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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Dickens-Land, by J. A. Nicklin
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Dickens-Land
+
+Author: J. A. Nicklin
+
+Illustrator: E. W. Haslehust
+
+Release Date: December 20, 2008 [EBook #27572]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK DICKENS-LAND ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Carla Foust and The Online Distributed
+Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This file was
+produced from images generously made available by The
+Internet Archive/Canadian Libraries)
+
+
+
+
+
+Transcriber's note
+
+
+Minor punctuation errors have been changed without notice. A printer
+error has been changed, and it is listed at the end. All other
+inconsistencies are as in the original.
+
+
+
+
+   [Illustration: CHALK, HOUSE WHERE DICKENS SPENT HIS HONEYMOON]
+
+
+
+
+   DICKENS-LAND
+
+   Described by J. A. NICKLIN
+
+   Pictured by E. W. HASLEHUST
+
+   [Illustration]
+
+   BLACKIE AND SON LIMITED LONDON GLASGOW AND BOMBAY 1911
+
+
+
+
+   Beautiful England
+
+   _Volumes Ready_
+
+   OXFORD
+   THE ENGLISH LAKES
+   CANTERBURY
+   SHAKESPEARE-LAND
+   THE THAMES
+   WINDSOR CASTLE
+   CAMBRIDGE
+   NORWICH AND THE BROADS
+   THE HEART OF WESSEX
+   THE PEAK DISTRICT
+   THE CORNISH RIVIERA
+   DICKENS-LAND
+   WINCHESTER
+   THE ISLE OF WIGHT
+   CHESTER AND THE DEE
+   YORK
+
+   _Uniform with this Series_
+
+   Beautiful Ireland
+
+   LEINSTER
+   ULSTER
+   MUNSTER
+   CONNAUGHT
+
+
+
+
+LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
+
+
+                                                                    Page
+
+   Chalk, House where Dickens spent his honeymoon         _Frontispiece_
+
+   Gadshill Place from the Gardens                                     8
+
+   Rochester from Strood                                              14
+
+   Restoration House, Rochester                                       20
+
+   Cobham Park                                                        26
+
+   Cooling Church                                                     32
+
+   Aylesford                                                          38
+
+   Maidstone, All Saints' Church and the Palace                       42
+
+   Jasper's Gateway                                                   46
+
+   Chalk Church                                                       50
+
+   Shorne Church                                                      54
+
+   The Leather Bottle, Cobham                                         58
+
+
+
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+The central shrine of a literary cult is at least as often its hero's
+home of adoption as his place of birth. To the Wordsworthian,
+Cockermouth has but a faint, remote interest in comparison with Grasmere
+and Rydal Mount. Edinburgh, for all its associations with the life and
+the genius of Scott, is not as Abbotsford, or as that beloved Border
+country in which his memory has struck its deepest roots. And so it is
+with Dickens. The accident of birth attaches his name but slightly to
+Landport in South-sea. The Dickens pilgrim treads in the most palpable
+footsteps of "Boz" amongst the landmarks of a Victorian London, too
+rapidly disappearing, and through the "rich and varied landscape" on
+either side of the Medway, "covered with cornfields and pastures, with
+here and there a windmill or a distant church", which Dickens loved from
+boyhood, peopled with the creatures of his teeming fancy, and chose for
+his last and most-cherished habitation.
+
+What Abbotsford was to Scott, that, almost, to Dickens in his later
+years was Gadshill Place. From his study window in the "grave red-brick
+house" "on his little Kentish freehold"--a house which he had "added to
+and stuck bits upon in all manner of ways, so that it was as pleasantly
+irregular and as violently opposed to all architectural ideas as the
+most hopeful man could possibly desire"--he looked out, so he wrote to a
+friend, "on as pretty a view as you will find in a long day's English
+ride.... Cobham Park and Woods are behind the house; the distant Thames
+is in front; the Medway, with Rochester and its old castle and
+cathedral, on one side." On every side he could not fail to reach, in
+those brisk walks with which he sought, too strenuously, perhaps, health
+and relaxation, some object redolent of childish dreams or mature
+achievement, of intimate joys and sorrows, of those phantoms of his
+brain which to him then, as to hundreds of thousands of his readers
+since, were not less real than the men and women of everyday encounter.
+On those seven miles between Rochester and Maidstone, which he
+discovered to be one of the most beautiful walks in England, he might be
+tempted to strike off at Aylesford for a short stroll to such a
+pleasant old Elizabethan mansion as Cobtree Hall, the very type, it may
+be, of Manor Farm, Dingley Dell, or for a longer tramp to Town Malling,
+from which he may well have borrowed many strokes for the picture of
+Muggleton, that town of sturdy Kentish cricket. Sometimes he would walk
+across the marshes to Gravesend, and returning through the village of
+Chalk, would pause for a retrospective glance at the house where his
+honeymoon was spent and a good part of _Pickwick_ planned. In the latter
+end of the year, when he could take a short cut through the stubble
+fields from Higham to the marshes lying further down the Thames, he
+would often visit the desolate churchyard where little Pip was so
+terribly frightened by the convict. Or, descending the long slope from
+Gadshill to Strood, and crossing Rochester Bridge--over the balustrades
+of which Mr. Pickwick leaned in agreeable reverie when he was accosted
+by Dismal Jemmy--the author of _Great Expectations_ and _Edwin Drood_
+would pass from Rochester High Street--where Mr. Pumblechook's seed shop
+looks across the way at Miss Twinkleton's establishment--into the Vines,
+to compare once more the impression on his unerring "inward eye" with
+the actual features of that Restoration House which, under another name,
+he assigned to Miss Havisham, and so round by Fort Pitt to the Chatham
+lines. And there--who can doubt?--if he seemed to hear the melancholy
+wind that whistled through the deserted fields as Mr. Winkle took his
+reluctant stand, a wretched and desperate duellist, his thoughts would
+also stray to the busy dockyard town and "a blessed little room" in a
+plain-looking plaster-fronted house from which dated all his early
+readings and imaginings.
+
+Between the "very small and not-over-particularly-taken-care-of boy" and
+the strong, self-reliant man whose fame had filled two continents,
+Gadshill Place was an immediate link. Everyone knows the story which
+Dickens tells of a vision of his former self meeting him on the road to
+Canterbury.
+
+     "So smooth was the old high road, and so fresh were the horses, and
+     so fast went I, that it was midway between Gravesend and Rochester,
+     and the widening river was bearing the ships, white-sailed or
+     black-smoked, out to sea, when I noticed by the wayside a very
+     queer small boy.
+
+     "'Halloa!' said I to the very queer small boy, 'where do you live?'
+
+     "'At Chatham,' says he.
+
+     "'What do you do there?' say I.
+
+     "'I go to school,' says he.
+
+     "I took him up in a moment, and we went on. Presently, the very
+     queer small boy says, 'This is Gadshill we are coming to, where
+     Falstaff went out to rob those travellers and ran away.'
+
+     "'You know something about Falstaff, eh?' said I.
+
+     "'All about him,' said the very queer small boy. 'I am old (I am
+     nine), and I read all sorts of books. But do let us stop at the top
+     of the hill, and look at the house there, if you please!'
+
+     "'You admire that house?' said I.
+
+[Illustration: GADSHILL PLACE FROM THE GARDENS]
+
+     "'Bless you, sir,' said the very queer small boy, 'when I was not
+     more than half as old as nine, it used to be a treat for me to be
+     brought to look at it. And now I am nine I come by myself to look
+     at it. And ever since I can recollect, my father, seeing me so fond
+     of it, has often said to me, If you were to be very persevering,
+     and were to work hard, you might some day come to live in it.
+     Though that's impossible!' said the very queer small boy, drawing a
+     low breath, and now staring at the house out of window with all his
+     might.
+
+     "I was rather amazed to be told this by the very queer small boy;
+     for that house happens to be _my_ house, and I have reason to
+     believe that what he said was true."
+
+As the queer small boy in the _Uncommercial Traveller_ said, Gadshill
+Place is at the very top of Falstaff's hill. It stands on the south side
+of the Dover road;--on the north side, but a little lower down, is "a
+delightfully oldfashioned inn of the old coaching days", the "Sir John
+Falstaff";--surrounded by a high wall and screened by a row of limes.
+The front view, with its wooden and pillared porch, its bays, its dormer
+windows let into the roof, and its surmounting bell turret and vane,
+bears much the same appearance as it did to the queer small boy. But
+amongst the many additions and alterations which Dickens was constantly
+making, the drawing-room had been enlarged from a smaller existing one,
+and the conservatory into which it opens was, as he laughingly told his
+younger daughter, "positively the last improvement at Gadshill"--a jest
+to prove sadly prophetic, for it was uttered on the Sunday before his
+death. The little library, too, on the opposite side of the porch from
+the drawing-room and conservatory, was a converted bedroom. Its aspect
+is familiar to most Dickens-lovers from Sir Luke Fildes's famous picture
+of "The Empty Chair". In summer, however, Dickens used to do his work
+not in the library but in a Swiss chalet, presented to him by Fechter,
+the great actor, which stood in a shrubbery lying on the other side of
+the highroad, and entered by a subway that Dickens had excavated for the
+purpose. The chalet now must be sought in the terrace garden of Cobham
+Hall. When Dickens sat at his desk in a room of the chalet, "up among
+the branches of the trees", the five mirrors which he had put in
+reflected "the leaves quivering at the windows, and the great fields of
+waving corn, and the sail-dotted river". The birds and butterflies flew
+in and out, the green branches shot in at the open windows, and the
+lights and shadows of the clouds and the scent of flowers and of
+everything growing for miles had the same free access. No imaginative
+artist, whether in words or colour, could have desired a more inspiring
+environment. The back of the house, looking southward, descends by one
+flight of steps upon a lawn, where one of the balustrades of the old
+Rochester Bridge had, when this was demolished, been fitted up as a
+sundial. The lawn, in turn, communicates with flower and vegetable
+gardens by another flight of steps. Beyond is "the much-coveted meadow"
+which Dickens obtained, partly by exchange, from the trustees--not of
+Watts's Charity, as Forster has stated, but of Sir Joseph Williamson's
+Free School at Rochester. It was in this field that the villagers from
+neighbouring Higham played cricket matches, and that, just before
+Dickens went to America for the last time, he held those quaint
+footraces for all and sundry, described in one of his letters to
+Forster. Though the landlord of the Falstaff, from over the way, was
+allowed to erect a drinking booth, and all the prizes were given in
+money; though, too, the road from Chatham to Gadshill was like a fair
+all day, and the crowd consisted mainly of rough labouring men, of
+soldiers, sailors, and navvies, there was no disorder, not a flag, rope,
+or stake displaced, and no drunkenness whatever. As striking a tribute,
+if rightly considered, as ever was exacted by a strong and winning
+personality! One of those oddities in which Dickens delighted was
+elicited by a hurdle race for strangers. The man who came in second ran
+120 yards and leaped over ten hurdles with a pipe in his mouth and
+smoking it all the time. "If it hadn't been for your pipe," said the
+Master of Gadshill Place, clapping him on the shoulder at the
+winning-post, "you would have been first." "I beg your pardon, sir," he
+answered, "but if it hadn't been for my pipe, I should have been
+nowhere."
+
+To the hospitable hearth of Gadshill Place were drawn, by the fame of
+the "Inimitable Boz", a long succession of brilliant men and women,
+mostly of the Anglo-Saxon race, whether English or American; and if not
+in the throngs for which at Abbotsford open house was kept, yet with a
+frequency which would have made literary work almost impossible for the
+host without remarkable steadiness of purpose and regularity of habits.
+For Longfellow and his daughters he "turned out", that they might see
+all of the surrounding country which could be seen in a short stay, "a
+couple of postilions in the old red jackets of the old red royal Dover
+road, and it was like a holiday ride in England fifty years ago".
+
+In his study in the late and early months, and his Swiss chalet through
+the summer, Dickens would write such novels as _Great Expectations_, and
+the unfinished _Mystery of Edwin Drood_, taking his local colour from
+spots which lay within the compass of a reasonable walk; and others,
+such as _A Tale of Two Cities_ and _Our Mutual Friend_, to which the
+circumstances of time and place furnished little or nothing except their
+influence on his mood. Some of the occasional papers which, in the
+character of "The Uncommercial Traveller", he furnished to _All the
+Year Round_, have as much of the _genius loci_ as any of his romances.
+Even to-day the rushing swarm of motor cars has not yet driven from the
+more secluded nooks of Kent all such idylls of open-air vagabondage as
+this:--
+
+     "I have my eyes upon a piece of Kentish road, bordered on either
+     side by a wood, and having on one hand, between the road dust and
+     the trees, a skirting patch of grass. Wild flowers grow in
+     abundance on this spot, and it lies high and airy, with a distant
+     river stealing steadily away to the ocean, like a man's life. To
+     gain the milestone here, which the moss, primroses, violets,
+     bluebells and wild roses would soon render illegible but for
+     peering travellers pushing them aside with their sticks, you must
+     come up a steep hill, come which way you may. So, all the tramps
+     with carts or caravans--the gipsy tramp, the show tramp, the Cheap
+     Jack--find it impossible to resist the temptations of the place,
+     and all turn the horse loose when they come to it, and boil the
+     pot. Bless the place, I love the ashes of the vagabond fires that
+     have scorched its grass!"
+
+The Kentish road that Dickens thus describes is certainly the Dover Road
+at Gadshill, from which, of course, there is a steep declivity whether
+the route is westward to Gravesend or eastwards to Strood and Rochester.
+In Strood itself Dickens found little to interest him, though the view
+of Rochester from Strood Hill is an arresting one, with the stately
+mediævalism of Castle and Cathedral emerging from a kind of haze in
+which it is hard to distinguish what is smoke-wreath and what a mass of
+crowding roofs. The Medway, which divides Strood from the almost
+indistinguishably overlapping towns of Rochester, Chatham, and
+Brompton, is crossed by an iron bridge, superseding the old stone
+structure commemorated in _Pickwick_. Mr. Pickwick's notes on "the four
+towns" do not require very much modification to apply to their present
+state.
+
+     "The principal productions", he wrote, "appear to be soldiers,
+     sailors, Jews, chalk, shrimps, officers, and dockyard men. The
+     commodities chiefly exposed for sale in the public streets are
+     marine stores, hard-bake, apples, flat-fish, and oysters. The
+     streets present a lively and animated appearance, occasioned
+     chiefly by the conviviality of the military.... The consumption of
+     tobacco in these towns 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."
+
+[Illustration: ROCHESTER FROM STROOD]
+
+This description is much less true of Rochester than of its three
+neighbours, and does no justice to the aspects which Dickens himself
+presented in the Market Town of _Great Expectations_, and the
+Cloisterham of _Edwin Drood_. Amid the rather sordid encroachments of a
+modern industrialism, Rochester still keeps something of the air of an
+old-world country town, and in the precincts of its Cathedral there
+still broods a cloistral peace. The dominating feature of the town, from
+whatever side approached, is the massive ruin of the Norman Keep of
+Bishop Gundulf, the architect also of London's White Tower. Though
+the blue sky is its only roof, and on the rugged staircase the dark
+apertures in the walls, where rafters and floors were once, show like
+gaping sockets from which the ravens and daws have picked out the eyes,
+it seems to stand with all the immovable strength of some solid rock on
+which the waves of rebellion or invasion would have dashed and broken.
+It is easy to believe the saying of Lambarde, in his _Perambulation of
+Kent_, that "from time to time it had a part in almost every tragedie".
+But the grimness of its grey walls is relieved by a green mantle of
+clinging ivy, and though it can no longer be said of the Castle that it
+is "bathed, though in ruins, with a flush of flowers", the beautiful
+single pink grows wild on its ramparts.
+
+From the Castle to the "Bull" in the High Street is a transition which
+seems almost an anachronism. It is but to follow in the traces of the
+Pickwick Club. The covered gateway, the staircase almost wide enough for
+a coach and four, the ballroom on the first floor landing, with
+card-room adjoining, and the bedroom which Mr. Winkle occupied inside
+Mr. Tupman's--all are there, just as when the club entertained Alfred
+Jingle to a dinner of soles, a broiled fowl and mushrooms, and Mr.
+Tupman took him to the ball in Mr. Winkle's coat, borrowed without
+leave, and Dr. Slammer of the 97th sent his challenge next morning to
+the owner of the coat. The Guildhall, with its gilt ship for a vane, and
+its old brick front, supported by Doric stone columns, is not so
+memorable because Hogarth played hop-scotch in the colonnade during his
+_Five Days' Peregrination by Land and Water_, as for the day when
+Pumblechook bundled Pip off to be bound apprentice to Jo before the
+Justices in the Hall, "a queer place, with higher pews in it than a
+church ... and with some shining black portraits on the walls". This was
+the Town Hall, too, which Dickens has told us that he had set up in his
+childish mind "as the model on which the genie of the lamp built the
+palace for Aladdin", only to return and recognize with saddened,
+grown-up eyes--exaggerating the depreciation a little, for the sake of
+the contrast--"a mere mean little heap of bricks, like a chapel gone
+demented". Close by the Guildhall is the Town Clock, "supposed to be the
+finest clock in the world", which, alas! "turned out to be as moon-faced
+and weak a clock as a man's eyes ever saw".
+
+On the north side of the High Street, not many yards from the Bull, is a
+Tudor two-storied, stone-built house, with latticed windows and gables.
+This is the Charity founded by the will of Richard Watts in 1579, to
+give lodging and entertainment for one night, and fourpence each, to
+"six poor travellers, not being rogues or proctors". It furnished the
+theme to the Christmas cycle of stories, _The Seven Poor Travellers_,
+the narrator, who treats the waifs and strays harboured one Christmas
+eve at the Charity to roast turkey, plum pudding, and "wassail",
+bringing up the number to seven, "being", as he says, "a traveller
+myself, though an idle one, and being withal as poor as I hope to be".
+
+Farther up the High Street towards Chatham, about a quarter of a mile
+from Rochester Bridge, are two sixteenth-century houses, with fronts of
+carved oak and gables, facing each other across the street. One has
+figured in both _Great Expectations_ and _Edwin Drood_, for it is the
+house of Mr. Pumblechook, the pompous and egregious corn and seedsman,
+and of Mr. Sapsea, the auctioneer, still more pompous and egregious. The
+other--Eastgate House, now converted into a museum--is the "Nun's
+House", where Miss Twinkleton kept school, and had Rosa Bud and Helen
+Landless for pupils.
+
+From the hum and traffic of the cheerfully frequented High Street to the
+calm and hush of the Cathedral precincts entrance is given by Chertsey's
+or College Yard Gate, which abuts on the High Street about a hundred
+yards north of the Cathedral. It was this Gate which Sir Luke Fildes
+sketched, as he has recorded in an interesting letter published in _A
+Week's Tramp in Dickens-Land_, by W. R. Hughes, for the background of
+his drawing of "Durdles Cautioning Sapsea". There are, however, two
+other gatehouses, the "Prior's", a tower over an archway, containing a
+single room approached by a "postern stair", and "Deanery Gate", a
+quaint old house adjoining the Cathedral which has ten rooms, some of
+them beautifully panelled. Its drawing-room on the upper floor bears a
+strong resemblance to the room--as depicted by Sir Luke Fildes--in which
+Jasper entertained his nephew and Neville Landless, but the artist
+believes that he never saw the interior. It is not unlikely that Dickens
+took some details from each of the gatehouses to make a composite
+picture of "Mr. Jasper's own gatehouse", which seemed so to stem the
+tide of life, that while the murmur of the tide was heard beyond, not a
+wave would pass the archway.
+
+Rochester Cathedral, which overshadows, though in a less insistent and
+tragic manner, the whole human interest of _Edwin Drood_ almost as much
+as Notre Dame overshadows the human interest in Victor Hugo's romance,
+preserves some remains of the original Saxon and Norman churches on the
+site of which it was erected. Its Early English and Decorated Gothic
+came off lightly from three restorations, but the tower is
+nineteenth-century vandalism. The Norman west front enshrines in the
+riches of its sculptured portal, with its five receding arches, figures
+of the Saviour and his twelve apostles, and on two shafts are carved
+likenesses of Henry I and his Queen. Freeman has pronounced it to be far
+the finest example of Norman architecture of its kind. The Chapter House
+door, a magnificent example of Decorated Gothic, is adorned with
+effigies representing the Christian and Jewish Churches, which are
+surrounded by Holy Fathers and Angels who pray for the soul,
+emblematically represented as a small nude form above them. But it is
+about the stone-vaulted crypt, where even by daylight "the heavy pillars
+which support the roof engender masses of black shade", with "lanes of
+light" between, and about the winding staircase and belfry of the great
+tower that the spells of the Dickens magic especially cling, and Jasper
+and Durdles revisit these haunts by the glimpses of the moon as
+persistently as Quasimodo and the sinister Priest beset with their
+ghostly presences the belfry of the great Paris minster.
+
+Of the historic imagination Dickens had little or none. He could not
+evoke, and never had the faintest desire to evoke, a Past that was
+divided from the Present by an unbridgeable chasm. Thus Rochester
+Castle, though he seldom failed to bring his guests to view it,
+affected him only with a remote sense of antiquity such as he would have
+experienced, no more and no less, amongst the Pyramids. But he was
+keenly sensitive to the influences of a Past which still survived and,
+by the continuity of a corporate life, made an integral part in the
+Present. The Cathedral life, in which by virtue of their office canons
+and dean were living relics of antiquity, and as much the contemporaries
+as the successors of the ecclesiastics who lay crumbling in the crypt,
+stirred this sense in him as it had been stirred by the ancient Inns of
+London. Almost the last words that he wrote were a tribute to the beauty
+of the venerable fane in which, beneath the monument of the founder of
+that quaint Charity rendered so famous by his story of _The Seven Poor
+Travellers_, a simple brass records his birth, death, and burial-place,
+"To connect his memory with the scenes in which his earliest and his
+latest years were passed, and with the associations of Rochester
+Cathedral and its neighbourhood which extended over all his life".
+
+[Illustration: RESTORATION HOUSE, ROCHESTER]
+
+In the old cemetery of St. Nicholas' Church, on the north side of the
+Cathedral, it was Dickens's desire to be buried, and his family would
+have carried out his wishes had it not been that the burial-ground had
+been closed for years and no further interments were allowed. On the
+south side of the Cathedral is the delightfully oldfashioned terrace
+known as Minor Canon Row--Dickens's name for it is Minor Canon
+Corner--where the Reverend Septimus Crisparkle kept house with the
+"china shepherdess" mother. The "Monks' Vineyard" of _Edwin Drood_
+exists as "The Vines". Here under a group of elms called "The Seven
+Sisters" Edwin Drood and Rosa sat when they decided to break their
+engagement, and opposite "The Seven Sisters" is the "Satis House" of
+_Great Expectations_, where the lonely and embittered Miss Havisham
+taught Estella the cruel lessons of a ruined life. It is really
+Restoration House--Satis House is on the site of the mansion of Master
+Richard Watts, to whose apologies for no better entertainment of his
+Sovereign, Queen Elizabeth answered "Satis"--and it takes its name from
+having received the restored Merry Monarch under its roof on his way to
+London and the throne. Pepys, who was terrified by the steepness of the
+castle cliff and had no time to stay to service at the Cathedral, when
+he had been inspecting the defences at Chatham, found something more to
+his mind in a stroll by Restoration House, and into the Cherry Garden,
+where he met a silly shopkeeper with a pretty wife, "and did kiss her".
+
+Dickens would often follow this route of Pepys, but in the reverse
+direction, that is, through the Vines to Chatham and its lines of
+fortification, where Mr. Pickwick, Mr. Winkle, and Mr. Snodgrass became
+so hopelessly entangled in the sham fight which they had gone over from
+Rochester to see. At No. 11 Ordnance Terrace the little Charles Dickens
+lived from 1817 to 1821, and at No. 18 St. Mary's Place from 1821 to
+1823, the financial troubles, which eventually drove the family into the
+Marshalsea debtors' prison, and Charles himself into the sordid drudgery
+of the blacking-shop by Hungerford Stairs, having already enforced a
+migration to a cheaper and meaner house. In Clover Street (then Clover
+Lane) the little Dickens went to a school kept by a Mr. William Giles,
+who years afterwards sent to him, when he was halfway through with
+_Pickwick_, a silver snuff-box inscribed to the "Inimitable Boz". To the
+Mitre Inn, in the Chatham High Street, where Nelson had many times put
+up, Dickens was often brought by his father to recite or sing, standing
+on a table, for the amusement of parties of friends. He speaks of it in
+the "Holly Tree Inn" as
+
+     "The inn where friends used to put up, and where we used to go to
+     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. I loved the
+     landlord's youngest daughter to distraction--but let that pass. It
+     was in this inn that I was cried over by my little rosy sister,
+     because I had acquired a black eye in a fight."
+
+When the little Charles Dickens was taken away to London inside the
+stage-coach Commodore--his kind master on the night before having come
+flitting in among the packing-cases to give him Goldsmith's _Bee_ as a
+keepsake--he was leaving behind for ever, in the playing-field near
+Clover Lane and the grounds of Rochester Castle and the green drives of
+Cobham Park, the untroubled dreams of happy childhood. And though he
+could not know this, yet, as he sat amongst the damp straw piled up
+round him in the inside of the coach, he "consumed his sandwiches in
+solitude and dreariness" and thought life sloppier than he had expected
+to find it. And in _David Copperfield_ he has thrown back into those
+earlier golden days the shadow of his London privations by bringing the
+little Copperfield, footsore and tired, toiling towards dusk into
+Chatham, "which, in that night's aspect is a mere dream of chalk and
+drawbridges and mastless ships in a muddy river, roofed like Noah's
+arks". No doubt the terrible old Jew in the marine-stores shop, who
+rated and frightened David with his "Oh, my eyes and limbs, what do you
+want? Oh, my lungs and liver, what do you want? Oh--goroo,
+goroo!"--until the helpless little fellow was obliged to close with an
+offer of a few pence instead of half a crown for his waistcoat, is the
+portrait of some actual Jew dealer whom, in one of the back streets of
+Chatham, the keen eyes of the precocious child, seeming to look at
+nothing, had curiously watched hovering like a hideous spider on the
+pounce behind his grime-encrusted window.
+
+It was old associations that led Dickens so often in his walks from
+Gadshill Place to Chatham. But the neighbourhood which gave him most
+pleasure, combining as it did with similar associations an exquisite
+beauty, was, Forster tells us, the sylvan scenery of Cobham Park. The
+green woods and green shades of Cobham would recur to his memory even in
+far-off Lausanne, and the last walk that he ever enjoyed--on the day
+before his fatal seizure--was through these woods, the charm of which
+cannot be better defined than in his own description in _Pickwick_:
+
+     "A delightful walk it was; for it was a pleasant afternoon in June,
+     and their way lay through a deep and shady wood, cooled by the
+     light wind which gently rustled the thick foliage, and enlivened by
+     the songs of the birds that perched upon the boughs. The ivy and
+     the moss crept in thick clusters over the old trees, and the soft
+     green turf overspread the ground like a silken mat. They emerged
+     upon an open park, with an ancient hall, displaying the quaint and
+     picturesque architecture of Elizabeth's time. Long vistas of
+     stately oaks and elm trees appeared on every side; large herds of
+     deer were cropping the fresh grass; and occasionally a startled
+     hare scoured along the ground with the speed of the shadows thrown
+     by the light clouds, which swept across a sunny landscape like a
+     passing breath of summer."
+
+The mission on which Mr. Pickwick and his two disciples were engaged
+was, it will be remembered, to convert Mr. Tupman from his resolution
+to forsake the world in a fit of misanthropy, induced by the
+faithlessness of Rachel Wardle.
+
+     "'If this,' said Mr. Pickwick, looking about him--'If this were the
+     place to which all who are troubled with our friend's complaint
+     came, I fancy their old attachment to this world would very soon
+     return.'"
+
+Mr. Pickwick was right, for when they arrived at the village, and
+entered that "clean and commodious village alehouse", the "Leather
+Bottle", they found Mr. Tupman set down at a table "well covered with a
+roast fowl, bacon, ale, and et ceteras", and "looking as unlike a man
+who had taken leave of the world as possible".
