were debarred by a clause in the novelist’s will, where he conjured his friends on no account to make him “the subject of any monument, memorial, or testimonial whatever,” as he rested his claim to the remembrance of his country upon his published works. It is not common knowledge that three baptismal names were bestowed upon Dickens, viz., Charles John Huffam, the first being the Christian name of his maternal grandfather, the second that of his father, while the third was the surname of his godfather, Christopher Huffam (incorrectly spelt “Huffham” in the church register), who is described in the London Postal Directory of that time as a “rigger in His Majesty’s Navy”; he lived at Limehouse Hole, near the lower reaches of the Thames, which afterwards played a conspicuous part in “Our Mutual Friend” (“Rogue Riderhood dwelt deep and dark in Limehouse Hole, amongst the riggers, and the mast, oar, and block-makers, and the boat-builders, and the sail-lofts, as in a kind of ship’s hold stored full of waterside characters, some no better than himself, some very much better, and none much worse”). It is interesting to know that the actual font used at the ceremony of Charles Dickens’s baptism has been preserved, and is now in St. Stephen’s Church, Portsea.

John Dickens, after a four years’ tenancy of No. 387, Mile End Terrace, went to reside in Hawke Street, Portsea. Here he remained from Midsummer Day, 1812, until Midsummer Day, 1814, when he was recalled to London by the officials at Somerset House.

I have spared no trouble in endeavouring to discover the house in Hawke Street which John Dickens and his family occupied. Mr. Robert Langton, in his “Childhood and Youth of Charles Dickens” (second edition), states that it is the “second house past the boundary of Portsea,” which, however, is not very helpful, as the following note (kindly furnished by the Town Clerk of Portsmouth) testifies:

“I cannot understand what the connection can be between Hawke Street and the borough boundary. The town of Portsea, no doubt, had a recognised boundary, because at one time the greater part of it was encircled by ramparts, but Hawke Street did not come near those ramparts. The old borough boundary was outside the ramparts, both of Portsmouth and Portsea, and therefore Hawke Street did not touch that boundary. Since then the borough boundary has been extended on more than one occasion, and, of course, these boundaries could not touch Hawke Street.” A letter sent by me to the Portsmouth newspapers having reference to this subject brought me into communication with a Southsea lady, who informs me that an old gentleman of her acquaintance (an octogenarian) lived in his youth at No. 8, Hawke Street, and he clearly remembers that the Dickens family resided at No. 16. Hawke Street, in those days, he says, was a most respectable locality, the tenants being people of a good class, while there were superior lodging-houses for naval officers who desired to be within easy reach of their ships in the royal dockyard, distant about five minutes’ walk. No. 16, Hawke Street is a house of three floors and a basement; three steps lead to the front door, and there are two bay-windows, one above the other. The tenant whom John Dickens succeeded was Chatterton, harpist to the late Queen Victoria.

Forster relates, as an illustration of Charles Dickens’s wonderfully retentive memory, that late in life he could recall many minor incidents of his childhood, even the house at Portsea (i.e., his birthplace in Commercial Road), and the nurse watching him (then not more than two years old) from “a low kitchen window almost level with the gravel walk” as he trotted about the “small front garden” with his sister Fanny.

Dickens’s memory obviously failed him on this point, for he was a mere infant of barely five months old when his parents left Commercial Road to reside in Hawke Street, a fact which he had probably forgotten, and of which Forster had no knowledge, as no mention is made by him of the latter street. Here the family had lived two years when John Dickens was recalled to London. I therefore venture to suggest that the novelist vaguely recalled certain incidents of his childhood associated with Hawke Street. True, there is no “small front garden” at No. 16 (indeed, all the houses here are flush with the sidewalk), but at the back is a garden overlooked by the kitchen window, which has an old-fashioned, broad window-seat.

On quitting Portsea for the Metropolis, John Dickens and his family occupied lodgings in Norfolk Street (now Cleveland Street), on the east side of the Middlesex Hospital. In a short time, however, he was again “detached,” having received instructions to join the staff at the Navy Pay-Office at Chatham Dockyard. The date of departure is given by Forster as 1816, and in all probability the Dickens family again took lodgings until a suitable home could be found. After careful research, the late Mr. Robert Langton discovered that from June, 1817 (probably midsummer), until Lady Day, 1821, their abode was at No. 2 (since altered to No. 11), Ordnance Terrace. There little Charles passed some of the happiest years of his childhood, and received the most durable of his early impressions.

Chatham, on the river Medway, derives its name from the Saxon word Ceteham or Cættham, meaning “village of cottages.” It is anything but a “village” now, having since that remote age developed into a river port and a populous fortified town. Remains of Roman villas have been found in the neighbourhood, thus testifying to its antiquity. Chatham is one of the principal royal shipbuilding establishments in the kingdom. The dockyard was founded by Elizabeth before the threatened invasion of the Spanish Armada, and removed to its present site in 1662; it is now nearly two miles in length, and controlled by an Admiral-Superintendent, with a staff of artisans and labourers numbering about five thousand. Dickens describes and mentions Chatham in several of his writings, and in one of the earliest he refers to it by the name of “Mudfog.”[2]

In “The Seven Poor Travellers” he says of Chatham: “I call it this town because if anybody present knows to a nicety where Rochester ends and Chatham begins, it is more than I do.”[3]

Mr. Pickwick’s impressions of Chatham and the neighbouring towns of Rochester, Strood, and Brompton were that the principal productions “appear to be soldiers, sailors, Jews, chalk, shrimps, officers, and dockyard men,” and that “the commodities chiefly exposed for sale in the public streets are marine stores, hard-bake, apples, flat-fish, and oysters.” He observed that the streets presented “a lively and animated appearance, occasioned chiefly by the conviviality of the military.” “The consumption of tobacco in these towns,” Mr. Pickwick opined, “must be very great, and the smell which pervades the streets must be exceedingly delicious to those who are extremely fond of smoking. A superficial traveller might object to the dirt, which is their leading characteristic, but to those who view it as an indication of traffic and commercial prosperity it is truly gratifying.” Were Mr. Pickwick to revisit Chatham, he would find many of these characteristics still prevailing, and could not fail to note, also, that during the interval of more than sixty years the town had undergone material changes in the direction of modern improvements. When poor little David Copperfield fled from his distressing experiences at Murdstone and Grinby’s, hoping to meet with a welcome from Betsy Trotwood at Dover, he wended his weary way through Rochester; and as he toiled into Chatham, it seemed to him in the night’s aspect “a mere dream of chalk, and drawbridges, and mastless ships in a muddy river, roofed like Noah’s arks.”[4]

NORFOLK (NOW CLEVELAND) STREET, FITZROY SQUARE. ([Page 7].)
Dickens and his parents resided in Norfolk Street in 1816, after their removal from Hawke Street, Portsea.

Dickens himself, when a boy, must have seen the place frequently under similar conditions. The impressions he then received of Chatham and the neighbourhood were permanently fixed upon the mental retina, to be recalled again and again when penning his stories and descriptive pieces. In an article written by him in collaboration with Richard Hengist Horne, he supplies a picture of Chatham as it subsequently appeared when the military element on the main thoroughfares seemed paramount: “Men were only noticeable by scores, by hundreds, by thousands, rank and file, companies, regiments, detachments, vessels full for exportation. They walked about the streets in rows or bodies, carrying their heads in exactly the same way, and doing exactly the same thing with their limbs. Nothing in the shape of clothing was made for an individual, everything was contracted for by the millions. The children of Israel were established in Chatham, as salesmen, outfitters, tailors, old clothesmen, army and navy accoutrement makers, bill discounters, and general despoilers of the Christian world, in tribes rather than in families.”[5]

John Dickens’s official connection with the Navy Pay Department offered facilities for little Charles to roam unchecked about the busy dockyard, where he experienced delight in watching the ropemakers, anchor-smiths, and others at their labours, and in gazing with curious awe at the convict hulks (or prison ships), and where he found constant delight in observing the innumerable changes and variety of scenes; on one day witnessing the bright display of military tactics on Chatham “Lines,” on another enjoying a sail on the Medway with his father, when on duty bound for Sheerness in the Commissioners’ yacht, a quaint, high-sterned sailing-vessel, pierced with circular ports, and dating from the seventeenth century; she was broken up at Chatham in 1868.

The boy unconsciously stored up the pictures of life, and character, and scenery thus brought to his notice, to be recalled and utilized as valuable material by-and-bye. Of the great dockyard he afterwards wrote: “It resounded with the noise of hammers beating upon iron, and the great sheds or slips under which the mighty men-of-war are built loomed business-like when contemplated from the opposite side of the river.... Great chimneys smoking with a quiet—almost a lazy—air, like giants smoking tobacco; and the giant shears moored off it, looking meekly and inoffensively out of proportion, like the giraffe of the machinery creation.”[6]

The famous Chatham Lines (constituting the fortifications of the town), are immortalized in “Pickwick” as the scene of the review at which Mr. Pickwick and his friends were present and got into difficulties; and the field adjacent to Fort Pitt (now the Chatham Military Hospital, standing on high ground near the railway station), was the locality selected for the intended duel between the irate Dr. Slammer and the craven (but innocent) Mr. Winkle, both field and the contiguous land surrounding Fort Pitt being now a public recreation ground, whence is obtainable a fine panoramic view of Chatham and Rochester. The “Lines” are today locally understood as referring to an open space near Fort Pitt, which is used as an exercising ground for the soldiers at the barracks near by. All this portion of the country possessed great attractions for Dickens in later years; it was rendered familiar to him when, as a lad, he accompanied his father in walks about the locality, thus hallowed by old associations.

Ordnance Terrace, Chatham, retains much the same aspect it possessed at the time of John Dickens’s residence there (1817-1821)—a row of three-storied houses, prominently situated on high ground within a short distance of the Chatham railway station. The Dickens abode was the second house in the terrace (now No. 11), whose front is now overgrown with a Virginia creeper, and so redeems its bareness. In describing the place, the late Mr. W. R. Hughes says: “It has the dining-room on the left-hand side of the entrance and the drawing-room on the first floor, and is altogether a pleasantly-situated, comfortable and respectable dwelling.” At Ordnance Terrace, we are assured by Forster, it was that little Charles (“a very queer, small boy,” as he afterwards described himself at this period) lived with his parents from his fifth to his ninth year; the child’s “first desire for knowledge, and his greatest passion for reading, were awakened by his mother, who taught him the first rudiments, not only of English, but also, a little later, of Latin.” The same authority states that he and his sister Fanny presently supplemented these home studies by attending a preparatory day-school in Rome Lane (now Railway Street), and that when revisiting Chatham in his manhood he tried to discover the place, found it had been pulled down “ages” before to make room for a new street; but there arose, nevertheless, “a not dim impression that it had been over a dyer’s shop, that he went up steps to it, that he had frequently grazed his knees in doing so, and that, in trying to scrape the mud off a very unsteady little shoe, he generally got his leg over the scraper.” Other recollections of the Ordnance Terrace days flashed upon him when engaged upon his “Boz” sketches; for example, the old lady in the sketch entitled “Our Parish” was drawn from a Mrs. Newnham who lived at No. 5 in the Terrace, and the original of the Half-Pay Captain (in the same sketch) was another near neighbour: at No. 1 there resided a winsome, golden-haired maiden named Lucy Stroughill, whom he regarded as his little sweetheart, and who figures as “Golden Lucy” in one of his Christmas stories,[7] while her brother George, “a frank, open, and somewhat daring boy,” is believed to have inspired the creation of James Steerforth in “David Copperfield.”

2 (NOW 11) ORDNANCE TERRACE, CHATHAM. ([Page 11].)
Occupied by John Dickens and his family, 1817-1821.

Little Charles must have been acquainted, too, with the prototype of Joe, the Fat Boy in “Pickwick,” whose real name was James Budden, and whose father kept the Red Lion Inn at the corner of High Street and Military Road, Chatham, where the lad’s remarkable obesity attracted general attention. The Mitre Inn and Clarence Hotel at Chatham, described in 1838 as “the first posting-house in the town,” is also associated with Dickens’s early years, and remains very much as it was when he knew it as a boy. At the period referred to the landlord of this fine old hostelry was a Mr. Tribe, with whose family Mr. and Mrs. John Dickens and their children were on visiting terms; indeed, it is recorded that, at the evening parties held at the Mitre, Charles distinguished himself by singing solos (usually old sea songs), and sometimes duets with his sister, both being mounted on a dining table for a stage. The Mitre is historically interesting by reason of the fact that Lord Nelson used to reside there when on duty at Chatham, a room he occupied being known as “Nelson’s Cabin.”[8]

In the eighteenth chapter of “The Mystery of Edwin Drood” we find the place disguised as “The Crozier”—“the orthodox hotel” at Cloisterham (i.e., Rochester)—and in “The Holly-Tree Inn” it is thus directly immortalized: “There was an inn in the cathedral town where I went to school, which had pleasanter recollections about it than any of these.... It was the inn where friends used to put up, and where we used to go and see parents, and to have salmon and fowls, and be tipped. It had an ecclesiastical sign—the Mitre—and a bar that seemed to be the next best thing to a bishopric, it was so snug.”[9]

John Dickens had by nature a very generous disposition, which inclined him to be too lavish in his expenditure. This idiosyncrasy, coupled with the ever-increasing demands of a young and growing family, compelled him to realize the immediate necessity for retrenchment. Hitherto his income (ranging from £200 to £350 per annum) amply sufficed to provide for the comfort of wife and children; but the time had arrived when rigid economy became imperative, and early in 1821 he removed into a less expensive and somewhat obscure habitation at No. 18, St. Mary’s Place (otherwise called “The Brook”), Chatham, situated in the valley through which a brook (now covered over) flows into the Medway. The house on “The Brook,” with a “plain-looking whitewashed plaster front, and a small garden before and behind,” still exists; it is a semi-detached, six-roomed tenement, of a much humbler type than that in Ordnance Terrace, and stands next to what is now the Drill Hall of the Salvation Army, but which, in John Dickens’s time, was a Baptist meeting-house called Providence Chapel. While the Dickens dwelling-place remains unaltered, the neighbourhood has since greatly deteriorated. The locality was then more rural and not so crowded as now, many of the people living there being of a quite respectable class. The minister then officiating at Providence Chapel was William Giles, whose son William had been educated at Oxford, and afterwards kept a school in Clover Lane (now Clover Street, the playground since covered by a railway station), Chatham, whence he moved to larger premises close by, still to be seen at the corner of Rhode Street and Best Street. Both Charles and his elder sister Fanny attended here as day scholars, and the boy, under Mr. Giles’s able tuition, made rapid progress with his studies. Apropos of Mr. Giles, it should be mentioned that when his intelligent pupil had attained manhood and achieved fame as the author of “Pickwick,” his old schoolmaster sent him, as a token of admiration, a silver snuff-box, the lid bearing an inscription addressed “To the Inimitable Boz.” For a considerable time afterwards Dickens jocosely alluded to himself, in letters to intimate friends, as “the Inimitable.” By the way, where is that snuff-box now?

St. Mary’s Place is in close proximity to the old parish church of St. Mary, where the Dickens family worshipped during their residence in Chatham. It dates from the early part of the twelfth century, but having lately undergone a process of rebuilding, the edifice no longer possesses that quaintness which formerly characterized it, both externally and internally. The present structure, standing on a site which has been occupied by a church from Saxon times, has been erected from the designs of the late Sir Arthur Blomfield, already mentioned as the architect of the new parochial church of St. Mary, Kingston. Happily, there are preserved in St. Mary’s, Chatham, some interesting remains of the Norman edifice (A.D. 1120), notably a fine doorway and staircase, and the columns of the central arch of the nave. Instead of the diminutive bell-turret originally surmounting the roof of the nave, a lofty detached tower now constitutes the most striking feature of the church, which was consecrated on October 28, 1903, in the presence of Lord Roberts. It has been suggested that the description of Blunderstone Church in “David Copperfield” recalls in some respects the old parish church of Chatham, so familiar to Dickens in his boyhood, although the picture was partly drawn from Blundeston Church, Suffolk: “Here is our pew in the church. What a high-backed pew! with a window near it, out of which our house can be seen, and is seen many times during the morning’s service by Peggotty, who likes to make herself as sure as she can that it’s not being robbed, or is not in flames.”[10] Dame Peggotty was no doubt to some extent depicted from Charles Dickens’s nurse of those days, Mary Weller, who afterwards married Thomas Gibson, a shipwright in the dockyard, and whose death took place in 1888.

In the registers at Chatham Church are recorded the entries of the baptism of three children born in the parish to John and Elizabeth Dickens, the parents of the novelist; and Mary Allen, an aunt of Charles, was married by license there on December 11, 1821, to Dr. Lamert, a regimental surgeon, who afterwards figured in “Pickwick” as Dr. Slammer. In the church registers may be found several names subsequently used by Dickens in his stories—names of persons who lived in the district—Sowerby (Sowerberry), Tapley, Wren, Jasper, Weller, etc., the Tapleys and the Wellers being well-known cognomens, for there are vaults in the church belonging to the former family, and a gravestone in the churchyard erected to the latter. At the west end of the church there are two inscriptions to the family of Stroughill, who lived in Ordnance Terrace, and to whom reference has already been made. The Vicar, in his appeal for subscriptions in aid of the restoration fund, expressed a hope that the people of Chatham would contribute towards the cost of a memorial in the church to Charles Dickens. Apropos, I may mention that the Council of that flourishing institution the Dickens Fellowship have, very rightly, approached the Corporation of Chatham with the suggestion that they should place commemorative tablets on the two houses in Chatham in which he spent some of the happiest years of his boyhood, and the Corporation have consented.

18 ST. MARY’S PLACE, THE BROOK, CHATHAM. ([Page 14].)
The Dickens family resided in the house next to Providence Chapel, 1821-1823.

From an upper window at the side of the house, No. 18, St. Mary’s Place, an old graveyard was plainly visible, and frequently at night little Charles and his sister would gaze upon the God’s-acre and at the heavens above from that point of vantage. Some thirty years later he recalled the circumstances in a poetical little story entitled “A Child’s Dream of a Star,”[11] a touching reminiscence of these early days, where he says: “There was once a child, and he strolled about a good deal, and thought of a number of things. He had a sister, who was a child too, and his constant companion. These two used to wonder all day long. They wondered at the beauty of the flowers; they wondered at the height and blueness of the sky; they wondered at the depth of the bright water; they wondered at the goodness and the power of God who made the lovely world.

“They used to say to one another sometimes, Supposing all the children upon earth were to die, would the flowers and the water and the sky be sorry? They believed they would be sorry. For, said they, the buds are the children of the flowers, and the little playful streams that gambol down the hillsides are the children of the water, and the smallest bright specks playing at hide-and-seek in the sky all night must surely be the children of the stars; and they would all be grieved to see their playmates, the children of men, no more.

“There was one clear shining star that used to come out in the sky before the rest, near the church spire, above the graves. It was larger and more beautiful, they thought, than all the others, and every night they watched for it, standing hand in hand at a window. Whoever saw it first cried out, ‘I see the star!’ and often they cried out both together, knowing so well when it would rise, and where. So they grew to be such friends with it that, before lying down in their beds, they always looked out once again to bid it good-night; and when they were turning round to sleep they used to say, ‘God bless the star!’”

FORT PITT, CHATHAM. ([Page 18].)
The playground of Dickens in his childhood, and the scene of the duel in “Pickwick.”

The Chatham days were replete with innocent delights for little Charles, whose young life overflowed with the happiness resulting therefrom. He and his schoolfellows often went to see the sham fights and siege operations on the “Lines,” and he enjoyed many a ramble with his sister and nurse in the fields about Fort Pitt; and “the sky was so blue, the sun was so bright, the water was so sparkling, the leaves were so green, the flowers were so lovely, and they heard such singing birds and saw so many butterflies, that everything was beautiful.” In “The Child’s Story,” whence these extracts are culled, we find the following undoubted allusions to some of the juvenile pleasures in which the children indulged while at Chatham: “They had the merriest games that ever were played.... They had holidays, too, and ‘twelfth-cakes,’ and parties where they danced till midnight, and real theatres, where they saw palaces of real gold and silver rise out of the real earth, and saw all the wonders of the world at once. As to friends, they had such dear friends and so many of them that I want the time to reckon them up.”[12] At home there were picture-books and toys—“the finest toys in the world and the most astonishing picture-books”—and, above all, in the little room adjoining his bedchamber a small library, consisting of the works of Fielding, Smollett, Defoe, Goldsmith, the “Arabian Nights,” and “Tales of the Genii,” which the boy perused with avidity over and over again. “They kept alive my fancy,” he said, as David Copperfield, “and my hope of something beyond that place and time ... and did me no harm, for whatever harm was in some of them was not there for me; I knew nothing of it.”[13] In referring afterwards to the “readings” and “imaginations” which he described as brought away from Chatham, he again observes with David: “The picture always rises in my mind of a summer evening, the boys at play in the churchyard, and I, sitting on my bed, reading as if for life. Every barn in the neighbourhood, every stone in the church, and every foot of the churchyard, had some association of its own in my mind connected with these books, and stood for some locality made famous in them”[14]—words that were written down as fact some years before they found their way into the story.

Happily for the boy, he remained in ignorance of the changes impending at home, and unconscious of the fact that he was about to relinquish for ever the delectations afforded by those daily visions of his childhood; the ships on the Medway, the military paradings and manœuvres, the woods and pastures, the delightful walks with his father to Rochester and Cobham—all were to vanish, as Forster says, “like a dream”; for in 1822 John Dickens was recalled to Somerset House, and in the winter of that year he departed by coach for London, accompanied by his wife and children, excepting Charles, who was left behind for a few weeks longer in the care of the worthy schoolmaster, William Giles. Presently the day arrived when the lonesome lad followed his parents to the Metropolis, leaving behind him, alas! everything that gave his “ailing little life its picturesqueness or sunshine”; for he was really a very sickly boy, and for that reason unable to join with zest in the more vigorous sports of his playfellows, which explains his fondness for reading, so unusual in lads of his age.