+
+The "ancient hall" of Cobham consists of two Tudor wings, with a central
+block designed by Inigo Jones. It has a splendid collection of Old
+Masters, and a music room which the Prince Regent pronounced to be the
+finest room in England. In the terrace flower garden at the back of the
+Hall, it may be mentioned again here, is the Swiss chalet from Gadshill
+Place, which served Dickens for a study in the summer months. The
+circuit of Cobham Park is about seven miles, and it is crossed by the
+"Long Avenue", leading to Rochester, and the "Grand Avenue", which,
+sloping down from the tenantless Mausoleum, opens into Cobham village.
+The inn to which Mr. Tupman retired, in disgust with life, still
+retains the title of the "Leather Bottle", but has mounted for its sign
+a coloured portrait of Mr. Pickwick addressing the Club in
+characteristic attitude. It was in Cobham village that Mr. Pickwick made
+his notable discovery of the stone with the mysterious inscription--an
+inscription which the envious Blotton maintained was nothing more than
+BIL STUMPS HIS MARK. Local tradition suggests that Dickens intended the
+episode for a skit upon archaeological theories about the dolmens known
+as Kit's Coty House, and that a Strood antiquary keenly resented the
+satire. However that may be, Kit's Coty House is not at Cobham, but some
+miles away, near Aylesford. In Cobham church there is perhaps the finest
+and most complete series of monumental brasses in this country, most of
+them commemorating the Lords of Cobham.
+
+[Illustration: COBHAM PARK]
+
+Out of the Cobham woods it is not a long walk to the little village of
+Shorne, where Dickens was fond of sitting on a hot summer afternoon in
+its pretty, shaded churchyard. This is believed to be the spot which he
+has described in _Pickwick_ as "one of the most peaceful and secluded
+churchyards in Kent, where wild flowers mingle with the grass, and the
+soft landscape around forms the fairest spot in the garden of England".
+A picturesque lane leads into the road from Rochester to Gravesend, on
+the outskirts of the village of Chalk. Here, in a corner house on the
+south side of the road, Dickens spent his honeymoon, and many of the
+earlier chapters of _Pickwick_ were written. In February of the
+following year--1837--Dickens and his wife returned to the same
+lodgings, shortly after the birth of his eldest son. Chalk church is
+about a mile from the village. There was formerly above the porch the
+figure of an old priest in a stooping attitude, holding an upturned jug.
+Dickens took a strange interest in this quaint carving, and it is said
+that, whenever he passed it, he took off his hat or gave it a nod, as to
+an old acquaintance.
+
+Very different to the soft and genial landscapes about Cobham is the
+grey and desolate aspect of another haunt which Dickens loved to
+frequent. This was the "meshes" around Cooling. In winter, when it was
+possible to make a short cut across the stubble fields, he would visit
+Cooling churchyard not less seldom than in summer he would go to sit in
+the churchyard of Shorne. First, however, he would have to pass through
+the village of Higham, where, too, was his nearest railway station,
+though he often preferred to walk over and entrain at Gravesend or
+Greenhithe. But the pleasant tinkle of harness bells was a familiar
+sound in the night to the Higham villagers, as the carriage was sent
+down from Gadshill Place to meet the master or his friends returning
+from London by the ten o'clock train. Dickens took a kindly and active
+interest in the affairs of the village, and the last cheque which he
+ever drew was for his subscription to the Higham Cricket Club.
+
+The flat levels that stretch away from beyond Higham towards the estuary
+of the Thames are more akin to the characteristics of Essex than of
+Kent. The hop gardens are dwarfed and stunted, and presently hops, corn,
+and pasture give place to fields of turnips, which show up like masses
+of jade on the chocolate-coloured soil. The bleak churchyard of Cooling,
+overgrown with nettles, lies amongst these desolate reaches, which
+resound at evening with the shrill, unearthly notes of sea-gulls,
+plovers, and herons. Beyond the churchyard are the marshes, "a dark,
+flat wilderness", as Dickens has described it in _Great Expectations_,
+"intersected with dykes and mounds and gates, with scattered cattle
+feeding on it"; still farther away is the "low, leaden line" of the
+river, and the "distant, savage lair", from which the wind comes
+rushing, is the sea. It was in this churchyard that the conception of
+the story sprang into life, and there are actually not five but ten
+little stone lozenges in one row, with three more at the back of them,
+which suggested to Dickens the five little prematurely cut off brothers
+of Pip. The grey ruins of Cooling Castle attracted him no less than the
+grey and weather-beaten churchyard. Besides some crumbling and broken
+walls there is a gate tower, with an inscription on fourteen copper
+plates, the writing in black, the ground of white enamel, with a seal
+and silk cords in their proper colours, which made known to all and
+sundry the purpose for which Lord Cobham--whose granddaughter married,
+for one of her five husbands, Sir John Oldcastle, the Lollard
+martyr--had erected this castle.
+
+   "Knoweth that beth and schul be
+    That i am mad in help of the cuntre
+    In knowyng of whych thyng
+    This is chartre and witnessyng."
+
+No forge stands now on the site of Joe Gargery's smithy, where, as the
+hammer rang on the anvil to the refrain--
+
+   "Beat it out, beat it out--Old Clem!
+    With a clink for the stout--Old Clem!
+    Blow the fire, blow the fire--Old Clem!
+    Roaring drier, soaring higher--Old Clem!"--
+
+Pip would see visions of Estella's face in the glowing fire or at the
+wooden window of the forge, looking in from the darkness of the night,
+and flitting away. But though the smithy has gone, the "Three Jolly
+Bargemen", where Joe would smoke his pipe by the kitchen fire on a
+Saturday night, still survives as the "Three Horseshoes"--the inn to
+which the secret-looking man who stirred his rum and water with a file,
+brought Magwitch's two one-pound notes for Pip, and the redoubtable
+Jaggers, the autocrat of the Old Bailey, with his burly form, great
+head, and huge, cross-examining forefinger announced to Pip his Great
+Expectations. Down the river in the direction of yonder "distant savage
+lair", from which the wind comes rushing, lie those long reaches,
+between Kent and Essex, "where the river is broad and solitary, where
+the waterside inhabitants are very few, and where lone public-houses are
+scattered here and there"--the lonely riverside on which Pip and Herbert
+sought a hiding-place for Magwitch until the steamer for Hamburg or the
+steamer for Rotterdam could be boarded, as she dropped down the tide
+from the Port of London. Whether on the Kent or the Essex side, the cast
+of the scenery corresponds with equal closeness to Dickens's
+description. Slimy stakes stick out of the mud, and slimy stones stick
+out of the mud, and red landmarks and tide-marks stick out of the mud,
+and old roofless buildings slip into the mud, and all about is
+stagnation and mud! The desolate flat marshes look still more weird by
+reason of the tall pollards that lean over them like spectres. Far away
+are the rising grounds, between which and the marshes there appears no
+sign of life except here and there in the foreground a melancholy gull.
+The course which the boat bearing the hunted man took from Mill Pond
+stairs through the crowded shipping of the Pool, past the floating
+Custom House at Gravesend, and onwards, skirting the little creeks and
+mudbanks where the Thames widens to the sea--when every sound of the
+tide flapping heavily at irregular intervals against the shore, and
+every ripple, were fraught with the terror of pursuit--exemplifies in
+the most striking way the rapidity and instinctive ease of Dickens's
+observation. Forster says:--
+
+     "To make himself sure of the actual course of a boat in such
+     circumstances, and what possible incidents the adventure might
+     have, Dickens hired a steamer for the day from Blackwall to
+     Southend. Eight or nine friends, and three or four members of his
+     family, were on board, and he seemed to have no care, the whole of
+     that summer day (22nd of May, 1861), except to enjoy their
+     enjoyment and entertain them with his own in shape of a thousand
+     whims and fancies; but his sleepless observation was at work all
+     the time, and nothing had escaped his keen vision on either side of
+     the river."
+
+Scattered amongst the deserted reaches along the riverside may be seen
+such lonely farmhouses or taverns as suggest the aspect of the alehouse,
+"not unknown to smuggling adventurers"--for the "owling", that is, the
+smuggling industry had flourished for centuries in these parts--to which
+the fugitives were led by a twinkling light in the window up a little
+cobbled causeway, and where Dickens placed that amphibious creature, "as
+slimy and smeary as if he had been low-water mark too", who exhibited a
+bloated pair of shoes "as interesting relics that he had taken from the
+feet of a drowned seaman washed ashore". This type of the gruesome
+long-shoremen whom Dickens had encountered in his waterside rambles, as
+he collected the materials for _Great Expectations_, was afterwards
+elaborated in the Rogue Riderhood of _Our Mutual Friend_.
+
+"Swamp, mist, and mudbank"--if that is the dominant impression made by
+the view of the Thames off the Cooling marshes, it is not the only and
+the invariable impression. Even the bleak churchyard, at the foot of the
+cold, grey tower, is sometimes strewn by the light and flying gust "with
+beautiful shadows of clouds and trees". And from the Old Battery, where
+Joe would smoke his pipe with a far more sagacious air than anywhere
+else, as Pip strove to initiate him into the mysteries of reading and
+writing by the aid of a broken slate and a short piece of slate pencil,
+it is "pleasant and quiet" to watch the vessels standing out to sea with
+their white sails spread, and the light struck aslant, afar off, upon a
+cloud or sail or green hillside or silvery water line.
+
+[Illustration: COOLING CHURCH]
+
+To the west of Cooling Castle, beyond wide fields--turnips or
+cabbages--of the colour of dark-green jade, the Church of Cliffe, with
+its lichgate, standing out boldly from its ridge of chalk, overlooks a
+straggling village of old and weather-boarded houses. It would be
+into the road from Cliffe to Rochester, at a point about half a mile
+from Cooling, that Uncle Pumblechook's chaise-cart would debouch when he
+took Mrs. Joe to Rochester market "to assist him in buying such
+household stuffs and goods as required a woman's judgment".
+
+Between the scenery about Cooling and Cliffe and the scenery of the
+valley of the Medway from Rochester to Maidstone there is all the
+difference between a November fog and a brilliant summer's day. At the
+foot of Rochester Castle, from which the long vista of the valley, lying
+between two chalk ranges of hills that form the watershed of the Medway,
+stretches far away to a distant horizon, the Esplanade extends along the
+east side of the river, and there it was that Edwin Drood and Rosa met
+for the last time and to speak of their separate plans. For a few miles
+along the valley the natural beauty of the scene is spoilt by the cement
+works of Borstal, Cuxton, and Wouldham, and the brickworks of Burham.
+The piles of clay and chalk, the beehive furnaces, and the chimneys
+vomiting smoke and flame, almost reproduce the characteristics of the
+Black Country or of a northern manufacturing district. But, when Burham
+has been left behind, the bright emerald pastures, the tender green of
+springing corn or the gold of waving harvests, and the orchards, a
+dazzling sight in May with the snowy clouds of pear and plum and cherry
+blooms, and the delicate pink-and-white of the apple blossom, more than
+justify the appellation claimed for Kent of the garden of England.
+Opposite to Cuxton, on the western bank, the village of Snodland stands
+at the junction of Snodland Brook with the Medway. It has been
+conjectured that Snodland Weir, a mile or so up the brook, was in
+Dickens's mind when he described Mr. Crisparkle's pilgrimages to
+Cloisterham Weir in the cold rimy mornings, and his discovery, first of
+Edwin Drood's watch in a corner of the weir, and then, after diving
+again and again, of his shirt-pin "sticking in some mud and ooze" at the
+bottom. The nearest weir on the Medway is at Allington, seven or eight
+miles above Rochester, and Cloisterham Weir was but "full two miles"
+away.
+
+Before Allington can be reached, in ascending the Medway, the river is
+spanned by an ancient stone bridge, of pointed arches and triangular
+buttresses, at Aylesford. The ancient Norman church, and the red roofs
+and crowding gables of the picturesque and historic village, are set in
+a circle of elm trees, with a background of rising chalk downs beyond.
+Those who have investigated with perhaps "an excess"--as Wordsworth
+would say--"of scrupulosity" all the details of Pickwickian topography
+are inclined to believe that the wooden bridge, upon which the chaise
+hired by the Club to make the journey from Rochester to Dingley Dell
+came hopelessly to grief, was Aylesford Bridge, transmuted for the nonce
+from Kentish ragstone into timber. However that may be, there is a
+matter of genuine history which has signalized in no common way this
+old-world village. At this ford, the lowest on the Medway, the Jutes
+under Hengist and Horsa routed the British in a battle which decided the
+predominating strain of race in future Men of Kent and Kentish Men:
+natives of Kent, that is, according as they dwell on the right or left
+bank of the Medway. A farmhouse with the name of Horsted, at the point
+farther back where the Rochester to Maidstone road is joined by the road
+from Chatham, stands, it is believed, on the grave of Horsa. And about a
+mile and a half north of Aylesford, a grey old cairn, set on a green
+sward in the midst of a cornfield, is also closely associated with the
+first great victory won by English people on the soil which they were
+destined to make their own and distinguish with their name. In his
+_Short History of the English People_ J. R. Green says of this
+cromlech:--
+
+     "It was from a steep knoll on which the grey weather-beaten stones
+     of this monument are reared that the view of their first
+     battlefield would break on the English warriors; and a lane which
+     still leads down from it through peaceful homesteads, would guide
+     them across the ford which has left its name in the little village
+     of Aylesford. The Chronicle of the conquering people tells nothing
+     of the rush that may have carried the ford, or of the fight that
+     went straggling up through the village. It only tells that Horsa
+     fell in the moment of victory, and the flint heap of Horsted, which
+     has long preserved his name, and was held in after-time to mark his
+     grave, is thus the earliest of those monuments of English valour of
+     which Westminster is the last and noblest shrine. The victory of
+     Aylesford did more than give East Kent to the English; it struck
+     the keynote of the whole English conquest of Britain."
+
+This cromlech, known as Kit's Coty House, consists of three upright
+dolmens of sandstone, with a fourth, much larger, crossing them above
+horizontally. In a neighbouring field there is another group of stones,
+scattered in disarray amongst the brushwood, to which, as also to
+Stonehenge and other so-called "Druidical" remains, there attaches the
+local superstition that they cannot be counted. It would be pleasanter
+to believe that the current story, to which reference has already been
+made, that Dickens was poking fun at the antiquarian's reverence for
+this hoary relic in his narrative of Mr. Pickwick's "BIL STUMPS"
+inscription, is altogether erroneous. Certainly it is open to anyone who
+wishes to be incredulous, for there is as much dissimilarity as possible
+between the massive cromlech near Aylesford and the small slab that Mr.
+Pickwick discovered at Cobham.
+
+The most salient feature in the Medway valley between Rochester and
+Maidstone is the height of Blue Bell, or Upper Bell. Here Dickens, who,
+as he said, had come to realize that the Rochester to Maidstone road
+passed through some of the most beautiful scenery in England, would
+often picnic with his visitors. Undulating slopes of pasture and
+cornfields, hop gardens, orchards, and woodlands, with many a deep-sunk
+lane embowered in overarching trees that rise from hedgerow clusters of
+dog-rose, ivy, and honeysuckle, and with snugly nestling homesteads and
+quaintly-cowled "oast-houses" sprinkled here and there, sweep across the
+valley, through which the river winds in sinuous curves, onwards to a
+long range of hills upon the skyline.
+
+Somewhere in this district Dickens came across the types of the
+oldfashioned and jovially comfortable home of the English yeoman,
+represented by his Manor Farm, Dingley Dell, and of the little country
+town, represented by the Muggleton of _Pickwick_, in which local
+enthusiasm for cricket was ardent, if the standard of skill was somewhat
+low. The most plausible identification of the home of Mr. Wardle is with
+Cobtree Hall, which divides the parishes of Boxley and Allington, and it
+is probable that the original of Muggleton was Town Malling, which is
+also known as West Malling.
+
+In the Jubilee Edition of _Pickwick_ Mr. Charles Dickens the Younger
+introduced a woodcut of High Street, Town Malling, with a note to the
+following effect:--
+
+     "Muggleton, perhaps, is only to be taken as a fancy sketch of a
+     small country town; but it is generally supposed, and probably with
+     sufficient accuracy, that, if it is in any degree a portrait of any
+     Kentish town, Town Malling, a great place for cricket in Mr.
+     Pickwick's time, sat for it."
+
+Town Malling does not correspond with the description of Muggleton in
+its distance from Rochester. It is only seven and a half, instead of
+fifteen miles, from Rochester. And it is not a corporate town. But:
+
+     "Everybody whose genius has a topographical bent knows perfectly
+     well that Muggleton is a corporate town, with a mayor, burgess and
+     freemen, and anybody who has consulted the addresses of the mayor
+     to the freemen, or the freemen to the mayor, or both to the
+     corporation, or all three to Parliament, will learn from thence
+     what they ought to have known before, that Muggleton is an ancient
+     and loyal borough, mingling a zealous advocacy of Christian
+     principles with a devoted attachment to commercial rights; in
+     demonstration whereof, the mayor, corporation, and other
+     inhabitants have presented, at divers times, no fewer than one
+     thousand four hundred and twenty petitions against the continuance
+     of negro slavery abroad, and an equal number against any
+     interference with the factory system at home; sixty-eight in favour
+     of the sale of livings in the Church, and eighty-six for abolishing
+     Sunday trading in the street."
+
+[Illustration: AYLESFORD]
+
+If Town Malling has not had so distinguished a political history as that
+which Dickens assigned to Muggleton, it has a pretty cricket ground,
+not far removed from the High Street, and the reputation of having in
+past years distinguished itself in the local cricket of this district of
+Kent. It is not difficult to believe, then, that Dumkins and Podder here
+made their gallant stand for All Muggleton against the Dingley Dellers,
+and that at the Swan--otherwise the Blue Lion--the Pickwick fellowship
+shared the conviviality of the rival teams, until Mr. Snodgrass's notes
+of the evening's transactions faded away into a blur in which there was
+an indistinct reference to "broiled bones" and "cold without". The
+stately ruins of a Benedictine Abbey, founded by Bishop Gundulf, give to
+the town an attraction of a severer kind.
+
+From Town Malling to Cobtree Hall, supposing the double identification
+to be correct, should be a walk of not above two miles "through shady
+lanes and sequestered footpaths", the delightful scenery of which made
+Mr. Pickwick feel regret to arrive in the main street of "Muggleton".
+The distance, however, is in fact something more than two miles as the
+crow flies. Cobtree Hall is a green-muffled Elizabethan mansion, of red
+brick, faced with stone, and looks out over an undulating country of
+orchards and hop fields. It has been altered and enlarged since the days
+of _Pickwick_, but the kitchen is just such another large, oldfashioned
+kitchen as befits the Christmas games and wassail that had been kept up
+at Manor Farm, Dingley Dell, "by old Wardle's forefathers from time
+immemorial". The dining-room, though modernized, has a massive marble
+mantlepiece not unsuited to that "capacious chimney up which you could
+have driven one of the new patent cabs, wheels and all", and in which a
+blazing fire used to roar every evening, not only when its warmth was
+grateful, but for a symbol, as it were, of old Wardle's attachment to
+his fireside. This was the kind of antiquity which made the most direct
+appeal to Dickens's sentiment and imagination--not a remote and historic
+antiquity, but the furthest extent of a living link between the Present
+and the Past. In many an old house of Kentish yeoman or squire Dickens
+would have seen some such long, dark-panelled room as the best
+sitting-room at Manor Farm, with four-branched, massive silver
+candlesticks in all sorts of recesses and on all kinds of brackets; with
+samplers and worsted landscapes of ancient date on the walls; with a
+very old lady in lofty cap and faded silk gown in the chimney corner,
+where she had sat on her little stool as a girl more than half a century
+before, and with a hearty, rubicund host presiding over a mighty bowl of
+wassail, something smaller than an ordinary washhouse copper, in which
+the hot apples would "hiss and bubble with a rich look and a jolly sound
+that were perfectly irresistible". Or when the carpet was up, the
+candles burning brightly, and family, guests, and servants were all
+ranged in eager lines, longing for the signal to start an oldfashioned
+country dance as, from a shady bower of holly and evergreens at the
+upper end of the room, the two best fiddles and only harp of the nearest
+market town prepared to strike up, it is no wonder that such a lover of
+unspoilt, natural manners as Boz declared, "If any of the old English
+yeomen had turned into fairies when they died, it was just the place in
+which they would have held their revels."
+
+A triangular piece of ground, with a sprinkling of elms about it, is all
+that is left of the rookery in which Mr. Tupman met with an accident
+from the unskilful marksmanship of Winkle. At the back of the house is
+the pond where Mr. Winkle's reputation as a sportsman led him into
+another catastrophe, and his skating exposed itself as of anything but a
+graceful and "swan-like" style; where, too, Mr. Pickwick revived the
+sliding propensities of his boyhood with infinite zest until the ice
+gave way with a "sharp, smart crack", and Mr. Pickwick's hat, gloves,
+and handkerchief, floating on the surface, were all of Mr. Pickwick that
+anyone could see.
+
+Cobtree Hall, it has been mentioned, divides the parishes of Boxley and
+Allington, the initials of which are carved on a beam in the kitchen
+that suggests Phiz's plate of "Christmas Eve at Mr. Wardle's". In
+Aylesford the tomb of the prototype, according to local tradition, of
+"Mr. Wardle" bears the inscription, "Also to the memory of Mr. W. Spong,
+late of Cobtree, in the Parish of Boxley, who died November 15th, 1839".
+Boxley village is near the ancient Pilgrims' Road to Canterbury, and
+here Alfred Tennyson stayed in 1842. Park House, nearer the Medway, was
+the home of Edward Lushington, who married Tennyson's sister Cecilia,
+and in its grounds Tennyson found the setting for the prologue to the
+"Princess". The "happy faces" of "the multitude, a thousand heads", by
+which the "sloping pasture" was "sown", under "broad ambrosial aisles of
+lofty lime", had probably come from Maidstone on the annual jaunt of
+that town's Mechanics' Institute. The village of Allington stands on the
+other side of the Medway, though the boundaries of the parish extend
+beyond the right bank of the river. Allington Castle, which the Medway
+half-encircles with a sweeping bend, was one of the seven chief castles
+of Kent. It was here that Sir Thomas Wyatt, the elder, diplomatist,
+poet, and lover of Anne Boleyn, who with the gallant and ill-fated
+Surrey "preluded", in a more exact sense than it could be said of
+Chaucer, "those melodious bursts that fill the spacious times of great
+Elizabeth", was able to proclaim, in an epistle to "Mine own John
+Poins":
+
+[Illustration: MAIDSTONE, ALL SAINTS' CHURCH AND THE PALACE]
+
+   "I am here in Kent and Christendome,
+    Among the Muses where I read and rhyme".
+
+Hither there comes, in Tennyson's "Queen Mary", to Sir Thomas Wyatt, the
+younger, his man William, with news of "three thousand men on Penenden
+heath all calling after you, and your worship's name heard into
+Maidstone market, and your worship the first man in Kent". And Wyatt
+sets out to lead a rising which will end on Tower Hill, and setting out,
+looks back and cries:
+
+   "Ah, grey old castle of Allington, green field
+    Beside the brimming Medway, it may chance
+    That I shall never look upon you more".
+
+"The brimming Medway."--the epithet is as just as Tennyson's descriptive
+epithet almost invariably proves to be. For at Allington the Medway,
+which from Aylesford Bridge to Allington Lock has dwindled to a narrow
+stream, swells out into a broad expanse, where many boats can easily
+move abreast. If the Cloisterham Weir of _Edwin Drood_ were really the
+nearest weir on the Medway to Rochester, then Allington Lock would be
+the place. But it has been pointed out on an earlier page that the
+distances do not tally in the novel and in actuality, and Dickens may
+have had in mind the weir on Snodland Brook.
+
+The country round Maidstone abounds in the "happy valleys" portrayed in
+the epilogue to the "Princess", with "grey halls alone among their
+massive groves", and "here and there a rustic tower Half lost in belts
+of hop and breadths of wheat". The gyres and loops of the Medway, too,
+afford through the screen of woodlands and orchards "the shimmering
+glimpses of a stream". To the credulous enthusiasm of an early
+eighteenth-century native of Strood, that Anne Pratt who did for English
+wild flowers what White of Selborne did for English wild birds,
+"travellers who have beheld in other lands the various scenes of
+culture--the olive grounds of Spain or Syria, the vineyards of Italy,
+the cotton plantations of India, or the rose fields of the East--have
+generally agreed that not one of them all equals in beauty our English
+hop gardens". To Dickens himself such a panegyric of the Kentish hop
+gardens would have scarcely seemed exaggeration, but he would have
+hastened to add the dismal antithesis of the missionary bishop--"Only
+man is vile". He had barely settled-in at Gadshill Place when he
+wrote:--
+
+     "Hop-picking is going on, and people sleep in the garden, and
+     breathe in at the keyhole of the house door. I have been amazed,
+     before this year, by the number of miserable base wretches, hardly
+     able to crawl, who go hop-picking. I find it is a superstition that
+     the dust of the newly picked hop, falling freshly into the throat,
+     is a cure for consumption. So the poor creatures drag themselves
+     along the roads, and sleep under wet hedges, and get cured soon and
+     finally."
+
+The county town of Kent is situated not only on the Medway, but on the
+pilgrim road to Canterbury, and of a monastic hospital for pilgrims and
+other poor travellers there still survive some relics. Overlooking the
+river stand some fine old houses, and the conspicuous grey square tower
+of All Saints, built by the proud Archbishop Courtenay, the enemy of
+Wicliffe, in the fourteenth century. Here is the tomb of Grocyn, that
+"lord of splendid lore Orient from old Hellas' shore", who was appointed
+master of the collegiate church in 1506. One of the sixteen palaces that
+the Archbishops of Canterbury could boast in days gone by is preserved
+as the local school of science and art, a dedication to public use which
+commemorates the Jubilee of Queen Victoria in 1887. The Corporation
+Museum is an even more interesting and beautiful structure. It was
+Chillington Manor House, a seat of the Cobham family, and, though it has
+had a new wing annexed to it, it is an exceptionally well preserved and
+beautiful example of Elizabethan domestic architecture, with its
+latticed windows, jutting gables, elaborately moulded timber, and
+pillared chimneys. In the panel of an oak fireplace is a carved head of
+Dickens, by a local carver named Hughes, who was employed at Gadshill
+Place. To Maidstone Jail Dickens proposed to carry Sir Luke Fildes, in
+order that he might make a picture of Jasper in the condemned cell, and
+do something which would surpass Cruikshank's illustration to _Oliver
+Twist_, in which Fagin's terror-stricken vigil in the murderer's cell is
+portrayed.
+
+At Maidstone the southern limit may be considered to have been reached
+of the district of Kent which can be distinguished as "Dickens-land" in
+the most intimate sense, as lying within the radius of the novelist's
+habitual walks and drives from his residence at Gadshill. It does not
+enter into the scope of this brief essay to describe topographically
+other parts of Kent. But it will be excusable to glance very slightly at
+Dickens's associations with Canterbury--though this is the subject of a
+separate monograph in this series--Broadstairs, Deal, Dover, and the
+famous London-to-Dover road through Rochester, Chatham, and Canterbury.
+
+[Illustration: JASPER'S GATEWAY]
+
+No one, perhaps, who has ever read _Little Dorrit_, whatever else in the
+novel may slip the memory, fails to recall the oracular utterance of
+Mr. F.'s aunt that "There's milestones on the Dover road". To the
+opening of _A Tale of Two Cities_ the colour and atmosphere of the time
+in which it is set, and of the drama which is to be developed, are given
+at once by the alarm of the passengers of the Dover coach as they walk
+up Shooter's Hill to ease the horses, when the furious galloping of a
+horseman is heard behind them--the supposed highwayman proving to be,
+however, Jerry Cruncher, messenger at Tellson's Bank by day, and at
+night an "agricooltural character" of ghoulish avocations. David
+Copperfield trudged the Dover road, footsore and hungry, when he left
+Murdstone and Grinby's blacking warehouse to throw himself on the
+compassion of Betsy Trotwood, "and got through twenty-three miles on the
+straight road" to Rochester and Chatham on a certain Sunday. Afterwards,
+when he had found a home and a protecting providence with his aunt, he
+met with his "first fall in life" on the Canterbury coach, being asked
+by the coachman to resign the box seat to a seedy gentleman, who
+proclaimed that "'Orses and dogs is some men's fancy. They're wittles
+and drink to me."
+
+     "I have always considered this as the first fall I had in life.
+     When I booked my place at the coach office, I had had 'Box Seat'
+     written against the entry, and had given the bookkeeper half a
+     crown. I was got up in a special greatcoat and shawl, expressly to
+     do honour to that distinguished eminence; had glorified myself upon
+     it a good deal; and had felt that I was a credit to the coach. And
+     here, in the very first stage, I was supplanted by a shabby man
+     with a squint, who had no other merit than smelling like a livery
+     stables, and being able to walk across me, more like a fly than a
+     human being, while the horses were at a canter."
+
+Pip, in _Great Expectations_, makes many expeditions to and fro on the
+Dover road, between Rochester and London, and on one of them, riding
+outside, has the two convicts, bound for the hulks moored off the
+marshes, as fellow passengers on the back seat.
+
+At Canterbury it is not possible to establish the identity of Dr.
+Strong's house--"a grave building in a courtyard, with a learned air
+about it that seemed very well suited to the stray rooks and jackdaws
+who came down from the Cathedral towers, and walked with a clerkly
+bearing on the grass plot"--but Canon Benham has asserted his conviction
+that Mr. Wickfield's house--where David made the acquaintance of Agnes
+and of Uriah Heap--is at the corner of Broad Street and Lady Wotton's
+Green, though it is another residence, by the West Gate, which is
+represented on the picture postcards.
+
+The Royal Fountain Hotel in St. Margaret's Street (formerly the Watling
+Street) is recognized as the County Inn at which Mr. Dick used to sleep
+when he went over to Canterbury to visit David Copperfield at Dr.
+Strong's school. All the little bills which he contracted there, it will
+be remembered, were referred to Miss Trotwood before they were paid; a
+circumstance which caused David to think "that Mr. Dick was only
+allowed to rattle his money, and not to spend it". A less pretentious
+establishment, the "little inn" where Mr. Micawber put up on his first
+visit to Canterbury, and "occupied a little room in it partitioned off
+from the commercial, and strongly flavoured with tobacco smoke", is
+probably the Sun Inn in Sun Street. Here Mr. and Mrs. Micawber
+entertained David to "a beautiful little dinner"--
+
+     "Quite an elegant dish of fish; the kidney end of a loin of veal
+     roasted; fried sausage meat; a partridge and a pudding. There was
+     wine, and there was strong ale; and after dinner Mrs. Micawber made
+     us a bowl of hot punch with her own hands."
+
+Local tradition at Broadstairs used to point to Fort House, on the cliff
+by the Coastguard Station, as the holiday residence at which Dickens
+wrote most of _Bleak House_. But though it has been rechristened from
+the title of the novel, by an owner who demolished Dickens's summer
+home, and built the existing pseudo-Gothic structure on its foundations,
+no part of _Bleak House_ was written at Broadstairs. Dickens, however,
+for many summers, visited the little town on the curving bay between
+Margate and Ramsgate; the Albion Hotel, where he notes that "the
+landlord has delicious hollands", No. 12 (now 31) High Street, and Lawn
+House, near Fort House, receiving him at different times. At Broadstairs
+he wrote a portion of _Pickwick_, of _Nicholas Nickleby_, and _The Old
+Curiosity Shop_, and he also stayed there while engaged on the _American
+Notes_, _Dombey and Son_, and _David Copperfield_. He forsook it at
+last, because it had become too noisy, but he has left an agreeable
+picture of it in _Our Watering Place_; but a passage in a letter to
+Forster invests it with still gayer colours:
+
+     "It is the brightest day you ever saw. The sun is sparkling on the
+     water so that I can hardly bear to look at it. The tide is in, and
+     the fishing boats are dancing like mad. Upon the green-topped
+     cliffs the corn is cut and piled in shocks; and thousands of
+     butterflies are fluttering about, taking the bright little red
+     flags at the mastheads for flowers, and panting with delight
+     accordingly."
+
+To the characters and the _mise en scène_ of his novels, however,
+Broadstairs appears to have contributed nothing, except that the lady
+whose aversion to donkeys furnished so strong an idiosyncrasy to Miss
+Betsy Trotwood's character was a native, not of Dover, as in the novel,
+but of Broadstairs.
+
+Dover, besides giving a local habitation to David's aunt, is associated
+with _The Tale of Two Cities_, since it was here that Mr. Lorry made the
+startling revelation to Miss Manette that her father had been "Recalled
+to Life". The vignette of eighteenth-century Dover is executed with true
+Dickensian verve:
+
+[Illustration: CHALK CHURCH]
+
+     "The little narrow, crooked town of Dover hid itself away from the
+     beach, and ran its head into the chalk cliffs like a marine
+     ostrich. The beach was a desert of heaps of sea and stones tumbling
+     wildly about, and the sea did what it liked, and what it liked was
+     destruction. It thundered at the town, and thundered at the cliffs,
+     and brought the coast down, madly. The air among the houses was of
+     so strong a piscatory flavour that one might have supposed sick
+     fish went up to be dipped in it, as sick people went down to be
+     dipped in the sea. A little fishing was done in the port, and a
+     quantity of strolling about by night, and looking seaward:
+     particularly at those times when the tide made, and was near flood.
+     Small tradesmen, who did no business whatever, sometimes
+     unaccountably realized large fortunes, and it was remarkable that
+     nobody in the neighbourhood could endure a lamplighter."
+
+It was to Dover that Dickens went when he was labouring with unusual
+difficulty over _Bleak House_, and lamenting his inability to "grind
+sparks out of this dull anvil". At Dover, on his Second Series of
+Readings, he found "the audience with the greatest sense of humour", and
+"they laughed with such really cordial enjoyment, when Squeers read the
+boy's letters, that the contagion" was irresistible even to Dickens
+himself.
+
+Deal, as it was in 1853, is rapidly but vigorously sketched in chapter
+xlv of _Bleak House_. Esther Summerson arrives from a night journey by
+coach, eager and anxious to help, if possible, Richard Carstone, the
+unhappy victim of the fatal chancery lawsuit:
+
+     "At last we came into the narrow streets of Deal; and very gloomy
+     they were, upon a raw misty morning. The long flat beach, with its
+     little irregular houses, wooden and brick, and its litter of
+     capstans, and great boats, and sheds, and bare upright poles with
+     tackle and blocks, and loose gravelly waste places overgrown with
+     grass and weeds, wore as dull an appearance as any place I ever
+     saw. The sea was heaving under a thick white fog; and nothing else
+     was moving but a few early rope-makers, who, with the yarn twisted
+     round their bodies, looked as if, tired of their present state of
+     existence, they were twisting themselves into cordage. But when we
+     got into a warm room in an excellent hotel, and sat down,
+     comfortably washed and dressed, to an early breakfast (for it was
+     too late to think of going to bed), Deal began to look more
+     cheerful.... Then the fog began to rise like a curtain; and numbers
+     of ships, that we had had no idea were near, appeared. I don't know
+     how many sail the waiter told us were then lying in the Downs. Some
+     of these vessels were of grand size: one was a large Indiaman, just
+     come home; and when the sun shone through the clouds, making
+     silvery pools in the dark sea, the way in which these ships
+     brightened, and shadowed, and changed, amid a bustle of boats
+     putting off from the shore to them, and from them to the shore, and
+     a general life and motion in themselves and everything around them,
+     was most beautiful."
+
+That Dickens was essentially a "Kentish Man", in spite of the absence of
+a birth qualification, in spite, too, of his long residence in London,
+and of his peculiarly intimate knowledge of the byways and nooks and
+corners of London, ample proof has by this time been given. To this,
+however, may be added Forster's significant statement that, "Excepting
+always the haunts and associations of his childhood, Dickens had no
+particular sentiment of locality, and any special regard for houses he
+had lived in was not a thing noticeable in him". This was not
+surprising. The conditions of life in a modern capital under most
+circumstances, but especially for anyone who has made many removes, tend
+to produce the impression that a man's rooftree only represents the
+transient shelter of a caravanserai, rather than an abiding habitation
+on which memory has stamped indelible traces. Nor can even the most
+extended associations of maturity take the place of the imperishable
+links forged in the most susceptible years of fresh and sensitive
+childhood. For Dickens this vital distinction was emphasized both by
+natural idiosyncrasy and by the pressure of events which shaped his
+destiny.
+
+     "If it should appear," he says, speaking of himself under the mask
+     of David Copperfield, "from anything I may set down in this
+     narrative, that I was a child of close observation, or that as a
+     man I have a strong memory of my childhood, I undoubtedly lay claim
+     to both of these characteristics."
+
+The change from Chatham and Rochester to London was indissolubly
+connected in his mind with a change in the family fortunes that deprived
+him of the ordinary advantages and pleasures open to any average boy of
+even the lower middle classes. It ushered in a period of misery and
+degradation that he could never recall without acute suffering. The few
+years of happiness which he enjoyed before he was carried away to London
+in the stage coach "Commodore", at the age of nine, were divided from a
+strenuous and successful manhood by so dark a gulf as to concentrate all
+the powers of recollection upon them with a desperate kind of intensity.
+It was the realization of a childish ambition conceived in that halcyon
+era which drew him to Gadshill, and he returned again and again to the
+contemplation of his earliest dreams and imaginings. He wrote from
+Gadshill of his old nurse--the original, it can hardly be doubted, of
+Peggotty:--
+
+     "I feel much as I used to do when I was a small child, a few miles
+     off [i.e. at Ordnance Terrace, Chatham], and somebody--_who_, I
+     wonder, and which way did _she_ go when she died?--hummed the
+     evening hymn, and I cried on the pillow--either with the remorseful
+     consciousness of having kicked somebody else, or because still
+     somebody else had hurt my feelings in the course of the day".
+
+For the second number of _Household Words_, when he "felt an uneasy
+sense of there being a want of something tender, which would apply to
+some universal household knowledge", he composed a little paper about "a
+child's dream of a star". It was the story of a brother and sister,
+constant child companions, who used to make friends of a star, watching
+it together until they knew when and where it would rise, and always
+bidding it good-night, so that when the sister dies, the lonely brother
+still connects her with the star, which he then sees opening as a sea
+of light, and its rays making a shining pathway from earth to heaven. It
+was his sister Fanny, who had often wandered with him at night in St.
+Mary's Churchyard, near their home at Chatham, looking up at the stars,
+and her death, shortly before the paper was written, had revived the
+fancy of childhood. In _The Uncommercial Traveller_ he revisits
+"Dullborough", and the first discovery he makes is that the station has
+swallowed up the playing field of the school to which he went during his
+last two years at Chatham.
+
+[Illustration: SHORNE CHURCH]
+
+     "It was gone. The two beautiful hawthorn trees, the hedge, the
+     turf, and all those buttercups and daisies, had given place to the
+     stoniest of jolting roads; while, beyond the station, an ugly dark
+     monster of a tunnel kept its jaws open, as if it had swallowed them
+     and were ravenous for more destruction. The coach that had carried
+     me away, was melodiously called Timpson's Blue-eyed Maid [it was
+     really called the 'Commodore'], and belonged to Timpson, at the
+     coach office up street; the locomotive engine that had brought me
+     back was called severely No. 97, and belonged to S.E.R., and was
+     spitting ashes and hot water over the blighted ground.... Here, in
+     the haymaking time, had I been delivered from the dungeons of
+     Seringapatam, an immense pile (of haycock), by my countrymen, the
+     victorious British (boy next door and his two cousins), and had
+     been recognized with ecstasy by my affianced one (Miss Green), who
+     had come all the way from England (second house in the terrace) to
+     ransom me and marry me."
+
+In playful vein Dickens professes to record his disappointment at
+failing to receive any recognition from a "native", in the person of a
+phlegmatic greengrocer, when he revisits Rochester, and revives the
+associations of haunts beloved in childhood.
+
+     "Nettled by his phlegmatic conduct, I informed him that I had left
+     the town when I was a child. He slowly returned, quite unsoftened,
+     and not without a sarcastic kind of complacency, Had I? Ah! and did
+     I find it had got on tolerably well without me? Such is the
+     difference (I thought when I had left him a few hundred yards
+     behind, and was by so much in a better temper) between going away
+     from a place and remaining in it. I had no right, I reflected, to
+     be angry with the greengrocer for his want of interest; I was
+     nothing to him; whereas he was the town, the cathedral, the bridge,
+     the river, my childhood, and a large slice of my life, to me."
+
+That is one side of the medal, but the other is displayed in _David
+Copperfield_, when little Mr. Chillip, the doctor, welcomes David back
+to England:
+
+     "'We are not ignorant, sir,' said Mr. Chillip, slowly shaking his
+     little head again, 'down in our part of the country, of your fame.
+     There must be great excitement here, sir,' said Mr. Chillip,
+     tapping himself on the forehead with his forefinger. 'You must find
+     it a trying occupation, sir!'"
+
+A feature of Dickens's literary manner, so insistent that the most
+superficial reader cannot miss it, is the individual and almost human
+aspect which a street or a landscape, a house or a room, takes on in his
+description. A typical example may be selected in Mr. Wickfield's
+house--
+
+     "A very old house bulging out over the road; a house with long, low
+     lattice windows bulging out still farther, and beams with carved
+     heads on the ends bulging out too, so that I fancied the whole
+     house was leaning forward, trying to see who was passing on the
+     narrow pavement below."
+
+It was the outcome of an acute nervous sensibility, amounting at times
+to an almost neurotic irritability, such as peeps out from his
+confession that the shape of Earl Grey's head, when he was a
+Parliamentary reporter in the Gallery, "was misery to me and weighed
+down my youth". This peculiarity of temperament had established itself
+when, a little delicate and highly strung child, he used to transfer the
+scenes and happenings of the novels to which he stole away from the
+other boys at their play, into the setting of his own existence, and
+"every barn in the neighbourhood, every stone in the church, and every
+foot of the churchyard, had some association of its own connected with
+these books, and stood for some locality made famous in them".
+
+There has seldom, perhaps, been such an absence of complexity in genius
+of a high order as there was in Dickens's character. But though there
+was no complexity, there were two very different aspects--acute
+sensibility was not incompatible with a virile and buoyant spirit. And
+so Dickens's associations with the country which he loved best and knew
+most intimately were, on the one side, those of a dreamy childhood, on
+the other, of a lusty zest in outdoor life and the rustic jollity of an
+old-world "Merry England". The sports and revels of Manor Farm, Dingley
+Dell, have all the exuberance of Lever's Irish novels. Dickens must have
+often taken part in merry-makings such as he describes, on flying visits
+that are not recorded in Forster, before he sat down to write about them
+during his honeymoon at Chalk. As the Master of Gadshill, his lithe,
+upright figure, clad in loose-fitting garments, and rather dilapidated
+shoes, was a familiar sight to all the country neighbours, as he swung
+along the shady lanes, banked high with hedges that were full of
+violets, purple and white, ferns, and lichens, and mosses. Often he
+would call at the oldfashioned "Crispin and Crispianus", on the north
+side of the London road just out of Strood, for a glass of ale, or a
+little cold brandy and water, and sit in the corner of the settle
+opposite the fireplace, looking at nothing but seeing everything. In the
+chapter on "Tramps" in _The Uncommercial Traveller_, he imagines himself
+to be the travelling clockmaker, who sees to something wrong with the
+bell of the turret stable clock up at Cobham Hall, and after being
+regaled in the enormous servants' hall with beef and bread, and powerful
+ale, sets off through the woods till the town lights appear right in
+front, and lies for the night at the ancient sign of Crispin and
+Crispianus. The floating population of the roads,--the travelling
+showman, the cheap jack, the harvest and hopping tramps, the young
+fellows who trudge along barefoot, their boots slung over their
+shoulders, their shabby bundles under their arms, their sticks newly cut
+from some roadside wood, and the truculently humorous tramp, who tells
+the Beadle: "Why, blow your little town! who wants to be in it? Wot does
+your dirty little town mean by comin' and stickin' itself in the road to
+anywhere?"--all are closely scanned and noted, as they mount or descend
+Strood Hill in perennial procession. Dickens was himself a sturdy and
+inveterate pedestrian. When he suffered from insomnia he would think
+nothing of rising in the middle of the night and taking a thirty miles'
+spin before breakfast.
+
+[Illustration: THE LEATHER BOTTLE, COBHAM]
+
+     "Coming in just now," he wrote in his third year at Gadshill,
+     "after twelve miles in the rain, I was so wet that I have had to
+     change and get my feet into warm water before I could do anything."
+
+In February, 1865, he wrote:
+
+     "I got frost-bitten by walking continually in the snow, and getting
+     wet in the feet daily. My boots hardened and softened, hardened and
+     softened, my left foot swelled, and I still forced the boot on; sat
+     in it to write, half the day; walked in it through the snow, the
+     other half; forced the boot on again next morning; sat and walked
+     again; and being accustomed to all sorts of changes in my feet,
+     took no heed. At length, going out as usual, I fell lame on the
+     walk, and had to limp home dead lame, through the snow, for the
+     last three miles--to the remarkable terror, by the way, of the two
+     big dogs."
+
+It is hardly necessary to say that Dickens never so absorbed the local
+spirit and genius of that part of rural England which he knew and loved
+best as the Brontës absorbed the spirit of the Yorkshire moorlands, or
+Mr. Hardy the spirit of Wessex, or Mr. Eden Phillpotts the spirit of
+Dartmoor, or Sir A. Quiller-Couch the spirit of the "Delectable Duchy".
+He was too busy and preoccupied a man for this, and had too much of his
+life and work behind him, when he made his permanent home in
+"Dickens-land". And Gadshill was too near to the bustle and stir of
+Chatham to furnish a purely idyllic environment or entirely
+unsophisticated rusticity. But it is not unduly fanciful to discover the
+influence of Kentish scenery, with its bright, clear atmosphere, its
+undulating slopes of green woodland and green hop fields, pink-and-white
+orchards, and golden harvests--the prettiest though not the most
+beautiful scenery in England--upon his conception of a typical
+
+           "English home--grey twilight pour'd
+       On dewy pastures, dewy trees,
+   Softer than sleep--all things in order stored,
+       A haunt of ancient Peace".
+
+Though no local name is attached to it, and no local tradition
+identifies it with any particular spot, there is no difficulty in fixing
+in the very heart of "Dickens-land" the picture upon which the "Battle
+of Life" is opened: the joyous dance of two girls, "quite unconstrained
+and careless", "in one little orchard attached to an old stone house
+with a honeysuckle porch", "while some half-dozen peasant women standing
+on ladders, gathering the apples from the trees, stopped in their work
+to look down, and share their enjoyment".
+
+     "As they danced among the orchard trees, and down the groves of
+     stems and back again, and twirled each other lightly round and
+     round, the influence of their airy motion seemed to spread and
+     spread, in the sunlighted scene, like an expanding circle in the
+     water. Their streaming hair and fluttering skirts, the elastic
+     grass beneath their feet, the boughs that rustled in the morning
+     air--the flushing leaves, their speckled shadows on the soft green
+     ground--the balmy wind that swept along the landscape, glad to turn
+     the distant windmill, cheerily--everything between the two girls,
+     and the man and team at plough upon the ridge of land, where they
+     showed against the sky as if they were the last things in the
+     world--seemed dancing too."
+
+Something, too, of the love of good cheer, quaint old Christmas customs,
+of junketings in ancient farmhouse kitchens and the parlours of ancient
+hostelries, which has made Dickens the early Victorian apostle of
+Yuletide "wassail", can be derived from his having "powlert up and down"
+in a county abounding with comfortable manor houses and cosy inns. It is
+a ripe and mellow tradition of good cheer, that is quite distinct from
+the bovine stolidity of a harvest home in George Eliot's Loamshire or
+the crude animalism of Meredith's Gaffer Gammon. For Kent, even from
+the time of Cæsar's Commentaries, has been "the civil'st place of all
+the isle".
+
+That is the aspect of Dickens's country on the one side--the side which,
+some years before he established himself at Gadshill, he mapped out,
+already knowing it intimately, to show to Forster in a brief excursion:
+
+     "You will come down booked for Maidstone (I will meet you at
+     Paddock-wood), and we will go thither in company over a most
+     beautiful little line of railroad. The eight miles walk from
+     Maidstone to Rochester, and a visit to the Druidical altar on the
+     wayside, are charming. This could be accomplished on the Tuesday;
+     and Wednesday we might look about us at Chatham, coming home by
+     Cobham on Thursday."
+
+The other side--the dreary marshes lying between the Medway and the
+Thames, a dark, flat wilderness intersected by dykes and mounds and
+gates--had associations not less intimate. In _David Copperfield_
+Dickens transferred the dreams and the events of his childhood to an
+alien setting. In _Great Expectations_ he invents a fictitious story in
+harmony with scenes in which he delighted to retrace his childish
+memories. Again, the amphibian creatures which he lightly sketches in
+_Great Expectations_, and more elaborately in _Our Mutual Friend_, had
+first impressed themselves on his imagination as he rambled, a tiny,
+eager-eyed boy, about the dockyards and waterside alleys of Chatham, or
+made trips to Sheerness with "Mr. Micawber", that is to say, his
+father, in the Navy Pay yacht, though he long afterwards pursued his
+studies of them more exhaustively at Wapping and the Isle of Dogs, and
+in expeditions with the Thames police. It was from a walk with Leech
+through Chatham by-streets that he gathered the hint of Charley Hexam
+and his father, for _Our Mutual Friend_, from the sight of "the
+uneducated father in fustian and the educated boy in spectacles".
+
+But when Dickens took Rochester once more for the background of a story
+in _Edwin Drood_ there seems, to us in our knowledge of the event,
+something almost ominous. It suggests Waller's famous simile of the stag
+that returns to die where it was roused. Dickens's last visit to the
+town was to stimulate his imagination for the conference between
+Datchery and the Princess Puffer at the entrance to the "Monks'
+Vineyard". On the last day of his life he was busy, in the chalet in the
+garden at Gadshill Place, embodying the fancies which he had gathered
+and fused on that last visit. On the last page which he was to write he
+endeavoured to record--for the last time--his sense of the atmosphere of
+the old city.
+
+     "A brilliant morning shines on the old city. Its antiquities and
+     ruins are surpassingly beautiful, with the lusty ivy gleaming in
+     the sun, and the rich trees waving in the balmy air. Changes of
+     glorious light from moving boughs, songs of birds, scents from
+     gardens, woods, and fields--or, rather, from the one great garden
+     of the whole of the cultivated island in its yielding
+     time--penetrate into the Cathedral, subdue its earthy odour, and
+     preach the Resurrection and the Life. The cold stone tombs of
+     centuries ago grow warm, and flecks of brightness dart into the
+     sternest marble corners of the building, fluttering there like
+     wings."
+
+On the eve of that last day he had more than once expressed his
+satisfaction at having finally abandoned all intention of exchanging
+Gadshill for London. He had done this still more impressively a few days
+before.
+
+     "While he lived, he said, he should wish his name to be more and
+     more associated with the place; and he had a notion that when he
+     died, he should like to lie in the little graveyard belonging to
+     the Cathedral at the foot of the Castle wall."
+
+Half of his wish had to go unfulfilled; the other half has been realized
+in a different but a profounder sense than that in which it is
+conceived. While he lives, in the creations of his humour and pathos,
+airy things of fun and frolic, tenderness and tears, his name is more
+and more associated "with the scenes"--to borrow the words of the
+memorial tablet in Rochester Cathedral--"in which his earliest and his
+latest years were passed", scenes that "from the associations ... which
+extended over all his life" have the best right to be known as
+"Dickens-land".
+
+_Printed by Blackie & Son, Ltd., Glasgow_
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Transcriber's note
+
+
+The following changes have been made to the text:
+
+Page 19: "by an unbridgable chasm" changed to "by an unbridgeable
+chasm".
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Dickens-Land, by J. A. Nicklin
+
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+<pre>
+
+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Dickens-Land, by J. A. Nicklin
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Dickens-Land
+
+Author: J. A. Nicklin
+
+Illustrator: E. W. Haslehust
+
+Release Date: December 20, 2008 [EBook #27572]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK DICKENS-LAND ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Carla Foust and The Online Distributed
+Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This file was
+produced from images generously made available by The
+Internet Archive/Canadian Libraries)
+
+
+
+
+
+
+</pre>
+
+
+<div class="transnote">
+<h3>Transcriber's note</h3>
+<p>
+In the HTML version some of the illustrations
+have been moved beside the relevant section of the text.