Little Charles was only ten years old when he bade farewell to Chatham, and took his place as a passenger in the stage-coach “Commodore.” “There was no other inside passenger,” he afterwards observed, “and I consumed my sandwiches in solitude and dreariness, and it rained hard all the way, and I thought life sloppier than I expected to find it.” Like Philip Pirrip, he might with more justice have thought that henceforth he “was for London and greatness.” Undoubtedly he experienced the same sensations as those of that youthful hero who, under similar circumstances, realized that “all beyond was so unknown and great that in a moment with a strong heave and sob I broke into tears.”[15] Reminiscences of that memorable journey are recorded in one of that charming series of papers contributed by him to All the Year Round under the general title of “The Uncommercial Traveller.” Dickens here calls his boyhood’s home “Dullborough”—“most of us come from Dullborough who come from a country town”—informing us that as he left the place “in the days when there were no railways in the land,” he left it in a stage-coach, and further takes us into his confidence by saying that he had never forgotten, nor lost the smell of, the damp straw in which he was packed, “like game, and forwarded, carriage paid, to the Cross Keys, Wood Street, Cheapside, London.” These words were written in June, 1860, and a few months later, when penning the twentieth chapter of “Great Expectations,” he again recalled the episode: “The journey from our town to the Metropolis was a journey of about five hours. It was a little past mid-day when the four-horse stage-coach by which I was a passenger got into the ravel of traffic frayed out about the Cross Keys, Wood Street, Cheapside, London.... The coach that had carried me away was melodiously called ‘Timpson’s Blue-Eyed Maid,’ and belonged to Timpson, at the coach-office up-street.... Timpson’s was a moderate-sized coach-office (in fact, a little coach-office), with an oval transparency in the window, which looked beautiful by night, representing one of Timpson’s coaches in the act of passing a milestone on the London road with great velocity, completely full inside and out, and all the passengers dressed in the first style of fashion, and enjoying themselves tremendously.” He found, on a later visit to Rochester and Chatham, that Timpson’s had disappeared, for “Pickford had come and knocked Timpson’s down,” and “had knocked two or three houses down on each side of Timpson’s, and then had knocked the whole into one great establishment....”[16] The late Mr. Robert Langton states that Timpson was really Simpson (the coach proprietor at Chatham), and that the “Blue-Eyed Maid” was a veritable coach, to which reference is also made in the third chapter of “Little Dorrit.”

If, as Forster tells us, the “Commodore,” and not the “Blue-Eyed Maid,” conveyed little Charles to London, it was the identical vehicle by which Mr. Pickwick and his companions travelled from the Golden Cross at Charing Cross to Rochester, as duly set forth in the opening chapter of “The Pickwick Papers”; this coach was driven by old Cholmeley (or Chumley), who is said to have been the original of Tony Weller, and concerning whom some amusing anecdotes are related in “Nimrod’s Northern Tour.”

THE GOLDEN CROSS, CHARING CROSS, CIRCA 1827. ([Page 22].)
Showing the hotel as it was in the Pickwickian days.
From a print in the collection of Councillor Newton, Hampstead.

CHAPTER II.
BOYHOOD AND YOUTH IN LONDON.

It was in the early spring of 1823 that Charles Dickens made acquaintance with London for the second time, that vast Metropolis which henceforth continued to exercise a fascination over him, and in the study of which, as well as of its various types of humanity, he found a perpetual charm. His early impressions, however, were not of the brightest, having (as he subsequently observed) exchanged “everything that had given his ailing little life its picturesqueness or sunshine” for the comparatively sordid environment of a London suburb, and suffered the deprivation of the companionship of his playfellows at Chatham to become a solitary lad under circumstances that could not fail to make sorrowful the stoutest heart, not the least depressing being his father’s money involvement with consequent poverty at home. John Dickens, whose financial affairs demanded retrenchment, had rented what Forster describes as “a mean, small tenement” at No. 16 (now No. 141), Bayham Street, Camden Town, to-day one of the poorest parts of London, but not quite so wretched then as we are led to suppose by the reference in Forster’s biography. The cottages in Bayham Street, built in 1812, were comparatively new in 1823, and then stood in the midst of what may be regarded as rural surroundings, there being a meadow at the back of the principal row of houses, in which haymaking was carried on in its season, while a beautiful walk across the fields led to Copenhagen House. Dickens averred that “a washer-woman lived next door” to his father, and “a Bow Street officer lived over the way.” We learn, too, that at the top of the street were some almshouses, and when revisiting the spot many years later Dickens told his biographer that “to go to this spot and look from it over the dust-heaps and dock-leaves and fields at the cupola of St. Paul’s looming through the smoke was a treat that served him for hours of vague reflection afterwards.” A writer who vividly remembered Camden Town as it appeared when John Dickens lived there has placed upon record some interesting particulars concerning it. He says: “In the days I am referring to gas was unknown. We had little twinkling oil-lamps. As soon as it became dark, the watchman went his rounds, starting from his box at the north end of Bayham Street, against the tea-gardens of the Mother Red Cap, then a humble roadside house, kept by a widow and her two daughters, of the name of Young. Then the road between Kentish and Camden Towns was very lonely—hardly safe after dark. These certainly were drawbacks, for depredations used frequently to be committed in the back premises of the houses.... The nearest church was Old St. Pancras, then in the midst of fields.”[17] Exception has been taken to Forster’s use of the word “squalid” as applied to the Bayham Street of 1823, and with justification, for persons of some standing made it their abode, and we learn that in certain of the twenty or thirty newly-erected houses there lived Engelhart and Francis Holl, the celebrated engravers, the latter the father of Frank Holl, the Royal Academician; Charles Rolls and Henry Selous, artists of note; and Angelo Selous, the dramatic author. Thus it would appear that Bayham Street, during the early part of its history, was eminently respectable, and we are compelled to presume that Dickens’s unfavourable presentment of the locality was the outcome of his own painful environment, such as would be forcibly impressed upon the mind of a sickly child (as he then was) and one keenly susceptible to outward influences. Undoubtedly, as Forster remarks, “he felt crushed and chilled by the change from the life at Chatham, breezy and full of colour, to the little back garret in Bayham Street,” and, looking upon the dingy brick tenement to-day, it is not difficult to realize this fact; for, although the house itself could not have been less attractive than his previous home on “the Brook” at Chatham, the surroundings did not offer advantages in the shape of country walks and riverside scenery such as the immediate neighbourhood of Chatham afforded.[18]

16 (NOW 141) BAYHAM STREET, CAMDEN TOWN. ([Page 24].)
Dickens and his parents lived here in 1823. The house was also the residence of Mr. Micawber, and the district is mentioned in “Dombey and Son” under the name of Staggs Gardens.

Bayham Street was named after Bayham Abbey in Sussex, one of the seats of the Marquis Camden. Eighty years ago this part of suburban London was but a village, and Bayham Street had grass struggling through the newly-paved road. Thus we are forced to the conclusion that the misery and depression of spirits, from which little Charles suffered while living here, must be attributed to family adversity and his own isolated condition rather than to the character of his environment. At this time his father’s pecuniary resources became so circumscribed as to compel the observance of the strictest domestic economy, and prevented him from continuing his son’s education. “As I thought,” said Dickens on one occasion very bitterly, “in the little back-garret in Bayham Street, of all I had lost in losing Chatham, what would I have given—if I had had anything to give—to have been sent back to any other school, to have been taught something anywhere!”

Instead of improving, the elder Dickens’s affairs grew from bad to worse, and all ordinary efforts to propitiate his creditors having been exhausted, Mrs. Dickens laudably resolved to attempt a solution of the difficulty by means of a school for young ladies. Accordingly, a house was taken at No. 4, Gower Street North, whither the family removed in 1823. This and the adjoining houses had only just been built. The rate-book shows that No. 4 was taken in the name of Mrs. Dickens, at an annual rental of £50, and that it was in the occupation of the Dickens family from Michaelmas, 1823, to Lady Day, 1824, they having apparently left Bayham Street at Christmas of the former year. No. 4, Gower Street North stood a little to the north of Gower Street Chapel, erected in 1820, and still existing on the west side of the road; the house, known in recent times as No. 147, Gower Street, was demolished about 1895, and an extension of Messrs. Maple’s premises now occupies the site. When, in 1890, I visited the place with my friend the late Mr. W. R. Hughes (author of “A Week’s Tramp in Dickens Land”), we found it in the occupation of a manufacturer of artificial human eyes, a sort of Mr. Venus, with his “human eyes warious,” as depicted in “Our Mutual Friend”; while there was a dancing academy next door, reminiscent of Mr. Turveydrop, the professor of deportment in “Bleak House.” The Dickens residence had six small rooms, with kitchen in basement, each front room having two windows—altogether a fairly comfortable abode, but minus a garden. The result of Mrs. Dickens’s enterprise proved as disastrous as that of Mrs. Micawber’s. “Poor Mrs. Micawber! She said she had tried to exert herself; and so, I have no doubt, she had. The centre of the street door was perfectly covered with a great brass plate, on which was engraved, ‘Mrs. Micawber’s Boarding Establishment for Young Ladies’; but I never found that any young ladies had ever been to school there; or that any young lady ever came, or proposed to come; or that the least preparation was ever made to receive any young lady.” The actual facts are thus recorded in fiction, and the futility of Mrs. Dickens’s excellent intention to retrieve the family misfortunes seemed inevitable, in spite of the energy displayed by the youthful Charles in distributing “at a great many doors a great many circulars,” calling attention to the superior advantages of the new seminary. The blow proved a crushing one, rendering the prospect more hopeless than ever. Importunate creditors, who could no longer be kept at bay, effected the arrest of John Dickens, who was conveyed forthwith to a prison for debtors in the Borough of Southwark; his last words to his heart-broken son as he was carried off being similar to those despondingly uttered by Mr. Micawber under like circumstances, to the effect that the sun was set upon him for ever.

Forster says that the particular prison where John Dickens suffered incarceration was the Marshalsea, and this statement appears correct, judging from the fragment of the novelist’s autobiography which refers to the unfortunate incident: “And he told me, I remember, to take warning by the Marshalsea, and to observe that if a man had twenty pounds a year, and spent nineteen pounds nineteen shillings and sixpence, he would be happy; but that a shilling spent the other way would make him wretched.” Another of Mr. Micawber’s wise sayings, be it observed. That impecunious gentleman (it will be remembered) suffered imprisonment at the King’s Bench, and it may be surmised that the novelist purposely changed the locale that old memories should not be revived. Of debtors’ prisons considerable knowledge is displayed in his books, his personal acquaintance with them dating, of course, from those days when the brightness of his young life was obscured by the “falling cloud” to which he compares this distressing time. Realistic and accurate pictures of the most noteworthy of these blots upon our social system may be found in the forcible description in the fortieth chapter of “Pickwick” of the Fleet Prison, of which the last vestiges were removed in 1872, and the site of which is now covered by the Memorial Hall, Farringdon Street, and by Messrs. Cassell and Co.’s printing works; the King’s Bench Prison (long since demolished) figures prominently in “David Copperfield”; while many of the principal scenes in “Little Dorrit” are laid in the departed Marshalsea, which adjoined the burial-ground of St. George’s Church in the Borough. The extreme rear of the Marshalsea Prison, described by Dickens in the preface to “Little Dorrit,” was transformed into a warehouse in 1887.

The second chapter of Forster’s biography makes dismal reading, relating, as it does, the bitter experiences of Charles Dickens’s boyhood—experiences, however, which yielded abundant material for future use in his stories. With the breadwinner in the clutches of the law, the wife and children, left stranded in the Gower Street house, had a terrible struggle for existence; we are told that in order to obtain the necessaries of life their bits of furniture and various domestic utensils were pawned or otherwise disposed of, until at length the place was practically emptied of its contents, and the inmates were perforce compelled to encamp in the two parlours, living there night and day. At this juncture a relative, James Lamert (who had lodged with the family in Bayham Street), heard of their misfortunes, and, through his connection with Warren’s Blacking Manufactory at 30, Hungerford Stairs, Strand, provided an occupation there for little Charles by which he could earn a few shillings a week—a miserable pittance, but extremely welcome under the circumstances, as, by exercising strict economy, it enabled him to support himself, thus making one mouth less to provide for at home. Hungerford Stairs (in after-life he used to declare that he knew Hunger-ford well!) stood near the present Charing Cross railway bridge (which usurps the old Hungerford Suspension Bridge, transferred to Clifton), and the site of Hungerford Market is covered by the railway station. Dickens has recorded that “the blacking warehouse was the last house on the left-hand side of the way, at old Hungerford Stairs. It was a crazy, tumble-down old house, abutting, of course, on the river, and literally overrun with rats. Its wainscotted rooms and its rotten floors and staircase, and the old grey rats swarming down in the cellars, and the sound of their squeaking and scuffling coming up the stairs at all times, and the dirt and decay of the place, rise up vividly before me, as if I were there again.” The blacking factory, which disappeared when Hungerford Market went, is faithfully portrayed in the eleventh chapter of “David Copperfield,” thinly disguised as Murdstone and Grinby’s Warehouse, “down in Blackfriars.” Dickens, like David, was keenly sensible of the humiliation of what he could not help regarding as a very menial occupation—the tying-up and labelling innumerable pots of paste-blacking—which he was now destined to follow, and for the remainder of his life he never recalled this episode without a pang.

He reminded Forster how fond he was of roaming about the neighbourhood of the Strand and Covent Garden during the dinner hour, intently observing the various types of humanity with precocious interest, and storing up impressions which were destined to prove invaluable to him. One of his favourite localities was the Adelphi, and he was particularly attracted by a little waterside tavern called the Fox-under-the-Hill; doubtless the incident narrated in the just-mentioned chapter of “Copperfield”—the autobiographical chapter—is true of himself, when he causes little David to confess to a fondness for wandering about that “mysterious place with those dark arches,” and to wonder what the coalheavers thought of him, a solitary lad, as he sat upon a bench outside the little public-house, watching them as they danced.[19] The pudding-shops and beef-houses in the neighbourhood of St. Martin’s Lane and Drury Lane were familiar enough to him in those days; for, with such a modest sum to invest for his mid-day meal, he naturally compared notes as to the charges made by each for a slice of pudding or cold spiced beef before deciding upon the establishment which should have the privilege of his custom. He sometimes favoured Johnson’s in Clare Court, which is identical with the place patronized by David Copperfield—viz., the “famous alamode beef-house near Drury Lane,” where he gave the waiter a halfpenny, and wished he hadn’t taken it. In the recently demolished Clare Court there existed in those days two of the best alamode beef-shops in London, the Old Thirteen Cantons and the New Thirteen Cantons, and we read in a curious book called “The Epicure’s Almanack” (1815), that “the beef and liquors at either house are equally good, and the attention of all who pass is attracted by the display of fine sallads in the windows, which display is daily executed with great ingenuity, and comprehends a variety of neat devices, in which the fine slices of red beetroot are pleasingly conspicuous.” The New Thirteen Cantons was kept by the veritable Johnson himself. We are further informed that he owned a clever dog called Carlo, “who once enacted so capital a part on the boards of Old Drury,” and whose sagacity “brought as many customers to Mr. Johnson as did the excellence of his fare.” Dickens, however, did not become acquainted with Carlo, who, a few years before the lad knew the shop, paid the penalty of a report that the famous animal had been bitten by a mad dog. “There were two pudding-shops,” said Dickens to his biographer, “between which I was divided, according to my finances.” One was in a court close to St. Martin’s Church, where the pudding was made with currants, “and was rather a special pudding,” but dear; the other was in the Strand, “somewhere in that part which has been rebuilt since,” where the pudding was much cheaper, being stout and pale, heavy and flabby, with a few big raisins stuck in at great distances apart. The more expensive shop stood in Church Court (at the back of the church), demolished when Adelaide Street was constructed about 1830, and may probably be identified with the Oxford eating-house, then existing opposite the departed Hungerford Street; the other establishment, where Dickens often dined for economy’s sake, flourished near the spot covered until quite recently by that children’s paradise, the Lowther Arcade. The courts surrounding St. Martin’s Church were formerly so thronged with eating-houses that the district became popularly known as “Porridge Island.”

DICKENS AT THE BLACKING WAREHOUSE. ([Page 29].)
From a drawing by Fred Barnard. Reproduced by kind permission of Messrs. Chapman and Hall.

Failing, by means of a certain “deed,” to propitiate his creditors, John Dickens continued to remain within the gloomy walls of the Marshalsea. The home in Gower Street was thereupon broken up, and Mrs. Dickens, with her family, went to live with her husband in the prison. Little Charles, however, was handed over as a lodger to a Mrs. Roylance, a reduced old lady who afterwards figured as Mrs. Pipchin in “Dombey and Son.” Mrs. Roylance, long known to the family, resided in Little College Street, Camden Town; it became College Street West in 1828, and the portion north of King Street has been known since 1887 as College Place. The abode in question was probably No. 37, for, according to the rate-book of 1824 (the period with which I am dealing), the house so numbered (rated at £18) was occupied by Elizabeth Raylase[20] until the following year, and demolished about 1890, at which time the street was rebuilt.

The boy still carried on his uncongenial duties at the blacking warehouse with satisfaction to his employers, in spite of the acute mental suffering he underwent. Experiencing a sense of loneliness in being cut off from his parents, brothers, and sisters, he pleaded to his father to be allowed to lodge nearer the prison, with the result that he left Mrs. Roylance, to take up his abode in Lant Street, Borough, where, in the house of an insolvent court agent, a back attic had been found for him, having from the little window “a pleasant prospect of a timber-yard.” Of Lant Street, as it probably then appeared, we have a capital description in the thirty-second chapter of the “Pickwick Papers,” for here it was that Bob Sawyer found a lodgment with the amiable (!) Mrs. Raddle and her husband, in the identical house, maybe, as that tenanted by the insolvent court agent. “There is a repose about Lant Street, in the Borough, which sheds a gentle melancholy upon the soul. There are always a good many houses to let in the street; it is a by-street, too, and its dulness is soothing. A house in Lant Street would not come within the denomination of a first-rate residence in the strict acceptation of the term, but it is a most desirable spot, nevertheless. If a man wished to abstract himself from the world, to remove himself from within the reach of temptation, to place himself beyond the possibility of any inducement to look out of the window, he should by all means go to Lant Street.

“In this happy retreat are colonized a few clear-starchers, a sprinkling of journeymen bookbinders, one or two prison agents for the insolvent court, several small housekeepers who are employed in the docks, a handful of mantua-makers, and a seasoning of jobbing tailors. The majority of the inhabitants either direct their energies to the letting of furnished apartments, or devote themselves to the healthful and invigorating pursuit of mangling. The chief features in the still life of the street are green shutters, lodging-bills, brass door-plates, and bell-handles, the principal specimens of animated nature, the pot-boy, the muffin youth, and the baked-potato man. The population is migratory, usually disappearing on the verge of quarter-day, and generally by night. His Majesty’s revenues are seldom collected in this happy valley; the rents are dubious, and the water communication is very frequently cut off.”

LANT STREET, BOROUGH. ([Page 34].)
Showing the older residential tenements. The actual house in which Dickens lived as a boy is now demolished.

Lant Street, as Bob Sawyer informed Mr. Pickwick, is near Guy’s Hospital, “little distance after you’ve passed St. George’s Church—turns out of the High Street on the right-hand side of the way.” It has not altered materially in its outward aspect since the time when little Charles Dickens slept there, on the floor of the back attic, an abode which he then thought was “a paradise.” We may suppose that such accommodation, poor as it must have been, yielded some consolation to the lonely child by reason of the fact that he was within easy reach of his parents, and also because his landlord—a fat, good-natured old gentleman, who was lame—and his quiet old wife were very kind to him; and it is interesting to know that they and their grown-up son are immortalized in “The Old Curiosity Shop” as the Garland family. Little Charles looked forward to Saturday nights, when his release from toil at an earlier hour than usual enabled him to indulge his fancy for rambling and loitering a little in the busy thoroughfares between Hungerford Stairs and the Marshalsea. His usual way home was over Blackfriars Bridge, and then to the left along Charlotte Street, which (he is careful to tell us) “has Rowland Hill’s chapel on one side, and the likeness of a golden dog licking a golden pot over a shop door on the other,” a quaint sign still existing here. He was sometimes tempted to expend a penny to enter a show-van which generally stood at a corner of the street “to see the fat pig, the wild Indian, and the little lady,” and for long afterwards could recall the peculiar smell of hat-making then (and now) carried on there.

The autobiographical record discloses another characteristic incident, which was afterwards embodied in the eleventh chapter of “Copperfield.”

One evening little Charles had acted as messenger for his father at the Marshalsea, and was returning to the prison by way of Westminster Bridge, when he went into a public-house in Parliament Street, at the corner of Derby Street, and ordered a glass of the very best ale (the “Genuine Stunning”), “with a good head to it.” “The landlord,” observes Dickens, “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 at 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 expect 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 “so juvenile a customer was evidently unusual at the Red Lion”; and he explains that “the occasion was a festive one,” either his own birthday or somebody else’s, but I doubt whether this would prove sufficient justification in the eyes of the rigid total abstainer. In “David Copperfield” we find an illustration of the scene depicted in a clever etching by “Phiz.” The public-house here referred to is the Red Lion, which has been lately rebuilt, and differs considerably from the unpretentious tavern as Dickens knew it; unfortunately, the sign of the rampant red lion has not been replaced, but in its stead we see a bust of the novelist, standing within a niche in the principal front of the new building.

By a happy stroke of good fortune, a rather considerable legacy from a relative accrued to John Dickens, and had been paid into court during his incarceration. This, in addition to the official pension due for long service at Somerset House, enabled him to meet his financial responsibilities, with the result that the Marshalsea knew him no more. Just then, too, the blacking business had become larger, and was transferred to Chandos Street, Covent Garden, where little Charles continued to manipulate the pots, but in a more public manner; for here the work was done in a window facing the street, and generally in the presence of an admiring crowd outside. The warehouse (pulled down in 1889) stood next to the shop at the corner of Bedford Street in Chandos Street (the southern corner, now the Civil Service Stores); opposite, there was the public-house where the lad got his ale. “The stones on the street,” he afterwards observed to Forster, “may be smoothed by my small feet going across to it at dinner-time, and back again.” The basement of the warehouse became transformed in later years into a chemist’s shop, and the sign of the tavern over the way was the Black Prince, closed in 1888, and demolished shortly afterwards to make room for buildings devoted to the medical school of the Charing Cross Hospital. His release from prison compelled the elder Dickens to seek another abode for himself and family, and he obtained temporary quarters with the before-mentioned Mrs. Roylance of Little College Street. Thence, according to Forster, they went to Hampstead, where the elder Dickens had taken a house, and from there, in 1825, he removed to a small tenement in Johnson Street, Somers Town, a poverty-stricken neighbourhood even in those days, and changed but little since. Johnson Street was then the last street in Somers Town, and adjoined the fields between it and Camden Town. It runs east from the north end of Seymour Street, and the house occupied by the Dickens family (including Charles, who had, of course, left his Lant Street “paradise”) was No. 13, at the east end of the north side, if we may rely upon the evidence afforded by the rate-book. At that time the house was numbered 29, and rated at £20, the numbering being changed to 13 at Christmas, 1825. In July of that year the name of the tenant is entered in the rate-book as Caroline Dickens, and so remains until January, 1829, after which the house is marked “Empty.”

THE SIGN OF THE DOG’S HEAD IN THE POT, CHARLOTTE STREET, BLACKFRIARS. ([Page 35].)
“That turning in the Blackfriars Road which has Rowland Hill’s Chapel on one side, and the likeness of a golden dog licking a golden pot over a shop door at the other” (Forster).

Brighter days were in store for the Dickens family, and especially for little Charles, whose father could now afford to send him to a good school in the neighbourhood, much to the boy’s delight. Owing to a quarrel (of which he was the subject) between John Dickens and James Lamert, the father declared that his boy should leave the blacking warehouse and go to school instead. Thus terminated, suddenly and unexpectedly, that period of his life which Charles Dickens ever regarded with a feeling of repugnance. “Until old Hungerford Market was pulled down,” he tells us, “until old Hungerford Stairs were destroyed, and the very nature of the ground changed, I never had the courage to go back to the place where my servitude began.” He never saw it, and could not endure to go near it, and, in order that a certain smell of the cement used for putting on the blacking-corks should not revive unpleasant associations, he would invariably, when approaching Warren’s later establishment in Chandos Street, cross over to the opposite side of the way.

He was about twelve years of age when he and the blacking-pots parted company for ever, and the new and more promising prospect opened before him—a future replete with possibilities, and yielding opportunities of which he knew the value and made the best use. The school to which he was sent as a day-scholar was called the Wellington House Academy, the proprietor being a Welshman named William Jones, whose “classical and commercial” seminary stood at the north-east corner of Granby Street, Hampstead Road. The residential portion still exists, although doomed to early demolition; but the detached schoolroom and large playground disappeared in 1835, on the formation of the London and Birmingham Railway, as it was then called. In a paper entitled “Our School,” contributed to Household Words in 1851, Dickens gives a thinly-veiled account of Jones’s Academy, and those of his pupils who yet survive readily understand the various allusions, and vouch for the general accuracy of the presentment. “It was a school,” he says, “of some celebrity in its neighbourhood—nobody could say why; the master was supposed among us to know nothing, and one of the ushers was supposed to know everything.” There can be no doubt that Wellington House Academy and its proprietor are revived in “David Copperfield” as Salem House and Mr. Creakle.

The most accessible route for young Dickens to follow between his home in Johnson Street and the school was by way of Drummond Street, then a quiet semi-rural thoroughfare, bounded on the north side by the cow pastures belonging to an ancestor of the late Cecil Rhodes (of South African fame), many members of whose family were located here. Dr. Dawson, a schoolfellow of Dickens at Wellington House, well remembered him acting as ringleader of other lads, and, simulating poverty, imploring charity from people in Drummond Street, especially old ladies.

29 (NOW 13) JOHNSON STREET, SOMERS TOWN, ([Page 38].)
The home of Dickens in 1824.

Among other associations of the future novelist with this locality may be mentioned his attendance (in company with Dr. Dawson) at the Sunday morning services in Somers Chapel (now called St. Mary’s Parish Church), in Seymour Street (then partly fields), Somers Town,[21] concerning which act of piety Dr. Dawson regrets to observe that his lively and irreverent young friend “did not attend in the slightest degree to the service, but incited me to laughter by declaring his dinner was ready, and the potatoes would be spoiled, and, in fact, behaved in such a manner that it was lucky for us we were not ejected from the chapel.” He remained at Wellington House Academy about two years (1824-1826), without achieving any particular distinction as a pupil. Thus ended his school training, elementary at the best, and it has been truly observed that a classical education might have “done for” him—that “Boz,” like Burns, might have acquired all necessary erudition in a Board school. “Pray, Mr. Dickens, where was your son educated?” conjured a friend of John Dickens, who significantly and pertinently replied, “Why, indeed, sir—ha! ha!—he may be said to have educated himself!” a response which the novelist used good-humouredly and whimsically to imitate in Forster’s hearing.

On relinquishing his studies at the age of fourteen, Charles Dickens for a brief period was installed as clerk in the service of Mr. Molloy, a solicitor in New Square, Lincoln’s Inn. His father, however, presently transferred him to the offices of Messrs. Ellis and Blackmore, attorneys, at No. 1, Raymond Buildings, Gray’s Inn (second floor), the clerks’ office looking out upon the roadway; here he performed similar duties from May, 1827, to November, 1828, at a weekly salary of 13s. 6d., rising to 15s. Although he did not relish the law, and failed to appreciate the particular kind of responsibility devolving upon him as a humble apprentice to that profession, the few months thus employed by him were productive of fruitful results, for they afforded him opportunities of studying the idiosyncrasies of lawyers, their clerks and clients, which can only be obtained by intimate association. In the words of David Copperfield, he said: “I looked at nothing that I know of, but I saw everything,” with the result that he culled from his mental storehouse those vivid pictures of legal life and character as portrayed in “The Pickwick Papers,” “Sketches by Boz,” and later works. The Dickens family at this time had left the unattractive environment of Johnson Street and made their home at the Polygon, Somers Town, a much more respectable and refined quarter, where Harold Skimpole (in “Bleak House”) afterwards settled, and “where there were at that time a number of poor Spanish refugees walking about in cloaks, smoking little paper cigars.” The Polygon was so called from the arrangement of the houses in the form of a circle; it stood within Clarendon Square, and, on completion, became the aristocratic part of Somers Town; many successful artists and engravers selecting it as a place of residence.[22] The name of Dickens, however, does not appear in the contemporary rate-book, but we find recorded there the significant fact that No. 17 was then “let to lodgers”—a very unusual entry—and this, added to the fact that the rents were comparatively high, justifies the assumption that the Dickens family were lodgers only at the house bearing that number. At this time John Dickens, with commendable energy and perseverance, had acquired the difficult art of shorthand writing, with a view to obtaining a livelihood as a Parliamentary reporter. He apparently changed his address with some frequency, in 1832-1833 living for a time at Highgate, whither Charles accompanied him, and lodging during brief intervals in the western part of London. Certain letters written by the son to an intimate friend indicate such addresses as North End (? Fulham) and Fitzroy Street.

WELLINGTON HOUSE ACADEMY, HAMPSTEAD ROAD. ([Page 39].)
The school of Dickens, 1824-1826.

The father, on securing an appointment as a reporter for the Morning Herald, established himself and his family (including Charles), at No. 18, Bentinck Street, Manchester Square. The rate-book, however, does not give his name as the tenant of this or any other house in the street, so we must assume that the family were again merely lodgers. This house and its neighbours were recently demolished, being replaced by a row of mansions, and, oddly enough, the name of the occupier of No. 19 in 1895 bore the novelist’s patronymic.

On leaving Ellis and Blackmore’s office in November, 1828, Charles Dickens abandoned the pursuit of the law for ever.

The profession of journalism offering him superior attractions, he was tempted to become a newspaper reporter. With that object in view, he gave himself up to the study of stenography, devoting much of his time at the British Museum acquiring a knowledge of the subject, and practising in the Law Courts of Doctors’ Commons with extraordinary assiduity until he arrived at something like proficiency. The impediments that beset him are duly set forth in the pages of “David Copperfield,” the incidents there narrated being based upon the author’s heart-breaking experience in endeavouring to master the mysteries of shorthand. Like David, he passed a period of probation, lasting nearly two years, reporting for the Proctors at Doctors’ Commons, St. Paul’s Churchyard. The scene of his labours is thus described in “Sketches by Boz”: “Crossing a quiet and shady courtyard paved with stone, and frowned upon by old red-brick houses, on the doors of which were painted the names of sundry learned civilians, we paused before a small, green-baized, brass-headed nailed door, which, yielding to our gentle push, at once admitted us into an old quaint-looking apartment, with sunken windows and black carved wainscotting, at the upper end of which, seated on a raised platform of semicircular shape, were about a dozen solemn-looking gentlemen in crimson gowns and wigs.” The courts were destroyed in 1867, and in their place a Royal Court of Probate was established at Westminster Hall.

According to the autographs on certain British Museum readers’ slips, Charles Dickens was residing, in 1831, at No. 10, Norfolk Street, Fitzroy Square, the same street (now Cleveland Street, east side of Middlesex Hospital) in which his father was domiciled for a while in 1814.

About the year 1833 Charles rented bachelor apartments in Cecil Street (Strand), as evidenced by a letter of that period to an intimate friend, where he says: “The people at Cecil Street put too much water in the hashes, lost the nutmeg-grater, attended on me most miserably ... and so I gave them warning, and have not yet fixed on a local habitation.”

We learn from Charles Dickens the younger that his father, before occupying chambers in Furnival’s Inn, had apartments in Buckingham Street, and it is, therefore, not unlikely that he went thither from Cecil Street; the same authority adds that “if he lived in David Copperfield’s rooms—as I have no doubt he did—he must have kept house on the top floor of No. 15 on the east side—the house which displays a tablet commemorating its one-time tenancy by Peter the Great, Czar of all the Russias.”[23] David, in describing his chambers, observes that “they were on the top of the house ... and consisted of a little half-blind entry where you could see hardly anything, a little stone-blind pantry where you could see nothing at all, a sitting-room, and a bedroom. The furniture was rather faded, but quite good enough for me; and, sure enough, the river was outside the windows.” Here, or at Cecil Street, Dickens doubtless met that martyr to “the spazzums,” the immortal Mrs. Crupp, and the “young gal” whom she hired for festive occasions, such as David’s dinner-party.

In 1832, after gaining experience at Doctors’ Commons, an opening was found for a reporter on the staff of the True Sun, a London morning paper, then just launched; and here it may be observed that newspaper reporting in those days, before railways and electric telegraphs, was not unattended by great difficulties and even danger, for Dickens himself relates how he had frequently to travel by post-chaise to remote parts of the country to record important speeches, and how, on the return journey, he transcribed his notes on the palm of his hand by the light of a dark lantern while galloping at fifteen miles an hour at the dead of night through a wild district, sometimes finding himself belated in miry country roads during the small hours in a wheelless carriage, with exhausted horses and drunken post-boys, and then succeeding in reaching the office in time for publication. While thus representing the True Sun he joined the reporting staff of the Mirror of Parliament (then a comparatively new paper, conducted by his uncle, John Henry Barrow, barrister-at-law), and in 1834 associated himself with the Morning Chronicle,[24] one of the leading London journals, and a formidable rival of the Times.

1 RAYMOND BUILDINGS, GRAY’S INN. ([Page 41].)
In the corner house were the offices of Ellis and Blackmore, attorneys, with whom Dickens was a clerk in 1827-1828.

As a Parliamentary reporter he won great and enviable distinction, it being an undoubted fact that of the eighty or ninety so employed with him in the “gallery” of the House of Commons, he retained the premier position by reason of his marvellous dexterity, accuracy, and capacity for work. It was, of course, in the old House, not the present palatial edifice, that Charles Dickens followed this avocation, where the accommodation provided for the newspaper representatives proved most unsatisfactory, the “gallery” in the House of Lords being no better than a “preposterous pen” (as Dickens described it), in which the reporters were “huddled together like so many sheep,” while the reporters in the Commons carried on their duties in the Strangers’ Gallery until a separate gallery was provided for their use in the temporary House constructed in 1834. The “gentlemen of the press” are now treated with much greater consideration; instead of the dark lobby, or “pen,” there are large writing-rooms, separate apartments for smoking, reading, dining, and dressing, as well as a stationer’s shop, a post-office, and a refreshment-bar.

Dickens’s final appearance at the House of Commons as a reporter was at the close of the session of 1836, when, like David Copperfield, he “noted down the music of the Parliamentary bagpipes for the last time.” For he had already tasted the delights of authorship, having written some original papers for the Evening Chronicle and other periodicals, and henceforth he determined to adopt literature as a profession. His first paper appeared (entitled “A Dinner at Poplar Walk”)[25] anonymously in the Monthly Magazine nearly three years prior to his retirement from the Press Gallery—that is, in December, 1833—and he has himself described how, “with fear and trembling,” he stealthily dropped the manuscript into “a dark letter-box, in a dark office, up a dark court in Fleet Street,” and how suffused with tears of joy and pride were the eyes of the young author when he beheld his little effusion “in all the glory of print” that “they could not bear the street and were not fit to be seen there.” The “dark court” referred to was Johnson’s Court, Fleet Street, the location of the office of the old (and long since defunct) Monthly Magazine; the court still exists, but the office was demolished quite recently for the extension of the premises of Mr. Henry Sells, who, happily, has preserved, as a memorial of the novelist, the door to which the veritable “dark letter-box” was attached. The story of Dickens’s early essays has often been related, and needs no repetition here. Suffice it to say that upon the success or failure of that maiden effort a very great deal depended, as he intended to be guided by the dictum of the publisher and of the public, and there is every probability that, had this initial sketch been unfavourably received, the young writer would have directed his attention to the stage, which for him always possessed a magnetic attraction; thus, instead of becoming a famous author, he would have blossomed into a popular actor, thereby missing his true vocation.

CHARLES DICKENS IN 1830.
The earliest authentic portrait known.
From the miniature by Mrs. Janet Barrow. Reproduced by permission of F. Sabin, Esq.

CHAPTER III.
THE LONDON AND SUBURBAN HOMES.

Dickens’s earlier sketches (which bore no signature until August, 1834, when he adopted the pseudonym of “Boz”) were penned when living with his father in Bentinck Street. At first they yielded no honorarium; but as soon as he received a modest fee for them in addition to his salary as a reporter, he exhibited a sense of independence in resolving to take the apartments in Buckingham Street, whence he presently removed to more commodious chambers in Furnival’s Inn, Holborn. He was then twenty-two years of age, and still on the staff of the Morning Chronicle, and from Christmas, 1834, he rented a “three-pair back” at No. 13, Furnival’s Inn. One of his earliest (undated) letters bears the address of Furnival’s Inn, in which he informs his future brother-in-law, Henry Austin, that he is about to start on a journey, alone and in a gig, to Essex and Suffolk—evidently on journalistic business for the Morning Chronicle—and expresses a belief that he would be spilt before paying a turnpike, or run over a child before reaching Chelmsford; his journey covered the same ground as that performed by Mr. Pickwick in his drive by coach to Ipswich. Twelve months later he transferred his impedimenta from No. 13 to more cheerful rooms at No. 15, renting a “three-pair floor south.” Several of the later “Sketches by Boz” were doubtless written at No. 13, which stood squeezed into a corner of the square on the right as entered from Holborn, the young author’s modest quarters being almost at the top of a steep and dark staircase.

His rooms at No. 15 were a decided improvement on these, and he probably had them in his mind when referring to Furnival’s Inn in “Martin Chuzzlewit” and to John Westlock’s apartments there, “two stories up”: “There are snug chambers in those Inns where the bachelors live, and, for the dissolute fellows they pretend to be, it is quite surprising how well they get on.... His rooms were the perfection of neatness and convenience.... There is little enough to see in Furnival’s Inn. It is a shady, quiet place, echoing to the footsteps of the stragglers who have business there, and rather monotonous and gloomy on Sunday evenings.” It does not require much stretch of imagination to believe that the description of Traddles’ chambers in Gray’s Inn (vide “David Copperfield,” chap. lix.) was drawn from these very apartments, or to realize the probability that the reference to Traddles and his lovely girl guests is a reminiscence of Dickens’s own.

YORK HOUSE, 15 BUCKINGHAM STREET, STRAND. ([Page 45].)
Charles Dickens lodged in the house overlooking the river about 1834, and Mrs. Crupps let apartments here to David Copperfield. This house was also occupied by Peter the Great, Henry Fielding, and William Black.

This humble abode ever remained in his memory as a hallowed spot, cherished by the fact that here he received the commission to write “Pickwick” and penned the opening chapters, by which immortal achievement he suddenly leaped into fame; but also by another interesting and very personal recollection, namely, that it was the scene of his early domestic life. For, be it remembered, the publication of the first number of “Pickwick” (April, 1836) synchronized with his marriage, the lady of his choice being Catherine Thomson Hogarth, eldest daughter of George Hogarth, one of his colleagues on the staff of the Morning Chronicle, the ceremony being performed at the Church of St. Luke, Chelsea, of which parish the Rev. Charles Kingsley (father of the author of “Westward Ho!”) then officiated as rector.

The honeymoon over, Dickens and his bride returned to London, and made their home at No. 15, Furnival’s Inn, where their eldest child, Charles, was born. Here his favourite sister-in-law, Mary Hogarth, sometimes stayed with the youthful couple, her amiable and delightful disposition proving a very joy in the little household; her premature death in 1837, in Doughty Street, at the age of seventeen, so unnerved her admiring brother-in-law that the course of “Pickwick” and “Oliver Twist” (produced almost simultaneously) was temporarily interrupted, and writing presently to Mrs. Hogarth from his next abode, he said: “I wish you could know how I weary now for the three rooms in Furnival’s Inn, and how I miss that pleasant smile and those sweet words which, bestowed upon our evening’s work, on our merry banterings round the fire, were more precious to me than the applause of a whole world would be.” Here, too (as already mentioned), lived John Westlock when visited by Tom Pinch, and it was the scene, also, of certain incidents in “The Mystery of Edwin Drood.” Does not Mr. Grewgious (whose chambers were “over the way” at Staple Inn) tell us that “Furnival’s is fireproof and specially watched and lighted,” and did he not escort Rosa Bud to her rooms there, at Wood’s Hotel in the Square, afterwards confiding her to the care of the “Unlimited head chambermaid”?[26]

It was once an Inn of Chancery attached to Lincoln’s Inn, deriving its name from Sir William Furnivall, who owned much property hereabouts. About 1818 it became a series of chambers wholly unconnected with any Inn of Court, and in that year was entirely rebuilt by Peto. On the right-hand side of the Square, as immediately entered from Holborn, the house (No. 15) containing the bright little rooms once tenanted by Dickens was easily identified in later years by the medallion above the ground-floor windows which notified the fact; this house and its neighbour were more ornate than the rest, by reason of the series of Ionic pilasters between the windows. The whole of Furnival’s Inn was swept away in 1898, and the site covered by an extension of the premises of the Prudential Insurance Company; thus, alas! disappears an extremely interesting Dickens landmark, so intimately associated with the novelist and his writings.

Dickens must have relinquished his tenancy of the chambers in Furnival’s Inn before the actual term had expired, the assumption being that he had taken them on a short lease, as, according to the official record, he continued to pay rent until February 1839. Two years previously, finding this accommodation inadequate, and realizing that his literary labours had already begun to yield a good income, he determined to take a house, No. 48, Doughty Street, Mecklenburgh Square—a locality not otherwise unknown to literary fame; for Shirley Brooks (a former editor of Punch) was born in this street, while both Sydney Smith and Edmund Yates lived there, the latter at No. 43,[27] opposite Tegg, the publisher of the “Peter Parley” series of juvenile books.

Yates, in his “Recollections and Experiences,” recalls the Doughty Street of his day (and of Dickens’s) as “a broad, airy, wholesome street; none of your common thoroughfares, to be rattled through by vulgar cabs and earth-shaking Pickford vans, but a self-included property, with a gate at each end, and a lodge with a porter in a gold-laced hat and the Doughty arms[28] on the buttons of his mulberry-coloured coat, to prevent anyone, except with a mission to one of the houses, from intruding on the exclusive territory.” The lodges and gates have been removed since this was written, and the porter in official garb disappeared with that exclusiveness and quietude which doubtless attracted Dickens to the spot more than sixty years ago.

No. 48, Doughty Street (where his daughters Mary and Kate were born) is situated on the east side of the street, and contains twelve rooms—a single-fronted, three-storied house, with a railed-in area in front and a small garden at the rear. A tiny little room on the ground-floor, facing the garden, is believed to have been the novelist’s study, in which he wrote the latter portion of “Pickwick,” and practically the whole of “Oliver Twist” and “Nicholas Nickleby.” The summer months he customarily spent away from home, taking his work with him, and thus a few chapters of these books were penned at Broadstairs, at Twickenham Park, and at Elm Cottage (now called Elm Lodge), Petersham, a pretty little rural retreat rented by him in the summer of 1839, a locality to which he then referred as “those remote and distant parts, with the chain of mountains formed by Richmond Hill presenting an almost insurmountable barrier between me and the busy world.”

15 FURNIVAL’S INN, HOLBORN. ([Page 50].)
From a sketch by the late F. G. Kitton. Reproduced by kind permission of Messrs. T. C. and E. C. Jack.