+Page numbers in the List of Illustrations reflect the position of the illustration
+in the original text, but links link to current position of illustrations.</p>
+
+<p>Minor punctuation errors have been changed without notice. A printer
+error has been changed, and it is indicated with
+a <a class="correction" title="like this" href="#tnotes">mouse-hover</a>
+and listed at the
+<a href="#tnotes">end of this book</a>. All other
+inconsistencies are as in the original.</p>
+</div>
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Frontispiece" id="Frontispiece">&nbsp;</a></span></p>
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 600px;">
+<img src="images/i002.jpg" width="600" height="389" alt="CHALK, HOUSE WHERE DICKENS SPENT HIS HONEYMOON" title="" />
+<span class="caption">CHALK, HOUSE WHERE DICKENS SPENT HIS HONEYMOON</span>
+</div>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h1>DICKENS-LAND</h1>
+<p><br /><br /></p>
+<p class="fm2">Described by J.&nbsp;A. NICKLIN</p>
+
+<p class="fm2">Pictured by E.&nbsp;W. HASLEHUST</p>
+<p><br /><br /></p>
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 358px;">
+<img src="images/i003.jpg" width="358" height="550" alt="" title="" />
+</div>
+<p><br /><br /></p>
+<p class="fm2">BLACKIE AND SON LIMITED LONDON</p>
+<p class="fm3">GLASGOW AND BOMBAY<br />
+1911</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<div class="bbox">
+<p class="fm2">Beautiful England</p>
+
+<p class="fm3"><i>Volumes Ready</i></p>
+
+<table summary="LOCATIONS">
+<tr>
+<td class="tdl"><span class="smcap">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;Oxford</span></td>
+<td class="tdl">&nbsp;</td>
+<td class="tdl"><span class="smcap">The Heart of Wessex</span></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td class="tdl"><span class="smcap">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;The English Lakes</span></td>
+<td class="tdl">&nbsp;</td>
+<td class="tdl"><span class="smcap">The Peak District</span></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td class="tdl"><span class="smcap">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;Canterbury</span></td>
+<td class="tdl">&nbsp;</td>
+<td class="tdl"><span class="smcap">The Cornish Riviera</span></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td class="tdl"><span class="smcap">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;Shakespeare-Land</span></td>
+<td class="tdl">&nbsp;</td>
+<td class="tdl"><span class="smcap">Dickens-Land</span></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td class="tdl"><span class="smcap">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;The Thames</span></td>
+<td class="tdl">&nbsp;</td>
+<td class="tdl"><span class="smcap">Winchester</span></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td class="tdl"><span class="smcap">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;Windsor Castle</span></td>
+<td class="tdl">&nbsp;</td>
+<td class="tdl"><span class="smcap">The Isle of Wight</span></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td class="tdl"><span class="smcap">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;Cambridge</span></td>
+<td class="tdl">&nbsp;</td>
+<td class="tdl"><span class="smcap">Chester and the Dee</span></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td class="tdl"><span class="smcap">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;Norwich and the Broads</span></td>
+<td class="tdl">&nbsp;</td>
+<td class="tdl"><span class="smcap">York</span></td>
+</tr>
+</table>
+
+<p><br /></p>
+<p class="fm3"><i>Uniform with this Series</i></p>
+
+<p class="fm2">Beautiful Ireland</p>
+
+<table summary="LOCATIONS">
+<tr>
+<td class="tdl">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;LEINSTER</td>
+<td class="tdl">&nbsp;</td>
+<td class="tdl">MUNSTER</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td class="tdl">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;ULSTER</td>
+<td class="tdl">&nbsp;</td>
+<td class="tdl">ULSTER</td>
+</tr>
+</table>
+</div>
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="LIST_OF_ILLUSTRATIONS" id="LIST_OF_ILLUSTRATIONS"></a>LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS</h2>
+
+<table summary="ILLUSTRATONS">
+<tr>
+<td class="tdl">&nbsp;</td>
+<td class="tdr page" colspan="2">Page</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td class="tdl">Chalk, House where Dickens spent his honeymoon</td>
+<td class="tdr"><a href="#Frontispiece"><i>Frontispiece</i></a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td class="tdl">Gadshill Place from the Gardens</td>
+<td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_8">8</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td class="tdl">Rochester from Strood</td>
+<td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_14">14</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td class="tdl">Restoration House, Rochester</td>
+<td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_21">20</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td class="tdl">Cobham Park</td>
+<td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_26">26</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td class="tdl">Cooling Church</td>
+<td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_29">32</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td class="tdl">Aylesford</td>
+<td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_36">38</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td class="tdl">Maidstone, All Saints' Church and the Palace</td>
+<td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_44">42</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td class="tdl">Jasper's Gateway</td>
+<td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_18">46</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td class="tdl">Chalk Church</td>
+<td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_27">50</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td class="tdl">Shorne Church</td>
+<td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_28">54</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td class="tdl">The Leather Bottle, Cobham</td>
+<td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_25">58</a></td>
+</tr>
+</table>
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_5" id="Page_5">[5]</a></span></p>
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 600px;">
+<img src="images/i007.jpg" width="600" height="314" alt="" title="" />
+</div>
+
+
+<p>The central shrine of a literary cult is at least as often its hero's
+home of adoption as his place of birth. To the Wordsworthian,
+Cockermouth has but a faint, remote interest in comparison with Grasmere
+and Rydal Mount. Edinburgh, for all its associations with the life and
+the genius of Scott, is not as Abbotsford, or as that beloved Border
+country in which his memory has struck its deepest roots. And so it is
+with Dickens. The accident of birth attaches his name but slightly to
+Landport in South-sea. The Dickens pilgrim treads in the most palpable
+footsteps of "Boz" amongst the landmarks of a Victorian London, too
+rapidly disappearing, and through the "rich and varied landscape" on
+either side of the Medway, "covered with cornfields and pastures, with
+here and there a windmill or a distant church", which Dickens loved from
+boyhood,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_6" id="Page_6">[6]</a></span> peopled with the creatures of his teeming fancy, and chose for
+his last and most-cherished habitation.</p>
+
+<p>What Abbotsford was to Scott, that, almost, to Dickens in his later
+years was Gadshill Place. From his study window in the "grave red-brick
+house" "on his little Kentish freehold"&mdash;a house which he had "added to
+and stuck bits upon in all manner of ways, so that it was as pleasantly
+irregular and as violently opposed to all architectural ideas as the
+most hopeful man could possibly desire"&mdash;he looked out, so he wrote to a
+friend, "on as pretty a view as you will find in a long day's English
+ride.... Cobham Park and Woods are behind the house; the distant Thames
+is in front; the Medway, with Rochester and its old castle and
+cathedral, on one side." On every side he could not fail to reach, in
+those brisk walks with which he sought, too strenuously, perhaps, health
+and relaxation, some object redolent of childish dreams or mature
+achievement, of intimate joys and sorrows, of those phantoms of his
+brain which to him then, as to hundreds of thousands of his readers
+since, were not less real than the men and women of everyday encounter.
+On those seven miles between Rochester and Maidstone, which he
+discovered to be one of the most beautiful walks in England, he might be
+tempted to strike off at Aylesford for a short stroll to such a<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_7" id="Page_7">[7]</a></span>
+pleasant old Elizabethan mansion as Cobtree Hall, the very type, it may
+be, of Manor Farm, Dingley Dell, or for a longer tramp to Town Malling,
+from which he may well have borrowed many strokes for the picture of
+Muggleton, that town of sturdy Kentish cricket. Sometimes he would walk
+across the marshes to Gravesend, and returning through the village of
+Chalk, would pause for a retrospective glance at the house where his
+honeymoon was spent and a good part of <i>Pickwick</i> planned. In the latter
+end of the year, when he could take a short cut through the stubble
+fields from Higham to the marshes lying further down the Thames, he
+would often visit the desolate churchyard where little Pip was so
+terribly frightened by the convict. Or, descending the long slope from
+Gadshill to Strood, and crossing Rochester Bridge&mdash;over the balustrades
+of which Mr. Pickwick leaned in agreeable reverie when he was accosted
+by Dismal Jemmy&mdash;the author of <i>Great Expectations</i> and <i>Edwin Drood</i>
+would pass from Rochester High Street&mdash;where Mr. Pumblechook's seed shop
+looks across the way at Miss Twinkleton's establishment&mdash;into the Vines,
+to compare once more the impression on his unerring "inward eye" with
+the actual features of that Restoration House which, under another name,
+he assigned to Miss Havisham, and so round by Fort Pitt to the Chatham
+lines. And there<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_8" id="Page_8">[8]</a></span>&mdash;who can doubt?&mdash;if he seemed to hear the melancholy
+wind that whistled through the deserted fields as Mr. Winkle took his
+reluctant stand, a wretched and desperate duellist, his thoughts would
+also stray to the busy dockyard town and "a blessed little room" in a
+plain-looking plaster-fronted house from which dated all his early
+readings and imaginings.</p>
+
+<p>Between the "very small and not-over-particularly-taken-care-of boy" and
+the strong, self-reliant man whose fame had filled two continents,
+Gadshill Place was an immediate link. Everyone knows the story which
+Dickens tells of a vision of his former self meeting him on the road to
+Canterbury.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>"So smooth was the old high road, and so fresh were the horses, and
+so fast went I, that it was midway between Gravesend and Rochester,
+and the widening river was bearing the ships, white-sailed or
+black-smoked, out to sea, when I noticed by the wayside a very
+queer small boy.</p>
+
+<p>"'Halloa!' said I to the very queer small boy, 'where do you live?'</p>
+
+<p>"'At Chatham,' says he.</p>
+
+<p>"'What do you do there?' say I.</p>
+
+<p>"'I go to school,' says he.</p>
+
+<p>"I took him up in a moment, and we went on. Presently, the very
+queer small boy says, 'This is Gadshill we are coming to, where
+Falstaff went out to rob those travellers and ran away.'</p>
+
+<p>"'You know something about Falstaff, eh?' said I.</p>
+
+<p>"'All about him,' said the very queer small boy. 'I am old (I am
+nine), and I read all sorts of books. But do let us stop at the top
+of the hill, and look at the house there, if you please!'</p>
+
+<p>"'You admire that house?' said I.</p></div>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 382px;">
+<img src="images/i011.jpg" width="382" height="575" alt="GADSHILL PLACE FROM THE GARDENS" title="" />
+<span class="caption">GADSHILL PLACE FROM THE GARDENS</span>
+</div>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>"'Bless you, sir,' said the very queer small boy, 'when I was not<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_9" id="Page_9">[9]</a></span>
+more than half as old as nine, it used to be a treat for me to be
+brought to look at it. And now I am nine I come by myself to look
+at it. And ever since I can recollect, my father, seeing me so fond
+of it, has often said to me, If you were to be very persevering,
+and were to work hard, you might some day come to live in it.
+Though that's impossible!' said the very queer small boy, drawing a
+low breath, and now staring at the house out of window with all his
+might.</p>
+
+<p>"I was rather amazed to be told this by the very queer small boy;
+for that house happens to be <i>my</i> house, and I have reason to
+believe that what he said was true."</p></div>
+
+<p>As the queer small boy in the <i>Uncommercial Traveller</i> said, Gadshill
+Place is at the very top of Falstaff's hill. It stands on the south side
+of the Dover road;&mdash;on the north side, but a little lower down, is "a
+delightfully oldfashioned inn of the old coaching days", the "Sir John
+Falstaff";&mdash;surrounded by a high wall and screened by a row of limes.
+The front view, with its wooden and pillared porch, its bays, its dormer
+windows let into the roof, and its surmounting bell turret and vane,
+bears much the same appearance as it did to the queer small boy. But
+amongst the many additions and alterations which Dickens was constantly
+making, the drawing-room had been enlarged from a smaller existing one,
+and the conservatory into which it opens was, as he laughingly told his
+younger daughter, "positively the last improvement at Gadshill"&mdash;a jest
+to prove sadly prophetic, for it was uttered on the Sunday<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_10" id="Page_10">[10]</a></span> before his
+death. The little library, too, on the opposite side of the porch from
+the drawing-room and conservatory, was a converted bedroom. Its aspect
+is familiar to most Dickens-lovers from Sir Luke Fildes's famous picture
+of "The Empty Chair". In summer, however, Dickens used to do his work
+not in the library but in a Swiss chalet, presented to him by Fechter,
+the great actor, which stood in a shrubbery lying on the other side of
+the highroad, and entered by a subway that Dickens had excavated for the
+purpose. The chalet now must be sought in the terrace garden of Cobham
+Hall. When Dickens sat at his desk in a room of the chalet, "up among
+the branches of the trees", the five mirrors which he had put in
+reflected "the leaves quivering at the windows, and the great fields of
+waving corn, and the sail-dotted river". The birds and butterflies flew
+in and out, the green branches shot in at the open windows, and the
+lights and shadows of the clouds and the scent of flowers and of
+everything growing for miles had the same free access. No imaginative
+artist, whether in words or colour, could have desired a more inspiring
+environment. The back of the house, looking southward, descends by one
+flight of steps upon a lawn, where one of the balustrades of the old
+Rochester Bridge had, when this was demolished, been fitted up as a<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_11" id="Page_11">[11]</a></span>
+sundial. The lawn, in turn, communicates with flower and vegetable
+gardens by another flight of steps. Beyond is "the much-coveted meadow"
+which Dickens obtained, partly by exchange, from the trustees&mdash;not of
+Watts's Charity, as Forster has stated, but of Sir Joseph Williamson's
+Free School at Rochester. It was in this field that the villagers from
+neighbouring Higham played cricket matches, and that, just before
+Dickens went to America for the last time, he held those quaint
+footraces for all and sundry, described in one of his letters to
+Forster. Though the landlord of the Falstaff, from over the way, was
+allowed to erect a drinking booth, and all the prizes were given in
+money; though, too, the road from Chatham to Gadshill was like a fair
+all day, and the crowd consisted mainly of rough labouring men, of
+soldiers, sailors, and navvies, there was no disorder, not a flag, rope,
+or stake displaced, and no drunkenness whatever. As striking a tribute,
+if rightly considered, as ever was exacted by a strong and winning
+personality! One of those oddities in which Dickens delighted was
+elicited by a hurdle race for strangers. The man who came in second ran
+120 yards and leaped over ten hurdles with a pipe in his mouth and
+smoking it all the time. "If it hadn't been for your pipe," said the
+Master of Gadshill Place, clapping him on the shoulder at the
+winning-post, "you would<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_12" id="Page_12">[12]</a></span> have been first." "I beg your pardon, sir," he
+answered, "but if it hadn't been for my pipe, I should have been
+nowhere."</p>
+
+<p>To the hospitable hearth of Gadshill Place were drawn, by the fame of
+the "Inimitable Boz", a long succession of brilliant men and women,
+mostly of the Anglo-Saxon race, whether English or American; and if not
+in the throngs for which at Abbotsford open house was kept, yet with a
+frequency which would have made literary work almost impossible for the
+host without remarkable steadiness of purpose and regularity of habits.
+For Longfellow and his daughters he "turned out", that they might see
+all of the surrounding country which could be seen in a short stay, "a
+couple of postilions in the old red jackets of the old red royal Dover
+road, and it was like a holiday ride in England fifty years ago".</p>
+
+<p>In his study in the late and early months, and his Swiss chalet through
+the summer, Dickens would write such novels as <i>Great Expectations</i>, and
+the unfinished <i>Mystery of Edwin Drood</i>, taking his local colour from
+spots which lay within the compass of a reasonable walk; and others,
+such as <i>A Tale of Two Cities</i> and <i>Our Mutual Friend</i>, to which the
+circumstances of time and place furnished little or nothing except their
+influence on his mood. Some of the occasional papers which, in the
+character of "The Uncommercial<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_13" id="Page_13">[13]</a></span> Traveller", he furnished to <i>All the
+Year Round</i>, have as much of the <i>genius loci</i> as any of his romances.
+Even to-day the rushing swarm of motor cars has not yet driven from the
+more secluded nooks of Kent all such idylls of open-air vagabondage as
+this:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>"I have my eyes upon a piece of Kentish road, bordered on either
+side by a wood, and having on one hand, between the road dust and
+the trees, a skirting patch of grass. Wild flowers grow in
+abundance on this spot, and it lies high and airy, with a distant
+river stealing steadily away to the ocean, like a man's life. To
+gain the milestone here, which the moss, primroses, violets,
+bluebells and wild roses would soon render illegible but for
+peering travellers pushing them aside with their sticks, you must
+come up a steep hill, come which way you may. So, all the tramps
+with carts or caravans&mdash;the gipsy tramp, the show tramp, the Cheap
+Jack&mdash;find it impossible to resist the temptations of the place,
+and all turn the horse loose when they come to it, and boil the
+pot. Bless the place, I love the ashes of the vagabond fires that
+have scorched its grass!"</p></div>
+
+<p>The Kentish road that Dickens thus describes is certainly the Dover Road
+at Gadshill, from which, of course, there is a steep declivity whether
+the route is westward to Gravesend or eastwards to Strood and Rochester.
+In Strood itself Dickens found little to interest him, though the view
+of Rochester from Strood Hill is an arresting one, with the stately
+medi&aelig;valism of Castle and Cathedral emerging from a kind of haze in
+which it is hard to distinguish what is smoke-wreath and what a mass of
+crowding roofs. The Medway, which divides Strood from the almost
+indistinguish<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_14" id="Page_14">[14]</a></span>ably overlapping towns of Rochester, Chatham, and
+Brompton, is crossed by an iron bridge, superseding the old stone
+structure commemorated in <i>Pickwick</i>. Mr. Pickwick's notes on "the four
+towns" do not require very much modification to apply to their present
+state.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 600px;">
+<img src="images/i019.jpg" width="600" height="392" alt="ROCHESTER FROM STROOD" title="" />
+<span class="caption">ROCHESTER FROM STROOD</span>
+</div>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>"The principal productions", he wrote, "appear to be soldiers,
+sailors, Jews, chalk, shrimps, officers, and dockyard men. The
+commodities chiefly exposed for sale in the public streets are
+marine stores, hard-bake, apples, flat-fish, and oysters. The
+streets present a lively and animated appearance, occasioned
+chiefly by the conviviality of the military.... The consumption of
+tobacco in these towns 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."</p></div>
+
+<p>This description is much less true of Rochester than of its three
+neighbours, and does no justice to the aspects which Dickens himself
+presented in the Market Town of <i>Great Expectations</i>, and the
+Cloisterham of <i>Edwin Drood</i>. Amid the rather sordid encroachments of a
+modern industrialism, Rochester still keeps something of the air of an
+old-world country town, and in the precincts of its Cathedral there
+still broods a cloistral peace. The dominating feature of the town, from
+whatever side approached, is the massive ruin of the Norman Keep of
+Bishop Gundulf, the archi<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_15" id="Page_15">[15]</a></span>tect also of London's White Tower. Though
+the blue sky is its only roof, and on the rugged staircase the dark
+apertures in the walls, where rafters and floors were once, show like
+gaping sockets from which the ravens and daws have picked out the eyes,
+it seems to stand with all the immovable strength of some solid rock on
+which the waves of rebellion or invasion would have dashed and broken.
+It is easy to believe the saying of Lambarde, in his <i>Perambulation of
+Kent</i>, that "from time to time it had a part in almost every tragedie".
+But the grimness of its grey walls is relieved by a green mantle of
+clinging ivy, and though it can no longer be said of the Castle that it
+is "bathed, though in ruins, with a flush of flowers", the beautiful
+single pink grows wild on its ramparts.</p>
+
+<p>From the Castle to the "Bull" in the High Street is a transition which
+seems almost an anachronism. It is but to follow in the traces of the
+Pickwick Club. The covered gateway, the staircase almost wide enough for
+a coach and four, the ballroom on the first floor landing, with
+card-room adjoining, and the bedroom which Mr. Winkle occupied inside
+Mr. Tupman's&mdash;all are there, just as when the club entertained Alfred
+Jingle to a dinner of soles, a broiled fowl and mushrooms, and Mr.
+Tupman took him to the ball in Mr. Winkle's coat, borrowed without
+leave, and Dr.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_16" id="Page_16">[16]</a></span> Slammer of the 97th sent his challenge next morning to
+the owner of the coat. The Guildhall, with its gilt ship for a vane, and
+its old brick front, supported by Doric stone columns, is not so
+memorable because Hogarth played hop-scotch in the colonnade during his
+<i>Five Days' Peregrination by Land and Water</i>, as for the day when
+Pumblechook bundled Pip off to be bound apprentice to Jo before the
+Justices in the Hall, "a queer place, with higher pews in it than a
+church ... and with some shining black portraits on the walls". This was
+the Town Hall, too, which Dickens has told us that he had set up in his
+childish mind "as the model on which the genie of the lamp built the
+palace for Aladdin", only to return and recognize with saddened,
+grown-up eyes&mdash;exaggerating the depreciation a little, for the sake of
+the contrast&mdash;"a mere mean little heap of bricks, like a chapel gone
+demented". Close by the Guildhall is the Town Clock, "supposed to be the
+finest clock in the world", which, alas! "turned out to be as moon-faced
+and weak a clock as a man's eyes ever saw".</p>
+
+<p>On the north side of the High Street, not many yards from the Bull, is a
+Tudor two-storied, stone-built house, with latticed windows and gables.
+This is the Charity founded by the will of Richard Watts in 1579, to
+give lodging and entertainment for one<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_17" id="Page_17">[17]</a></span> night, and fourpence each, to
+"six poor travellers, not being rogues or proctors". It furnished the
+theme to the Christmas cycle of stories, <i>The Seven Poor Travellers</i>,
+the narrator, who treats the waifs and strays harboured one Christmas
+eve at the Charity to roast turkey, plum pudding, and "wassail",
+bringing up the number to seven, "being", as he says, "a traveller
+myself, though an idle one, and being withal as poor as I hope to be".</p>
+
+<p>Farther up the High Street towards Chatham, about a quarter of a mile
+from Rochester Bridge, are two sixteenth-century houses, with fronts of
+carved oak and gables, facing each other across the street. One has
+figured in both <i>Great Expectations</i> and <i>Edwin Drood</i>, for it is the
+house of Mr. Pumblechook, the pompous and egregious corn and seedsman,
+and of Mr. Sapsea, the auctioneer, still more pompous and egregious. The
+other&mdash;Eastgate House, now converted into a museum&mdash;is the "Nun's
+House", where Miss Twinkleton kept school, and had Rosa Bud and Helen
+Landless for pupils.</p>
+
+<p>From the hum and traffic of the cheerfully frequented High Street to the
+calm and hush of the Cathedral precincts entrance is given by Chertsey's
+or College Yard Gate, which abuts on the High Street about a hundred
+yards north of the Cathedral. It was this Gate which Sir Luke Fildes
+sketched, as<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_18" id="Page_18">[18]</a></span> he has recorded in an interesting letter published in <i>A
+Week's Tramp in Dickens-Land</i>, by W.&nbsp;R. Hughes, for the background of
+his drawing of "Durdles Cautioning Sapsea". There are, however, two
+other gatehouses, the "Prior's", a tower over an archway, containing a
+single room approached by a "postern stair", and "Deanery Gate", a
+quaint old house adjoining the Cathedral which has ten rooms, some of
+them beautifully panelled. Its drawing-room on the upper floor bears a
+strong resemblance to the room&mdash;as depicted by Sir Luke Fildes&mdash;in which
+Jasper entertained his nephew and Neville Landless, but the artist
+believes that he never saw the interior. It is not unlikely that Dickens
+took some details from each of the gatehouses to make a composite
+picture of "Mr. Jasper's own gatehouse", which seemed so to stem the
+tide of life, that while the murmur of the tide was heard beyond, not a
+wave would pass the archway.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 400px;">
+<img src="images/i063.jpg" width="400" height="600" alt="JASPER&#39;S GATEWAY" title="" />
+<span class="caption">JASPER&#39;S GATEWAY</span>
+</div>
+
+<p>Rochester Cathedral, which overshadows, though in a less insistent and
+tragic manner, the whole human interest of <i>Edwin Drood</i> almost as much
+as Notre Dame overshadows the human interest in Victor Hugo's romance,
+preserves some remains of the original Saxon and Norman churches on the
+site of which it was erected. Its Early English and Decorated Gothic
+came off lightly from three restorations,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_19" id="Page_19">[19]</a></span> but the tower is
+nineteenth-century vandalism. The Norman west front enshrines in the
+riches of its sculptured portal, with its five receding arches, figures
+of the Saviour and his twelve apostles, and on two shafts are carved
+likenesses of Henry I and his Queen. Freeman has pronounced it to be far
+the finest example of Norman architecture of its kind. The Chapter House
+door, a magnificent example of Decorated Gothic, is adorned with
+effigies representing the Christian and Jewish Churches, which are
+surrounded by Holy Fathers and Angels who pray for the soul,
+emblematically represented as a small nude form above them. But it is
+about the stone-vaulted crypt, where even by daylight "the heavy pillars
+which support the roof engender masses of black shade", with "lanes of
+light" between, and about the winding staircase and belfry of the great
+tower that the spells of the Dickens magic especially cling, and Jasper
+and Durdles revisit these haunts by the glimpses of the moon as
+persistently as Quasimodo and the sinister Priest beset with their
+ghostly presences the belfry of the great Paris minster.</p>
+
+<p>Of the historic imagination Dickens had little or none. He could not
+evoke, and never had the faintest desire to evoke, a Past that was
+divided from the Present by an
+<a name="corr1" id="corr1"></a><a class="correction" href="#cn1" title="changed from 'unbridgable'">unbridgeable</a> chasm. Thus Rochester
+Castle, though he seldom failed to bring his guests<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_20" id="Page_20">[20]</a></span> to view it,
+affected him only with a remote sense of antiquity such as he would have
+experienced, no more and no less, amongst the Pyramids. But he was
+keenly sensitive to the influences of a Past which still survived and,
+by the continuity of a corporate life, made an integral part in the
+Present. The Cathedral life, in which by virtue of their office canons
+and dean were living relics of antiquity, and as much the contemporaries
+as the successors of the ecclesiastics who lay crumbling in the crypt,
+stirred this sense in him as it had been stirred by the ancient Inns of
+London. Almost the last words that he wrote were a tribute to the beauty
+of the venerable fane in which, beneath the monument of the founder of
+that quaint Charity rendered so famous by his story of <i>The Seven Poor
+Travellers</i>, a simple brass records his birth, death, and burial-place,
+"To connect his memory with the scenes in which his earliest and his
+latest years were passed, and with the associations of Rochester
+Cathedral and its neighbourhood which extended over all his life".</p>
+
+<p>In the old cemetery of St. Nicholas' Church, on the north side of the
+Cathedral, it was Dickens's desire to be buried, and his family would
+have carried out his wishes had it not been that the burial-ground had
+been closed for years and no further interments were allowed. On the
+south side of the Cathedral<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_21" id="Page_21">[21]</a></span> is the delightfully oldfashioned terrace
+known as Minor Canon Row&mdash;Dickens's name for it is Minor Canon
+Corner&mdash;where the Reverend Septimus Crisparkle kept house with the
+"china shepherdess" mother. The "Monks' Vineyard" of <i>Edwin Drood</i>
+exists as "The Vines". Here under a group of elms called "The Seven
+Sisters" Edwin Drood and Rosa sat when they decided to break their
+engagement, and opposite "The Seven Sisters" is the "Satis House" of
+<i>Great Expectations</i>, where the lonely and embittered Miss Havisham
+taught Estella the cruel lessons of a ruined life. It is really
+Restoration House&mdash;Satis House is on the site of the mansion of Master
+Richard Watts, to whose apologies for no better entertainment of his
+Sovereign, Queen Elizabeth answered "Satis"&mdash;and it takes its name from
+having received the restored Merry Monarch under its roof on his way to
+London and the throne. Pepys, who was terrified by the steepness of the
+castle cliff and had no time to stay to service at the Cathedral, when
+he had been inspecting the defences at Chatham, found something more to
+his mind in a stroll by Restoration House, and into the Cherry Garden,
+where he met a silly shopkeeper with a pretty wife, "and did kiss her".</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 398px;">
+<img src="images/i027.jpg" width="398" height="600" alt="RESTORATION HOUSE, ROCHESTER" title="" />
+<span class="caption">RESTORATION HOUSE, ROCHESTER</span>
+</div>
+
+<p>Dickens would often follow this route of Pepys, but in the reverse
+direction, that is, through the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_22" id="Page_22">[22]</a></span> Vines to Chatham and its lines of
+fortification, where Mr. Pickwick, Mr. Winkle, and Mr. Snodgrass became
+so hopelessly entangled in the sham fight which they had gone over from
+Rochester to see. At No. 11 Ordnance Terrace the little Charles Dickens
+lived from 1817 to 1821, and at No. 18 St. Mary's Place from 1821 to
+1823, the financial troubles, which eventually drove the family into the
+Marshalsea debtors' prison, and Charles himself into the sordid drudgery
+of the blacking-shop by Hungerford Stairs, having already enforced a
+migration to a cheaper and meaner house. In Clover Street (then Clover
+Lane) the little Dickens went to a school kept by a Mr. William Giles,
+who years afterwards sent to him, when he was halfway through with
+<i>Pickwick</i>, a silver snuff-box inscribed to the "Inimitable Boz". To the
+Mitre Inn, in the Chatham High Street, where Nelson had many times put
+up, Dickens was often brought by his father to recite or sing, standing
+on a table, for the amusement of parties of friends. He speaks of it in
+the "Holly Tree Inn" as</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>"The inn where friends used to put up, and where we used to go to
+see parents, and to have salmon and fowls, and be tipped. It had an
+ecclesiastical sign&mdash;the 'mitre'&mdash;and a bar that seemed to be the
+next best thing to a bishopric, it was so snug. I loved the
+landlord's youngest daughter to distraction&mdash;but let that pass. It
+was in this inn that I was cried over by my little rosy sister,
+because I had acquired a black eye in a fight."</p></div><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_23" id="Page_23">[23]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>When the little Charles Dickens was taken away to London inside the
+stage-coach Commodore&mdash;his kind master on the night before having come
+flitting in among the packing-cases to give him Goldsmith's <i>Bee</i> as a
+keepsake&mdash;he was leaving behind for ever, in the playing-field near
+Clover Lane and the grounds of Rochester Castle and the green drives of
+Cobham Park, the untroubled dreams of happy childhood. And though he
+could not know this, yet, as he sat amongst the damp straw piled up
+round him in the inside of the coach, he "consumed his sandwiches in
+solitude and dreariness" and thought life sloppier than he had expected
+to find it. And in <i>David Copperfield</i> he has thrown back into those
+earlier golden days the shadow of his London privations by bringing the
+little Copperfield, footsore and tired, toiling towards dusk into
+Chatham, "which, in that night's aspect is a mere dream of chalk and
+drawbridges and mastless ships in a muddy river, roofed like Noah's
+arks". No doubt the terrible old Jew in the marine-stores shop, who
+rated and frightened David with his "Oh, my eyes and limbs, what do you
+want? Oh, my lungs and liver, what do you want? Oh&mdash;goroo,
+goroo!"&mdash;until the helpless little fellow was obliged to close with an
+offer of a few pence instead of half a crown for his waistcoat, is the
+portrait of some actual Jew dealer whom, in one<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_24" id="Page_24">[24]</a></span> of the back streets of
+Chatham, the keen eyes of the precocious child, seeming to look at
+nothing, had curiously watched hovering like a hideous spider on the
+pounce behind his grime-encrusted window.</p>
+
+<p>It was old associations that led Dickens so often in his walks from
+Gadshill Place to Chatham. But the neighbourhood which gave him most
+pleasure, combining as it did with similar associations an exquisite
+beauty, was, Forster tells us, the sylvan scenery of Cobham Park. The
+green woods and green shades of Cobham would recur to his memory even in
+far-off Lausanne, and the last walk that he ever enjoyed&mdash;on the day
+before his fatal seizure&mdash;was through these woods, the charm of which
+cannot be better defined than in his own description in <i>Pickwick</i>:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>"A delightful walk it was; for it was a pleasant afternoon in June,
+and their way lay through a deep and shady wood, cooled by the
+light wind which gently rustled the thick foliage, and enlivened by
+the songs of the birds that perched upon the boughs. The ivy and
+the moss crept in thick clusters over the old trees, and the soft
+green turf overspread the ground like a silken mat. They emerged
+upon an open park, with an ancient hall, displaying the quaint and
+picturesque architecture of Elizabeth's time. Long vistas of
+stately oaks and elm trees appeared on every side; large herds of
+deer were cropping the fresh grass; and occasionally a startled
+hare scoured along the ground with the speed of the shadows thrown
+by the light clouds, which swept across a sunny landscape like a
+passing breath of summer."</p></div>
+
+<p>The mission on which Mr. Pickwick and his two disciples were engaged
+was, it will be remembered,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_25" id="Page_25">[25]</a></span> to convert Mr. Tupman from his resolution
+to forsake the world in a fit of misanthropy, induced by the
+faithlessness of Rachel Wardle.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>"'If this,' said Mr. Pickwick, looking about him&mdash;'If this were the
+place to which all who are troubled with our friend's complaint
+came, I fancy their old attachment to this world would very soon
+return.'"</p></div>
+
+<p>Mr. Pickwick was right, for when they arrived at the village, and
+entered that "clean and commodious village alehouse", the "Leather
+Bottle", they found Mr. Tupman set down at a table "well covered with a
+roast fowl, bacon, ale, and et ceteras", and "looking as unlike a man
+who had taken leave of the world as possible".</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 403px;">
+<img src="images/i081.jpg" width="403" height="600" alt="THE LEATHER BOTTLE, COBHAM" title="" />
+<span class="caption">THE LEATHER BOTTLE, COBHAM</span>
+</div>
+
+<p>The "ancient hall" of Cobham consists of two Tudor wings, with a central
+block designed by Inigo Jones. It has a splendid collection of Old
+Masters, and a music room which the Prince Regent pronounced to be the
+finest room in England. In the terrace flower garden at the back of the
+Hall, it may be mentioned again here, is the Swiss chalet from Gadshill
+Place, which served Dickens for a study in the summer months. The
+circuit of Cobham Park is about seven miles, and it is crossed by the
+"Long Avenue", leading to Rochester, and the "Grand Avenue", which,
+sloping down from the tenantless Mausoleum, opens into Cobham village.
+The inn to which Mr. Tupman retired, in<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_26" id="Page_26">[26]</a></span> disgust with life, still
+retains the title of the "Leather Bottle", but has mounted for its sign
+a coloured portrait of Mr. Pickwick addressing the Club in
+characteristic attitude. It was in Cobham village that Mr. Pickwick made
+his notable discovery of the stone with the mysterious inscription&mdash;an
+inscription which the envious Blotton maintained was nothing more than
+BIL STUMPS HIS MARK. Local tradition suggests that Dickens intended the
+episode for a skit upon archaeological theories about the dolmens known
+as Kit's Coty House, and that a Strood antiquary keenly resented the
+satire. However that may be, Kit's Coty House is not at Cobham, but some
+miles away, near Aylesford. In Cobham church there is perhaps the finest
+and most complete series of monumental brasses in this country, most of
+them commemorating the Lords of Cobham.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 600px;">
+<img src="images/i035.jpg" width="600" height="389" alt="COBHAM PARK" title="" />
+<span class="caption">COBHAM PARK</span>
+</div>
+
+<p>Out of the Cobham woods it is not a long walk to the little village of
+Shorne, where Dickens was fond of sitting on a hot summer afternoon in
+its pretty, shaded churchyard. This is believed to be the spot which he
+has described in <i>Pickwick</i> as "one of the most peaceful and secluded
+churchyards in Kent, where wild flowers mingle with the grass, and the
+soft landscape around forms the fairest spot in the garden of England".
+A picturesque lane leads into the road from Rochester to Gravesend, on
+the outskirts of the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_27" id="Page_27">[27]</a></span> village of Chalk. Here, in a corner house on the
+south side of the road, Dickens spent his honeymoon, and many of the
+earlier chapters of <i>Pickwick</i> were written. In February of the
+following year&mdash;1837&mdash;Dickens and his wife returned to the same
+lodgings, shortly after the birth of his eldest son. Chalk church is
+about a mile from the village. There was formerly above the porch the
+figure of an old priest in a stooping attitude, holding an upturned jug.
+Dickens took a strange interest in this quaint carving, and it is said
+that, whenever he passed it, he took off his hat or gave it a nod, as to
+an old acquaintance.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 403px;">
+<img src="images/i069.jpg" width="403" height="600" alt="CHALK CHURCH" title="" />
+<span class="caption">CHALK CHURCH</span>
+</div>
+
+<p>Very different to the soft and genial landscapes about Cobham is the
+grey and desolate aspect of another haunt which Dickens loved to
+frequent. This was the "meshes" around Cooling. In winter, when it was
+possible to make a short cut across the stubble fields, he would visit
+Cooling churchyard not less seldom than in summer he would go to sit in
+the churchyard of Shorne. First, however, he would have to pass through
+the village of Higham, where, too, was his nearest railway station,
+though he often preferred to walk over and entrain at Gravesend or
+Greenhithe. But the pleasant tinkle of harness bells was a familiar
+sound in the night to the Higham villagers, as the carriage was sent
+down from Gadshill Place to meet the master or his friends returning
+from<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_28" id="Page_28">[28]</a></span> London by the ten o'clock train. Dickens took a kindly and active
+interest in the affairs of the village, and the last cheque which he
+ever drew was for his subscription to the Higham Cricket Club.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 600px;">
+<img src="images/i075.jpg" width="600" height="393" alt="SHORNE CHURCH" title="" />
+<span class="caption">SHORNE CHURCH</span>
+</div>
+
+<p>The flat levels that stretch away from beyond Higham towards the estuary
+of the Thames are more akin to the characteristics of Essex than of
+Kent. The hop gardens are dwarfed and stunted, and presently hops, corn,
+and pasture give place to fields of turnips, which show up like masses
+of jade on the chocolate-coloured soil. The bleak churchyard of Cooling,
+overgrown with nettles, lies amongst these desolate reaches, which
+resound at evening with the shrill, unearthly notes of sea-gulls,
+plovers, and herons. Beyond the churchyard are the marshes, "a dark,
+flat wilderness", as Dickens has described it in <i>Great Expectations</i>,
+"intersected with dykes and mounds and gates, with scattered cattle
+feeding on it"; still farther away is the "low, leaden line" of the
+river, and the "distant, savage lair", from which the wind comes
+rushing, is the sea. It was in this churchyard that the conception of
+the story sprang into life, and there are actually not five but ten
+little stone lozenges in one row, with three more at the back of them,
+which suggested to Dickens the five little prematurely cut off brothers
+of Pip. The grey ruins of Cooling Castle attracted him no less than the
+grey and weather-<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_29" id="Page_29">[29]</a></span>beaten churchyard. Besides some crumbling and broken
+walls there is a gate tower, with an inscription on fourteen copper
+plates, the writing in black, the ground of white enamel, with a seal
+and silk cords in their proper colours, which made known to all and
+sundry the purpose for which Lord Cobham&mdash;whose granddaughter married,
+for one of her five husbands, Sir John Oldcastle, the Lollard
+martyr&mdash;had erected this castle.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 399px;">
+<img src="images/i043.jpg" width="399" height="575" alt="COOLING CHURCH" title="" />
+<span class="caption">COOLING CHURCH</span>
+</div>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"Knoweth that beth and schul be<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">That i am mad in help of the cuntre<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">In knowyng of whych thyng<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">This is chartre and witnessyng."<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>No forge stands now on the site of Joe Gargery's smithy, where, as the
+hammer rang on the anvil to the refrain&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"Beat it out, beat it out&mdash;Old Clem!<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">With a clink for the stout&mdash;Old Clem!<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Blow the fire, blow the fire&mdash;Old Clem!<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Roaring drier, soaring higher&mdash;Old Clem!"&mdash;<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>Pip would see visions of Estella's face in the glowing fire or at the
+wooden window of the forge, looking in from the darkness of the night,
+and flitting away. But though the smithy has gone, the "Three Jolly
+Bargemen", where Joe would smoke his pipe by the kitchen fire on a
+Saturday night, still survives as the "Three Horseshoes"&mdash;the inn to
+which the secret-looking man who stirred his rum and water with a file,
+brought<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_30" id="Page_30">[30]</a></span> Magwitch's two one-pound notes for Pip, and the redoubtable
+Jaggers, the autocrat of the Old Bailey, with his burly form, great
+head, and huge, cross-examining forefinger announced to Pip his Great
+Expectations. Down the river in the direction of yonder "distant savage
+lair", from which the wind comes rushing, lie those long reaches,
+between Kent and Essex, "where the river is broad and solitary, where
+the waterside inhabitants are very few, and where lone public-houses are
+scattered here and there"&mdash;the lonely riverside on which Pip and Herbert
+sought a hiding-place for Magwitch until the steamer for Hamburg or the
+steamer for Rotterdam could be boarded, as she dropped down the tide
+from the Port of London. Whether on the Kent or the Essex side, the cast
+of the scenery corresponds with equal closeness to Dickens's
+description. Slimy stakes stick out of the mud, and slimy stones stick
+out of the mud, and red landmarks and tide-marks stick out of the mud,
+and old roofless buildings slip into the mud, and all about is
+stagnation and mud! The desolate flat marshes look still more weird by
+reason of the tall pollards that lean over them like spectres. Far away
+are the rising grounds, between which and the marshes there appears no
+sign of life except here and there in the foreground a melancholy gull.
+The course which the boat bearing the hunted man took from Mill Pond
+stairs through the crowded<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_31" id="Page_31">[31]</a></span> shipping of the Pool, past the floating
+Custom House at Gravesend, and onwards, skirting the little creeks and
+mudbanks where the Thames widens to the sea&mdash;when every sound of the
+tide flapping heavily at irregular intervals against the shore, and
+every ripple, were fraught with the terror of pursuit&mdash;exemplifies in
+the most striking way the rapidity and instinctive ease of Dickens's
+observation. Forster says:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>"To make himself sure of the actual course of a boat in such
+circumstances, and what possible incidents the adventure might
+have, Dickens hired a steamer for the day from Blackwall to
+Southend. Eight or nine friends, and three or four members of his
+family, were on board, and he seemed to have no care, the whole of
+that summer day (22nd of May, 1861), except to enjoy their
+enjoyment and entertain them with his own in shape of a thousand
+whims and fancies; but his sleepless observation was at work all
+the time, and nothing had escaped his keen vision on either side of
+the river."</p></div>
+
+<p>Scattered amongst the deserted reaches along the riverside may be seen
+such lonely farmhouses or taverns as suggest the aspect of the alehouse,
+"not unknown to smuggling adventurers"&mdash;for the "owling", that is, the
+smuggling industry had flourished for centuries in these parts&mdash;to which
+the fugitives were led by a twinkling light in the window up a little
+cobbled causeway, and where Dickens placed that amphibious creature, "as
+slimy and smeary as if he had been low-water mark too", who exhibited a
+bloated pair of shoes "as interesting relics that he<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_32" id="Page_32">[32]</a></span> had taken from the
+feet of a drowned seaman washed ashore". This type of the gruesome
+long-shoremen whom Dickens had encountered in his waterside rambles, as
+he collected the materials for <i>Great Expectations</i>, was afterwards
+elaborated in the Rogue Riderhood of <i>Our Mutual Friend</i>.</p>
+
+<p>"Swamp, mist, and mudbank"&mdash;if that is the dominant impression made by
+the view of the Thames off the Cooling marshes, it is not the only and
+the invariable impression. Even the bleak churchyard, at the foot of the
+cold, grey tower, is sometimes strewn by the light and flying gust "with
+beautiful shadows of clouds and trees". And from the Old Battery, where
+Joe would smoke his pipe with a far more sagacious air than anywhere
+else, as Pip strove to initiate him into the mysteries of reading and
+writing by the aid of a broken slate and a short piece of slate pencil,
+it is "pleasant and quiet" to watch the vessels standing out to sea with
+their white sails spread, and the light struck aslant, afar off, upon a
+cloud or sail or green hillside or silvery water line.</p>
+
+<p>To the west of Cooling Castle, beyond wide fields&mdash;turnips or
+cabbages&mdash;of the colour of dark-green jade, the Church of Cliffe, with
+its lichgate, standing out boldly from its ridge of chalk, overlooks a
+straggling village of old and weather-boarded houses. It <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_33" id="Page_33">[33]</a></span> would be
+into the road from Cliffe to Rochester, at a point about half a mile
+from Cooling, that Uncle Pumblechook's chaise-cart would debouch when he
+took Mrs. Joe to Rochester market "to assist him in buying such
+household stuffs and goods as required a woman's judgment".</p>
+
+<p>Between the scenery about Cooling and Cliffe and the scenery of the
+valley of the Medway from Rochester to Maidstone there is all the
+difference between a November fog and a brilliant summer's day. At the
+foot of Rochester Castle, from which the long vista of the valley, lying
+between two chalk ranges of hills that form the watershed of the Medway,
+stretches far away to a distant horizon, the Esplanade extends along the
+east side of the river, and there it was that Edwin Drood and Rosa met
+for the last time and to speak of their separate plans. For a few miles
+along the valley the natural beauty of the scene is spoilt by the cement
+works of Borstal, Cuxton, and Wouldham, and the brickworks of Burham.
+The piles of clay and chalk, the beehive furnaces, and the chimneys
+vomiting smoke and flame, almost reproduce the characteristics of the
+Black Country or of a northern manufacturing district. But, when Burham
+has been left behind, the bright emerald pastures, the tender green of
+springing corn or the gold of waving harvests, and the orchards,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_34" id="Page_34">[34]</a></span> a
+dazzling sight in May with the snowy clouds of pear and plum and cherry
+blooms, and the delicate pink-and-white of the apple blossom, more than
+justify the appellation claimed for Kent of the garden of England.
+Opposite to Cuxton, on the western bank, the village of Snodland stands
+at the junction of Snodland Brook with the Medway. It has been
+conjectured that Snodland Weir, a mile or so up the brook, was in
+Dickens's mind when he described Mr. Crisparkle's pilgrimages to
+Cloisterham Weir in the cold rimy mornings, and his discovery, first of
+Edwin Drood's watch in a corner of the weir, and then, after diving
+again and again, of his shirt-pin "sticking in some mud and ooze" at the
+bottom. The nearest weir on the Medway is at Allington, seven or eight
+miles above Rochester, and Cloisterham Weir was but "full two miles"
+away.</p>
+
+<p>Before Allington can be reached, in ascending the Medway, the river is
+spanned by an ancient stone bridge, of pointed arches and triangular
+buttresses, at Aylesford. The ancient Norman church, and the red roofs
+and crowding gables of the picturesque and historic village, are set in
+a circle of elm trees, with a background of rising chalk downs beyond.
+Those who have investigated with perhaps "an excess"&mdash;as Wordsworth
+would say&mdash;"of scrupulosity" all the details of Pickwickian topography
+are in<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_35" id="Page_35">[35]</a></span>clined to believe that the wooden bridge, upon which the chaise
+hired by the Club to make the journey from Rochester to Dingley Dell
+came hopelessly to grief, was Aylesford Bridge, transmuted for the nonce
+from Kentish ragstone into timber. However that may be, there is a
+matter of genuine history which has signalized in no common way this
+old-world village. At this ford, the lowest on the Medway, the Jutes
+under Hengist and Horsa routed the British in a battle which decided the
+predominating strain of race in future Men of Kent and Kentish Men:
+natives of Kent, that is, according as they dwell on the right or left
+bank of the Medway. A farmhouse with the name of Horsted, at the point
+farther back where the Rochester to Maidstone road is joined by the road
+from Chatham, stands, it is believed, on the grave of Horsa. And about a
+mile and a half north of Aylesford, a grey old cairn, set on a green
+sward in the midst of a cornfield, is also closely associated with the
+first great victory won by English people on the soil which they were
+destined to make their own and distinguish with their name. In his
+<i>Short History of the English People</i> J.&nbsp;R. Green says of this
+cromlech:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>"It was from a steep knoll on which the grey weather-beaten stones
+of this monument are reared that the view of their first
+battlefield would break on the English warriors; and a lane which
+still leads down from it through peaceful homesteads, would<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_36" id="Page_36">[36]</a></span> guide
+them across the ford which has left its name in the little village
+of Aylesford. The Chronicle of the conquering people tells nothing
+of the rush that may have carried the ford, or of the fight that
+went straggling up through the village. It only tells that Horsa
+fell in the moment of victory, and the flint heap of Horsted, which
+has long preserved his name, and was held in after-time to mark his
+grave, is thus the earliest of those monuments of English valour of
+which Westminster is the last and noblest shrine. The victory of
+Aylesford did more than give East Kent to the English; it struck
+the keynote of the whole English conquest of Britain."</p></div>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 399px;">
+<img src="images/i051.jpg" width="399" height="600" alt="AYLESFORD" title="" />
+<span class="caption">AYLESFORD</span>
+</div>
+
+<p>This cromlech, known as Kit's Coty House, consists of three upright
+dolmens of sandstone, with a fourth, much larger, crossing them above
+horizontally. In a neighbouring field there is another group of stones,
+scattered in disarray amongst the brushwood, to which, as also to
+Stonehenge and other so-called "Druidical" remains, there attaches the
+local superstition that they cannot be counted. It would be pleasanter
+to believe that the current story, to which reference has already been
+made, that Dickens was poking fun at the antiquarian's reverence for
+this hoary relic in his narrative of Mr. Pickwick's "BIL STUMPS"
+inscription, is altogether erroneous. Certainly it is open to anyone who
+wishes to be incredulous, for there is as much dissimilarity as possible
+between the massive cromlech near Aylesford and the small slab that Mr.
+Pickwick discovered at Cobham.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_37" id="Page_37">[37]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>The most salient feature in the Medway valley between Rochester and
+Maidstone is the height of Blue Bell, or Upper Bell. Here Dickens, who,
+as he said, had come to realize that the Rochester to Maidstone road
+passed through some of the most beautiful scenery in England, would
+often picnic with his visitors. Undulating slopes of pasture and
+cornfields, hop gardens, orchards, and woodlands, with many a deep-sunk
+lane embowered in overarching trees that rise from hedgerow clusters of
+dog-rose, ivy, and honeysuckle, and with snugly nestling homesteads and
+quaintly-cowled "oast-houses" sprinkled here and there, sweep across the
+valley, through which the river winds in sinuous curves, onwards to a
+long range of hills upon the skyline.</p>
+
+<p>Somewhere in this district Dickens came across the types of the
+oldfashioned and jovially comfortable home of the English yeoman,
+represented by his Manor Farm, Dingley Dell, and of the little country
+town, represented by the Muggleton of <i>Pickwick</i>, in which local
+enthusiasm for cricket was ardent, if the standard of skill was somewhat
+low. The most plausible identification of the home of Mr. Wardle is with
+Cobtree Hall, which divides the parishes of Boxley and Allington, and it
+is probable that the original of Muggleton was Town Malling, which is
+also known as West Malling.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_38" id="Page_38">[38]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>In the Jubilee Edition of <i>Pickwick</i> Mr. Charles Dickens the Younger
+introduced a woodcut of High Street, Town Malling, with a note to the
+following effect:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>"Muggleton, perhaps, is only to be taken as a fancy sketch of a
+small country town; but it is generally supposed, and probably with
+sufficient accuracy, that, if it is in any degree a portrait of any
+Kentish town, Town Malling, a great place for cricket in Mr.
+Pickwick's time, sat for it."</p></div>
+
+<p>Town Malling does not correspond with the description of Muggleton in
+its distance from Rochester. It is only seven and a half, instead of
+fifteen miles, from Rochester. And it is not a corporate town. But:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>"Everybody whose genius has a topographical bent knows perfectly
+well that Muggleton is a corporate town, with a mayor, burgess and
+freemen, and anybody who has consulted the addresses of the mayor
+to the freemen, or the freemen to the mayor, or both to the
+corporation, or all three to Parliament, will learn from thence
+what they ought to have known before, that Muggleton is an ancient
+and loyal borough, mingling a zealous advocacy of Christian
+principles with a devoted attachment to commercial rights; in
+demonstration whereof, the mayor, corporation, and other
+inhabitants have presented, at divers times, no fewer than one
+thousand four hundred and twenty petitions against the continuance
+of negro slavery abroad, and an equal number against any
+interference with the factory system at home; sixty-eight in favour
+of the sale of livings in the Church, and eighty-six for abolishing
+Sunday trading in the street."</p></div>
+
+<p>If Town Malling has not had so distinguished a political history as that
+which Dickens assigned to<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_39" id="Page_39">[39]</a></span> Muggleton, it has a pretty cricket ground,
+not far removed from the High Street, and the reputation of having in
+past years distinguished itself in the local cricket of this district of
+Kent. It is not difficult to believe, then, that Dumkins and Podder here
+made their gallant stand for All Muggleton against the Dingley Dellers,
+and that at the Swan&mdash;otherwise the Blue Lion&mdash;the Pickwick fellowship
+shared the conviviality of the rival teams, until Mr. Snodgrass's notes
+of the evening's transactions faded away into a blur in which there was
+an indistinct reference to "broiled bones" and "cold without". The
+stately ruins of a Benedictine Abbey, founded by Bishop Gundulf, give to
+the town an attraction of a severer kind.</p>
+
+<p>From Town Malling to Cobtree Hall, supposing the double identification
+to be correct, should be a walk of not above two miles "through shady
+lanes and sequestered footpaths", the delightful scenery of which made
+Mr. Pickwick feel regret to arrive in the main street of "Muggleton".
+The distance, however, is in fact something more than two miles as the
+crow flies. Cobtree Hall is a green-muffled Elizabethan mansion, of red
+brick, faced with stone, and looks out over an undulating country of
+orchards and hop fields. It has been altered and enlarged since the days
+of <i>Pickwick</i>, but the kitchen is just<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_40" id="Page_40">[40]</a></span> such another large, oldfashioned
+kitchen as befits the Christmas games and wassail that had been kept up
+at Manor Farm, Dingley Dell, "by old Wardle's forefathers from time
+immemorial". The dining-room, though modernized, has a massive marble
+mantlepiece not unsuited to that "capacious chimney up which you could
+have driven one of the new patent cabs, wheels and all", and in which a
+blazing fire used to roar every evening, not only when its warmth was
+grateful, but for a symbol, as it were, of old Wardle's attachment to
+his fireside. This was the kind of antiquity which made the most direct
+appeal to Dickens's sentiment and imagination&mdash;not a remote and historic
+antiquity, but the furthest extent of a living link between the Present
+and the Past. In many an old house of Kentish yeoman or squire Dickens
+would have seen some such long, dark-panelled room as the best
+sitting-room at Manor Farm, with four-branched, massive silver
+candlesticks in all sorts of recesses and on all kinds of brackets; with
+samplers and worsted landscapes of ancient date on the walls; with a
+very old lady in lofty cap and faded silk gown in the chimney corner,
+where she had sat on her little stool as a girl more than half a century
+before, and with a hearty, rubicund host presiding over a mighty bowl of
+wassail, something smaller than an ordinary washhouse copper, in<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_41" id="Page_41">[41]</a></span> which
+the hot apples would "hiss and bubble with a rich look and a jolly sound
+that were perfectly irresistible". Or when the carpet was up, the
+candles burning brightly, and family, guests, and servants were all
+ranged in eager lines, longing for the signal to start an oldfashioned
+country dance as, from a shady bower of holly and evergreens at the
+upper end of the room, the two best fiddles and only harp of the nearest
+market town prepared to strike up, it is no wonder that such a lover of
+unspoilt, natural manners as Boz declared, "If any of the old English
+yeomen had turned into fairies when they died, it was just the place in
+which they would have held their revels."</p>
+
+<p>A triangular piece of ground, with a sprinkling of elms about it, is all
+that is left of the rookery in which Mr. Tupman met with an accident
+from the unskilful marksmanship of Winkle. At the back of the house is
+the pond where Mr. Winkle's reputation as a sportsman led him into
+another catastrophe, and his skating exposed itself as of anything but a
+graceful and "swan-like" style; where, too, Mr. Pickwick revived the
+sliding propensities of his boyhood with infinite zest until the ice
+gave way with a "sharp, smart crack", and Mr. Pickwick's hat, gloves,
+and handkerchief, floating on the surface, were all of Mr. Pickwick that
+anyone could see.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_42" id="Page_42">[42]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Cobtree Hall, it has been mentioned, divides the parishes of Boxley and
+Allington, the initials of which are carved on a beam in the kitchen
+that suggests Phiz's plate of "Christmas Eve at Mr. Wardle's". In
+Aylesford the tomb of the prototype, according to local tradition, of
+"Mr. Wardle" bears the inscription, "Also to the memory of Mr. W. Spong,
+late of Cobtree, in the Parish of Boxley, who died November 15th, 1839".