At Elm Cottage he frequently enjoyed the society of his friends—Maclise, Landseer, Ainsworth, Talfourd, and the rest—many of whom joined in athletic competitions organized by their energetic host in the extensive grounds, among other frivolities being a balloon club for children, of which Forster was elected president on condition that he supplied all the balloons. Elm Cottage (Lodge) is now a school, screened from the public road by a high wooden fence and a barrier of elm-trees; it is a heavy-looking structure, roofed with red tiles, and at the rear is Sudbrook Lane. The novelist’s first country home, however, was at No. 4, Ailsa Park Villas, Twickenham, still standing in the Isleworth Road,[29] near St. Margaret’s railway-station, described in a recent issue of the Richmond and Twickenham Times as “a building on regular lines, shut in from the world by a plenitude of trees, silent and quiet, an ideal cottage for a mind seeking rest and repose;” not a picturesque edifice by any means, but having a quaint entablature with a circular window in the centre thereof, the house having since undergone little or no change, except, perhaps, in the enlargement of the balcony over the main entrance. There are several references in Dickens’s early letters to this region of the Thames Valley (to the Star and Garter, at Richmond, Eel Pie Island, etc.), and much local colouring is employed in certain of his novels—“Nicholas Nickleby,” “Little Dorrit,” and especially in “Oliver Twist.”[29] It is interesting to know that the Old Coach and Horses at Isleworth, where Sikes and Oliver halted during the burglary expedition to Chertsey, remains almost intact to this day, opposite Syon Lane, and contiguous to Syon House, the residence of that popular writer of fiction, Mr. George Manville Fenn.[29]

It was during the Doughty Street days that Dickens, in order to relieve the mental tension, indulged in many enjoyable jaunts into the country with Forster, these acting as a stimulant to fresh exertion. He either rode on horseback or walked to such outlying districts as Hampstead, Barnet, or Richmond, his favourite haunt in the northern suburb being Jack Straw’s Castle on the Heath, famous also for its associations with Thackeray, Du Maurier, and Lord Leighton, and commemorated a generation before by Washington Irving in his “Tales of a Traveller.” Here the Dickens traditions are still cherished, a small upper apartment in front being pointed out as the bedroom which he occasionally occupied. “I knows a good ’ous there,” he said to Forster when imploring his companionship on a bout to Hampstead, “where we can have a red-hot chop for dinner and a glass of wine”; and the notification resulted in many happy meetings there in the coming years.[30] A writer in the Daily Graphic (July 18, 1903) avers that Hampstead possesses other Dickensian associations—that the novelist had lodgings at Wylde’s Farm, and, it is said, wrote some chapters of “Bleak House” in the picturesque cottage, which, with the farmhouse and land, it is proposed to acquire for the use and enjoyment of the public. Wylde’s Farm is situated on the north-west boundary of Hampstead Heath, close to North End, Hampstead; it formerly consisted of two farms, one known as Collins’s and the other as Tooley’s, and it was at Collins’s that John Linnell, the artist, lived for some years, and there welcomed, as visitors, William Blake, Mulready, Flaxman, George Morland, and others distinguished in Art and Literature.

48 DOUGHTY STREET. ([Page 54].)
The residence of Charles Dickens, 1837-1839. His only London residence which remains unchanged. Part of “Pickwick,” “Oliver Twist,” and the greater part of “Nickleby” were written here.

The associations of the novelist with No. 48, Doughty Street are perpetuated not only in the name “Dickens House” recently bestowed upon it, but by the tablet affixed thereon by the London County Council in December last—truly, a long-delayed tribute, and especially deserving in this case owing to the fact that it is the only London home of Charles Dickens which survives intact structurally. It was here that in September, 1838, Forster lunched with him, and then to sit, read, or work, “or do something” (as the author expressed it in his note of invitation), “while I write the last chapter of ‘Oliver,’ which will be arter a lamb chop.” “How well I remember that evening!” observes his friend, “and our talk of what should be the fate of Charley Bates, on behalf of whom (as, indeed, for the Dodger, too) Talfourd[31] had pleaded as earnestly in mitigation of judgment as ever at the bar for any client he had most respected.”

Writing to his friend Macready, the actor, in November, 1839, Dickens said: “You must come and see my new house when we have it to rights.” He had just completed the last number of “Nicholas Nickleby,” when he decided to leave Doughty Street for a more commodious residence in a more exclusive neighbourhood, namely, No. 1, Devonshire Terrace, York Gate—“a house of great promise (and great premium), undeniable situation, and excessive splendour,” to quote his own concise description; it had a large garden, and was shut out from the New Road (now the Marylebone Road) by a high brick wall facing the York Gate into Regent’s Park. In “The Uncommercial Traveller,” Dickens refers to “having taken the lease of a house in a certain distinguished Metropolitan parish—a house which then appeared to me to be a frightfully first-class Family Mansion, involving awful responsibilities.”[32]

JACK STRAW’S CASTLE, HAMPSTEAD, CIRCA 1835. ([Page 56].)
From a print in the collection of Councillor Newton, Hampstead.

A contemporary drawing of the house by Daniel Maclise, R.A., represents it as detached and standing in its own grounds, with a wrought-iron entrance-gate surmounted by a lamp-bracket; the building consisted of a basement, two stories, and an attic. There are only three houses in the Terrace, and immediately beyond is the burial-ground of St. Marylebone Church.[33] No. 1, Devonshire Terrace is now semi-detached, having a line of taller residential structures on the southern side, while a portion of the high brick wall on the Terrace side has been replaced by an iron railing. The house itself has been structurally changed since Dickens’s days, and has undergone enlargement, a new story being inserted between the ground-floor and the upper story, thus considerably altering its original proportions without actually removing its principal features. Mr. Hughes, who in 1888 examined the house prior to these “improvements,” states that it then contained thirteen rooms. “The polished mahogany doors in the hall, and the chaste Italian marble mantelpieces in the principal rooms, are said to have been put up by the novelist. On the ground-floor the smaller room to the eastward of the house, with windows facing north and looking into the pleasant garden, where the plane-trees and turf are beautifully green, is pointed out as having been his study.”[34] Concerning Dickens’s studies, his eldest daughter tells us that they “were always cheery, pleasant rooms, and always, like himself, the personification of neatness and tidiness. On the shelf of his writing-table were many dainty and useful ornaments—gifts from his friends or members of his family—and always a vase of bright and fresh flowers.” Referring to the sanctum at Devonshire Terrace, Miss Dickens observes that it (the first she could remember) was “a pretty room, with steps leading directly into the garden from it, and with an extra baize door to keep out all sounds and noise.” The garden here constituted a great attraction to Dickens, for it enabled him, with his children and friends, to indulge in such simple games as battledore and shuttlecock and bowls, which not only delighted him, but conveniently afforded means of obtaining necessary exercise and recreation at intervals during his literary labours.

In a stable on the south side of the garden were kept the two ravens that inspired the conception of Grip in “Barnaby Rudge,” of which famous bird they were the “great originals.” Longfellow, after visiting the novelist here in 1841, said in a letter to a friend: “I write this from Dickens’s study, the focus from which so many luminous things have radiated. The raven croaks in the garden, and the ceaseless roar of London fills my ears.” The first raven died in 1841 from the effects (it was believed) of a meal of white paint; he was quickly succeeded by an older and a larger raven (“comparatively of weak intellect”), whose decease in 1845 was similarly premature, probably owing to “the same illicit taste for putty and paint which had been fatal to his predecessor.” “Voracity killed him,” said Dickens, “as it did Scott’s; he died unexpectedly by the kitchen fire. He kept his eye to the last upon the meat as it roasted, and suddenly turned over on his back with a sepulchral cry of ‘Cuckoo.’” The novelist occupied No. 1, Devonshire Terrace (the scene of many of his literary triumphs) for a period of about twelve years—the happiest period of his life—and there wrote some of the best of his stories, including “The Old Curiosity Shop,” “Barnaby Rudge,” “Martin Chuzzlewit,” “Dombey and Son,” and “David Copperfield,” the latter the most delightful of all his books, and his own favourite. Here also he composed those ever-popular Yule-tide annuals, “A Christmas Carol,” “The Cricket on the Hearth,” and “The Haunted Man.”

The friends which the fame of the young author attracted thither included some of the most distinguished men of the day, such as Macready, Talfourd, Proctor (“Barry Cornwall”), Clarkson Stanfield, R.A., Sir David Wilkie, R.A., Sir Edwin Landseer, R.A., Samuel Rogers, Sydney Smith, and many others of equal note, for which reason, among others, he always cherished fond recollections of this London home, and writing to Forster from Genoa in 1844, he could not refrain from expressing how strangely he felt in the midst of such unfamiliar environment. “I seem,” he said, “as if I had plucked myself out of my proper soil when I left Devonshire Terrace, and would take root no more until I return to it.... Did I tell you how many fountains we have here? No matter. If they played nectar they wouldn’t please me half so well as the West Middlesex Waterworks at Devonshire Terrace.” As in the case of 48, Doughty Street, this house bears a commemorative tablet, placed by the London County Council. It is interesting to add that within a stone’s-throw stands the old parish church of St. Marylebone, the scene of the burial of little Paul Dombey and his mother, and of Mr. Dombey’s second marriage.

At Devonshire Terrace four sons were born to him, viz., Walter Landor, Francis Jeffrey, Alfred Tennyson, Henry Fielding, and one daughter, Dora Annie, who survived only a few months.

On particular occasions, owing to a prolonged absence from England, he let this house firstly to General Sir John Wilson in 1842 (when he first visited America); secondly, to a widow lady, who agreed to occupy it during his stay in Italy in 1844; and, thirdly, in 1846, to Sir James Duke. The widow lady took possession a week or two before he started for the Continent, thus compelling him to seek temporary quarters elsewhere. He found the necessary accommodation near at hand, namely, at No. 9, Osnaburgh Terrace, New Road (now Euston Road), which he rented for the interval. Here occurred an amusing contretemps. Before entering upon this brief tenancy, he had invited a number of valued friends to a farewell dinner prior to his departure for Italy, and suddenly discovered that, owing to the small dimensions of the rooms, he would be obliged to abandon or postpone the function, the house having no convenience “for the production of any other banquet than a cold collation of plate and linen, the only comforts we have not left behind us.” Additional help being obtained, however, the dinner went off satisfactorily.

Dickens and his family left England for Italy in July, 1844, remaining abroad for a period of twelve months. In November, however, he made a quick journey to London, in order to test the effect of a reading aloud of his just completed Christmas book, “The Chimes,” before a few friends assembled for that purpose at Forster’s residence, Lincoln’s Inn Fields, which, as readers of “Bleak House” may remember, is introduced into that story as Mr. Tulkinghorn’s Chambers. The pleasurable interlude over, the novelist returned to Genoa, there remaining until June, 1845, when, homesick and eager to renew the “happy old walks and old talks” with his friends in the “dear old home,” he gladly settled down again in Devonshire Terrace. But only eleven months elapsed before he departed for Switzerland, where he rented a little villa called Rosemont at Lausanne; here he embarked upon a new story, “Dombey and Son,” and wrote “The Battle of Life.” His stay on the Continent was unexpectedly curtailed by the illness from scarlet fever of his eldest son Charles, then at King’s College school in London, whereupon, at the end of February, 1847, the novelist and his wife hastily made their way to the bedside of their sick boy, taking up their abode at the Victoria Hotel, Euston Square,[35] the Devonshire Terrace home being still occupied by Sir James Duke. The little invalid was under the care of his grandmother, Mrs. Hogarth, in Albany Street, Regent’s Park, and Dickens secured temporary quarters near at hand, in Chester Place, where he remained until June, and where a fifth son was born, christened Sydney Smith Haldemand.

1 DEVONSHIRE TERRACE. ([Page 58].)
The residence of Dickens, 1839-1851. Some of his finest books were written here.

Writing to Mrs. Hogarth from Chester Place (the number is not recorded), he said: “This house is very cheerful on the drawing-room floor and above, looking into the park on one side and Albany Street on the other.”

Early in 1848 Devonshire Terrace was quitted by Sir James Duke, and Dickens returned to London from Brighton (where he had been spending two or three weeks) joyfully to enter into possession once more of his own home, taking with him for completion an important chapter of “Dombey and Son.” The lease of this house expired in 1851, the last book written there being “David Copperfield,” at the publication of which his reputation attained its highest level. He now realized that, for a family consisting of six sons and two daughters (of whom the eldest, Charles Culliford Boz, was but fourteen years of age), this residence did not offer sufficient accommodation, and therefore he decided with keen regret not to renew the lease.[36] Indeed, from the beginning of the year he had been negotiating for a more commodious domicile, Tavistock House, in Tavistock Square, then, and for some years previously, the residence of his cherished artist friend, Frank Stone, A.R.A., father of Mr. Marcus Stone, the Royal Academician. An opportunity arising for the immediate purchase of the lease of Tavistock House, Dickens felt convinced it was prudent that he should buy it, for, as he observed in a letter to Frank Stone, it seemed very unlikely that he would obtain “the same comforts for the rising generation elsewhere for the same money,” and gave him carte-blanche to make the necessary arrangements for acquiring the lease at a price not exceeding £1,500. “I don’t make any apologies,” he added, “for thrusting this honour upon you, knowing what a thorough-going old pump you are.” After securing the property, the summer months were spent by the novelist at Broadstairs, where a “dim vision” suddenly confronted him in connection with the impending change of residence. “Supposing,” he wrote considerately to Stone, “you should find, on looking forward, a probability of your being houseless at Michaelmas, what do you say to using Devonshire Terrace as a temporary encampment? It will not be in its usual order, but we would take care that there should be as much useful furniture of all sorts there as to render it unnecessary for you to move a stick. If you should think this a convenience, then I should propose to you to pile your furniture in the middle of the rooms at Tavistock House, and go out to Devonshire Terrace two or three weeks before Michaelmas, to enable my workmen to commence their operations. This might be to our mutual convenience, and therefore I suggest it. Certainly, the sooner I can begin on Tavistock House the better, and possibly your going into Devonshire Terrace might relieve you from a difficulty that would otherwise be perplexing. I make this suggestion (I need not say to you) solely on the chance of its being useful to both of us. If it were merely convenient to me, you know I shouldn’t dream of it. Such an arrangement, while it would cost you nothing, would perhaps enable you to get your new house into order comfortably, and do exactly the same thing for me.”[37] The exchange was accordingly made, so enabling Dickens to effect certain structural improvements in Tavistock House before returning from Broadstairs to take possession in November. These alterations and reparations, which were apparently on a somewhat extensive scale, were carried out under the superintendence of his brother-in-law, Henry Austin, an architect and sanitary engineer, to whom Dickens (harassed by delays in the work) wrote despairingly as follows:

9 OSNABURGH TERRACE. ([Page 62].)
Occupied by Dickens in the summer of 1844.

“Broadstairs, “Sunday, September 7, 1851.

“My dear Henry,

“I am in that state of mind which you may (once) have seen described in the newspapers as ‘bordering on distraction,’ the house given up to me, the fine weather going on (soon to break, I dare say), the printing season oozing away, my new book (‘Bleak House’) waiting to be born, and

“No Workmen on the Premises,

along of my not hearing from you!! I have torn all my hair off, and constantly beat my unoffending family. Wild notions have occurred to me of sending in my own plumber to do the drains. Then I remember that you have probably written to propose your man, and restrain my audacious hand. Then Stone presents himself, with a most exasperatingly mysterious visage, and says that a rat has appeared in the kitchen, and it’s his opinion (Stone’s, not the rat’s) that the drains want ‘compo-ing’; for the use of which explicit language I could fell him without remorse. In my horrible desire to ‘compo’ everything, the very postman becomes my enemy, because he brings no letter from you; and, in short, I don’t see what’s to become of me unless I hear from you to-morrow, which I have not the least expectation of doing.

“Going over the house again, I have materially altered the plans, abandoned conservatory and front balcony, decided to make Stone’s painting-room the drawing-room (it is nearly 6 inches higher than the room below), to carry the entrance passage right through the house to a back door leading to the garden, and to reduce the once intended drawing-room—now schoolroom—to a manageable size, making a door of communication between the new drawing-room and the study. Curtains and carpets, on a scale of awful splendour and magnitude, are already in preparation, and still—still—

“No Workmen on the Premises.

“To pursue this theme is madness. Where are you? When are you coming home? Where is the man who is to do the work? Does he know that an army of artificers must be turned in at once, and the whole thing finished out of hand?

“O rescue me from my present condition. Come up to the scratch, I entreat and implore you!

“I send this to Lætitia (Mrs. Austin) to forward,

“Being, as you well know why,

Completely floored by N.W.,[38] I

Sleep!

I hope you may be able to read this. My state of mind does not admit of coherence.

“Ever affectionately, “Charles Dickens.

“P.S.—No Workmen on the Premises!

“Ha! ha! ha! (I am laughing demoniacally.)”[39]

Other letters followed, testifying to the highly nervous condition and impatience of the writer, who in certain of these characteristic missives, said:

“I am perpetually wandering (in fancy) up and down the house (Tavistock House) and tumbling over the workmen; when I feel that they are gone to dinner, I become low; when I look forward to their total abstinence on Sundays, I am wretched. The gravy at dinner has a taste of glue in it. I smell paint in the sea. Phantom lime attends me all the day long. I dream that I am a carpenter, and can’t partition off the hall. I frequently dance (with a distinguished company) in the dressing-room, and fall in the kitchen for want of a pillar.... I dream, also, of the workmen every night. They make faces at me, and won’t do anything.... Oh! if this were to last long; the distractions of the new book, the whirling of the story through one’s mind, escorted by workmen, the imbecility, the wild necessity of beginning to write, the not being able to do so, the—O! I should go——O!”[40]

The house, after all, was not ready to receive him at the stipulated time, for it proved to be as difficult to get the workmen off the premises as to get them on, and at the end of October they were still busy in their own peculiar manner, the painters mislaying their brushes every five minutes, and chiefly whistling in the intervals, while the carpenters “continued to look sideways with one eye down pieces of wood, as if they were absorbed in the contemplation of the perspective of the Thames Tunnel, and had entirely relinquished the vanities of this transitory world.” With white lime in the kitchens, blank paper constantly spread on drawing-room walls and shred off again, men clinking at the new stair-rails, Irish labourers howling in the schoolroom (“but I don’t know why”), the gardener vigorously lopping the trees, something like pandemonium reigned supreme, and the “Inimitable” mentally blessed the day when silence and order at length succeeded, permitting him once more to settle down to his desk, and to concentrate his thoughts upon the new serial, “Bleak House,” the writing of which was begun at the end of November, 1851—on a Friday, too, regarded by him as his lucky day.

Tavistock House,[41] with Russell House and Bedford House adjoining (all the property of the Duke of Bedford and all demolished), stood at the northeast corner of the private, secluded Tavistock Square (named after the Marquis of Tavistock, father of the celebrated William, Lord Russell), a short distance south of Euston Road, about midway between Euston Square and the aristocratic Russell Square, and railed off from Upper Woburn Place.

The exterior of Tavistock House (pulled down in 1901) presented a plain brick structure of two stories in height above the ground-floor, with attics in the roof, an open portico or porch being added by a later tenant; it contained no less than eighteen rooms, including a drawing-room capable of holding more than three hundred persons. On the garden side, at the rear, the house had a bowed front somewhat resembling that at Devonshire Terrace. Hans Christian Andersen, who visited him here in 1857, has left us a delightful record of his impressions of the mansion:

“In Tavistock Square stands Tavistock House. This and the strip of garden in front are shut out from the thoroughfare (Gordon Place, on the east side) by an iron railing. A large garden, with a grass plot 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.[42] On the first floor was a rich library, with a fireplace and a writing-table, looking out on the garden.... The kitchen was underground, and at the top of the house were bedrooms. I had a snug room looking out on the garden, and over the tree-tops I saw the London towers and spires appear and disappear as the weather cleared or thickened.”

Dickens’s eldest daughter, in recalling her father’s study at Tavistock House, remembered it as being larger and more ornate than his previous sanctum, and describes it as “a fine large room, opening into the drawing-room by means of sliding doors. When the rooms were thrown together,” she adds, “they gave my father a promenade of considerable length for the constant indoor walking which formed a favourite recreation for him after a hard day’s writing.” Here were wholly or partly written some of his best stories—viz., “Bleak House,” “Hard Times,” “Little Dorrit,” “A Tale of Two Cities,” and “Great Expectations,” his labours being agreeably diversified by private theatricals.

With a view to possibilities of this kind, he caused the school-room (on the ground-floor at the back of the house) to be adapted for such entertainments by having a stage erected and a platform built outside the window for scenic purposes. His older children (the last of the family, Edward Bulwer Lytton, was born in Tavistock House, 1852) had now attained an age that justified a demand for a special form of home amusement, and this met with a ready response from an indulgent father, who, mainly, if not entirely, for their delight, arranged for a series of juvenile theatricals, which began on the first Twelfth Night there (the eldest son’s fifteenth birthday) with a performance of Fielding’s burlesque, “Tom Thumb,” with Mark Lemon and Dickens himself in the cast. Thackeray, who was present, thoroughly enjoyed the fun, rolling off his seat in a burst of laughter at the absurdity of the thing. Play-bills were printed, and every detail carried out in the orthodox style, for Dickens (who, as “Lessee and Manager,” humorously styled himself “Mr. Crummies”) entered heart and soul into the business, and as thoroughly as if his income solely depended on it—this was entirely characteristic of the man.

For the time being, the house was given up to theatrical preparations; the schoolroom became a painter’s shop; there was a gasfitters shop all over the basement; the topmost rooms were devoted to dressmaking, and the novelist’s dressing-room to tailoring, while he himself at intervals did his best to write “Little Dorrit” in corners, “like the Sultan’s groom, who was turned upside-down by the genii.”

The most remarkable performances at “The Smallest Theatre in the World”! (for so the play-bills described it) were the presentations of “The Lighthouse” and “The Frozen Deep,” plays specially written by Wilkie Collins, for which the scenes were painted by Clarkson Stanfield, R.A., one of these beautiful works of art (depicting the Eddystone Lighthouse) realizing a thousand guineas after the novelist’s death! These theatrical entertainments, continued on Twelfth Nights for many years, were witnessed and enjoyed by many notabilities of London (Carlyle among them), and created quite a public sensation.

Dickens’s cherished friend, the late Miss Mary Boyle, had vivid and pleasing recollections of Tavistock House and the master spirit who presided over it.

TAVISTOCK HOUSE. ([Page 70].)
The residence of Dickens, 1851-1860.
From a photograph by Catherine Weed Barnes Ward.

“The very sound of the name,” she says, “is replete to me with memories of innumerable evenings passed in the most congenial and delightful intercourse—dinners where the guests vied with each other in brilliant conversation, whether intellectual, witty, or sparkling; evenings devoted to music or theatricals. First and foremost of that magic circle was the host himself, always ‘one of us,’ who invariably drew out what was best and most characteristic in others.... I can never forget one evening, shortly after the arrival at Tavistock House, when we danced in the New Year. It seemed like a page cut out of the ‘Christmas Carol,’ as far, at least, as fun and frolic went.”[43]

It was while living at Tavistock House that Dickens devised the series of imitation book-backs with incongruous titles which were to serve as a decorative feature in his study, and were afterwards transferred, together with Clarkson Stanfield’s scenery, to his next home. Here, too, he gave sittings for his portrait to E. M. Ward, R.A., in 1854, in which is seen the strongly-contrasting tints of curtains, carpet, and other accessories, indicating the great writer’s passion for colour. The background and other details in the portrait by Mr. W. P. Frith, R.A., in 1859, were also painted in Dickens’s study at Tavistock House while he was at work. It has been suggested that the novelist probably found this residence a little too convenient for friends and other callers, whose unexpected visits somewhat interrupted him, and that this may have been a reason for his exodus into the country.

In 1855 the novelist ascertained that a picturesque house at Gad’s Hill, near Rochester, the possession of which he declared to be a dream of his childhood, was to be sold, and he at once determined to buy it if possible. In this he succeeded, but it was not until 1860 that he finally left his London abode to make his home at his “little Kentish freehold.” During part of the interval he divided his favours between Tavistock House and Gad’s Hill Place, usually spending the summer months at his country retreat, furnished merely as a temporary summer residence until September, 1860, when he disposed of the remainder of the lease of the London house to Mr. Davis, a Jewish gentleman. Concerning the transaction, he wrote (on the 4th of the month) to his henchman, W. H. Wills: “Tavistock House is cleared to-day, and possession delivered up. I must say that in all things the purchaser has behaved thoroughly well, and that I cannot call to mind any occasion when I have had money dealings with a Christian that have been so satisfactory, considerate, and trusting.” His occupation of Tavistock House covered a period of exactly ten years.

5 HYDE PARK PLACE (NOW 5 MARBLE ARCH). ([Page 77].)
The centre house, without a porch, was the residence of Dickens in the early part of 1870.

In 1885 and subsequently Tavistock House was occupied as a Jewish College, and it is worthy of note that prior to that date it was tenanted by Gounod, the composer, and by Mrs. Georgina Weldon, the well-known lady litigant, who in 1880 privately issued an extraordinary pamphlet entitled “The Ghastly Consequences of Living in Charles Dickens’s House,” where she dilates upon an attempt made to forcibly convey her to a lunatic asylum.[44]

Tavistock House, with its neighbours Bedford House and Russell House, were razed to the ground about four years ago, and the land, to be let on a building lease, is still a desolate waste.

Although definitely settled at Gad’s Hill, Dickens decided upon taking a furnished house in town for a few months of the London season for the sake of his daughters, then young ladies just emerged from their teens, and the younger of whom was then engaged to be married. Accordingly, in the spring months of 1861 we find him and his household established at No. 3, Hanover Terrace, Regent’s Park, a retired spot adjoining the western side of the Park. In February, 1862, he made an exchange of houses for three months with his friends Mr. and Mrs. Hogge, they going to Gad’s Hill, and he and his family to Mr. Hogge’s house at No. 16, Hyde Park Gate, South Kensington Gore (south side of Kensington High Street); for, as the novelist explained, his unmarried daughter naturally liked to be in town at that time of the year. In the middle of February, 1864, he removed to another London mansion, No. 57, Gloucester Place, north of Hyde Park, where he stayed until June, busily engaged during those months with “Our Mutual Friend.” Gloucester Place now forms part of Gloucester Terrace, near Bayswater Road, and the northern end of the Serpentine.

For the spring of 1865 a furnished house was taken at No. 16, Somers Place, north of Hyde Park (between Cambridge Square and Southwick Crescent), which Dickens, with his sister-in-law and daughter, occupied from the beginning of March until June, while Gad’s Hill Place was being “gorgeously painted,” as he informed Macready, with a further intimation that, owing to great suffering in his foot, he was a terror to the household, likewise to all the organs and brass bands in this quarter. In 1866 he rented for the spring a furnished house at No. 6, Southwick Place, Hyde Park Square (contiguous to his former residence in Somers Place), and early in January, 1870 (five months before his death), he took for the season the classic-fronted mansion of his friends Mr. and Mrs. Milner-Gibson, at No. 5, Hyde Park Place, apropos of which he said in a letter to his American friend James T. Fields: “We live here (opposite the Marble Arch) in a charming house until the 1st of June, and then return to Gad’s.... I have a large room here, with three fine windows, overlooking the Park, unsurpassable for airiness and cheerfulness.”

This house was Charles Dickens’s last London residence; he rented it, Forster tells us, for the period of his London Readings at that time, in order to avoid the daily railway journey to London from Gad’s Hill, entertaining an especial dislike to that mode of travelling in the then serious state of his health.

At Hyde Park Place he wrote a considerable portion of the unfinished fragment of “The Mystery of Edwin Drood,” and made the acquaintance, through his friend Sir John Millais, of the illustrator of that story, Mr. Luke Fildes, now the well-known Royal Academician, who cherishes the most pleasant recollections of the collaboration.

We learn that in 1867 and 1869 Dickens did not take a house in London, as was customary in these later years. In May of 1869 he stayed with his daughter and sister-in-law for two or three weeks at the St. James’s Hotel (now the Berkeley), at the corner of Berkeley Street, Piccadilly, having promised to be in London at the time of the arrival of a number of American friends; in order, too, that he might be near his London doctor for a while,[45] and be able to avail himself of invitations from innumerable familiar acquaintances.

In 1867, having a series of Readings in town and country alternately, he decided to dispense with unnecessary travelling between Gad’s Hill and London by sleeping in bachelor quarters at the office of his weekly journal, All the Year Round, which succeeded the earlier publication, Household Words, in 1859.

THE OFFICE OF “ALL THE YEAR ROUND,”
26 (FORMERLY 11) WELLINGTON STREET, STRAND. ([Page 78].)
In 1860 Dickens furnished rooms here, which were “Really a success. As comfortable, cheerful, and private as anything of the kind can possibly be” (letter to Miss Mamie Dickens).

The office of All the Year Round was then No. 11, Wellington Street, North Strand, and still exists as No. 26, Wellington Street, at the south corner of Tavistock Street, at its junction with Wellington Street. In 1872 the lessee of the property was unavailingly approached by emissaries from Chicago with the view of purchasing and transporting the building to the World’s Fair, as a memento of the novelist. For his own convenience Dickens furnished rooms here,[46] to be used as bedroom and sitting-room as occasion required, which must have reminded him of those early days when he lived in similar bachelor apartments at Furnival’s Inn. Happily for him, his creature comforts were ensured by an old and tried servant—a paragon—whom Dickens declared to be “the cleverest man of his kind in the world,” and able to do anything, “from excellent carpentry to excellent cooking.”

The office of Household Words was situated in Wellington Street, Strand, nearly opposite the portico of the Lyceum Theatre, a short distance from the Strand on the right-hand side of the way, and was rendered somewhat conspicuous by a large bow window. This building stood on the site of a very old tenement, with which there was bound up a very weird London legend, setting forth how the room on the first-floor front was the identical apartment which had served Hogarth as the scene of the final tableau in “The Harlot’s Progress.” The novelist used to tell his contributors that he had often, while sitting in his editorial sanctum, conjured up mental pictures of Kate Hackabout lying dead in her coffin, wept over by drunken beldames.

On September 17, 1903, the London County Council’s housebreakers took possession of the old office of Household Words (whence in 1850 Dickens launched the first number of that periodical), and the building has since been sacrificed in the general scheme for providing a new thoroughfare from the Strand to Holborn. Dickens used the front-room on the first floor—that with a large bow window—as his editorial sanctum, and on busy nights he slept on the premises instead of returning to Gad’s Hill. Latterly this room was used as an office by the manager of the Gaiety Theatre. The projection of the new Kingsway and Aldwych has resulted in the inevitable evanishment of many Dickensian landmarks, for a glance at the plans of these thoroughfares now in course of construction shows that they will cover an important section of “Dickens’s London,” such as Clare Market, the New Inn, Portugal Street, Drury Lane, Sardinia Street, Kingsgate Street, etc.

* * * * * * * *

A brief mention of certain public and private institutions in London having more or less informal associations with Dickens will form a fitting conclusion to the present chapter.

THE OFFICE OF “HOUSEHOLD WORDS,” WELLINGTON STREET, STRAND. ([Page 80].)
The principal entrance was where the centre window on the ground floor is shown.
The building is now demolished.

In 1838 the author of “Pickwick” (then lately completed) was elected a member of the Athenæum Club, his sponsor being Mr. Serjeant Storks, and continued his membership of that very exclusive confraternity for the rest of his life. The late Rev. F. G. Waugh, author of a booklet on the Athenæum Club, did not think that Dickens considered himself a popular member, probably because he seldom spoke to anyone unless previously addressed. When not taking his sandwich standing, his usual seat in the coffee-room was the table on the east side of the room, just south of the fireplace. “I believe,” says Mr. Waugh, in a letter to the present writer, “the last letter he wrote from here was to his son, who did not receive it till after his father’s death.” The club, which preserves the novelist’s favourite chair, was the scene, too, of a happy incident—the reconciliation of Thackeray and Dickens after a period of strained relationship. This occurred only a few days before the death of the author of “Vanity Fair,” when the two great writers, meeting by accident in the lobby of the club, suddenly turned and saw each other, “and the unrestrained impulse of both was to hold out the hand of forgiveness and fellowship.”

“... In the hall, that trysting-place,

Two severed friends meet face to face:

’Tis Boz and Makepeace, good and true

(‘Behind the coats,’ hats not a few).

A start, and both uncertain stand;

Then each has clasped the other’s hand!”[47]

The Temple, practically unchanged since Dickens’s day, ever remained a favourite locality with him. When quite a young man, and popularly known as “Boz,” he entered his name among the students of the Inn of the Middle Temple, though he did not eat dinners there until many years later, and was never called to the Bar. The Daily News offices (the old building, not the existing ornate structure) in Bouverie Street are remembered chiefly by the fact that this Liberal newspaper was founded by Dickens, its first editor, in 1846, and a bust-portrait of him may be seen in a niche in the façade of the new building. John Forster’s residence, No. 58, Lincoln’s Inn Fields, is specially memorable on account of the novelist’s associations therewith. Here he was ever a welcome guest, and here, in 1844, he read “The Chimes” from the newly-completed manuscript to an assembled group of friends, the germ of those public readings to which he subsequently devoted so much time and energy. The two houses, Nos. 57 and 58, Lincoln’s Inn Fields, were once the town mansion of the Earl of Lindsey. Dickens made Forster’s residence the home of Tulkinghorn, the old family lawyer in “Bleak House,” whose room with the painted ceiling depicting “fore-shortened allegory” faces the large forecourt, and is now in the occupation of a solicitor; the painting, however, was obliterated some years ago.

CHAPTER IV.
IN THE WEST COUNTRY.

Dickens first made acquaintance with many provincial towns during his early newspaper days, when, as a reporter, he galloped by road in post-chaises, both by day and night, to remote parts of the country, meeting with strange adventures, sometimes experiencing awkward predicaments, from which he invariably succeeded in extricating himself and in reaching his destination in good time for publication, his carefully-prepared notes being transcribed, not infrequently, during “the smallest hours of the night in a swift-flying carriage and pair,” by the light of a blazing wax-candle. In 1845, when recalling his reporting days, he informed Forster that he “had to charge for all sorts of breakages fifty times in a journey without question,” as the ordinary results of the pace he was compelled to travel. He had charged his employers for everything but a broken head, “which,” he naïvely added, “is the only thing they would have grumbled to pay for.” One of the foremost of these expeditions took place in 1835, when he and a colleague, Thomas Beard, journeyed by express coach to Bristol to report, for the Morning Chronicle, the political speeches in connection with Lord John Russell’s Devon contest. He lodged at the Bush Inn, where that “ill-starred gentleman,” Mr. Winkle, took up his quarters when fleeing from the wrath of the infuriated Dowler, as set forth in the thirty-eighth chapter of “Pickwick.” We are told that Mr. Winkle found Bristol “a shade more dirty than any place he had ever seen”; that, at the time referred to (nearly eighty years ago), the pavements of that city were “not the widest or cleanest upon earth,” its streets were “not altogether the straightest or least intricate,” and their “manifold windings and twistings” greatly puzzled Mr. Winkle, who, when exploring them, lost his way, with the result that he unexpectedly came upon his old acquaintances, Bob Sawyer and Ben Allen, the former occupying a newly-painted tenement (not identified), which had been recently converted into “something between a shop and a private house,” with the word “Surgery” inscribed above the window of what had been the front parlour. At the Bush tavern the fugitive was discovered by Sam Weller, who had received peremptory orders from “the governor” to follow and keep him in sight until Mr. Pickwick arrived on the scene. The Bush no longer exists; it stood in Corn Street, near the Guildhall, and was taken down in 1864, the present Wiltshire Bank marking the site. It will be remembered that it was to Clifton, on the outskirts of Bristol, where Arabella Allen was sent by her brother (who regarded himself as “her natural protector and guardian”) to spend a few months at an old aunt’s, “in a nice dull place,” in order to break her to his will that she should marry Bob Sawyer (“late Nockemorf”). Hither Sam Weller went in quest of her, walking (as we are told) “up one street and down another—we were going to say, up one hill and down another, only it’s all uphill at Clifton”—and, after struggling across the Downs, “against a good high wind,” eventually arrived at “several little villas of quiet and secluded appearance,” at one of which he, too, met a familiar acquaintance in “the pretty housemaid from Mrs. Nupkins’s,” who proved a valuable guide to the whereabouts of Miss Allen. In 1866 and 1869 Dickens gave public readings at Clifton, staying on the former occasion at the Down Hotel. The suspension bridge across the Avon is the old Hungerford Bridge, removed in 1863, and the sight of it at the time of his later visits to Clifton must have recalled to Dickens the troubled period of his boyhood at the blacking factory.

The occasion of the Bristol reporting expedition in 1835 is also memorable for the fact that it marks the date of Dickens’s first visit to the contiguous city of Bath, which plays a still more important part in the Transactions of the Pickwick Club. At Bath he had to prepare a report of a political dinner given there by Lord John Russell, and to despatch it “by Cooper Company’s Coach, leaving the Bush (Bristol) at half-past six next morning.” It was sharp work, as Russell’s speech at the banquet had to be transcribed by Dickens for the printers while travelling by the mail-coach viâ Marlborough for London; this necessitated for himself and Thomas Beard the relinquishment of sleep and rest during two consecutive days and nights. It is fair to suppose that on one of his early reporting expeditions to the West of England Dickens put up for a night at the quaint little roadside inn near Marlborough Downs, which he so carefully describes in the Bagman’s Story in “Pickwick.”

“It was a strange old place, built of a kind of shingle, inlaid, as it were, with cross-beams, with gable-topped windows projecting over the pathway, and a low door with a dark porch, and a couple of steep steps leading down into the house, instead of the modern fashion of half a dozen shallow ones leading up to it.” Like Tom Smart, the hero of the story, he doubtless slept in the selfsame apartment, with its “big closets, and a bed which might have served for a whole boarding-school, to say nothing of a couple of oaken presses that would have held the baggage of a small army.” Nay, he may even have experienced Tom Smart’s strange hallucination in regard to the ancient armchair, apparently assuming in the uncertain light of the chamber fire the outlines of a strangely-formed specimen of humanity, although probably he did not go so far as to enter into conversation with this remarkable bedroom companion, as did the Bagman, whose vivid imagination, aided by the narcotic effects of his noggins of whisky, enabled him to impart a spiciness to his narrative. From the detailed manner in which Dickens portrays this old-fashioned alehouse, we are justified in conjecturing that such a place really existed during the thirties, and attempts have been made to identify it, for we need not take for granted the statement in “Pickwick” that the place had been pulled down. From inquiries which I instituted on the subject, a local correspondent informs me that the Marquis of Ailesbury’s Arms at Clatford somewhat answered to the description prior to extensive structural alterations effected about twenty years ago.

Another investigator considers that the inn at Beckhampton, the Catherine Wheel, fulfils most of the requirements. With this conclusion, however, the Rev. W. H. Davies, of Avebury, is not disposed to agree, and the late Rev. A. C. Smith, in his “British and Roman Antiquities,” tells us that the inn which formerly existed at Shepherd’s Shord (or Shore) was the one referred to by Dickens, and that at the time of the publication of “Pickwick” everybody in Wiltshire so identified it. Another suggestion is that the original of Tom Smart’s house of call was the Kennett Inn at Beckhampton, which, according to a drawing of the place, answers the descriptions even better than those already mentioned, although it stood upon the wrong side of the road. We ought, I think, to accept the local opinion of Pickwickian days, and fix the scene of the Bagman’s adventure at Shepherd’s Shore.[48]

Remembering what little leisure he must have had in the midst of political turmoil and journalistic responsibilities while at Bath, it is indeed surprising to find how truthful a presentment of that delightful city is achieved in “Pickwick.” On the occasion in question he put up at a small hotel, the Saracen’s Head, a quaint-looking, unpretentious building still existing in Broad Street, its two red-tiled gables and stuccoed front facing that thoroughfare. The landlady relates that Dickens, owing to the fact that all the bedrooms of the house were occupied on his arrival at a late hour, had to be accommodated with a room over some stables or outbuildings at the farther end of the inn yard, overlooking Walcot Street.[49] Visitors are shown a curious two-handled mug which the novelist is believed to have used, and the bedroom once occupied by him, and containing the old four-post bedstead upon which he slept; while in another room, low and raftered, is to be seen the stiff wooden armchair in which he sat!—relics that are deservedly cherished and handed down as heirlooms.

Bath is frequently referred to in the novelist’s writings, and, judging by a particular allusion to the historic town, it seems not to have left a very favourable impression on his mind, for he there mentions it as “that grass-grown city of the ancients.”[50] At a subsequent date he remarked: “Landor’s ghost goes along the silent streets here before me.... The place looks to me like a cemetery which the dead have succeeded in rising and taking. Having built streets of their old gravestones, they wander about scantly trying to ‘look alive.’ A dead failure.”[51] He had a pleasant remembrance of Walter Savage Landor at No. 35, St. James’s Square, upon which a tablet was fixed in 1903 recording the fact of a visit paid to him by the novelist on the latter’s birthday, February 7, 1840, on which occasion he was accompanied by Mrs. Dickens, Maclise, and Forster, the party remaining there until the end of the month. We are assured by his biographer that it was during this visit to Bath “that the fancy which was shortly to take the form of Little Nell first occurred to its author.” The girl-heroine of “The Old Curiosity Shop” was an immense favourite with Landor, who in after-years emphatically declared that the one mistake of his life was that he had not purchased the house in which the conception of her dawned upon Dickens, and then and there burned it to the ground, so that no meaner associations should desecrate it.

MILE END COTTAGE, ALPHINGTON. ([Page 94].)
Taken by Dickens in 1839 for his parents’ use. “The house is on the high road to Plymouth, and the situation is charming” (letter to Mr. Thomas Mitton).

Brief as his stay in Bath undoubtedly was in the capacity of reporter for the Morning Chronicle in 1835, he, nevertheless, made excellent use of his abnormal powers of observation in spite of professional activities, his retentive memory enabling him to reproduce in “The Pickwick Papers” a few months afterwards those typical scenes in the social life of Bath of that period, which has since undergone many changes, Mr. Pickwick being almost the last to witness the peculiarities of Bath society as described by the novel-writers of a century or so ago. Dickens noticed, among other topographical features, the steepness of Park Street, which (he said) “was very much like the perpendicular streets a man sees in a dream, which he cannot get up for the life of him.” He remembered, too, that the White Hart Hotel (the proprietor of which establishment was the Moses Pickwick who owned the very coach on which Sam Weller saw inscribed “the magic name of Pickwick”) stood “opposite the great Pump Room, where the waiters, from their costume, might be mistaken for Westminster boys, only they destroy the illusion by behaving themselves so much better.”[52] The White Hart flourished in Stall Street, and until 1864 (when the house was given up) the waiters wore knee-breeches and silk stockings, and the women servants donned neat muslin caps. The old coaching inn, alas! no longer exists, and its site is indicated by the Grand Pump Room Hotel, the original carved sign of a white hart being preserved and still used over the door of an inn of the same name in Widcombe, a suburb of Bath.

The pen-pictures of scenes at the Assembly Rooms and Pump Rooms are admirably rendered in the pages of “Pickwick,” and we feel convinced that the author must have witnessed them.

“Bath being full, the company and the sixpences for tea poured in in shoals. In the ball-room, the long card-room, the octagonal card-room, the staircases, and the passages, the hum of many voices and the sound of many feet were perfectly bewildering. Dresses rustled, feathers waved, lights shone, and jewels sparkled. There was the music—not of the quadrille band, for it had not yet commenced, but the music of soft, tiny footsteps, with now and then a clear, merry laugh, low and gentle, but very pleasant to hear in a female voice, whether in Bath or elsewhere. Brilliant eyes, lighted up with pleasurable expectations, gleamed from every side; and look where you would, some exquisite form glided gracefully through the throng, and was no sooner lost than it was replaced by another as dainty and bewitching.

“In the tea-room, and hovering round the card-tables, were a vast number of queer old ladies and decrepit old gentlemen, discussing all the small-talk and scandal of the day, with a relish and gusto which sufficiently bespoke the intensity of the pleasure they derived from the occupation. Mingled with these groups were three or four matchmaking mammas, appearing to be wholly absorbed by the conversation in which they were taking part, but failing not from time to time to cast an anxious sidelong glance upon their daughters, who, remembering the maternal injunction to make the best of their youth, had already commenced incipient flirtations in the mislaying of scarves, putting on gloves, setting down cups, and so forth—slight matters apparently, but which may be turned to surprisingly good account by expert practitioners.

“Lounging near the doors, and in remote corners, were various knots of silly young men, displaying various varieties of puppyism and stupidity, amusing all sensible people near them with their folly and conceit, and happily thinking themselves the objects of general admiration—a wise and merciful dispensation which no good man will quarrel with.

“And, lastly, seated on some of the back benches, where they had already taken up their positions for the evening, were divers unmarried ladies past their grand climacteric, who, not dancing because there were no partners for them, and not playing cards lest they should be set down as irretrievably single, were in the favourable situation of being able to abuse everybody without reflecting on themselves. In short, they could abuse everybody, because everybody was there. It was a scene of gaiety, glitter, and show, of richly-dressed people, handsome mirrors, chalked floors, girandoles, and wax-candles; and in all parts of the scene, gliding from spot to spot in silent softness, bowing obsequiously to this party, nodding familiarly to that, and smiling complacently on all, was the sprucely-attired person of Angelo Cyrus Bantam, Esquire, Master of the Ceremonies” (chap. xxxv.).