+Boxley village is near the ancient Pilgrims' Road to Canterbury, and
+here Alfred Tennyson stayed in 1842. Park House, nearer the Medway, was
+the home of Edward Lushington, who married Tennyson's sister Cecilia,
+and in its grounds Tennyson found the setting for the prologue to the
+"Princess". The "happy faces" of "the multitude, a thousand heads", by
+which the "sloping pasture" was "sown", under "broad ambrosial aisles of
+lofty lime", had probably come from Maidstone on the annual jaunt of
+that town's Mechanics' Institute. The village of Allington stands on the
+other side of the Medway, though the boundaries of the parish extend
+beyond the right bank of the river. Allington Castle, which the Medway
+half-encircles with a sweeping bend, was one of the seven chief castles
+of Kent. It was here that Sir Thomas Wyatt, the elder, diplomatist,
+poet, and lover of Anne Boleyn, who with the gallant and ill-fated
+Surrey "preluded",<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_43" id="Page_43">[43]</a></span> in a more exact sense than it could be said of
+Chaucer, "those melodious bursts that fill the spacious times of great
+Elizabeth", was able to proclaim, in an epistle to "Mine own John
+Poins":</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"I am here in Kent and Christendome,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Among the Muses where I read and rhyme".<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>Hither there comes, in Tennyson's "Queen Mary", to Sir Thomas Wyatt, the
+younger, his man William, with news of "three thousand men on Penenden
+heath all calling after you, and your worship's name heard into
+Maidstone market, and your worship the first man in Kent". And Wyatt
+sets out to lead a rising which will end on Tower Hill, and setting out,
+looks back and cries:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"Ah, grey old castle of Allington, green field<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Beside the brimming Medway, it may chance<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">That I shall never look upon you more".<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>"The brimming Medway."&mdash;the epithet is as just as Tennyson's descriptive
+epithet almost invariably proves to be. For at Allington the Medway,
+which from Aylesford Bridge to Allington Lock has dwindled to a narrow
+stream, swells out into a broad expanse, where many boats can easily
+move abreast. If the Cloisterham Weir of <i>Edwin Drood</i> were really the
+nearest weir on the Medway to Rochester, then Allington Lock would be
+the place. But it has been<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_44" id="Page_44">[44]</a></span> pointed out on an earlier page that the
+distances do not tally in the novel and in actuality, and Dickens may
+have had in mind the weir on Snodland Brook.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 600px;">
+<img src="images/i057.jpg" width="600" height="399" alt="MAIDSTONE, ALL SAINTS&#39; CHURCH AND THE PALACE" title="" />
+<span class="caption">MAIDSTONE, ALL SAINTS&#39; CHURCH AND THE PALACE</span>
+</div>
+
+<p>The country round Maidstone abounds in the "happy valleys" portrayed in
+the epilogue to the "Princess", with "grey halls alone among their
+massive groves", and "here and there a rustic tower Half lost in belts
+of hop and breadths of wheat". The gyres and loops of the Medway, too,
+afford through the screen of woodlands and orchards "the shimmering
+glimpses of a stream". To the credulous enthusiasm of an early
+eighteenth-century native of Strood, that Anne Pratt who did for English
+wild flowers what White of Selborne did for English wild birds,
+"travellers who have beheld in other lands the various scenes of
+culture&mdash;the olive grounds of Spain or Syria, the vineyards of Italy,
+the cotton plantations of India, or the rose fields of the East&mdash;have
+generally agreed that not one of them all equals in beauty our English
+hop gardens". To Dickens himself such a panegyric of the Kentish hop
+gardens would have scarcely seemed exaggeration, but he would have
+hastened to add the dismal antithesis of the missionary bishop&mdash;"Only
+man is vile". He had barely settled-in at Gadshill Place when he
+wrote:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>"Hop-picking is going on, and people sleep in the garden, and
+breathe in at the keyhole of the house door. I have been amazed,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_45" id="Page_45">[45]</a></span>
+before this year, by the number of miserable base wretches, hardly
+able to crawl, who go hop-picking. I find it is a superstition that
+the dust of the newly picked hop, falling freshly into the throat,
+is a cure for consumption. So the poor creatures drag themselves
+along the roads, and sleep under wet hedges, and get cured soon and
+finally."</p></div>
+
+<p>The county town of Kent is situated not only on the Medway, but on the
+pilgrim road to Canterbury, and of a monastic hospital for pilgrims and
+other poor travellers there still survive some relics. Overlooking the
+river stand some fine old houses, and the conspicuous grey square tower
+of All Saints, built by the proud Archbishop Courtenay, the enemy of
+Wicliffe, in the fourteenth century. Here is the tomb of Grocyn, that
+"lord of splendid lore Orient from old Hellas' shore", who was appointed
+master of the collegiate church in 1506. One of the sixteen palaces that
+the Archbishops of Canterbury could boast in days gone by is preserved
+as the local school of science and art, a dedication to public use which
+commemorates the Jubilee of Queen Victoria in 1887. The Corporation
+Museum is an even more interesting and beautiful structure. It was
+Chillington Manor House, a seat of the Cobham family, and, though it has
+had a new wing annexed to it, it is an exceptionally well preserved and
+beautiful example of Elizabethan domestic architecture, with its
+latticed windows, jutting gables, elaborately moulded timber, and
+pillared chimneys. In<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_46" id="Page_46">[46]</a></span> the panel of an oak fireplace is a carved head of
+Dickens, by a local carver named Hughes, who was employed at Gadshill
+Place. To Maidstone Jail Dickens proposed to carry Sir Luke Fildes, in
+order that he might make a picture of Jasper in the condemned cell, and
+do something which would surpass Cruikshank's illustration to <i>Oliver
+Twist</i>, in which Fagin's terror-stricken vigil in the murderer's cell is
+portrayed.</p>
+
+<p>At Maidstone the southern limit may be considered to have been reached
+of the district of Kent which can be distinguished as "Dickens-land" in
+the most intimate sense, as lying within the radius of the novelist's
+habitual walks and drives from his residence at Gadshill. It does not
+enter into the scope of this brief essay to describe topographically
+other parts of Kent. But it will be excusable to glance very slightly at
+Dickens's associations with Canterbury&mdash;though this is the subject of a
+separate monograph in this series&mdash;Broadstairs, Deal, Dover, and the
+famous London-to-Dover road through Rochester, Chatham, and Canterbury.</p>
+
+<p>No one, perhaps, who has ever read <i>Little Dorrit</i>, whatever else in the
+novel may slip the memory, fails to recall the oracular utterance of Mr.
+F.'s aunt that "There's milestones on the Dover road". To the opening of
+<i>A Tale of Two Cities</i> the colour and atmosphere of the time in which it
+is set, and of the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_47" id="Page_47">[47]</a></span> drama which is to be developed, are given at once
+by the alarm of the passengers of the Dover coach as they walk up
+Shooter's Hill to ease the horses, when the furious galloping of a
+horseman is heard behind them&mdash;the supposed highwayman proving to be,
+however, Jerry Cruncher, messenger at Tellson's Bank by day, and at
+night an "agricooltural character" of ghoulish avocations. David
+Copperfield trudged the Dover road, footsore and hungry, when he left
+Murdstone and Grinby's blacking warehouse to throw himself on the
+compassion of Betsy Trotwood, "and got through twenty-three miles on the
+straight road" to Rochester and Chatham on a certain Sunday. Afterwards,
+when he had found a home and a protecting providence with his aunt, he
+met with his "first fall in life" on the Canterbury coach, being asked
+by the coachman to resign the box seat to a seedy gentleman, who
+proclaimed that "'Orses and dogs is some men's fancy. They're wittles
+and drink to me."</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>"I have always considered this as the first fall I had in life.
+When I booked my place at the coach office, I had had 'Box Seat'
+written against the entry, and had given the bookkeeper half a
+crown. I was got up in a special greatcoat and shawl, expressly to
+do honour to that distinguished eminence; had glorified myself upon
+it a good deal; and had felt that I was a credit to the coach. And
+here, in the very first stage, I was supplanted by a shabby man
+with a squint, who had no other merit than smelling like a livery
+stables, and being able to walk<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_48" id="Page_48">[48]</a></span> across me, more like a fly than a
+human being, while the horses were at a canter."</p></div>
+
+<p>Pip, in <i>Great Expectations</i>, makes many expeditions to and fro on the
+Dover road, between Rochester and London, and on one of them, riding
+outside, has the two convicts, bound for the hulks moored off the
+marshes, as fellow passengers on the back seat.</p>
+
+<p>At Canterbury it is not possible to establish the identity of Dr.
+Strong's house&mdash;"a grave building in a courtyard, with a learned air
+about it that seemed very well suited to the stray rooks and jackdaws
+who came down from the Cathedral towers, and walked with a clerkly
+bearing on the grass plot"&mdash;but Canon Benham has asserted his conviction
+that Mr. Wickfield's house&mdash;where David made the acquaintance of Agnes
+and of Uriah Heap&mdash;is at the corner of Broad Street and Lady Wotton's
+Green, though it is another residence, by the West Gate, which is
+represented on the picture postcards.</p>
+
+<p>The Royal Fountain Hotel in St. Margaret's Street (formerly the Watling
+Street) is recognized as the County Inn at which Mr. Dick used to sleep
+when he went over to Canterbury to visit David Copperfield at Dr.
+Strong's school. All the little bills which he contracted there, it will
+be remembered, were referred to Miss Trotwood before they were paid; a
+circumstance which caused David to<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_49" id="Page_49">[49]</a></span> think "that Mr. Dick was only
+allowed to rattle his money, and not to spend it". A less pretentious
+establishment, the "little inn" where Mr. Micawber put up on his first
+visit to Canterbury, and "occupied a little room in it partitioned off
+from the commercial, and strongly flavoured with tobacco smoke", is
+probably the Sun Inn in Sun Street. Here Mr. and Mrs. Micawber
+entertained David to "a beautiful little dinner"&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>"Quite an elegant dish of fish; the kidney end of a loin of veal
+roasted; fried sausage meat; a partridge and a pudding. There was
+wine, and there was strong ale; and after dinner Mrs. Micawber made
+us a bowl of hot punch with her own hands."</p></div>
+
+<p>Local tradition at Broadstairs used to point to Fort House, on the cliff
+by the Coastguard Station, as the holiday residence at which Dickens
+wrote most of <i>Bleak House</i>. But though it has been rechristened from
+the title of the novel, by an owner who demolished Dickens's summer
+home, and built the existing pseudo-Gothic structure on its foundations,
+no part of <i>Bleak House</i> was written at Broadstairs. Dickens, however,
+for many summers, visited the little town on the curving bay between
+Margate and Ramsgate; the Albion Hotel, where he notes that "the
+landlord has delicious hollands", No. 12 (now 31) High Street, and Lawn
+House, near Fort House, receiving him at different times. At Broadstairs
+he<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_50" id="Page_50">[50]</a></span> wrote a portion of <i>Pickwick</i>, of <i>Nicholas Nickleby</i>, and <i>The Old
+Curiosity Shop</i>, and he also stayed there while engaged on the <i>American
+Notes</i>, <i>Dombey and Son</i>, and <i>David Copperfield</i>. He forsook it at
+last, because it had become too noisy, but he has left an agreeable
+picture of it in <i>Our Watering Place</i>; but a passage in a letter to
+Forster invests it with still gayer colours:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>"It is the brightest day you ever saw. The sun is sparkling on the
+water so that I can hardly bear to look at it. The tide is in, and
+the fishing boats are dancing like mad. Upon the green-topped
+cliffs the corn is cut and piled in shocks; and thousands of
+butterflies are fluttering about, taking the bright little red
+flags at the mastheads for flowers, and panting with delight
+accordingly."</p></div>
+
+<p>To the characters and the <i>mise en sc&egrave;ne</i> of his novels, however,
+Broadstairs appears to have contributed nothing, except that the lady
+whose aversion to donkeys furnished so strong an idiosyncrasy to Miss
+Betsy Trotwood's character was a native, not of Dover, as in the novel,
+but of Broadstairs.</p>
+
+<p>Dover, besides giving a local habitation to David's aunt, is associated
+with <i>The Tale of Two Cities</i>, since it was here that Mr. Lorry made the
+startling revelation to Miss Manette that her father had been "Recalled
+to Life". The vignette of eighteenth-century Dover is executed with true
+Dickensian verve:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>"The little narrow, crooked town of Dover hid itself away from the
+beach, and ran its head into the chalk cliffs like a marine<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_51" id="Page_51">[51]</a></span>
+ostrich. The beach was a desert of heaps of sea and stones tumbling
+wildly about, and the sea did what it liked, and what it liked was
+destruction. It thundered at the town, and thundered at the cliffs,
+and brought the coast down, madly. The air among the houses was of
+so strong a piscatory flavour that one might have supposed sick
+fish went up to be dipped in it, as sick people went down to be
+dipped in the sea. A little fishing was done in the port, and a
+quantity of strolling about by night, and looking seaward:
+particularly at those times when the tide made, and was near flood.
+Small tradesmen, who did no business whatever, sometimes
+unaccountably realized large fortunes, and it was remarkable that
+nobody in the neighbourhood could endure a lamplighter."</p></div>
+
+<p>It was to Dover that Dickens went when he was labouring with unusual
+difficulty over <i>Bleak House</i>, and lamenting his inability to "grind
+sparks out of this dull anvil". At Dover, on his Second Series of
+Readings, he found "the audience with the greatest sense of humour", and
+"they laughed with such really cordial enjoyment, when Squeers read the
+boy's letters, that the contagion" was irresistible even to Dickens
+himself.</p>
+
+<p>Deal, as it was in 1853, is rapidly but vigorously sketched in chapter
+xlv of <i>Bleak House</i>. Esther Summerson arrives from a night journey by
+coach, eager and anxious to help, if possible, Richard Carstone, the
+unhappy victim of the fatal chancery lawsuit:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>"At last we came into the narrow streets of Deal; and very gloomy
+they were, upon a raw misty morning. The long flat<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_52" id="Page_52">[52]</a></span> beach, with its
+little irregular houses, wooden and brick, and its litter of
+capstans, and great boats, and sheds, and bare upright poles with
+tackle and blocks, and loose gravelly waste places overgrown with
+grass and weeds, wore as dull an appearance as any place I ever
+saw. The sea was heaving under a thick white fog; and nothing else
+was moving but a few early rope-makers, who, with the yarn twisted
+round their bodies, looked as if, tired of their present state of
+existence, they were twisting themselves into cordage. But when we
+got into a warm room in an excellent hotel, and sat down,
+comfortably washed and dressed, to an early breakfast (for it was
+too late to think of going to bed), Deal began to look more
+cheerful.... Then the fog began to rise like a curtain; and numbers
+of ships, that we had had no idea were near, appeared. I don't know
+how many sail the waiter told us were then lying in the Downs. Some
+of these vessels were of grand size: one was a large Indiaman, just
+come home; and when the sun shone through the clouds, making
+silvery pools in the dark sea, the way in which these ships
+brightened, and shadowed, and changed, amid a bustle of boats
+putting off from the shore to them, and from them to the shore, and
+a general life and motion in themselves and everything around them,
+was most beautiful."</p></div>
+
+<p>That Dickens was essentially a "Kentish Man", in spite of the absence of
+a birth qualification, in spite, too, of his long residence in London,
+and of his peculiarly intimate knowledge of the byways and nooks and
+corners of London, ample proof has by this time been given. To this,
+however, may be added Forster's significant statement that, "Excepting
+always the haunts and associations of his childhood, Dickens had no
+particular sentiment of locality, and any special regard for houses he
+had lived in was not a thing noticeable in him". This was not<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_53" id="Page_53">[53]</a></span>
+surprising. The conditions of life in a modern capital under most
+circumstances, but especially for anyone who has made many removes, tend
+to produce the impression that a man's rooftree only represents the
+transient shelter of a caravanserai, rather than an abiding habitation
+on which memory has stamped indelible traces. Nor can even the most
+extended associations of maturity take the place of the imperishable
+links forged in the most susceptible years of fresh and sensitive
+childhood. For Dickens this vital distinction was emphasized both by
+natural idiosyncrasy and by the pressure of events which shaped his
+destiny.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>"If it should appear," he says, speaking of himself under the mask
+of David Copperfield, "from anything I may set down in this
+narrative, that I was a child of close observation, or that as a
+man I have a strong memory of my childhood, I undoubtedly lay claim
+to both of these characteristics."</p></div>
+
+<p>The change from Chatham and Rochester to London was indissolubly
+connected in his mind with a change in the family fortunes that deprived
+him of the ordinary advantages and pleasures open to any average boy of
+even the lower middle classes. It ushered in a period of misery and
+degradation that he could never recall without acute suffering. The few
+years of happiness which he enjoyed before he was carried away to London
+in the stage coach "Commodore",<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_54" id="Page_54">[54]</a></span> at the age of nine, were divided from a
+strenuous and successful manhood by so dark a gulf as to concentrate all
+the powers of recollection upon them with a desperate kind of intensity.
+It was the realization of a childish ambition conceived in that halcyon
+era which drew him to Gadshill, and he returned again and again to the
+contemplation of his earliest dreams and imaginings. He wrote from
+Gadshill of his old nurse&mdash;the original, it can hardly be doubted, of
+Peggotty:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>"I feel much as I used to do when I was a small child, a few miles
+off [i.e. at Ordnance Terrace, Chatham], and somebody&mdash;<i>who</i>, I
+wonder, and which way did <i>she</i> go when she died?&mdash;hummed the
+evening hymn, and I cried on the pillow&mdash;either with the remorseful
+consciousness of having kicked somebody else, or because still
+somebody else had hurt my feelings in the course of the day".</p></div>
+
+<p>For the second number of <i>Household Words</i>, when he "felt an uneasy
+sense of there being a want of something tender, which would apply to
+some universal household knowledge", he composed a little paper about "a
+child's dream of a star". It was the story of a brother and sister,
+constant child companions, who used to make friends of a star, watching
+it together until they knew when and where it would rise, and always
+bidding it good-night, so that when the sister dies, the lonely brother
+still connects her with the star, which he then sees opening as a sea<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_55" id="Page_55">[55]</a></span>
+of light, and its rays making a shining pathway from earth to heaven. It
+was his sister Fanny, who had often wandered with him at night in St.
+Mary's Churchyard, near their home at Chatham, looking up at the stars,
+and her death, shortly before the paper was written, had revived the
+fancy of childhood. In <i>The Uncommercial Traveller</i> he revisits
+"Dullborough", and the first discovery he makes is that the station has
+swallowed up the playing field of the school to which he went during his
+last two years at Chatham.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>"It was gone. The two beautiful hawthorn trees, the hedge, the
+turf, and all those buttercups and daisies, had given place to the
+stoniest of jolting roads; while, beyond the station, an ugly dark
+monster of a tunnel kept its jaws open, as if it had swallowed them
+and were ravenous for more destruction. The coach that had carried
+me away, was melodiously called Timpson's Blue-eyed Maid [it was
+really called the 'Commodore'], and belonged to Timpson, at the
+coach office up street; the locomotive engine that had brought me
+back was called severely No. 97, and belonged to S.E.R., and was
+spitting ashes and hot water over the blighted ground.... Here, in
+the haymaking time, had I been delivered from the dungeons of
+Seringapatam, an immense pile (of haycock), by my countrymen, the
+victorious British (boy next door and his two cousins), and had
+been recognized with ecstasy by my affianced one (Miss Green), who
+had come all the way from England (second house in the terrace) to
+ransom me and marry me."</p></div>
+
+<p>In playful vein Dickens professes to record his disappointment at
+failing to receive any recognition from a "native", in the person of a
+phlegmatic green<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_56" id="Page_56">[56]</a></span>grocer, when he revisits Rochester, and revives the
+associations of haunts beloved in childhood.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>"Nettled by his phlegmatic conduct, I informed him that I had left
+the town when I was a child. He slowly returned, quite unsoftened,
+and not without a sarcastic kind of complacency, Had I? Ah! and did
+I find it had got on tolerably well without me? Such is the
+difference (I thought when I had left him a few hundred yards
+behind, and was by so much in a better temper) between going away
+from a place and remaining in it. I had no right, I reflected, to
+be angry with the greengrocer for his want of interest; I was
+nothing to him; whereas he was the town, the cathedral, the bridge,
+the river, my childhood, and a large slice of my life, to me."</p></div>
+
+<p>That is one side of the medal, but the other is displayed in <i>David
+Copperfield</i>, when little Mr. Chillip, the doctor, welcomes David back
+to England:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>"'We are not ignorant, sir,' said Mr. Chillip, slowly shaking his
+little head again, 'down in our part of the country, of your fame.
+There must be great excitement here, sir,' said Mr. Chillip,
+tapping himself on the forehead with his forefinger. 'You must find
+it a trying occupation, sir!'"</p></div>
+
+<p>A feature of Dickens's literary manner, so insistent that the most
+superficial reader cannot miss it, is the individual and almost human
+aspect which a street or a landscape, a house or a room, takes on in his
+description. A typical example may be selected in Mr. Wickfield's
+house&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>"A very old house bulging out over the road; a house with long, low
+lattice windows bulging out still farther, and beams with carved
+heads on the ends bulging out too, so that I fancied the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_57" id="Page_57">[57]</a></span> whole
+house was leaning forward, trying to see who was passing on the
+narrow pavement below."</p></div>
+
+<p>It was the outcome of an acute nervous sensibility, amounting at times
+to an almost neurotic irritability, such as peeps out from his
+confession that the shape of Earl Grey's head, when he was a
+Parliamentary reporter in the Gallery, "was misery to me and weighed
+down my youth". This peculiarity of temperament had established itself
+when, a little delicate and highly strung child, he used to transfer the
+scenes and happenings of the novels to which he stole away from the
+other boys at their play, into the setting of his own existence, and
+"every barn in the neighbourhood, every stone in the church, and every
+foot of the churchyard, had some association of its own connected with
+these books, and stood for some locality made famous in them".</p>
+
+<p>There has seldom, perhaps, been such an absence of complexity in genius
+of a high order as there was in Dickens's character. But though there
+was no complexity, there were two very different aspects&mdash;acute
+sensibility was not incompatible with a virile and buoyant spirit. And
+so Dickens's associations with the country which he loved best and knew
+most intimately were, on the one side, those of a dreamy childhood, on
+the other, of a lusty zest in outdoor life and the rustic jollity of an
+old-world "Merry<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_58" id="Page_58">[58]</a></span> England". The sports and revels of Manor Farm, Dingley
+Dell, have all the exuberance of Lever's Irish novels. Dickens must have
+often taken part in merry-makings such as he describes, on flying visits
+that are not recorded in Forster, before he sat down to write about them
+during his honeymoon at Chalk. As the Master of Gadshill, his lithe,
+upright figure, clad in loose-fitting garments, and rather dilapidated
+shoes, was a familiar sight to all the country neighbours, as he swung
+along the shady lanes, banked high with hedges that were full of
+violets, purple and white, ferns, and lichens, and mosses. Often he
+would call at the oldfashioned "Crispin and Crispianus", on the north
+side of the London road just out of Strood, for a glass of ale, or a
+little cold brandy and water, and sit in the corner of the settle
+opposite the fireplace, looking at nothing but seeing everything. In the
+chapter on "Tramps" in <i>The Uncommercial Traveller</i>, he imagines himself
+to be the travelling clockmaker, who sees to something wrong with the
+bell of the turret stable clock up at Cobham Hall, and after being
+regaled in the enormous servants' hall with beef and bread, and powerful
+ale, sets off through the woods till the town lights appear right in
+front, and lies for the night at the ancient sign of Crispin and
+Crispianus. The floating population of the roads,&mdash;the travelling
+showman, the cheap jack, the harvest<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_59" id="Page_59">[59]</a></span> and hopping tramps, the young
+fellows who trudge along barefoot, their boots slung over their
+shoulders, their shabby bundles under their arms, their sticks newly cut
+from some roadside wood, and the truculently humorous tramp, who tells
+the Beadle: "Why, blow your little town! who wants to be in it? Wot does
+your dirty little town mean by comin' and stickin' itself in the road to
+anywhere?"&mdash;all are closely scanned and noted, as they mount or descend
+Strood Hill in perennial procession. Dickens was himself a sturdy and
+inveterate pedestrian. When he suffered from insomnia he would think
+nothing of rising in the middle of the night and taking a thirty miles'
+spin before breakfast.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>"Coming in just now," he wrote in his third year at Gadshill,
+"after twelve miles in the rain, I was so wet that I have had to
+change and get my feet into warm water before I could do anything."</p></div>
+
+<p>In February, 1865, he wrote:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>"I got frost-bitten by walking continually in the snow, and getting
+wet in the feet daily. My boots hardened and softened, hardened and
+softened, my left foot swelled, and I still forced the boot on; sat
+in it to write, half the day; walked in it through the snow, the
+other half; forced the boot on again next morning; sat and walked
+again; and being accustomed to all sorts of changes in my feet,
+took no heed. At length, going out as usual, I fell lame on the
+walk, and had to limp home dead lame, through the snow, for the
+last three miles&mdash;to the remarkable terror, by the way, of the two
+big dogs."</p></div><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_60" id="Page_60">[60]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>It is hardly necessary to say that Dickens never so absorbed the local
+spirit and genius of that part of rural England which he knew and loved
+best as the Bront&euml;s absorbed the spirit of the Yorkshire moorlands, or
+Mr. Hardy the spirit of Wessex, or Mr. Eden Phillpotts the spirit of
+Dartmoor, or Sir A. Quiller-Couch the spirit of the "Delectable Duchy".
+He was too busy and preoccupied a man for this, and had too much of his
+life and work behind him, when he made his permanent home in
+"Dickens-land". And Gadshill was too near to the bustle and stir of
+Chatham to furnish a purely idyllic environment or entirely
+unsophisticated rusticity. But it is not unduly fanciful to discover the
+influence of Kentish scenery, with its bright, clear atmosphere, its
+undulating slopes of green woodland and green hop fields, pink-and-white
+orchards, and golden harvests&mdash;the prettiest though not the most
+beautiful scenery in England&mdash;upon his conception of a typical</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i7">"English home&mdash;grey twilight pour'd<br /></span>
+<span class="i3">On dewy pastures, dewy trees,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Softer than sleep&mdash;all things in order stored,<br /></span>
+<span class="i3">A haunt of ancient Peace".<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>Though no local name is attached to it, and no local tradition
+identifies it with any particular spot, there is no difficulty in fixing
+in the very heart of "Dickens-land" the picture upon which the "Battle
+of Life"<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_61" id="Page_61">[61]</a></span> is opened: the joyous dance of two girls, "quite unconstrained
+and careless", "in one little orchard attached to an old stone house
+with a honeysuckle porch", "while some half-dozen peasant women standing
+on ladders, gathering the apples from the trees, stopped in their work
+to look down, and share their enjoyment".</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>"As they danced among the orchard trees, and down the groves of
+stems and back again, and twirled each other lightly round and
+round, the influence of their airy motion seemed to spread and
+spread, in the sunlighted scene, like an expanding circle in the
+water. Their streaming hair and fluttering skirts, the elastic
+grass beneath their feet, the boughs that rustled in the morning
+air&mdash;the flushing leaves, their speckled shadows on the soft green
+ground&mdash;the balmy wind that swept along the landscape, glad to turn
+the distant windmill, cheerily&mdash;everything between the two girls,
+and the man and team at plough upon the ridge of land, where they
+showed against the sky as if they were the last things in the
+world&mdash;seemed dancing too."</p></div>
+
+<p>Something, too, of the love of good cheer, quaint old Christmas customs,
+of junketings in ancient farmhouse kitchens and the parlours of ancient
+hostelries, which has made Dickens the early Victorian apostle of
+Yuletide "wassail", can be derived from his having "powlert up and down"
+in a county abounding with comfortable manor houses and cosy inns. It is
+a ripe and mellow tradition of good cheer, that is quite distinct from
+the bovine stolidity of a harvest home in George Eliot's Loamshire or
+the crude animalism of Meredith's Gaffer Gammon. For Kent, even from<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_62" id="Page_62">[62]</a></span>
+the time of C&aelig;sar's Commentaries, has been "the civil'st place of all
+the isle".</p>
+
+<p>That is the aspect of Dickens's country on the one side&mdash;the side which,
+some years before he established himself at Gadshill, he mapped out,
+already knowing it intimately, to show to Forster in a brief excursion:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>"You will come down booked for Maidstone (I will meet you at
+Paddock-wood), and we will go thither in company over a most
+beautiful little line of railroad. The eight miles walk from
+Maidstone to Rochester, and a visit to the Druidical altar on the
+wayside, are charming. This could be accomplished on the Tuesday;
+and Wednesday we might look about us at Chatham, coming home by
+Cobham on Thursday."</p></div>
+
+<p>The other side&mdash;the dreary marshes lying between the Medway and the
+Thames, a dark, flat wilderness intersected by dykes and mounds and
+gates&mdash;had associations not less intimate. In <i>David Copperfield</i>
+Dickens transferred the dreams and the events of his childhood to an
+alien setting. In <i>Great Expectations</i> he invents a fictitious story in
+harmony with scenes in which he delighted to retrace his childish
+memories. Again, the amphibian creatures which he lightly sketches in
+<i>Great Expectations</i>, and more elaborately in <i>Our Mutual Friend</i>, had
+first impressed themselves on his imagination as he rambled, a tiny,
+eager-eyed boy, about the dockyards and waterside alleys of Chatham, or
+made trips to Sheerness<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_63" id="Page_63">[63]</a></span> with "Mr. Micawber", that is to say, his
+father, in the Navy Pay yacht, though he long afterwards pursued his
+studies of them more exhaustively at Wapping and the Isle of Dogs, and
+in expeditions with the Thames police. It was from a walk with Leech
+through Chatham by-streets that he gathered the hint of Charley Hexam
+and his father, for <i>Our Mutual Friend</i>, from the sight of "the
+uneducated father in fustian and the educated boy in spectacles".</p>
+
+<p>But when Dickens took Rochester once more for the background of a story
+in <i>Edwin Drood</i> there seems, to us in our knowledge of the event,
+something almost ominous. It suggests Waller's famous simile of the stag
+that returns to die where it was roused. Dickens's last visit to the
+town was to stimulate his imagination for the conference between
+Datchery and the Princess Puffer at the entrance to the "Monks'
+Vineyard". On the last day of his life he was busy, in the chalet in the
+garden at Gadshill Place, embodying the fancies which he had gathered
+and fused on that last visit. On the last page which he was to write he
+endeavoured to record&mdash;for the last time&mdash;his sense of the atmosphere of
+the old city.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>"A brilliant morning shines on the old city. Its antiquities and
+ruins are surpassingly beautiful, with the lusty ivy gleaming in
+the sun, and the rich trees waving in the balmy air. Changes of
+glorious light from moving boughs, songs of birds, scents from
+gardens, woods, and fields&mdash;or, rather, from the one great garden<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_64" id="Page_64">[64]</a></span>
+of the whole of the cultivated island in its yielding
+time&mdash;penetrate into the Cathedral, subdue its earthy odour, and
+preach the Resurrection and the Life. The cold stone tombs of
+centuries ago grow warm, and flecks of brightness dart into the
+sternest marble corners of the building, fluttering there like
+wings."</p></div>
+
+<p>On the eve of that last day he had more than once expressed his
+satisfaction at having finally abandoned all intention of exchanging
+Gadshill for London. He had done this still more impressively a few days
+before.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>"While he lived, he said, he should wish his name to be more and
+more associated with the place; and he had a notion that when he
+died, he should like to lie in the little graveyard belonging to
+the Cathedral at the foot of the Castle wall."</p></div>
+
+<p>Half of his wish had to go unfulfilled; the other half has been realized
+in a different but a profounder sense than that in which it is
+conceived. While he lives, in the creations of his humour and pathos,
+airy things of fun and frolic, tenderness and tears, his name is more
+and more associated "with the scenes"&mdash;to borrow the words of the
+memorial tablet in Rochester Cathedral&mdash;"in which his earliest and his
+latest years were passed", scenes that "from the associations ... which
+extended over all his life" have the best right to be known as
+"Dickens-land".</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 45%;" />
+<p class="fm4"><i>Printed by Blackie &amp; Son, Ltd., Glasgow</i></p>
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<div class="transnote">
+<h3>Transcriber's note<a name="tnotes" id="tnotes"></a></h3>
+
+<p>
+The following change has been made to the text:</p>
+
+<p>Page 19: "by an unbridgable chasm" changed to "by an
+<a name="cn1" id="cn1"></a><a href="#corr1">unbridgeable</a> chasm".</p>
+</div>
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+<pre>
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Dickens-Land, by J. A. Nicklin
+
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+</body>
+</html>
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@@ -0,0 +1,1950 @@
+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Dickens-Land, by J. A. Nicklin
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Dickens-Land
+
+Author: J. A. Nicklin
+
+Illustrator: E. W. Haslehust
+
+Release Date: December 20, 2008 [EBook #27572]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK DICKENS-LAND ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Carla Foust and The Online Distributed
+Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This file was
+produced from images generously made available by The
+Internet Archive/Canadian Libraries)
+
+
+
+
+
+Transcriber's note
+
+
+Minor punctuation errors have been changed without notice. A printer
+error has been changed, and it is listed at the end. All other
+inconsistencies are as in the original.