“The great pump-room is a spacious saloon, ornamented with Corinthian pillars, and a music gallery, and a Tompion clock, and a statue of Nash, and a golden inscription, to which all the water-drinkers should attend, for it appeals to them in the cause of a deserving charity. There is a large bar with a marble vase, out of which the pumper gets the water; and there are a number of yellow-looking tumblers, out of which the company gets it; and it is a most edifying and satisfactory sight to behold the perseverance and gravity with which they swallow it. There are baths near at hand, in which a part of the company wash themselves; and a band plays afterwards to congratulate the remainder on their having done so. There is another pump-room, into which infirm ladies and gentlemen are wheeled, in such an astonishing variety of chairs and chaises that any adventurous individual who goes in with the regular number of toes is in imminent danger of coming out without them; and there is a third, into which the quiet people go, for it is less noisy than either. There is an immensity of promenading, on crutches and off, with sticks and without, and a great deal of conversation, and liveliness, and pleasantry.... At the afternoon’s promenade ... all the great people, and all the morning water-drinkers, meet in grand assemblage. After this, they walked out or drove out, or were pushed out in bath-chairs, and met one another again. After this, the gentlemen went to the reading-rooms and met divisions of the mass. After this, they went home. If it were theatre night, perhaps they met at the theatre; if it were assembly night, they met at the rooms; and if it were neither, they met the next day. A very pleasant routine, with perhaps a slight tinge of sameness” (chap. xxxvi.).

The citizens of Bath are naturally proud of its Pickwickian associations; Mr. Pickwick’s lodging in the Royal Crescent is pointed out, as well as the actual spot in the Assembly Rooms where he played whist, while the veritable rout seats of that time are preserved and cherished. The Royal Hotel, whence Mr. Winkle hurriedly departed by coach for Bristol, has shared the fate of the White Hart; indeed, Mr. Snowden Ward avers that there was no Royal Hotel in Bath in Dickens’s time, and that he probably refers to the York House Hotel, frequently patronized by royalty, and once at least by the novelist himself. We may still look, however, upon the “small greengrocer’s shop” where Bath footmen used to hold their social evenings, and memorable as the scene of the “leg-o’-mutton swarry.” It is now the Beaufort Arms, in a narrow street out of Queen’s Square, Bath, and within a short distance of No. 12 in the Square, the residence of Angelo Cyrus Bantam, Esq., Master of the Ceremonies, who welcomed Mr. Pickwick to Ba-ath.

In the course of an interesting speech delivered in 1865 at the second annual dinner of the Newspaper Press Fund, Dickens made an interesting allusion to the Devonshire political contest of thirty years previously, and to the part he took in it as a Chronicle reporter. “The very last time I was at Exeter,” he said, “I strolled into the Castle yard, there to identify, for the amusement of a friend, the spot on which I once ‘took,’ as we used to call it, an election speech of Lord John Russell ... in the midst of a lively fight maintained by all the vagabonds in that division of the county, and under such a pelting rain that I remember two good-natured colleagues, who chanced to be at leisure, held a pocket-handkerchief over my note-book, after the manner of a state canopy in an ecclesiastical procession.” In 1839 a mission of a very different character caused him to journey to “the capital of the West” (as that city has been denominated), his object being to arrange a new home for his parents in that locality. Making his headquarters at the New London Inn (where he had Charles Kean’s sitting-room), he soon discovered a suitable residence about a mile south from the city boundary on the highroad to Plymouth, Mile End Cottage, which is really divided into two portions, one-half being then occupied by the landlady, and the other being available for the new tenants. Dickens, when writing to Forster, described the place as “two white cottages,” and respecting the accommodation here provided for his parents, he said: “I almost forget the number of rooms, but there is an excellent parlour, which I am furnishing as a drawing-room, and there is a splendid garden.” In a letter to his friend Thomas Mitton he dilates more fully upon the attractions of the cottage and its environment. “I do assure you,” he observed, “that I am charmed with the place and the beauty of the country round about, though I have not seen it under very favourable circumstances.... It is really delightful, and when the house is to rights and the furniture all in, I shall be quite sorry to leave it.... The situation is charming; meadows in front, an orchard running parallel to the garden hedge, richly-wooded hills closing in the prospect behind, and, away to the left, before a splendid view of the hill on which Exeter is situated, the cathedral towers rising up into the sky in the most picturesque manner possible. I don’t think I ever saw so cheerful and pleasant a spot....”[53] It will be remembered that “Nicholas Nickleby” opens with a reference to “a sequestered part of the county of Devonshire” (sic), where lived one Mr. Godfrey Nickleby, the grandfather of the hero of the story; and there is no doubt that the home of Mrs. Nickleby’s friends, the Dibabses, as pictured by that lady in the fifty-fifth chapter, was identical with the tenement in which Mr. and Mrs. John Dickens found a temporary lodgment—“the beautiful little thatched white house one story high, covered all over with ivy and creeping plants, with an exquisite little porch with twining honeysuckle, and all sorts of things.”

Charles Dickens’s return to England at the end of his triumphant progress through the United States in 1842 was the occasion for a special celebration, which assumed the form of a holiday trip in Cornwall with his cherished friends Stanfield, Maclise, and Forster. They chose Cornwall for the excursion because it transpired that this “desolate region,” as Dickens termed it, was unfamiliar to them, and would therefore enhance their enjoyment. The decision to make Cornwall their destination suggested to Dickens the idea of opening his new book, “Martin Chuzzlewit,” on that rugged coast, “in some terrible dreary, iron-bound spot,” and to select the lantern of a lighthouse (probably the Longship’s, off Land’s End) as the opening scene; but he changed his mind. This expedition in the late summer lasted nearly three weeks, it proving a source of such unexpected and unabated attraction that the merry party felt loath to return to town. Railways were not of much use to them, as they did not penetrate to the remote districts which the travellers desired to visit. Post-horses were therefore requisitioned, and when the roads proved inaccessible to these, pedestrianism was perforce resorted to. They visited Tintagel, and explored every part of mountain and sea “consecrated by the legends of Arthur.” They ascended to the cradle of the highest pinnacle of Mount St. Michael,[54] and descended in several mines; but above all the marvels of land and sea, that which yielded the most lasting impression was a sunset at Land’s End, concerning which Forster says: “There was something in the sinking of the sun behind the Atlantic that autumn afternoon, as we viewed it together from the top of the rock projecting farthest into the sea, which each in his turn declared to have no parallel in memory.” The famous Logan Stone, too, was not forgotten. Writing subsequently to Forster, the novelist said: “Don’t I still see the Logan Stone, and you perched on the giddy top, while we, rocking it on its pivot, shrank from all that lay concealed below!” For Forster possessed the necessary courage and agility (lacking in the rest) to mount the huge swaying stone, the feat being immortalized by Stanfield in a sketch bequeathed to the Victoria and Albert Museum.[55] Lastly, the waterfall at St. Wighton was visited, memorable for the fact that a painting of it (from a sketch made on this occasion) appears as the background to Maclise’s picture of “A Girl at a Waterfall,” the figure being depicted from a sister-in-law of Dickens. The novelist, while the glow of enjoyment was yet upon him, could not resist dilating upon the exhilarating effect induced by this glorious holiday in the midst of natural scenery, then witnessed by the joyous quartette for the first time; and the following letter, addressed to his American friend, Professor Felton, fittingly concludes these references to the event which he ever recalled with delight: “Blessed star of the morning, such a trip as we had into Cornwall, just after Longfellow went away!... We went down into Devonshire by the railroad, and there we hired an open carriage from an innkeeper, patriotic in all Pickwick matters, and went on with post-horses. Sometimes we travelled all night, sometimes all day, sometimes both. I kept the joint-stock purse, ordered all the dinners, paid all the turnpikes, conducted facetious conversations with the post-boys, and regulated the pace at which we travelled. Stanfield (an old sailor) consulted an enormous map on all disputed points of wayfaring, and referred, moreover, to a pocket-compass and other scientific instruments. The luggage was in Forster’s department, and Maclise, having nothing particular to do, sang songs. Heavens! if you could have seen the necks of bottles—distracting in their immense varieties of shape—peering out of the carriage pockets! If you could have witnessed the deep devotion of the post-boys, the wild attachment of the hostlers, the maniac glee of the waiters! If you could have followed us into the earthy old churches we visited, and into the strange caverns on the gloomy seashore, and down into the depths of mines, and up to the tops of giddy heights, where the unspeakably green water was roaring I don’t know how many hundred feet below! If you could have seen but one gleam of the bright fires by which we sat in the big rooms of ancient inns at night until long after the small hours had come and gone, or smelt but one steam of the hot punch,... which came in every evening in a huge, broad, china bowl! I never laughed in my life as I did on this journey. It would have done you good to hear me. I was choking and gasping and bursting the buckle off the back of my stock all the way, and Stanfield ... got into such apoplectic entanglements that we were often obliged to beat him on the back with portmanteaus before we could recover him. Seriously, I do believe that there never was such a trip. And they made such sketches, those two men, in the most romantic of our halting-places, that you could have sworn we had the Spirit of Beauty with us, as well as the Spirit of Fun....”[56]

THE GEORGE INN, AMESBURY. ([Page 100].)
“The Blue Dragon” of “Martin Chuzzlewit.”

Dickens, as already intimated, originally conceived the idea of opening the tale of “Martin Chuzzlewit” on the coast of Cornwall. Instead of this, however, we find, in the initial chapter of that story, that the scene is laid in a village near Salisbury. That he had previously made himself acquainted with Wiltshire is indicated in his correspondence with Forster in 1842, where he declared (for instance) that in beholding an American prairie for the first time he felt no such emotions as he experienced when crossing Salisbury Plain. “I would say to every man who can’t see a prairie,” he remarked, “go to Salisbury Plain, Marlborough Downs, or any of the broad, high, open lands near the sea. Many of them are fully as impressive, and Salisbury Plain is decidedly more so.”

Six years later he and Forster, with John Leech and Mark Lemon, procured horses at Salisbury, and “passed the whole of a March day in riding over every part of the plain, visiting Stonehenge, and exploring Hazlitt’s hut at Winterslow, the birthplace of some of his finest essays.”[57]

There are persons still living in the neighbourhood of Salisbury who remember Dickens’s quest for local colour with which to give a semblance of reality to his topographical descriptions in “Chuzzlewit.” “The fair old town of Salisbury” figures prominently in that story, and we must believe that his allusion (in the fifth chapter) to the grand cathedral derived inspiration from personal observation: “The yellow light that streamed in through the ancient windows in the choir was mingled with a murky red. As the grand tones (of the organ) resounded through the church, they seemed to Tom to find an echo in the depth of every ancient tomb, no less than in the deep mystery of his own heart.” He makes a curious mistake in the twelfth chapter when speaking of the “towers” of the old cathedral; but, of course, he knew perfectly well that the venerable fane is surmounted by a beautifully tapering spire, immortalized in one of Constable’s most remarkable pictures. The scene in Salisbury Market, so vividly portrayed in chapter v., could not have been penned except by an acute observer like Dickens; nothing escaped him, and he noted all the details of that busy scene, and stored them in his retentive memory in readiness for the pen-picture which he afterwards delineated so faithfully and so picturesquely.

The “little Wiltshire village,” described as being within an easy journey of Salisbury, has not been absolutely identified. Certain commentators opine that Amesbury is intended, while others consider it more probable that the novelist had in his mind the village of Alderbury, and that its principal inn, the Green Dragon, was the original of Mrs. Lupin’s establishment, concerning which that unprincipled adventurer, Montague Tigg, spoke with undisguised disparagement and contempt.

CHAPTER V.
IN SOUTHERN ENGLAND.

Portsmouth is justly proud of the fact that it is the native place of certain distinguished men—to wit, Charles Dickens, Sir Walter Besant, and Brunel the great engineer.

In 1838, when engaged upon “Nicholas Nickleby,” Dickens renewed acquaintance with the town, of which it is fair to suppose he could remember but little, seeing that he was only about two years of age when his father was recalled to London, taking with him wife and family. He, however, astonished Forster (who accompanied him thither) by readily recalling memories of his childhood there, and distinctly remembering such details as the exact shape of the military parade.

Dickens’s particular object in then journeying to Portsmouth (not on foot, as did Nicholas and Smike) was doubtless for the express purpose of obtaining local colour for “Nickleby,” as presented in chapters xxiii. and xxiv. He succeeded in finding suitable lodging for Vincent Crummles at Bulph the pilot’s in St. Thomas’s Street (conjectured to be No. 78), for Miss Snevellicci at a tailor’s in Lombard Street, while Nickleby and his companion were quartered at a tobacconist’s on the Common Hard, which he describes as “a dirty street leading down to the dockyard.” The old Portsmouth Theatre, the scene of Nicholas’s early triumphs on the stage, plays a prominent part in the tale. This primitive building, which stood in the High Street, was destroyed many years ago; it occupied the site of the Cambridge Barracks; the present house is styled “The New Theatre Royal.” The story is current in Portsmouth that Dickens, on the occasion just referred to, called upon the manager at the old theatre and actually asked for a small part. Whether this tradition be true or false, we are justified in assuming that he and Forster went behind the scenes and chatted with the players, the result being the portrayal of those inimitable descriptions which treat of the company of Mr. Vincent Crummles, and of the “great bespeak” for Miss Snevellicci. Apropos of the theatre itself, as it appeared to the hero of the story, we read: “It was not very light, but Nicholas found himself close to the first entrance on the prompter’s side, among bare walls, dusty scenes, mildewed clouds, heavily daubed draperies, and dirty floors. He looked about him; ceiling, pit, boxes, gallery, orchestra, fittings, and decorations of every kind—all looked coarse, cold, gloomy, and wretched. ‘Is this a theatre?’ whispered Smike in amazement. ‘I thought it was a blaze of light and finery.’ ‘Why, so it is,’ replied Nicholas, hardly less surprised; ‘but not by day, Smike—not by day!’” Matters theatrical have improved vastly since then, and provincial theatres now vie with those in the Metropolis in regard to the comfort and magnificence of their appointments.

Plymouth, in a much less degree, is also associated with Dickens. There are slight references to the town in “David Copperfield” and “Bleak House.” He visited Plymouth in 1858 and in 1861, staying at the West Hoe Hotel on the first occasion, when he gave public readings in a handsome room at Stonehouse, “on the top of a windy and muddy hill, leading (literally) to nowhere; and it looks (except that it is new and mortary) as if the subsidence of the waters after the Deluge might have left it where it is.”[58] In 1861 we find Plymouth again included in the itinerary of an Autumn Reading tour. Dickens’s connection with Brighton was of a more intimate character, his acquaintance with “the Queen of watering-places” beginning as early as 1837, when he resumed the writing of “Oliver Twist.” “We have a beautiful bay-windowed sitting-room here, fronting the sea,” he informed Forster; “but I have seen nothing of B.’s brother who was to have shown me the lions, and my notions of the place are consequently somewhat confined, being limited to the pavilion, the chain pier, and the sea. The last is quite enough for me....” During his stay he attended a performance at the theatre of a comedy entitled “No Thoroughfare,” this being, curiously enough, the exact title of the only story he ever took part himself in dramatizing three years before his death. In 1841 he again journeyed by coach, the Brighton Era, to Brighton, and busied himself there with “Barnaby Rudge,” making his temporary home at the Old Ship Hotel at No. 38, King’s Road—not the more modern establishment of that name in Ship Street.[59] In May, 1847, Dickens lodged for some weeks at No. 148, King’s Road, for the recovery of his wife’s health after the birth of a son, christened Sydney Smith Haldemand. He went there first with Mrs. Dickens and her sister and the eldest boy (the latter just recovered from an attack of scarlet fever), and was joined at the latter part of the time by his two little daughters. In the spring of 1850 he was again at the King’s Road lodgings, his thoughts being then concentrated upon the new weekly journal, Household Words, the first number of which appeared in March of that year.

AMESBURY CHURCH. ([Page 100].)
Where Tom Pinch played the organ for nothing, and Mr. Pecksniff heard himself denounced.

In March, 1848, Dickens and his wife, accompanied by Mrs. Macready, spent three weeks in Brighton at Junction House, where they were “very comfortably (not to say gorgeously) accommodated”; and for a short time during the spring of 1853, when engaged upon “Bleak House,” he rented rooms at No. 1, Junction Parade. Of all his Brighton residences, however, that which justly claims priority is the celebrated Bedford Hotel, whence (in November, 1848) we find letters addressed to his friends Frank Stone, A.R.A. (who was then designing illustrations for “The Haunted Man”) and Mark Lemon. To the artist he said: “The Duke of Cambridge is staying at this house, and they are driving me mad by having Life Guards bands under our windows playing our overtures (i.e., the overtures in connection with the amateur performances by Dickens and his friends)!... I don’t in the abstract approve of Brighton. I couldn’t pass an autumn here, but it is a gay place for a week or so; and when one laughs or cries, and suffers the agitation that some men experience over their books, it’s a bright change to look out of window, and see the gilt little toys on horseback going up and down before the mighty sea, and thinking nothing of it.”[60] In February, 1849, Dickens spent another holiday at Brighton, accompanied by his wife and sister-in-law and two daughters, and they were joined by the genial artist John Leech and his wife. They had not been in their lodgings a week when both his landlord and his landlord’s daughter went raving mad, this untoward circumstance compelling the lodgers to seek quarters elsewhere—at the Bedford Hotel. “If,” wrote Dickens, when relating the adventure to Forster, “you could have heard the cursing and crying of the two; could have seen the physician and nurse quoited out into the passage by the madman at the hazard of their lives; could have seen Leech and me flying to the doctor’s rescue; could have seen our wives pulling us back; could have seen the M.D. faint with fear; could have seen three other M.D.’s come to his aid; with an atmosphere of Mrs. Gamps, strait-waistcoats, struggling friends and servants, surrounding the whole, you would have said it was quite worthy of me, and quite in keeping with my usual proceedings.” The Reading tour in 1861 again took him to Brighton and the Bedford, and one of his audiences included the Duchess of Cambridge and a Princess. “I think they were pleased with me, and I am sure I was with them.”

Apart from these personal associations, Brighton derives particular interest from the fact that it figures largely in “Dombey and Son.” It was at the Bedford where Mr. Dombey stayed during his weekend visits to Brighton for the purpose of seeing his children, and where Major Bagstock enjoyed the privilege of dining with that purse-proud City merchant. It was to Brighton that Little Paul was sent to school, first as a pupil of the austere and vinegary Mrs. Pipchin. “The castle of this ogress and child-queller was in a steep by-street at Brighton, where the soil was more than usually chalky, flinty, and sterile, and the houses were more than usually brittle and thin; where the small front-gardens had an unaccountable property of producing nothing but marigolds, whatever was sown in them; and where snails were constantly discovered holding on to the street doors, and other public places they were not expected to ornament, with the tenacity of cupping-glasses.” Here also was the superior and “very expensive” establishment of Dr. Blimber—“a great hot-house, in which there was a forcing apparatus incessantly at work,” where, we are told, “mental green peas were produced at Christmas, and intellectual asparagus all the year round. Mathematical gooseberries (very sour ones, too) were common at untimely seasons, and from mere sprouts of bushes, under Dr. Blimber’s cultivation. Every description of Greek and Latin vegetable was got off the driest twigs of boys under the frostiest circumstances.” We learn on excellent authority that Dr. Blimber and his school really existed at Brighton, the prototype of the worthy pedagogue being Dr. Everard, whose celebrated seminary was familiarly called the “Young House of Lords,” from the aristocracy of the pupils. It seems that during the Christmas holidays it became customary with Dr. Everard to organize dances for the boys (such as that so delightfully described in the fourteenth chapter of “Dombey and Son”). In those days, curly locks were considered an indispensable accessory to full dress, and the whole of the afternoon preceding the ball Dr. Everard’s house was pervaded by a strong smell of singed hair and curling-tongs.[61] “There was such ... a smell of singed hair that Dr. Blimber sent up the footman with his compliments, and wished to know if the house was on fire.”

In the summer and autumn of 1849 Dickens went with his family, for the first time, to Bonchurch, Isle of Wight, where he hired for six months the attractive villa, Winterbourne, belonging to the Rev. James White (an author of some repute and a keen lover of books), with whom his intimacy, already begun, now ripened into a lifelong friendship. The novelist had in June of that year passed a brief period at Shanklin, whence he wrote to his wife: “I have taken a most delightful and beautiful house, belonging to White, at Bonchurch—cool, airy, private bathing; everything delicious. I think it is the prettiest place I ever saw in my life at home or abroad.... A waterfall in the grounds, which I have arranged with a carpenter to convert into a perpetual shower-bath.”[62]

He liked the place exceedingly at first, and considered that the views from the summit of the highest downs “are only to be equalled on the Genoese shore of the Mediterranean.” The variety of walks in the neighbourhood struck him as extraordinary; the people were civil, and everything was cheap, while he fully appreciated the fact that the place was certainly cold rather than hot in the summertime, and the sea-bathing proved “delicious.” Here at Bonchurch he was joined by John Leech, and soon settled down to work, being then engaged upon the early portion of “David Copperfield,” varying his literary occupations by taking part, with his customary zest, in dinners at Blackgang and picnics of “tremendous success” on Shanklin Down. One of these festivities he particularly remembered, when he expressly stipulated that the party should be provided with materials for a fire and a great iron pot to boil potatoes in, these, with the comestibles, being conveyed to the ground in a cart. Doubtless this was the veritable function described by the late Mrs. Phœbe Lankester (“Penelope”). Her husband, Dr. Lankester (to whom Dickens referred as “a very good, merry fellow”), and other distinguished men of science then staying at Sandown, belonged to a select and notable club founded originally by the younger members of the British Association, and called the “Red Lions.” The Bonchurch party, headed by Dickens, constituted themselves into a temporary rival club, called the “Sea Serpents,” and picnics were arranged between the two factions, the meetings usually taking place at Cook’s Castle. “Well do I recollect,” observes Mrs. Lankester, “the jolly procession from Sandown as it moved across the Downs, young and old carrying aloft a banner bearing the device of a noble red lion painted in vermilion on a white ground. Wending up the hill from the Bonchurch side might be seen the ‘Sea Serpents,’ with their ensign floating in the wind—a waving, curling serpent, cut out of yards and yards of calico, and painted of a bronzy-green colour with fiery red eyes, its tail being supported at the end by a second banner-holder. Carts brought up the provisions on either side, and at the top the factions met to prepare and consume the banquet on the short, sweet grass under shadow of a rock or a tree. Charles Dickens delighted in the fun. He usually boiled the potatoes when the fire had been lighted by the youngsters, and handed them round in a saucepan, and John Leech used to make sketches of us, one of which is still to be seen in the collection from Punch, and is called ‘Awful Appearance of a “Wopps” at a Picnic.’[63] I was very young then, and did not fully realize what it was to eat potatoes boiled by Charles Dickens, or to make a figure in a sketch by Leech.” On one of these jovial occasions a race was run, after the repast, between Mark Lemon and Dr. Lankester, both competitors of abnormal stoutness, Macready officiating as judge, after which the merry party adjourned to Dickens’s villa for tea and music.

His stay at Bonchurch was enlivened, too, by visits from such cherished friends as Justice Talfourd, Frank Stone, and Augustus Egg, social intercourse with whom formed agreeable interludes between severe spells of literary work. Unhappily, the enervating effect of the climate presently began to prostrate him, and after a few weeks’ residence he complained of insomnia, extreme mental depression, and a “dull, stupid languor.” Commenting upon his physical condition, he remarked: “It’s a mortal mistake—that’s the plain fact. Of all the places I ever have been in, I have never been in one so difficult to exist in pleasantly. Naples is hot and dirty, New York feverish, Washington bilious, Genoa exciting, Paris rainy; but Bonchurch—smashing. I am quite convinced that I should die here in a year.” His wife, sister-in-law, and the Leeches were also affected, but not to the same extent, and, finding it impossible to endure much longer the distressing symptoms, he determined to leave Bonchurch at the end of September and “go down to some cold place,” such as Ramsgate, for a week or two, hoping thus to shake off the effects. In the interval he completed the fifth number of “Copperfield,” after which, during the remainder of the holiday, he and his party (by way of relaxation) indulged in such amusements as “great games of rounders every afternoon, with all Bonchurch looking on.” These revels were disagreeably interrupted by a serious accident to John Leech, who, while bathing in a rough sea, was knocked over by an immense wave, which resulted in congestion of the brain, and necessitated, first, the placing of “twenty of his namesakes on his temple,” and then, as the illness developed, the continuous application of ice to the head, with blood-letting from the arm. The unfortunate artist becoming gradually worse, Dickens essayed the effect of mesmerism, in the virtue of which he apparently had faith, and succeeded in obtaining a period of much-needed sleep for the relief of the invalid, whose condition thenceforth improved until complete restoration of his customary health became assured, enabling him for many subsequent years to delight the world with his inimitable pencil. As already intimated, Dickens remained in the Island until the expiration of the time originally planned for this seaside holiday; but although he brought away many happy associations, he never renewed acquaintance with Bonchurch.

CHAPTER VI.
IN EAST ANGLIA.

Dickens must have become first acquainted with Eastern England during his reporting days, as many of the scenes in “Pickwick” are laid in the chief town of Suffolk. The merging, in 1899, of the Suffolk Chronicle into the Suffolk Times and Mercury revived an incident in Dickens’s career as a reporter, in stating that it was the Suffolk Chronicle which, in 1835, brought him down to Ipswich for the purpose of assisting in reporting the speeches in connection with the Parliamentary election at that time being contested in the county. We are further assured by the same authority that “Boz” (then actually engaged upon the opening chapters of “Pickwick”) stayed at the Great White Horse in Tavern Street for two or three weeks, and it has been reasonably surmised that the night adventure with “the middle-aged lady in the yellow curl-papers,” ascribed to Mr. Pickwick, was a veritable experience of the young author himself. It is said that, in consequence of this embarrassing mischance, Dickens entertained a feeling of prejudice against the house, and never liked the place afterwards. If this be correct, it accounts for the somewhat disparaging remarks in “Pickwick” concerning the hotel: “Never were such labyrinths of uncarpeted passages, such clusters of mouldy, badly-lighted rooms, such huge numbers of small dens for eating or sleeping in, beneath any one roof, as are collected together between the four walls of the Great White Horse at Ipswich.” Nevertheless, the famous hostelry still flourishes, and makes the most of its Pickwickian associations, even to the extent of revealing to visitors the identical bedroom (No. 16), where the adventure occurred. Over the principal hotel entrance we may yet see the stone presentment of a “rampacious” white horse, “distantly resembling an insane cart-horse”; but the building generally has since been altered in the direction of certain improvements necessitated by the requirements of present-day travellers.[64]

THE COMMON HARD, PORTSMOUTH. ([Page 102].)
Nickleby and Snipe lodged “at a tobacconist’s shop on the Common Hard,” now known as “The Old Curiosity Shop.”

We can readily conceive that the description of the coach journey to Ipswich, starting from the Bull Inn, Whitechapel, and rattling along the Whitechapel and Mile End Roads, “to the admiration of the whole population of that pretty densely-populated quarter,” and so to Suffolk’s county town (as duly set forth in the twenty-second chapter of “Pickwick”), is a personal reminiscence of Dickens himself when fulfilling his engagement with the Suffolk Chronicle.

While busy with newspaper responsibilities, to which he had pledged himself, he evidently made the best use of the opportunities thus afforded of noting certain topographical details of the town, finding “in a kind of courtyard of venerable appearance,” near St. Clement’s Church, a suitable locale for the incident of the unexpected meeting of Sam Weller and Job Trotter; the “green gate,” which Job was seen to open and close after him, is locally believed to be one that adjoins the churchyard a few yards from Church Street, the inhabitants taking great pride in pointing it out as the precise spot where Alfred Jingle’s body-servant embraced Sam “in an ecstasy of joy.” In regard to these scenes Ipswich is mentioned by name, but it has been conjectured that the town also figures in “Pickwick” under the successful disguise of “Eatanswill,” although Norwich has been mentioned in this connection. Certainly the weight of such evidence as that proffered by the Suffolk Times and Mercury favours the belief that Ipswich stood for the unflattering portrait, and, but for the facts as averred by that journal, we should possibly never have had Mr. Pickwick’s nocturnal misadventure, nor heard of the rival editors of the Eatanswill Gazette and the Eatanswill Independent.

Dickens’s reporting expedition in Suffolk during the electoral campaign of 1835 doubtless compelled him to include in his itinerary several of the leading towns in the county, where political meetings would naturally be held, and among them Bury St. Edmunds, where, according to tradition, he put up at the Angel Inn, his room being No. 11. In describing this hostelry, Mr. Percy Fitzgerald says that it is “a solemn, rather imposing, and stately building, of a gloomy slate colour, and of the nature of a family hotel.... It has yards and stabling behind it, which must have flourished in the old posting times.” Standing in Market Square, it continues to this day to be the principal hotel in the place, and remains in much the same condition as when the novelist knew it about seventy years ago. Bury St. Edmunds, like Ipswich, has won immortality in the pages of “Pickwick,” where it is referred to as “a handsome little town of thriving and cleanly appearance,” its well-paved streets being specially commended. In one of “The Uncommercial Traveller” papers he calls it “a bright little town.”

We are told that the coach, with Mr. Pickwick among the passengers newly arrived from Eatanswill, pulled up at the “large inn, situated in a wide, open street, nearly facing the old abbey.” “And this,” said Mr. Pickwick, “is the Angel. We alight here, Sam...;” whereupon a private room was ordered, and then dinner, everything being arranged with caution, for it will be remembered that Mr. Pickwick and his faithful attendant were in quest of that thorough-paced adventurer Alfred Jingle, Esq., “of No Hall, Nowhere,” intent upon frustrating probable intentions on his part of practising further deceptions. Here, at Bury, the “Mulberry man” (otherwise Job Trotter) was found by Sam in the pious act of reading a hymn-book, a discovery which proved to be the initial stage of Mr. Pickwick’s adventure at the boarding-school for young ladies—Westgate House—which, we are told, is a well-known residence called Southgate House, although there are other antique-looking schools for girls on the Westgate side of the town that seem more or less to answer the description.

More than two decades later—i.e., in 1861—Dickens again visited both Ipswich and Bury St. Edmunds, when he gave readings from his works, beginning the series at Norwich, where, writing from the recently-demolished Royal Hotel in the Market Place, he spoke of his audience in that city as “a very lumpish audience indeed ... an intent and staring audience. They laughed, though, very well, and the storm made them shake themselves again. But they were not magnetic, and the great big place (St. Andrew’s Hall) was out of sorts somehow.”[65]

On the last day of the year 1848, Dickens contemplated an excursion with Leech, Lemon, and Forster to some old cathedral city then unfamiliar to him, believing the sight of “pastures new” would afford him the necessary mental refreshment. “What do you say to Norwich and Stanfield Hall?” he queried of Forster, and it was decided forthwith that the three friends should depart thence. Stanfield Hall had just gained unenviable notoriety as the scene of a dreadful tragedy—the murder of Jeremy, the Recorder of Norwich, by Rush, afterwards executed at Norwich Castle. They arrived between the Hall and Potass Farm as the search was going on for the pistol, and the novelist was fain to confess that the place had nothing attractive about it, unless such a definition might be applied to a “murderous look that seemed to invite such a crime.”

Quaint old Norwich, as it has been justly termed (although its quaintness and picturesqueness have suffered woefully in recent years through commercial innovations), did not appeal to Dickens, who declared it to be “a disappointment”—everything there save the ancient castle, “which we found fit for a gigantic scoundrel’s exit,” alluding, of course, to Rush. The castle no longer serves as the county prison, and its gruesome associations are practically obliterated by the wholesome use to which the massive Norman structure is devoted, that of museum and art gallery under civic control.

Without doubt Dickens’s principal motive in journeying to Norfolk and Suffolk in 1848 was to obtain “local colour” for “David Copperfield,” the writing of which he was then meditating. He stayed for a time at Somerleyton Hall, near Lowestoft, as the guest of Sir Morton Peto, the well-known civil engineer and railway contractor, under whose guidance he first made acquaintance with that portion of Suffolk, studying it carefully, and afterwards portraying it in the story with characteristic exactitude. Two miles from Somerleyton Hall (now the residence of Sir Saville Crossley, M.P.) is Blundeston, a typical English village, which, thinly disguised as Blunderstone, appears in the book as the birthplace of David. The novelist afterwards confessed that he noticed the name on a direction-post between Lowestoft and Yarmouth, and at once adapted it because he liked the sound of the word; the actual direction-post still standing as he saw it.

There is a little uncertainty respecting the identity of the “Rookery” where David first saw the light, the Rectory being regarded by some careful students of the topography of “Copperfield” as the possible original, whence can be obtained a fairly distinct view of the church porch and the gravestones in the churchyard. Local tradition, however, favours Blundeston Hall, the present tenant-owner of which (Mr. T. Hardwich Woods) remembers that when very young he was taken by the old housekeeper down the “long passage ... leading from Peggotty’s kitchen to the front entrance,” and shown the “dark storeroom” opening out of it. While staying in the neighbourhood Dickens visited Blundeston Hall, which presented a weird and gloomy appearance before its recent restoration, and the fact is recalled that for a brief space he contemplated the prospect from one of the side windows facing the church, then plainly visible from this point, but the view is now obstructed by trees.

“In no other residence hereabouts,” observes Mr. Woods, “do rooms and passages coincide so exactly with the descriptions given in the novel.” In the garden we may still behold the “tall old elm-trees” in which there were formerly some rooks’ nests, but no rooks. (“David Copperfield all over!” cried Miss Betsey. “David Copperfield from head to foot! Calls a house a rookery when there’s not a rook near it, and takes the birds on trust because he sees the nests!”)

The roadside tavern referred to in the fourth chapter as “our little village alehouse” may be recognised in the Plough at Blundeston, to the recently-stuccoed front of which are affixed the initials “R. E. B.” and the date “1701” in wrought-iron.

Blundeston Church, like many others in East Anglia, has a round tower (probably Norman), but no spire, as mentioned in the story; the high-backed pews and quaint pulpit have since been replaced by others of modern workmanship, but happily the ancient rood-screen with its painted panels has survived such sacrilegious treatment. The porch, with a sun-dial above the entrance, is still intact. “There is nothing,” says little David, “half so green that I know anywhere as the grass of that churchyard; nothing half so shady as its trees; nothing half so quiet as its tombstones. The sheep are feeding there when I kneel up, early in the morning, in my little bed in a closet within my mother’s room to look out at it; and I see the red light shining on the sun-dial, and I think within myself, ‘Is the sun-dial glad, I wonder, that it can tell the time again?’” It is interesting to know that it was at Blundeston House (now called The Lodge) where the poet Gray stayed with his friend the Rev. Norton Nicholls (rector of the adjoining parishes of Lound and Bradwell), and here he found that sublime quietude which his soul loved.

That popular seaside resort, Great Yarmouth, was first seen by Dickens at the close of 1848, and he thought it “the strangest place in the wide world, one hundred and forty-six miles of hill-less marsh between it and London”; substituting the word “country” for “marsh,” the statement would be practically correct. Strongly impressed by the exceptional and Dutch-like features of this flat expanse, on the eastern margin of which stands the celebrated seaport, he forthwith decided to “try his hand” at it, with the result (as everyone knows) that he placed there, on the open Denes, the home of Little Em’ly and the Peggottys. In all probability the idea of causing them to live in a discarded boat arose from his having seen a humble abode of this character when perambulating the outskirts of Yarmouth, for such domiciles were not uncommon in those days, and might be met with both in Yarmouth and Lowestoft; indeed, we are told that even now the little village of Carracross, on the west coast of Ireland, consists of seventeen superannuated fishing-boats, one of which dates from about 1740. Apropos of Peggotty’s boat, it may be remarked that the old inverted boat, bricked up and roofed in, which revealed itself in 1879 during the process of demolition, has hitherto been considered as the veritable domicile immortalized in “Copperfield”; but the cherished belief is not worthy of credence, being unsupported by trustworthy evidence, an important point antagonistic to that conjecture being the fact that Peggotty’s boat stood on the open Denes upon its keel (“Phiz” notwithstanding), whereas that discovered in Tower Road was put keel uppermost, by a shrimper, on garden ground in the midst of a noisome locality called by the inappropriate name “Angel’s Piece,” with no “sandy waste” surrounding it.[66]

At Yarmouth Dickens made his headquarters at the Royal Hotel, on the sea-front, having John Leech and Mark Lemon as congenial companions, for illness prevented Forster from remaining with them. The old town, and the flat, sandy expanse of uncultivated land between river and sea, already alluded to as the Denes, deeply imprinted itself upon Dickens’s mental retina, and he conveys his impressions thereof through the medium of his boy-hero:

“It looked rather spongy and sloppy, I thought, as I carried my eye over the great dull waste that lay across the river; and I could not help wondering, if the world were really as round as my geography book said, how any part of it came to be so flat. But I reflected that Yarmouth might be situated at one of the poles, which would account for it.

THE GEORGE, GRETA BRIDGE. ([Page 123].)
Dickens visited this inn when collecting material for “Nicholas Nickleby,” and here Mr. Squeers alighted from the coach on his return from London with the new boys.

“As we drew a little nearer, and saw the whole adjacent prospect lying a straight low line under the sky, I hinted to Peggotty that a mound or so might improve it, and also that if the land had been a little more separated from the sea, and the town and the tide had not been quite so much mixed up, like toast-and-water, it would have been nicer....

“When we got into the street (which was strange enough to me), and smelt the fish, and pitch, and oakum, and tar, and saw the sailors walking about, and the carts jingling up and down over the stones, I felt that I had done so busy a place an injustice, and said as much to Peggotty, who ... told me it was well known ... that Yarmouth was, upon the whole, the finest place in the universe.”

David, as Ham carried him on his broad back from the carrier’s cart to the boathouse, gazed upon the dreary amplitude of the Denes in anxious expectation of catching a glimpse of the romantic abode for which they were destined. “We turned down lanes,” he says, “bestrewn with bits of chips and little hillocks of sand, and went past gasworks, rope-walks, boat-builders’ yards, shipwrights’ yards, ship-breakers’ yards, caulkers’ yards, riggers’ lofts, smiths’ forges, and a great litter of such places, until we came out upon the dull waste I had already seen at a distance.... I looked in all directions, as far as I could stare over the wilderness, and away at the sea, and away at the river, but no house could I make out”—nothing except a “ship-looking thing,” which presently resolved itself into the identical house for which they were bound, and proved to be—in the boy’s estimation, at least—as charming and delightful as Aladdin’s palace, “roc’s egg and all.” It is pointed out by Dr. Bately that the description given by Dickens (as above quoted) of the various objects seen on the way from Yarmouth to the South Denes really reverses their order, just as he noted them when walking in the contrary direction. There are not many boat-builders’ yards now remaining hereabouts.

CHAPTER VII.
IN THE NORTH.

In 1837 Dickens’s thoughts were concentrated upon a new serial story, “Nicholas Nickleby,” in which he determined to expose the shortcomings of cheap boarding-schools then flourishing in Northern England, his first impressions of which were picked up when, as a child, he sat “in by-places, near Rochester Castle, with a head full of Partridge, Strap, Tom Pipes, and Sancho Panza.” The time had arrived (he thought) when, by means of his writings, he could secure a large audience, to whom he might effectively present the actual facts concerning the alleged cruelties customarily practised at those seminaries of which he had heard so much. Having thus resolved to punish the culprits by means of his powerful pen, and, if possible, to suppress the evils of the system they favoured, the novelist and his illustrator, “Phiz,” departed from London by coach on a cold winter’s day in January, 1838, for Greta Bridge, in the North Riding, with the express intention of obtaining authoritative information regarding the subject of the schools, for in that locality were situated some of the most culpable of those institutions. Greta Bridge takes its name from a lofty bridge of one arch, erected on the line of Watling Street, upon the site of a more ancient structure, over the river Greta, a little above its junction with the Tees.

The parish of Rokeby, in the petty sessional division of Greta Bridge, is celebrated as the scene of Sir Walter Scott’s poem, “Rokeby,” which was written on the spot, and does no more than justice to the beautiful scenery of the neighbourhood.

Dickens and “Phiz” broke their journey at Grantham, at which town they arrived late on the night of January 30, and put up at the George—“the very best inn I have ever put up at.” Early the next morning they continued their journey by the Glasgow mail, “which charged us the remarkably low sum of £6 fare for two places inside.” Snow began to fall, and the drifts grew deeper, until there was “no vestige of a track” over the wild heaths as the coach approached the destination of the two fellow-travellers, who were half frozen on their arrival at Greta Bridge. In the story the author gives the name of the hostelry where Squeers and his party alighted from the coach as the George and New Inn; but, in so doing, he indulges in an artistic license, for he thus bestows upon one house the respective signs of two distinct inns at Greta Bridge, situated about half a mile from each other. The George stands near the bridge already referred to, the public portion of the premises having since been converted into a private residence. The New Inn has also been changed, and is now a farmhouse called Thorpe Grange; built before the railway era for Mr. Morrit, the landlord of the George, it not only rivalled the older establishment, but absorbed its custom, the owner claiming it as the veritable inn of Dickens’s story.[67] It seems very probable that the novelist himself put up at the New Inn during his brief tour of investigation in 1838; writing thence to his wife at this date, he said that at 11 p.m. the mail reached “a bare place with a house standing alone in the midst of a dreary moor, which the guard informed us was Greta Bridge. I was in a perfect agony of apprehension, for it was fearfully cold, and there were no outward signs of anybody being up in the house. But to our great joy we discovered a comfortable room, with drawn curtains and a most blazing fire. In half an hour they gave us a smoking supper and a bottle of mulled port (in which we drank your health), and then we retired to a couple of capital bedrooms, in each of which there was a rousing fire halfway up the chimney. We have had for breakfast toast, cakes, a Yorkshire pie, a piece of beef about the size and much the shape of my portmanteau, tea, coffee, ham and eggs, and are now going to look about us....”[68] After exploring the immediate neighbourhood, Dickens, accompanied by “Phiz,” went by post-chaise to Barnard Castle, four miles from Greta Bridge, and just over the Yorkshire border, there to deliver a letter given to him by Mr. Smithson (a London solicitor, who had a Yorkshire connection), and to visit the numerous schools thereabouts. This letter of introduction bore reference (as the author explains in his preface to “Nicholas Nickleby”) to a supposititious little boy who had been left with a widowed mother who didn’t know what to do with him; the poor lady had thought, as a means of thawing the tardy compassion of her relations on his behalf, of sending him to a Yorkshire school. “I was the poor lady’s friend, travelling that way; and if the recipient of the letter could inform me of a school in his neighbourhood, the writer would be very much obliged.” The result of this “pious fraud” (as Dickens himself termed it) has become a matter of history. The person to whom the missive was addressed was a farmer (since identified as John S——, of Broadiswood), who appears in the story as honest John Browdie. Not being at home when the novelist called upon him, he journeyed through the snow to the inn where Dickens was staying, and entreated him to advise the widow to refrain from sending her boy to any of those wretched schools “while there’s a harse to hoold in a’ Lunnun, or a goother to lie asleep in!” The old coaching-house where this memorable interview is believed to have taken place was the still existing Unicorn at Bowes. Another inn associated with this tour of inspection is the King’s Head, Barnard Castle,[69] where Dickens made a brief stay, and where he observed, across the way, the name of “Humphreys, clockmaker,” over a shop door, this suggesting the title of his next work, “Master Humphrey’s Clock.”

It was at Bowes where he obtained material which served him for depicting the “internal economy” of Dotheboys Hall, in the school presided over by William Shaw, who, it has since transpired, was by no means the worst of his tribe. As a matter of fact, he won respect from his neighbours, and is remembered by many of his pupils (some of whom attained high positions in various professions) as a worthy and much injured man. In “Nicholas Nickleby,” however, he became a scapegoat for others who thoroughly deserved the punishment inflicted upon Shaw. Even to-day many of the people at Bowes regard Dickens’s attack as unjust so far as that particular schoolmaster is concerned, and visitors to the place are advised to refrain from alluding to Dotheboys Hall.

There is no lack of evidence to prove the general accuracy of the novelist’s description, and to him we owe a deep debt of gratitude for so successful an attempt to annihilate those terrible “Caves of Despair.” Bowes is situated high up on the moorland, and may now be reached by railway from Barnard Castle. The village consists principally of one street nearly three-quarters of a mile in length, running east to west, and is lighted with oil lamps, under a village lighting committee. Shaw’s house (known generally as Dotheboys Hall until recent times) stands at the western extremity of Bowes. The present tenants have altered somewhat the original appearance of the house by attempting to convert it into a kind of suburban villa—in fact, it is now called “The Villa.” Prior to these structural changes it was a long, low building of two storeys. The classroom and dormitories were demolished a few years ago, but the original pump, at which Shaw’s pupils used to wash, is still in the yard at the back of the house, and an object of great interest to tourists.