+
+
+
+
+   [Illustration: CHALK, HOUSE WHERE DICKENS SPENT HIS HONEYMOON]
+
+
+
+
+   DICKENS-LAND
+
+   Described by J. A. NICKLIN
+
+   Pictured by E. W. HASLEHUST
+
+   [Illustration]
+
+   BLACKIE AND SON LIMITED LONDON GLASGOW AND BOMBAY 1911
+
+
+
+
+   Beautiful England
+
+   _Volumes Ready_
+
+   OXFORD
+   THE ENGLISH LAKES
+   CANTERBURY
+   SHAKESPEARE-LAND
+   THE THAMES
+   WINDSOR CASTLE
+   CAMBRIDGE
+   NORWICH AND THE BROADS
+   THE HEART OF WESSEX
+   THE PEAK DISTRICT
+   THE CORNISH RIVIERA
+   DICKENS-LAND
+   WINCHESTER
+   THE ISLE OF WIGHT
+   CHESTER AND THE DEE
+   YORK
+
+   _Uniform with this Series_
+
+   Beautiful Ireland
+
+   LEINSTER
+   ULSTER
+   MUNSTER
+   CONNAUGHT
+
+
+
+
+LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
+
+
+                                                                    Page
+
+   Chalk, House where Dickens spent his honeymoon         _Frontispiece_
+
+   Gadshill Place from the Gardens                                     8
+
+   Rochester from Strood                                              14
+
+   Restoration House, Rochester                                       20
+
+   Cobham Park                                                        26
+
+   Cooling Church                                                     32
+
+   Aylesford                                                          38
+
+   Maidstone, All Saints' Church and the Palace                       42
+
+   Jasper's Gateway                                                   46
+
+   Chalk Church                                                       50
+
+   Shorne Church                                                      54
+
+   The Leather Bottle, Cobham                                         58
+
+
+
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+The central shrine of a literary cult is at least as often its hero's
+home of adoption as his place of birth. To the Wordsworthian,
+Cockermouth has but a faint, remote interest in comparison with Grasmere
+and Rydal Mount. Edinburgh, for all its associations with the life and
+the genius of Scott, is not as Abbotsford, or as that beloved Border
+country in which his memory has struck its deepest roots. And so it is
+with Dickens. The accident of birth attaches his name but slightly to
+Landport in South-sea. The Dickens pilgrim treads in the most palpable
+footsteps of "Boz" amongst the landmarks of a Victorian London, too
+rapidly disappearing, and through the "rich and varied landscape" on
+either side of the Medway, "covered with cornfields and pastures, with
+here and there a windmill or a distant church", which Dickens loved from
+boyhood, peopled with the creatures of his teeming fancy, and chose for
+his last and most-cherished habitation.
+
+What Abbotsford was to Scott, that, almost, to Dickens in his later
+years was Gadshill Place. From his study window in the "grave red-brick
+house" "on his little Kentish freehold"--a house which he had "added to
+and stuck bits upon in all manner of ways, so that it was as pleasantly
+irregular and as violently opposed to all architectural ideas as the
+most hopeful man could possibly desire"--he looked out, so he wrote to a
+friend, "on as pretty a view as you will find in a long day's English
+ride.... Cobham Park and Woods are behind the house; the distant Thames
+is in front; the Medway, with Rochester and its old castle and
+cathedral, on one side." On every side he could not fail to reach, in
+those brisk walks with which he sought, too strenuously, perhaps, health
+and relaxation, some object redolent of childish dreams or mature
+achievement, of intimate joys and sorrows, of those phantoms of his
+brain which to him then, as to hundreds of thousands of his readers
+since, were not less real than the men and women of everyday encounter.
+On those seven miles between Rochester and Maidstone, which he
+discovered to be one of the most beautiful walks in England, he might be
+tempted to strike off at Aylesford for a short stroll to such a
+pleasant old Elizabethan mansion as Cobtree Hall, the very type, it may
+be, of Manor Farm, Dingley Dell, or for a longer tramp to Town Malling,
+from which he may well have borrowed many strokes for the picture of
+Muggleton, that town of sturdy Kentish cricket. Sometimes he would walk
+across the marshes to Gravesend, and returning through the village of
+Chalk, would pause for a retrospective glance at the house where his
+honeymoon was spent and a good part of _Pickwick_ planned. In the latter
+end of the year, when he could take a short cut through the stubble
+fields from Higham to the marshes lying further down the Thames, he
+would often visit the desolate churchyard where little Pip was so
+terribly frightened by the convict. Or, descending the long slope from
+Gadshill to Strood, and crossing Rochester Bridge--over the balustrades
+of which Mr. Pickwick leaned in agreeable reverie when he was accosted
+by Dismal Jemmy--the author of _Great Expectations_ and _Edwin Drood_
+would pass from Rochester High Street--where Mr. Pumblechook's seed shop
+looks across the way at Miss Twinkleton's establishment--into the Vines,
+to compare once more the impression on his unerring "inward eye" with
+the actual features of that Restoration House which, under another name,
+he assigned to Miss Havisham, and so round by Fort Pitt to the Chatham
+lines. And there--who can doubt?--if he seemed to hear the melancholy
+wind that whistled through the deserted fields as Mr. Winkle took his
+reluctant stand, a wretched and desperate duellist, his thoughts would
+also stray to the busy dockyard town and "a blessed little room" in a
+plain-looking plaster-fronted house from which dated all his early
+readings and imaginings.
+
+Between the "very small and not-over-particularly-taken-care-of boy" and
+the strong, self-reliant man whose fame had filled two continents,
+Gadshill Place was an immediate link. Everyone knows the story which
+Dickens tells of a vision of his former self meeting him on the road to
+Canterbury.
+
+     "So smooth was the old high road, and so fresh were the horses, and
+     so fast went I, that it was midway between Gravesend and Rochester,
+     and the widening river was bearing the ships, white-sailed or
+     black-smoked, out to sea, when I noticed by the wayside a very
+     queer small boy.
+
+     "'Halloa!' said I to the very queer small boy, 'where do you live?'
+
+     "'At Chatham,' says he.
+
+     "'What do you do there?' say I.
+
+     "'I go to school,' says he.
+
+     "I took him up in a moment, and we went on. Presently, the very
+     queer small boy says, 'This is Gadshill we are coming to, where
+     Falstaff went out to rob those travellers and ran away.'
+
+     "'You know something about Falstaff, eh?' said I.
+
+     "'All about him,' said the very queer small boy. 'I am old (I am
+     nine), and I read all sorts of books. But do let us stop at the top
+     of the hill, and look at the house there, if you please!'
+
+     "'You admire that house?' said I.
+
+[Illustration: GADSHILL PLACE FROM THE GARDENS]
+
+     "'Bless you, sir,' said the very queer small boy, 'when I was not
+     more than half as old as nine, it used to be a treat for me to be
+     brought to look at it. And now I am nine I come by myself to look
+     at it. And ever since I can recollect, my father, seeing me so fond
+     of it, has often said to me, If you were to be very persevering,
+     and were to work hard, you might some day come to live in it.
+     Though that's impossible!' said the very queer small boy, drawing a
+     low breath, and now staring at the house out of window with all his
+     might.
+
+     "I was rather amazed to be told this by the very queer small boy;
+     for that house happens to be _my_ house, and I have reason to
+     believe that what he said was true."
+
+As the queer small boy in the _Uncommercial Traveller_ said, Gadshill
+Place is at the very top of Falstaff's hill. It stands on the south side
+of the Dover road;--on the north side, but a little lower down, is "a
+delightfully oldfashioned inn of the old coaching days", the "Sir John
+Falstaff";--surrounded by a high wall and screened by a row of limes.
+The front view, with its wooden and pillared porch, its bays, its dormer
+windows let into the roof, and its surmounting bell turret and vane,
+bears much the same appearance as it did to the queer small boy. But
+amongst the many additions and alterations which Dickens was constantly
+making, the drawing-room had been enlarged from a smaller existing one,
+and the conservatory into which it opens was, as he laughingly told his
+younger daughter, "positively the last improvement at Gadshill"--a jest
+to prove sadly prophetic, for it was uttered on the Sunday before his
+death. The little library, too, on the opposite side of the porch from
+the drawing-room and conservatory, was a converted bedroom. Its aspect
+is familiar to most Dickens-lovers from Sir Luke Fildes's famous picture
+of "The Empty Chair". In summer, however, Dickens used to do his work
+not in the library but in a Swiss chalet, presented to him by Fechter,
+the great actor, which stood in a shrubbery lying on the other side of
+the highroad, and entered by a subway that Dickens had excavated for the
+purpose. The chalet now must be sought in the terrace garden of Cobham
+Hall. When Dickens sat at his desk in a room of the chalet, "up among
+the branches of the trees", the five mirrors which he had put in
+reflected "the leaves quivering at the windows, and the great fields of
+waving corn, and the sail-dotted river". The birds and butterflies flew
+in and out, the green branches shot in at the open windows, and the
+lights and shadows of the clouds and the scent of flowers and of
+everything growing for miles had the same free access. No imaginative
+artist, whether in words or colour, could have desired a more inspiring
+environment. The back of the house, looking southward, descends by one
+flight of steps upon a lawn, where one of the balustrades of the old
+Rochester Bridge had, when this was demolished, been fitted up as a
+sundial. The lawn, in turn, communicates with flower and vegetable
+gardens by another flight of steps. Beyond is "the much-coveted meadow"
+which Dickens obtained, partly by exchange, from the trustees--not of
+Watts's Charity, as Forster has stated, but of Sir Joseph Williamson's
+Free School at Rochester. It was in this field that the villagers from
+neighbouring Higham played cricket matches, and that, just before
+Dickens went to America for the last time, he held those quaint
+footraces for all and sundry, described in one of his letters to
+Forster. Though the landlord of the Falstaff, from over the way, was
+allowed to erect a drinking booth, and all the prizes were given in
+money; though, too, the road from Chatham to Gadshill was like a fair
+all day, and the crowd consisted mainly of rough labouring men, of
+soldiers, sailors, and navvies, there was no disorder, not a flag, rope,
+or stake displaced, and no drunkenness whatever. As striking a tribute,
+if rightly considered, as ever was exacted by a strong and winning
+personality! One of those oddities in which Dickens delighted was
+elicited by a hurdle race for strangers. The man who came in second ran
+120 yards and leaped over ten hurdles with a pipe in his mouth and
+smoking it all the time. "If it hadn't been for your pipe," said the
+Master of Gadshill Place, clapping him on the shoulder at the
+winning-post, "you would have been first." "I beg your pardon, sir," he
+answered, "but if it hadn't been for my pipe, I should have been
+nowhere."
+
+To the hospitable hearth of Gadshill Place were drawn, by the fame of
+the "Inimitable Boz", a long succession of brilliant men and women,
+mostly of the Anglo-Saxon race, whether English or American; and if not
+in the throngs for which at Abbotsford open house was kept, yet with a
+frequency which would have made literary work almost impossible for the
+host without remarkable steadiness of purpose and regularity of habits.
+For Longfellow and his daughters he "turned out", that they might see
+all of the surrounding country which could be seen in a short stay, "a
+couple of postilions in the old red jackets of the old red royal Dover
+road, and it was like a holiday ride in England fifty years ago".
+
+In his study in the late and early months, and his Swiss chalet through
+the summer, Dickens would write such novels as _Great Expectations_, and
+the unfinished _Mystery of Edwin Drood_, taking his local colour from
+spots which lay within the compass of a reasonable walk; and others,
+such as _A Tale of Two Cities_ and _Our Mutual Friend_, to which the
+circumstances of time and place furnished little or nothing except their
+influence on his mood. Some of the occasional papers which, in the
+character of "The Uncommercial Traveller", he furnished to _All the
+Year Round_, have as much of the _genius loci_ as any of his romances.
+Even to-day the rushing swarm of motor cars has not yet driven from the
+more secluded nooks of Kent all such idylls of open-air vagabondage as
+this:--
+
+     "I have my eyes upon a piece of Kentish road, bordered on either
+     side by a wood, and having on one hand, between the road dust and
+     the trees, a skirting patch of grass. Wild flowers grow in
+     abundance on this spot, and it lies high and airy, with a distant
+     river stealing steadily away to the ocean, like a man's life. To
+     gain the milestone here, which the moss, primroses, violets,
+     bluebells and wild roses would soon render illegible but for
+     peering travellers pushing them aside with their sticks, you must
+     come up a steep hill, come which way you may. So, all the tramps
+     with carts or caravans--the gipsy tramp, the show tramp, the Cheap
+     Jack--find it impossible to resist the temptations of the place,
+     and all turn the horse loose when they come to it, and boil the
+     pot. Bless the place, I love the ashes of the vagabond fires that
+     have scorched its grass!"
+
+The Kentish road that Dickens thus describes is certainly the Dover Road
+at Gadshill, from which, of course, there is a steep declivity whether
+the route is westward to Gravesend or eastwards to Strood and Rochester.
+In Strood itself Dickens found little to interest him, though the view
+of Rochester from Strood Hill is an arresting one, with the stately
+mediaevalism of Castle and Cathedral emerging from a kind of haze in
+which it is hard to distinguish what is smoke-wreath and what a mass of
+crowding roofs. The Medway, which divides Strood from the almost
+indistinguishably overlapping towns of Rochester, Chatham, and
+Brompton, is crossed by an iron bridge, superseding the old stone
+structure commemorated in _Pickwick_. Mr. Pickwick's notes on "the four
+towns" do not require very much modification to apply to their present
+state.
+
+     "The principal productions", he wrote, "appear to be soldiers,
+     sailors, Jews, chalk, shrimps, officers, and dockyard men. The
+     commodities chiefly exposed for sale in the public streets are
+     marine stores, hard-bake, apples, flat-fish, and oysters. The
+     streets present a lively and animated appearance, occasioned
+     chiefly by the conviviality of the military.... The consumption of
+     tobacco in these towns 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."
+
+[Illustration: ROCHESTER FROM STROOD]
+
+This description is much less true of Rochester than of its three
+neighbours, and does no justice to the aspects which Dickens himself
+presented in the Market Town of _Great Expectations_, and the
+Cloisterham of _Edwin Drood_. Amid the rather sordid encroachments of a
+modern industrialism, Rochester still keeps something of the air of an
+old-world country town, and in the precincts of its Cathedral there
+still broods a cloistral peace. The dominating feature of the town, from
+whatever side approached, is the massive ruin of the Norman Keep of
+Bishop Gundulf, the architect also of London's White Tower. Though
+the blue sky is its only roof, and on the rugged staircase the dark
+apertures in the walls, where rafters and floors were once, show like
+gaping sockets from which the ravens and daws have picked out the eyes,
+it seems to stand with all the immovable strength of some solid rock on
+which the waves of rebellion or invasion would have dashed and broken.
+It is easy to believe the saying of Lambarde, in his _Perambulation of
+Kent_, that "from time to time it had a part in almost every tragedie".
+But the grimness of its grey walls is relieved by a green mantle of
+clinging ivy, and though it can no longer be said of the Castle that it
+is "bathed, though in ruins, with a flush of flowers", the beautiful
+single pink grows wild on its ramparts.
+
+From the Castle to the "Bull" in the High Street is a transition which
+seems almost an anachronism. It is but to follow in the traces of the
+Pickwick Club. The covered gateway, the staircase almost wide enough for
+a coach and four, the ballroom on the first floor landing, with
+card-room adjoining, and the bedroom which Mr. Winkle occupied inside
+Mr. Tupman's--all are there, just as when the club entertained Alfred
+Jingle to a dinner of soles, a broiled fowl and mushrooms, and Mr.
+Tupman took him to the ball in Mr. Winkle's coat, borrowed without
+leave, and Dr. Slammer of the 97th sent his challenge next morning to
+the owner of the coat. The Guildhall, with its gilt ship for a vane, and
+its old brick front, supported by Doric stone columns, is not so
+memorable because Hogarth played hop-scotch in the colonnade during his
+_Five Days' Peregrination by Land and Water_, as for the day when
+Pumblechook bundled Pip off to be bound apprentice to Jo before the
+Justices in the Hall, "a queer place, with higher pews in it than a
+church ... and with some shining black portraits on the walls". This was
+the Town Hall, too, which Dickens has told us that he had set up in his
+childish mind "as the model on which the genie of the lamp built the
+palace for Aladdin", only to return and recognize with saddened,
+grown-up eyes--exaggerating the depreciation a little, for the sake of
+the contrast--"a mere mean little heap of bricks, like a chapel gone
+demented". Close by the Guildhall is the Town Clock, "supposed to be the
+finest clock in the world", which, alas! "turned out to be as moon-faced
+and weak a clock as a man's eyes ever saw".
+
+On the north side of the High Street, not many yards from the Bull, is a
+Tudor two-storied, stone-built house, with latticed windows and gables.
+This is the Charity founded by the will of Richard Watts in 1579, to
+give lodging and entertainment for one night, and fourpence each, to
+"six poor travellers, not being rogues or proctors". It furnished the
+theme to the Christmas cycle of stories, _The Seven Poor Travellers_,
+the narrator, who treats the waifs and strays harboured one Christmas
+eve at the Charity to roast turkey, plum pudding, and "wassail",
+bringing up the number to seven, "being", as he says, "a traveller
+myself, though an idle one, and being withal as poor as I hope to be".
+
+Farther up the High Street towards Chatham, about a quarter of a mile
+from Rochester Bridge, are two sixteenth-century houses, with fronts of
+carved oak and gables, facing each other across the street. One has
+figured in both _Great Expectations_ and _Edwin Drood_, for it is the
+house of Mr. Pumblechook, the pompous and egregious corn and seedsman,
+and of Mr. Sapsea, the auctioneer, still more pompous and egregious. The
+other--Eastgate House, now converted into a museum--is the "Nun's
+House", where Miss Twinkleton kept school, and had Rosa Bud and Helen
+Landless for pupils.
+
+From the hum and traffic of the cheerfully frequented High Street to the
+calm and hush of the Cathedral precincts entrance is given by Chertsey's
+or College Yard Gate, which abuts on the High Street about a hundred
+yards north of the Cathedral. It was this Gate which Sir Luke Fildes
+sketched, as he has recorded in an interesting letter published in _A
+Week's Tramp in Dickens-Land_, by W. R. Hughes, for the background of
+his drawing of "Durdles Cautioning Sapsea". There are, however, two
+other gatehouses, the "Prior's", a tower over an archway, containing a
+single room approached by a "postern stair", and "Deanery Gate", a
+quaint old house adjoining the Cathedral which has ten rooms, some of
+them beautifully panelled. Its drawing-room on the upper floor bears a
+strong resemblance to the room--as depicted by Sir Luke Fildes--in which
+Jasper entertained his nephew and Neville Landless, but the artist
+believes that he never saw the interior. It is not unlikely that Dickens
+took some details from each of the gatehouses to make a composite
+picture of "Mr. Jasper's own gatehouse", which seemed so to stem the
+tide of life, that while the murmur of the tide was heard beyond, not a
+wave would pass the archway.
+
+Rochester Cathedral, which overshadows, though in a less insistent and
+tragic manner, the whole human interest of _Edwin Drood_ almost as much
+as Notre Dame overshadows the human interest in Victor Hugo's romance,
+preserves some remains of the original Saxon and Norman churches on the
+site of which it was erected. Its Early English and Decorated Gothic
+came off lightly from three restorations, but the tower is
+nineteenth-century vandalism. The Norman west front enshrines in the
+riches of its sculptured portal, with its five receding arches, figures
+of the Saviour and his twelve apostles, and on two shafts are carved
+likenesses of Henry I and his Queen. Freeman has pronounced it to be far
+the finest example of Norman architecture of its kind. The Chapter House
+door, a magnificent example of Decorated Gothic, is adorned with
+effigies representing the Christian and Jewish Churches, which are
+surrounded by Holy Fathers and Angels who pray for the soul,
+emblematically represented as a small nude form above them. But it is
+about the stone-vaulted crypt, where even by daylight "the heavy pillars
+which support the roof engender masses of black shade", with "lanes of
+light" between, and about the winding staircase and belfry of the great
+tower that the spells of the Dickens magic especially cling, and Jasper
+and Durdles revisit these haunts by the glimpses of the moon as
+persistently as Quasimodo and the sinister Priest beset with their
+ghostly presences the belfry of the great Paris minster.
+
+Of the historic imagination Dickens had little or none. He could not
+evoke, and never had the faintest desire to evoke, a Past that was
+divided from the Present by an unbridgeable chasm. Thus Rochester
+Castle, though he seldom failed to bring his guests to view it,
+affected him only with a remote sense of antiquity such as he would have
+experienced, no more and no less, amongst the Pyramids. But he was
+keenly sensitive to the influences of a Past which still survived and,
+by the continuity of a corporate life, made an integral part in the
+Present. The Cathedral life, in which by virtue of their office canons
+and dean were living relics of antiquity, and as much the contemporaries
+as the successors of the ecclesiastics who lay crumbling in the crypt,
+stirred this sense in him as it had been stirred by the ancient Inns of
+London. Almost the last words that he wrote were a tribute to the beauty
+of the venerable fane in which, beneath the monument of the founder of
+that quaint Charity rendered so famous by his story of _The Seven Poor
+Travellers_, a simple brass records his birth, death, and burial-place,
+"To connect his memory with the scenes in which his earliest and his
+latest years were passed, and with the associations of Rochester
+Cathedral and its neighbourhood which extended over all his life".
+
+[Illustration: RESTORATION HOUSE, ROCHESTER]
+
+In the old cemetery of St. Nicholas' Church, on the north side of the
+Cathedral, it was Dickens's desire to be buried, and his family would
+have carried out his wishes had it not been that the burial-ground had
+been closed for years and no further interments were allowed. On the
+south side of the Cathedral is the delightfully oldfashioned terrace
+known as Minor Canon Row--Dickens's name for it is Minor Canon
+Corner--where the Reverend Septimus Crisparkle kept house with the
+"china shepherdess" mother. The "Monks' Vineyard" of _Edwin Drood_
+exists as "The Vines". Here under a group of elms called "The Seven
+Sisters" Edwin Drood and Rosa sat when they decided to break their
+engagement, and opposite "The Seven Sisters" is the "Satis House" of
+_Great Expectations_, where the lonely and embittered Miss Havisham
+taught Estella the cruel lessons of a ruined life. It is really
+Restoration House--Satis House is on the site of the mansion of Master
+Richard Watts, to whose apologies for no better entertainment of his
+Sovereign, Queen Elizabeth answered "Satis"--and it takes its name from
+having received the restored Merry Monarch under its roof on his way to
+London and the throne. Pepys, who was terrified by the steepness of the
+castle cliff and had no time to stay to service at the Cathedral, when
+he had been inspecting the defences at Chatham, found something more to
+his mind in a stroll by Restoration House, and into the Cherry Garden,
+where he met a silly shopkeeper with a pretty wife, "and did kiss her".
+
+Dickens would often follow this route of Pepys, but in the reverse
+direction, that is, through the Vines to Chatham and its lines of
+fortification, where Mr. Pickwick, Mr. Winkle, and Mr. Snodgrass became
+so hopelessly entangled in the sham fight which they had gone over from
+Rochester to see. At No. 11 Ordnance Terrace the little Charles Dickens
+lived from 1817 to 1821, and at No. 18 St. Mary's Place from 1821 to
+1823, the financial troubles, which eventually drove the family into the
+Marshalsea debtors' prison, and Charles himself into the sordid drudgery
+of the blacking-shop by Hungerford Stairs, having already enforced a
+migration to a cheaper and meaner house. In Clover Street (then Clover
+Lane) the little Dickens went to a school kept by a Mr. William Giles,
+who years afterwards sent to him, when he was halfway through with
+_Pickwick_, a silver snuff-box inscribed to the "Inimitable Boz". To the
+Mitre Inn, in the Chatham High Street, where Nelson had many times put
+up, Dickens was often brought by his father to recite or sing, standing
+on a table, for the amusement of parties of friends. He speaks of it in
+the "Holly Tree Inn" as
+
+     "The inn where friends used to put up, and where we used to go to
+     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. I loved the
+     landlord's youngest daughter to distraction--but let that pass. It
+     was in this inn that I was cried over by my little rosy sister,
+     because I had acquired a black eye in a fight."
+
+When the little Charles Dickens was taken away to London inside the
+stage-coach Commodore--his kind master on the night before having come
+flitting in among the packing-cases to give him Goldsmith's _Bee_ as a
+keepsake--he was leaving behind for ever, in the playing-field near
+Clover Lane and the grounds of Rochester Castle and the green drives of
+Cobham Park, the untroubled dreams of happy childhood. And though he
+could not know this, yet, as he sat amongst the damp straw piled up
+round him in the inside of the coach, he "consumed his sandwiches in
+solitude and dreariness" and thought life sloppier than he had expected
+to find it. And in _David Copperfield_ he has thrown back into those
+earlier golden days the shadow of his London privations by bringing the
+little Copperfield, footsore and tired, toiling towards dusk into
+Chatham, "which, in that night's aspect is a mere dream of chalk and
+drawbridges and mastless ships in a muddy river, roofed like Noah's
+arks". No doubt the terrible old Jew in the marine-stores shop, who
+rated and frightened David with his "Oh, my eyes and limbs, what do you
+want? Oh, my lungs and liver, what do you want? Oh--goroo,
+goroo!"--until the helpless little fellow was obliged to close with an
+offer of a few pence instead of half a crown for his waistcoat, is the
+portrait of some actual Jew dealer whom, in one of the back streets of
+Chatham, the keen eyes of the precocious child, seeming to look at
+nothing, had curiously watched hovering like a hideous spider on the
+pounce behind his grime-encrusted window.