Nearly all provincial towns in England were visited by Dickens during his acting and reading tours, and many can boast of more intimate relations with the novelist. It was from Liverpool, on January 4, 1842, that he embarked on board the Britannia for the United States—his first memorable visit to Transatlantic shores—and in 1844 he presided at a great public meeting held in the Mechanics’ Institution, then sadly in need of funds, on which occasion he delivered a powerful speech in support of the objects of that foundation. Referring to the building, he said: “It is an enormous place. The lecture-room ... will accommodate over thirteen hundred people.... I should think it an easy place to speak in, being a semicircle with seats rising one above another to the ceiling.”

Respecting this function, we learn from a contemporary report that long before the hour appointed for the opening of the doors the street was crowded with persons anxious to obtain admission, so anxious were they to see and hear the young man (then only in his thirty-third year) who had given them “Pickwick,” “Oliver Twist,” and “Nicholas Nickleby.” At the termination of his speech a vote of thanks was accorded to the novelist, who, in replying thereto, concluded his acknowledgments by quoting the words of Tiny Tim, “God bless us every one.” An interesting incident lay in the fact that the young lady who presided at the pianoforte was Miss Christina Weller, who, with her father, was introduced to the author of “Pickwick,” thus causing considerable merriment.

DOTHEBOYS HALL, BOWES. ([Page 126].)
Visited by Dickens when writing “Nicholas Nickleby.”

In 1847 Dickens and his distinguished company of amateur actors gave a representation in Liverpool of Ben Jonson’s comedy, “Every Man in His Humour,” for the benefit of Leigh Hunt. The Reading tours in the fifties and sixties again called him to that busy mercantile centre, one of the readings taking place in St. George’s Hall—“the beautiful St. George’s Hall,” as he described it: “brilliant to see when lighted up, and for a reading simply perfect.” One of the closing incidents of his life was the great Liverpool banquet, which took place on April 10, 1869, in St. George’s Hall, after his country Readings, the late Marquis of Dufferin presiding, the function being made memorable by an eloquent speech by the novelist, replying to a remonstrance from Lord Houghton against his (Dickens’s) objection to entering public life.[70] While sojourning at Liverpool he usually stayed at the Adelphi Hotel. In 1844 he made Radley’s Hotel his headquarters.

It is quite in accordance with our expectations to find frequent mention of Liverpool throughout Dickens’s works. For descriptive passages we must turn to the pages of “Martin Chuzzlewit” and certain of his minor writings, where we discover interesting and important references “to that rich and beautiful port,” as he calls it in one instance. Apropos of the return to England of Martin Chuzzlewit the younger and his faithful companion Mark Tapley after their trying experiences in the New Country, the novelist, in thus depicting Liverpool and the Mersey, doubtless records his own impressions of some two years previous on his arrival there at the termination, in 1842, of his American tour:

“It was mid-day and high-water in the English port for which the Screw was bound, when, borne in gallantly upon the fulness of the tide, she let go her anchor in the river.

“Bright as the scene was—fresh, and full of motion; airy, free, and sparkling—it was nothing to the life and exaltation in the hearts of the two travellers at sight of the old churches, roofs, and darkened chimney-stacks of home. The distant roar that swelled up hoarsely from the busy streets was music in their ears; the lines of people gazing from the wharves were friends held dear; the canopy of smoke that overhung the town was brighter and more beautiful to them than if the richest silks of Persia had been waving in the air. And though the water, going on its glistening track, turned ever and again aside to dance and sparkle round great ships, and heave them up, and leaped from off the blades of oars, a shower of diving diamonds, and wantoned with the idle boats, and swiftly passed, in many a sporting chase, through obdurate old iron rings, set deep into the stonework of the quays, not even it was half so buoyant and so restless as their fluttering hearts, when yearning to set foot once more on native ground.”

In one of “The Uncommercial Traveller” papers (1860) will be found this vivid pen-picture of the slums of Liverpool, favoured by seafaring men of the lower class, a district probably little altered since those lines were penned:

“A labyrinth of dismal courts and blind alleys, called ‘entries,’ kept in wonderful order by the police, and in much better order than by the Corporation, the want of gaslight in the most dangerous and infamous of these places being quite unworthy of so spirited a town.... Many of these sailors’ resorts we attained by noisome passages so profoundly dark that we felt our way with our hands. Not one of the whole number we visited was without its show of prints and ornamental crockery, the quantity of the latter, set forth on little shelves and in little cases in otherwise wretched rooms, indicating that Mercantile Jack must have an extraordinary fondness for crockery to necessitate so much of that bait in his traps ... etc.”[71]

With the characteristics of that other great Lancashire town, Manchester, the novelist became, perhaps, even more intimate. “Manchester is (for Manchester) bright and fresh,” he wrote to Miss Hogarth from the Queen’s Hotel in 1869, where he stayed on the occasion of his Farewell Readings in the provinces, and where the chimney of his sitting-room caught fire and compelled him to “turn out elsewhere to breakfast.” Long before this date—that is, in 1843—the people of Manchester were first privileged to meet him on the occasion of a bazaar in the Free Trade Hall in aid of the fund for improving the financial condition of the Athenæum, then sadly in debt. The bazaar was followed by a soirée, held in the same building, under the presidency of Dickens, who then delivered a speech which has been described as “a masterpiece of graceful eloquence.” The subject thereof forcibly appealed to him—viz., the education of the very poor, for he did not believe in the old adage that averred a little learning to be a “dangerous thing,” but rather that the most minute particle of knowledge is preferable to complete and consummate ignorance. This memorable function is noteworthy also by reason of the fact that among the speakers who addressed the vast audience were Disraeli and Cobden. Dickens expressed a wish to become a member of the Athenæum, but left Manchester without going through the necessary formalities—an oversight soon rectified, however.

In 1852, on the occasion of the inauguration of the Manchester Public Free Libraries, the novelist accepted an invitation to be present at an important meeting held at Campfield, the “first home” of these free libraries (formerly known as “The Hall of Science”); the meeting was attended by a number of distinguished men, including Bulwer Lytton, Thackeray, John Bright, Peter Cunningham, etc., and it naturally fell to Dickens to make a speech, having the use of literature as its theme. Thackeray, by the way, had prepared a careful oration, but, after delivering half a sentence, ignominiously sat down! Public oratory was not his forte. In 1858 Dickens presided at the annual meeting of the Institutional Association of Lancashire and Cheshire, held in the Manchester Athenæum and the Free Trade Hall, and handed prizes to candidates from more than a hundred local mechanics’ institutes affiliated to the association. “Knowledge has a very limited power indeed,” he observed, in the speech delivered on behalf of the Manchester Mechanics’ Institute in Cooper Street, “when it informs the head alone; but when it informs the head and heart too, it has power over life and death, the body and the soul, and dominates the universe.” We are reminded that this peroration is an echo of words in “Hard Times” (written four years previously), and that his exhortation to the Manchester audience practically reproduced the leading thought in that powerful novel—a story which impelled the admiration of Ruskin, who, commenting upon it, said that the book “should be studied with close and earnest care by persons interested in social questions.” In “Hard Times” Manchester is disguised as matter-of-fact Coketown, and the presentment is easily recognisable:

“It was a town of red brick, or of brick that would have been red if the smoke and ashes had allowed it; but, as matters stood, it was a town of unnatural red and black, like the painted face of a savage. It was a town of machinery and tall chimneys, out of which interminable serpents of smoke trailed themselves for ever and ever, and never got uncoiled. It had a black canal in it, and a river that ran purple with evil-smelling dye, and vast piles of building full of windows, where there was a rattling and a trembling all day long, and where the piston of the steam-engine worked monotonously up and down, like the head of an elephant in a state of melancholy madness. It contained several large streets, all very like one another, and many small streets, still more like one another, inhabited by people equally like one another, who all went in and out at the same hours, with the same sound upon the same pavements, to do the same work, and to whom every day was the same as yesterday and to-morrow, and every year the counterpart of the last and the next. These attributes of Coketown were in the main inseparable from the work by which it was sustained; against them were to be set off comforts of life which found their way all over the world, and elegancies of life which made we will not ask how much of the fine lady, who could scarcely bear to hear the place mentioned. You saw nothing in Coketown but what was severely workful....

“In the hardest working part of Coketown; in the innermost fortifications of that ugly citadel, where Nature was as strongly bricked out as killing airs and gasses were bricked in; at the heart of the labyrinth of narrow courts upon courts, and close streets upon streets, which had come into existence piecemeal, every piece in a violent hurry for some one man’s purpose, and the whole one unnatural family, shouldering, and trampling, and pressing one another to death; in the last close nook of the great exhausted receiver, where the chimneys, for want or air to make a draught, were built in an immense variety of stunted and crooked shapes, as though every house put out a sign of the kind of people who might be expected to be born in it.”

Of Coketown on a sunny midsummer day (for “there was such a thing sometimes, even in Coketown”) the author exhibits a realistic picture. “Seen from a distance in such weather, Coketown lay shrouded in a haze of its own, which appeared impervious to the sun’s rays. You only knew the town was there because you knew there could have been no such sulky blotch upon the prospect without a town. A blur of soot and smoke, now confusedly bending this way, now that way, now aspiring to the vault of heaven, now murkily creeping along the earth as the wind rose and fell or changed its quarter—a dense, formless jumble, with sheets of cross-light in it, that showed nothing but masses of darkness. Coketown in the distance was suggestive of itself, though not a brick of it could be seen ... the streets were hot and dusty on the summer day, and the sun was so bright that it even shone through the heavy vapour drooping over Coketown, and could not be looked at steadily. Stokers emerged from low underground doorways and factory yards, and sat on steps, and posts, and palings, wiping their swarthy visages, and contemplating coals. The whole town seemed to be frying in oil. There was a stifling smell of hot oil everywhere. The steam-engines shone with it; the dresses of the Hands were soiled with it; the mills throughout their many stories oozed and trickled it. The atmosphere of those Fairy palaces[72] was like the breath of the simoon, and their inhabitants, wasting with heat, toiled languidly in the desert. But no temperature made the melancholy-mad elephants more mad or more sane. Their wearisome heads went up and down at the same rate, in hot weather and cold, wet weather and dry, fair weather and foul. The measured motion of their shadows on the walls was the substitute Coketown had to show for the shadows of rustling woods; while for the summer hum of insects it could offer, all the year round, from the dawn of Monday to the night of Saturday, the whir of shafts and wheels.

“Drowsily they whirred all through this sunny day, making the passenger more sleepy and more hot as he passed the humming walls of the mills. Sun-blinds and sprinklings of water a little cooled the main streets and shops, but the mills and the courts and the alleys baked at a fierce heat. Down upon the river, that was black and thick with dye, some Coketown boys, who were at large—a rare sight there—rowed a crazy boat, which made a spurious track upon the water as it jogged along, while every dip of an oar stirred up vile smells.”[73]

Apropos of “Hard Times,” it may be mentioned that in 1854 Dickens stayed at the Bull Hotel in Preston, when he visited that town expressly for the purpose of witnessing the effects of a strike in a manufacturing town. He failed, however, to secure much material here for the story, for he wrote: “Except the crowds at the street-corners reading the placards pro and con, and the cold absence of smoke from the mill-chimneys, there is very little in the streets to make the town remarkable.” He expected to find in Preston a model town, instead of which it proved to be, in his estimation, a “nasty place,” while to the Bull he referred in disrespectful terms as an “old, grubby, smoky, mean, intensely formal red-brick house, with a narrow gateway and a dingy yard.” Preston figures in the early chapters of “George Silverman’s Explanation,” a cellar in that town being the birthplace of the principal character, the Rev. George Silverman.

THE RED LION, BARNET. ([Page 173].)
Dickens and Forster dined here in March, 1838, to celebrate the birth of Miss Mary (Mamie) Dickens.

Reverting to Manchester, it must not be forgotten that Dickens, in the capacity of an actor, journeyed thither four times, appearing with his amateur company first at the Theatre Royal in 1847 for the benefit of Leigh Hunt, twice in 1852 at the Old Free Trade Hall, and again in that building in 1857. Needless to say, the performances attracted vast and enthusiastic audiences, and were eminently successful both artistically and financially.

The Free Trade Hall, too, was the scene of his public Readings in Manchester, and it is recorded that he was accustomed to stay at Old Trafford as the guest of Mr. John Knowles, of the Theatre Royal. This large house was then surrounded by an extensive wood, and considered to be a lonely and remote place, but is now near a network of railways, and the reverse of rural.[74]

About the year 1841 Charles Dickens’s elder sister Fanny (nearly two years his senior) married Henry Burnett, an accomplished operatic singer, who had retired from performing on the stage, and taken up his abode in Manchester as an instructor in music, Mrs. Burnett, herself a musician of considerable acquirements, assisting her husband in conducting the choir of Rusholme Road Congregational Chapel, where they worshipped, and the pastor of which was the Rev. James Griffin, who has recorded in print his recollections of the Burnetts. There is, consequently, a link of a distinctly personal kind connecting Dickens with Manchester, which is made additionally interesting by the fact that the little crippled son of the Burnetts (who lived in Upper Brook Street) was the prototype of Paul Dombey. It may be added that Mr. Burnett unconsciously posed for some of the characteristics of Nicholas Nickleby, while in Fanny Dorrit there are certain indications suggesting that her portrait was inspired by the novelist’s sister.

In a literary sense, Manchester can boast of other Dickensian associations, for here resided the originals of the delightful Cheeryble Brothers, who (the author assures us in his preface to “Nicholas Nickleby”) were “very slightly and imperfectly sketched” from life. “Those who take an interest in this tale,” he adds, “will be glad to learn that the Brothers Cheeryble live; that their liberal charity, their singleness of heart, their noble nature, and their unbounded benevolence, are no creation of the author’s brain, but are prompting every day (and oftenest by stealth) some munificent deed in that town of which they are the pride and honour.” The actual models whence he portrayed the Cheerybles with approximate accuracy were the brothers Grant, William and Daniel, merchants, of Ramsbottom and Manchester, with whom the novelist declared he “never interchanged any communication in his life.” From evidence recently forthcoming, however, we learn that in 1838 (the year prior to the publication of “Nickleby”) he and Forster were the guests of Mr. Gilbert Winter, of Stocks House, Cheetham Hill Road, Manchester, to whom they went with a letter of introduction from Harrison Ainsworth. Stocks House (demolished in 1884) was formerly surrounded by a moat, a portion of which was filled up at the time of the construction of the old road to Bury, the fine old mansion probably representing the manor-house of Cheetham Manor, given as a reward to the Earls of Derby after the Battle of Bosworth Field. It was at Stocks House that Dickens became acquainted with the Grants; indeed, Forster practically admits this when he says: “A friend now especially welcome was the novelist Mr. Ainsworth, with whom we visited, during two of those years (1838 and 1839), friends of art and letters in his native Manchester, from among whom Dickens brought away the Brothers Cheeryble....” The Rev. Hume Elliot informs us that although William and Daniel Grant had residences in Manchester, they preferred to live together at Springside, Ramsbottom, “which they made a veritable home of hospitality and good works,”[75] and it is fair to assume that Dickens must have seen at their home the original of David, “the apoplectic butler,” or ascertained from an authentic source the peculiarities of Alfred, who served the Grants in a like capacity and possessed similar idiosyncrasies.

There are two houses in Manchester associated with the Grants. One of these, now a parcel-receiving office of the London and North-Western Railway Company, is in Mosley Street, and the other (a more important place) stands at the lower end of Cannon Street (No. 15), a large, roomy warehouse, occupied by a paper dealer, who caused the name “Cheeryble House” to be placed on the front of the building.[76]

The rare combination of the qualities of charity and humanity with sound business instincts, such as are ascribed to the Cheeryble Brothers, was exactly true of the Grants. On the death of William Grant (the elder brother) in 1842, the novelist (writing from Niagara Falls to his American friend, Professor Felton), said: “One of the noble hearts who sat for the Cheeryble Brothers is dead. If I had been in England I would certainly have gone into mourning for the loss of such a glorious life. His brother is not expected to survive him. [He died in 1855, at the age of seventy-five.] I am told that it appears from a memorandum found among the papers of the deceased that in his lifetime he gave away £600,000, or three million dollars.” There is a marble tablet to the memory of William Grant in St. Andrew’s Presbyterian Church, Ramsbottom, recording his “vigour of understanding, his spotless integrity of character, and his true benevolence of heart.... If you are in poverty,” the inscription continues, “grieve for the loss of so good a friend; if born to wealth and influence, think of the importance of such a trust, and earn in like manner by a life of charitable exertion the respect and love of all who knew you, and the prayers and blessings of the poor.” Honoured descendants of the two philanthropists are still surviving in the city which cherishes their memory.

In 1847 the novelist presided at a meeting of the Mechanics’ Institute in Leeds, thus proving his practical interest in the welfare of working men—an interest again testified in 1855, when he visited Sheffield for the purpose of reading the “Christmas Carol” in the Mechanics’ Hall on behalf of the funds of the Institute in that busy town. After the reading, the Mayor begged his acceptance of a handsome service of table cutlery and other useful articles of local manufacture, the gift of a few gentlemen in Sheffield, as a substantial manifestation of their gratitude to him.

In a letter to Wilkie Collins, dated August 29, 1857, Dickens said: “I want to cast about whether you and I can go anywhere—take any tour—see anything—whereon we could write something together. Have you any idea tending to any place in the world? Will you rattle your head and see if there is any pebble in it which we could wander away and play at marbles with?” This was written just after the conclusion of the readings and theatrical performances in aid of the Douglas Jerrold fund, Dickens experiencing a sense of restlessness when the excitement attending them had subsided, and seeming anxious “to escape from himself” by means of a pilgrimage with a congenial companion, and such as might provide material for a series of papers in Household Words. Arrangements were speedily made with this object, and the two friends started forthwith “on a ten or twelve days’ expedition to out-of-the-way places, to do (in inns and coast corners) a little tour in search of an article and in avoidance of railroads.” They decided for a foray upon the fells of Cumberland, Dickens having discovered (in “The Beauties of England and Wales” and other topographical works) descriptions of “some promising moors and bleak places thereabout.” To the Lake district they accordingly departed in September, and their adventures are related in “The Lazy Tour of Two Idle Apprentices” (published in Household Words during the latter part of the same year), the authors skilfully collaborating in the preparation of the record, nearly all the descriptive passages emanating from the pen of Dickens. Almost the first thing attempted by the travellers was the climbing of Carrock Fell, “a gloomy old mountain 1,500 feet high.” “Nobody goes up,” said Dickens to Forster; “guides have forgotten it.” The proprietor of a little inn, however, volunteered his services as guide, and the party of enthusiasts ascended in a downpour of rain. The Two Idle Apprentices (who bear the respective names Francis Goodchild and Thomas Idle, the former being the pseudonym favoured by Dickens) concluded that to perform the feat “would be the culminating triumph of Idleness.” “Up hill and down hill, and twisting to the left, and with old Skiddaw (who has vaunted himself a great deal more than his merits deserve, but that is rather the way of the Lake country) dodging the apprentices in a picturesque and pleasant manner. Good, weatherproof, warm, pleasant houses, well white-limed, scantily dotting the road.... Well-cultivated gardens attached to the cottages.... Lonely nooks, and wild; but people can be born, and married, and buried in such nooks, and can live, and love, and be loved there as elsewhere, thank God!” The village is portrayed as consisting of “black, coarse-stoned, rough-windowed houses, some with outer staircases, like Swiss houses, a sinuous and stony gutter winding up hill and round the corner by way of street.”[77] The ascent of the mountain was safely achieved, but during the descent Collins unfortunately fell into a watercourse and sprained his ankle, an accident which proved to be a serious hindrance. They slept that night at Wigton, which (we are told) “had no population, no business, no streets to speak of.” In Household Words may be found an elaborate, amusing (but doubtless accurate) description of Wigton marketplace as seen at night nearly fifty years ago, and written with Dickens’s customary power, illustrating his marvellous acuteness of observation:

“Wigton market was over, and its bare booths were smoking with rain all down the street.... ‘I see,’ said Brother Francis, ‘what I hope and believe to be one of the most dismal places ever seen by eyes. I see the houses with their roofs of dull black, their stained fronts, and their dark-rimmed windows, looking as if they were all in mourning. As every little puff of wind comes down the street, I see a perfect train of rain let off along the wooden stalls in the market-place and exploded against me. I see a very big gas-lamp in the centre, which I know, by a secret instinct, will not be lighted to-night. I see a pump, with a trivet underneath its spout whereon to stand the vessels that are brought to be filled with water. I see a man come to the pump, and he pumps very hard; but no water follows, and he strolls empty away.... I see one, two, three, four, five linen-drapers’ shops in front of me. I see a linen-draper’s shop next door to the right, and there are five more linen-drapers’ shops round the corner to the left. Eleven homicidal linen-drapers’ shops within a short stone’s-throw, each with its hands at the throats of all the rest! Over the small first-floor of one of these linen-drapers’ shops appears the wonderful inscription: BANK.... I see a sweet-meat shop, which the proprietor calls a ‘Salt Warehouse.’... And I see a watchmaker’s, with only three great pale watches of a dull metal hanging in his window, each on a separate pane.

“... There is nothing more to see, except the curl-paper bill of the theatre ... and the short, square, chunky omnibus that goes to the railway, and leads too rattling a life over the stones to hold together long. Oh yes! Now I see two men with their hands in their pockets ... they are looking at nothing very hard, very hard ... they spit at times, but speak not. I see it growing darker, and I still see them, sole visible population of the place, standing to be rained upon, with their backs towards me, and looking at nothing very hard.

“... The murky shadows are gathering fast, and the wings of evening and the wings of coal are folding over Wigton.... And now the town goes to sleep, undazzled by the large unlighted lamp in the market-place; and let no man wake it.”[78]

From Wigton the friends proceeded to Allonby, on the coast of Cumberland, here resolving to begin their writing, to record their impressions while fresh in their minds. They found a comfortable lodging, a “capital little homely inn,” the Ship, overlooking the watery expanse, and by a curious coincidence the landlady previously lived at Greta Bridge, Yorkshire, when Dickens went there in quest of the cheap boarding-schools.