+
+It was old associations that led Dickens so often in his walks from
+Gadshill Place to Chatham. But the neighbourhood which gave him most
+pleasure, combining as it did with similar associations an exquisite
+beauty, was, Forster tells us, the sylvan scenery of Cobham Park. The
+green woods and green shades of Cobham would recur to his memory even in
+far-off Lausanne, and the last walk that he ever enjoyed--on the day
+before his fatal seizure--was through these woods, the charm of which
+cannot be better defined than in his own description in _Pickwick_:
+
+     "A delightful walk it was; for it was a pleasant afternoon in June,
+     and their way lay through a deep and shady wood, cooled by the
+     light wind which gently rustled the thick foliage, and enlivened by
+     the songs of the birds that perched upon the boughs. The ivy and
+     the moss crept in thick clusters over the old trees, and the soft
+     green turf overspread the ground like a silken mat. They emerged
+     upon an open park, with an ancient hall, displaying the quaint and
+     picturesque architecture of Elizabeth's time. Long vistas of
+     stately oaks and elm trees appeared on every side; large herds of
+     deer were cropping the fresh grass; and occasionally a startled
+     hare scoured along the ground with the speed of the shadows thrown
+     by the light clouds, which swept across a sunny landscape like a
+     passing breath of summer."
+
+The mission on which Mr. Pickwick and his two disciples were engaged
+was, it will be remembered, to convert Mr. Tupman from his resolution
+to forsake the world in a fit of misanthropy, induced by the
+faithlessness of Rachel Wardle.
+
+     "'If this,' said Mr. Pickwick, looking about him--'If this were the
+     place to which all who are troubled with our friend's complaint
+     came, I fancy their old attachment to this world would very soon
+     return.'"
+
+Mr. Pickwick was right, for when they arrived at the village, and
+entered that "clean and commodious village alehouse", the "Leather
+Bottle", they found Mr. Tupman set down at a table "well covered with a
+roast fowl, bacon, ale, and et ceteras", and "looking as unlike a man
+who had taken leave of the world as possible".
+
+The "ancient hall" of Cobham consists of two Tudor wings, with a central
+block designed by Inigo Jones. It has a splendid collection of Old
+Masters, and a music room which the Prince Regent pronounced to be the
+finest room in England. In the terrace flower garden at the back of the
+Hall, it may be mentioned again here, is the Swiss chalet from Gadshill
+Place, which served Dickens for a study in the summer months. The
+circuit of Cobham Park is about seven miles, and it is crossed by the
+"Long Avenue", leading to Rochester, and the "Grand Avenue", which,
+sloping down from the tenantless Mausoleum, opens into Cobham village.
+The inn to which Mr. Tupman retired, in disgust with life, still
+retains the title of the "Leather Bottle", but has mounted for its sign
+a coloured portrait of Mr. Pickwick addressing the Club in
+characteristic attitude. It was in Cobham village that Mr. Pickwick made
+his notable discovery of the stone with the mysterious inscription--an
+inscription which the envious Blotton maintained was nothing more than
+BIL STUMPS HIS MARK. Local tradition suggests that Dickens intended the
+episode for a skit upon archaeological theories about the dolmens known
+as Kit's Coty House, and that a Strood antiquary keenly resented the
+satire. However that may be, Kit's Coty House is not at Cobham, but some
+miles away, near Aylesford. In Cobham church there is perhaps the finest
+and most complete series of monumental brasses in this country, most of
+them commemorating the Lords of Cobham.
+
+[Illustration: COBHAM PARK]
+
+Out of the Cobham woods it is not a long walk to the little village of
+Shorne, where Dickens was fond of sitting on a hot summer afternoon in
+its pretty, shaded churchyard. This is believed to be the spot which he
+has described in _Pickwick_ as "one of the most peaceful and secluded
+churchyards in Kent, where wild flowers mingle with the grass, and the
+soft landscape around forms the fairest spot in the garden of England".
+A picturesque lane leads into the road from Rochester to Gravesend, on
+the outskirts of the village of Chalk. Here, in a corner house on the
+south side of the road, Dickens spent his honeymoon, and many of the
+earlier chapters of _Pickwick_ were written. In February of the
+following year--1837--Dickens and his wife returned to the same
+lodgings, shortly after the birth of his eldest son. Chalk church is
+about a mile from the village. There was formerly above the porch the
+figure of an old priest in a stooping attitude, holding an upturned jug.
+Dickens took a strange interest in this quaint carving, and it is said
+that, whenever he passed it, he took off his hat or gave it a nod, as to
+an old acquaintance.
+
+Very different to the soft and genial landscapes about Cobham is the
+grey and desolate aspect of another haunt which Dickens loved to
+frequent. This was the "meshes" around Cooling. In winter, when it was
+possible to make a short cut across the stubble fields, he would visit
+Cooling churchyard not less seldom than in summer he would go to sit in
+the churchyard of Shorne. First, however, he would have to pass through
+the village of Higham, where, too, was his nearest railway station,
+though he often preferred to walk over and entrain at Gravesend or
+Greenhithe. But the pleasant tinkle of harness bells was a familiar
+sound in the night to the Higham villagers, as the carriage was sent
+down from Gadshill Place to meet the master or his friends returning
+from London by the ten o'clock train. Dickens took a kindly and active
+interest in the affairs of the village, and the last cheque which he
+ever drew was for his subscription to the Higham Cricket Club.
+
+The flat levels that stretch away from beyond Higham towards the estuary
+of the Thames are more akin to the characteristics of Essex than of
+Kent. The hop gardens are dwarfed and stunted, and presently hops, corn,
+and pasture give place to fields of turnips, which show up like masses
+of jade on the chocolate-coloured soil. The bleak churchyard of Cooling,
+overgrown with nettles, lies amongst these desolate reaches, which
+resound at evening with the shrill, unearthly notes of sea-gulls,
+plovers, and herons. Beyond the churchyard are the marshes, "a dark,
+flat wilderness", as Dickens has described it in _Great Expectations_,
+"intersected with dykes and mounds and gates, with scattered cattle
+feeding on it"; still farther away is the "low, leaden line" of the
+river, and the "distant, savage lair", from which the wind comes
+rushing, is the sea. It was in this churchyard that the conception of
+the story sprang into life, and there are actually not five but ten
+little stone lozenges in one row, with three more at the back of them,
+which suggested to Dickens the five little prematurely cut off brothers
+of Pip. The grey ruins of Cooling Castle attracted him no less than the
+grey and weather-beaten churchyard. Besides some crumbling and broken
+walls there is a gate tower, with an inscription on fourteen copper
+plates, the writing in black, the ground of white enamel, with a seal
+and silk cords in their proper colours, which made known to all and
+sundry the purpose for which Lord Cobham--whose granddaughter married,
+for one of her five husbands, Sir John Oldcastle, the Lollard
+martyr--had erected this castle.
+
+   "Knoweth that beth and schul be
+    That i am mad in help of the cuntre
+    In knowyng of whych thyng
+    This is chartre and witnessyng."
+
+No forge stands now on the site of Joe Gargery's smithy, where, as the
+hammer rang on the anvil to the refrain--
+
+   "Beat it out, beat it out--Old Clem!
+    With a clink for the stout--Old Clem!
+    Blow the fire, blow the fire--Old Clem!
+    Roaring drier, soaring higher--Old Clem!"--
+
+Pip would see visions of Estella's face in the glowing fire or at the
+wooden window of the forge, looking in from the darkness of the night,
+and flitting away. But though the smithy has gone, the "Three Jolly
+Bargemen", where Joe would smoke his pipe by the kitchen fire on a
+Saturday night, still survives as the "Three Horseshoes"--the inn to
+which the secret-looking man who stirred his rum and water with a file,
+brought Magwitch's two one-pound notes for Pip, and the redoubtable
+Jaggers, the autocrat of the Old Bailey, with his burly form, great
+head, and huge, cross-examining forefinger announced to Pip his Great
+Expectations. Down the river in the direction of yonder "distant savage
+lair", from which the wind comes rushing, lie those long reaches,
+between Kent and Essex, "where the river is broad and solitary, where
+the waterside inhabitants are very few, and where lone public-houses are
+scattered here and there"--the lonely riverside on which Pip and Herbert
+sought a hiding-place for Magwitch until the steamer for Hamburg or the
+steamer for Rotterdam could be boarded, as she dropped down the tide
+from the Port of London. Whether on the Kent or the Essex side, the cast
+of the scenery corresponds with equal closeness to Dickens's
+description. Slimy stakes stick out of the mud, and slimy stones stick
+out of the mud, and red landmarks and tide-marks stick out of the mud,
+and old roofless buildings slip into the mud, and all about is
+stagnation and mud! The desolate flat marshes look still more weird by
+reason of the tall pollards that lean over them like spectres. Far away
+are the rising grounds, between which and the marshes there appears no
+sign of life except here and there in the foreground a melancholy gull.
+The course which the boat bearing the hunted man took from Mill Pond
+stairs through the crowded shipping of the Pool, past the floating
+Custom House at Gravesend, and onwards, skirting the little creeks and
+mudbanks where the Thames widens to the sea--when every sound of the
+tide flapping heavily at irregular intervals against the shore, and
+every ripple, were fraught with the terror of pursuit--exemplifies in
+the most striking way the rapidity and instinctive ease of Dickens's
+observation. Forster says:--
+
+     "To make himself sure of the actual course of a boat in such
+     circumstances, and what possible incidents the adventure might
+     have, Dickens hired a steamer for the day from Blackwall to
+     Southend. Eight or nine friends, and three or four members of his
+     family, were on board, and he seemed to have no care, the whole of
+     that summer day (22nd of May, 1861), except to enjoy their
+     enjoyment and entertain them with his own in shape of a thousand
+     whims and fancies; but his sleepless observation was at work all
+     the time, and nothing had escaped his keen vision on either side of
+     the river."
+
+Scattered amongst the deserted reaches along the riverside may be seen
+such lonely farmhouses or taverns as suggest the aspect of the alehouse,
+"not unknown to smuggling adventurers"--for the "owling", that is, the
+smuggling industry had flourished for centuries in these parts--to which
+the fugitives were led by a twinkling light in the window up a little
+cobbled causeway, and where Dickens placed that amphibious creature, "as
+slimy and smeary as if he had been low-water mark too", who exhibited a
+bloated pair of shoes "as interesting relics that he had taken from the
+feet of a drowned seaman washed ashore". This type of the gruesome
+long-shoremen whom Dickens had encountered in his waterside rambles, as
+he collected the materials for _Great Expectations_, was afterwards
+elaborated in the Rogue Riderhood of _Our Mutual Friend_.
+
+"Swamp, mist, and mudbank"--if that is the dominant impression made by
+the view of the Thames off the Cooling marshes, it is not the only and
+the invariable impression. Even the bleak churchyard, at the foot of the
+cold, grey tower, is sometimes strewn by the light and flying gust "with
+beautiful shadows of clouds and trees". And from the Old Battery, where
+Joe would smoke his pipe with a far more sagacious air than anywhere
+else, as Pip strove to initiate him into the mysteries of reading and
+writing by the aid of a broken slate and a short piece of slate pencil,
+it is "pleasant and quiet" to watch the vessels standing out to sea with
+their white sails spread, and the light struck aslant, afar off, upon a
+cloud or sail or green hillside or silvery water line.
+
+[Illustration: COOLING CHURCH]
+
+To the west of Cooling Castle, beyond wide fields--turnips or
+cabbages--of the colour of dark-green jade, the Church of Cliffe, with
+its lichgate, standing out boldly from its ridge of chalk, overlooks a
+straggling village of old and weather-boarded houses. It would be
+into the road from Cliffe to Rochester, at a point about half a mile
+from Cooling, that Uncle Pumblechook's chaise-cart would debouch when he
+took Mrs. Joe to Rochester market "to assist him in buying such
+household stuffs and goods as required a woman's judgment".
+
+Between the scenery about Cooling and Cliffe and the scenery of the
+valley of the Medway from Rochester to Maidstone there is all the
+difference between a November fog and a brilliant summer's day. At the
+foot of Rochester Castle, from which the long vista of the valley, lying
+between two chalk ranges of hills that form the watershed of the Medway,
+stretches far away to a distant horizon, the Esplanade extends along the
+east side of the river, and there it was that Edwin Drood and Rosa met
+for the last time and to speak of their separate plans. For a few miles
+along the valley the natural beauty of the scene is spoilt by the cement
+works of Borstal, Cuxton, and Wouldham, and the brickworks of Burham.
+The piles of clay and chalk, the beehive furnaces, and the chimneys
+vomiting smoke and flame, almost reproduce the characteristics of the
+Black Country or of a northern manufacturing district. But, when Burham
+has been left behind, the bright emerald pastures, the tender green of
+springing corn or the gold of waving harvests, and the orchards, a
+dazzling sight in May with the snowy clouds of pear and plum and cherry
+blooms, and the delicate pink-and-white of the apple blossom, more than
+justify the appellation claimed for Kent of the garden of England.
+Opposite to Cuxton, on the western bank, the village of Snodland stands
+at the junction of Snodland Brook with the Medway. It has been
+conjectured that Snodland Weir, a mile or so up the brook, was in
+Dickens's mind when he described Mr. Crisparkle's pilgrimages to
+Cloisterham Weir in the cold rimy mornings, and his discovery, first of
+Edwin Drood's watch in a corner of the weir, and then, after diving
+again and again, of his shirt-pin "sticking in some mud and ooze" at the
+bottom. The nearest weir on the Medway is at Allington, seven or eight
+miles above Rochester, and Cloisterham Weir was but "full two miles"
+away.
+
+Before Allington can be reached, in ascending the Medway, the river is
+spanned by an ancient stone bridge, of pointed arches and triangular
+buttresses, at Aylesford. The ancient Norman church, and the red roofs
+and crowding gables of the picturesque and historic village, are set in
+a circle of elm trees, with a background of rising chalk downs beyond.
+Those who have investigated with perhaps "an excess"--as Wordsworth
+would say--"of scrupulosity" all the details of Pickwickian topography
+are inclined to believe that the wooden bridge, upon which the chaise
+hired by the Club to make the journey from Rochester to Dingley Dell
+came hopelessly to grief, was Aylesford Bridge, transmuted for the nonce
+from Kentish ragstone into timber. However that may be, there is a
+matter of genuine history which has signalized in no common way this
+old-world village. At this ford, the lowest on the Medway, the Jutes
+under Hengist and Horsa routed the British in a battle which decided the
+predominating strain of race in future Men of Kent and Kentish Men:
+natives of Kent, that is, according as they dwell on the right or left
+bank of the Medway. A farmhouse with the name of Horsted, at the point
+farther back where the Rochester to Maidstone road is joined by the road
+from Chatham, stands, it is believed, on the grave of Horsa. And about a
+mile and a half north of Aylesford, a grey old cairn, set on a green
+sward in the midst of a cornfield, is also closely associated with the
+first great victory won by English people on the soil which they were
+destined to make their own and distinguish with their name. In his
+_Short History of the English People_ J. R. Green says of this
+cromlech:--
+
+     "It was from a steep knoll on which the grey weather-beaten stones
+     of this monument are reared that the view of their first
+     battlefield would break on the English warriors; and a lane which
+     still leads down from it through peaceful homesteads, would guide
+     them across the ford which has left its name in the little village
+     of Aylesford. The Chronicle of the conquering people tells nothing
+     of the rush that may have carried the ford, or of the fight that
+     went straggling up through the village. It only tells that Horsa
+     fell in the moment of victory, and the flint heap of Horsted, which
+     has long preserved his name, and was held in after-time to mark his
+     grave, is thus the earliest of those monuments of English valour of
+     which Westminster is the last and noblest shrine. The victory of
+     Aylesford did more than give East Kent to the English; it struck
+     the keynote of the whole English conquest of Britain."
+
+This cromlech, known as Kit's Coty House, consists of three upright
+dolmens of sandstone, with a fourth, much larger, crossing them above
+horizontally. In a neighbouring field there is another group of stones,
+scattered in disarray amongst the brushwood, to which, as also to
+Stonehenge and other so-called "Druidical" remains, there attaches the
+local superstition that they cannot be counted. It would be pleasanter
+to believe that the current story, to which reference has already been
+made, that Dickens was poking fun at the antiquarian's reverence for
+this hoary relic in his narrative of Mr. Pickwick's "BIL STUMPS"
+inscription, is altogether erroneous. Certainly it is open to anyone who
+wishes to be incredulous, for there is as much dissimilarity as possible
+between the massive cromlech near Aylesford and the small slab that Mr.
+Pickwick discovered at Cobham.
+
+The most salient feature in the Medway valley between Rochester and
+Maidstone is the height of Blue Bell, or Upper Bell. Here Dickens, who,
+as he said, had come to realize that the Rochester to Maidstone road
+passed through some of the most beautiful scenery in England, would
+often picnic with his visitors. Undulating slopes of pasture and
+cornfields, hop gardens, orchards, and woodlands, with many a deep-sunk
+lane embowered in overarching trees that rise from hedgerow clusters of
+dog-rose, ivy, and honeysuckle, and with snugly nestling homesteads and
+quaintly-cowled "oast-houses" sprinkled here and there, sweep across the
+valley, through which the river winds in sinuous curves, onwards to a
+long range of hills upon the skyline.
+
+Somewhere in this district Dickens came across the types of the
+oldfashioned and jovially comfortable home of the English yeoman,
+represented by his Manor Farm, Dingley Dell, and of the little country
+town, represented by the Muggleton of _Pickwick_, in which local
+enthusiasm for cricket was ardent, if the standard of skill was somewhat
+low. The most plausible identification of the home of Mr. Wardle is with
+Cobtree Hall, which divides the parishes of Boxley and Allington, and it
+is probable that the original of Muggleton was Town Malling, which is
+also known as West Malling.
+
+In the Jubilee Edition of _Pickwick_ Mr. Charles Dickens the Younger
+introduced a woodcut of High Street, Town Malling, with a note to the
+following effect:--
+
+     "Muggleton, perhaps, is only to be taken as a fancy sketch of a
+     small country town; but it is generally supposed, and probably with
+     sufficient accuracy, that, if it is in any degree a portrait of any
+     Kentish town, Town Malling, a great place for cricket in Mr.
+     Pickwick's time, sat for it."
+
+Town Malling does not correspond with the description of Muggleton in
+its distance from Rochester. It is only seven and a half, instead of
+fifteen miles, from Rochester. And it is not a corporate town. But:
+
+     "Everybody whose genius has a topographical bent knows perfectly
+     well that Muggleton is a corporate town, with a mayor, burgess and
+     freemen, and anybody who has consulted the addresses of the mayor
+     to the freemen, or the freemen to the mayor, or both to the
+     corporation, or all three to Parliament, will learn from thence
+     what they ought to have known before, that Muggleton is an ancient
+     and loyal borough, mingling a zealous advocacy of Christian
+     principles with a devoted attachment to commercial rights; in
+     demonstration whereof, the mayor, corporation, and other
+     inhabitants have presented, at divers times, no fewer than one
+     thousand four hundred and twenty petitions against the continuance
+     of negro slavery abroad, and an equal number against any
+     interference with the factory system at home; sixty-eight in favour
+     of the sale of livings in the Church, and eighty-six for abolishing
+     Sunday trading in the street."
+
+[Illustration: AYLESFORD]
+
+If Town Malling has not had so distinguished a political history as that
+which Dickens assigned to Muggleton, it has a pretty cricket ground,
+not far removed from the High Street, and the reputation of having in
+past years distinguished itself in the local cricket of this district of
+Kent. It is not difficult to believe, then, that Dumkins and Podder here
+made their gallant stand for All Muggleton against the Dingley Dellers,
+and that at the Swan--otherwise the Blue Lion--the Pickwick fellowship
+shared the conviviality of the rival teams, until Mr. Snodgrass's notes
+of the evening's transactions faded away into a blur in which there was
+an indistinct reference to "broiled bones" and "cold without". The
+stately ruins of a Benedictine Abbey, founded by Bishop Gundulf, give to
+the town an attraction of a severer kind.
+
+From Town Malling to Cobtree Hall, supposing the double identification
+to be correct, should be a walk of not above two miles "through shady
+lanes and sequestered footpaths", the delightful scenery of which made
+Mr. Pickwick feel regret to arrive in the main street of "Muggleton".
+The distance, however, is in fact something more than two miles as the
+crow flies. Cobtree Hall is a green-muffled Elizabethan mansion, of red
+brick, faced with stone, and looks out over an undulating country of
+orchards and hop fields. It has been altered and enlarged since the days
+of _Pickwick_, but the kitchen is just such another large, oldfashioned
+kitchen as befits the Christmas games and wassail that had been kept up
+at Manor Farm, Dingley Dell, "by old Wardle's forefathers from time
+immemorial". The dining-room, though modernized, has a massive marble
+mantlepiece not unsuited to that "capacious chimney up which you could
+have driven one of the new patent cabs, wheels and all", and in which a
+blazing fire used to roar every evening, not only when its warmth was
+grateful, but for a symbol, as it were, of old Wardle's attachment to
+his fireside. This was the kind of antiquity which made the most direct
+appeal to Dickens's sentiment and imagination--not a remote and historic
+antiquity, but the furthest extent of a living link between the Present
+and the Past. In many an old house of Kentish yeoman or squire Dickens
+would have seen some such long, dark-panelled room as the best
+sitting-room at Manor Farm, with four-branched, massive silver
+candlesticks in all sorts of recesses and on all kinds of brackets; with
+samplers and worsted landscapes of ancient date on the walls; with a
+very old lady in lofty cap and faded silk gown in the chimney corner,
+where she had sat on her little stool as a girl more than half a century
+before, and with a hearty, rubicund host presiding over a mighty bowl of
+wassail, something smaller than an ordinary washhouse copper, in which
+the hot apples would "hiss and bubble with a rich look and a jolly sound
+that were perfectly irresistible". Or when the carpet was up, the
+candles burning brightly, and family, guests, and servants were all
+ranged in eager lines, longing for the signal to start an oldfashioned
+country dance as, from a shady bower of holly and evergreens at the
+upper end of the room, the two best fiddles and only harp of the nearest
+market town prepared to strike up, it is no wonder that such a lover of
+unspoilt, natural manners as Boz declared, "If any of the old English
+yeomen had turned into fairies when they died, it was just the place in
+which they would have held their revels."
+
+A triangular piece of ground, with a sprinkling of elms about it, is all
+that is left of the rookery in which Mr. Tupman met with an accident
+from the unskilful marksmanship of Winkle. At the back of the house is
+the pond where Mr. Winkle's reputation as a sportsman led him into
+another catastrophe, and his skating exposed itself as of anything but a
+graceful and "swan-like" style; where, too, Mr. Pickwick revived the
+sliding propensities of his boyhood with infinite zest until the ice
+gave way with a "sharp, smart crack", and Mr. Pickwick's hat, gloves,
+and handkerchief, floating on the surface, were all of Mr. Pickwick that
+anyone could see.
+
+Cobtree Hall, it has been mentioned, divides the parishes of Boxley and
+Allington, the initials of which are carved on a beam in the kitchen
+that suggests Phiz's plate of "Christmas Eve at Mr. Wardle's". In
+Aylesford the tomb of the prototype, according to local tradition, of
+"Mr. Wardle" bears the inscription, "Also to the memory of Mr. W. Spong,
+late of Cobtree, in the Parish of Boxley, who died November 15th, 1839".
+Boxley village is near the ancient Pilgrims' Road to Canterbury, and
+here Alfred Tennyson stayed in 1842. Park House, nearer the Medway, was
+the home of Edward Lushington, who married Tennyson's sister Cecilia,
+and in its grounds Tennyson found the setting for the prologue to the
+"Princess". The "happy faces" of "the multitude, a thousand heads", by
+which the "sloping pasture" was "sown", under "broad ambrosial aisles of
+lofty lime", had probably come from Maidstone on the annual jaunt of
+that town's Mechanics' Institute. The village of Allington stands on the
+other side of the Medway, though the boundaries of the parish extend
+beyond the right bank of the river. Allington Castle, which the Medway
+half-encircles with a sweeping bend, was one of the seven chief castles
+of Kent. It was here that Sir Thomas Wyatt, the elder, diplomatist,
+poet, and lover of Anne Boleyn, who with the gallant and ill-fated
+Surrey "preluded", in a more exact sense than it could be said of
+Chaucer, "those melodious bursts that fill the spacious times of great
+Elizabeth", was able to proclaim, in an epistle to "Mine own John
+Poins":
+
+[Illustration: MAIDSTONE, ALL SAINTS' CHURCH AND THE PALACE]
+
+   "I am here in Kent and Christendome,
+    Among the Muses where I read and rhyme".
+
+Hither there comes, in Tennyson's "Queen Mary", to Sir Thomas Wyatt, the
+younger, his man William, with news of "three thousand men on Penenden
+heath all calling after you, and your worship's name heard into
+Maidstone market, and your worship the first man in Kent". And Wyatt
+sets out to lead a rising which will end on Tower Hill, and setting out,
+looks back and cries:
+
+   "Ah, grey old castle of Allington, green field
+    Beside the brimming Medway, it may chance
+    That I shall never look upon you more".
+
+"The brimming Medway."--the epithet is as just as Tennyson's descriptive
+epithet almost invariably proves to be. For at Allington the Medway,
+which from Aylesford Bridge to Allington Lock has dwindled to a narrow
+stream, swells out into a broad expanse, where many boats can easily
+move abreast. If the Cloisterham Weir of _Edwin Drood_ were really the
+nearest weir on the Medway to Rochester, then Allington Lock would be
+the place. But it has been pointed out on an earlier page that the
+distances do not tally in the novel and in actuality, and Dickens may
+have had in mind the weir on Snodland Brook.
+
+The country round Maidstone abounds in the "happy valleys" portrayed in
+the epilogue to the "Princess", with "grey halls alone among their
+massive groves", and "here and there a rustic tower Half lost in belts
+of hop and breadths of wheat". The gyres and loops of the Medway, too,
+afford through the screen of woodlands and orchards "the shimmering
+glimpses of a stream". To the credulous enthusiasm of an early
+eighteenth-century native of Strood, that Anne Pratt who did for English
+wild flowers what White of Selborne did for English wild birds,
+"travellers who have beheld in other lands the various scenes of
+culture--the olive grounds of Spain or Syria, the vineyards of Italy,
+the cotton plantations of India, or the rose fields of the East--have
+generally agreed that not one of them all equals in beauty our English
+hop gardens". To Dickens himself such a panegyric of the Kentish hop
+gardens would have scarcely seemed exaggeration, but he would have
+hastened to add the dismal antithesis of the missionary bishop--"Only
+man is vile". He had barely settled-in at Gadshill Place when he
+wrote:--
+
+     "Hop-picking is going on, and people sleep in the garden, and
+     breathe in at the keyhole of the house door. I have been amazed,
+     before this year, by the number of miserable base wretches, hardly
+     able to crawl, who go hop-picking. I find it is a superstition that
+     the dust of the newly picked hop, falling freshly into the throat,
+     is a cure for consumption. So the poor creatures drag themselves
+     along the roads, and sleep under wet hedges, and get cured soon and
+     finally."
+
+The county town of Kent is situated not only on the Medway, but on the
+pilgrim road to Canterbury, and of a monastic hospital for pilgrims and
+other poor travellers there still survive some relics. Overlooking the
+river stand some fine old houses, and the conspicuous grey square tower
+of All Saints, built by the proud Archbishop Courtenay, the enemy of
+Wicliffe, in the fourteenth century. Here is the tomb of Grocyn, that
+"lord of splendid lore Orient from old Hellas' shore", who was appointed
+master of the collegiate church in 1506. One of the sixteen palaces that
+the Archbishops of Canterbury could boast in days gone by is preserved
+as the local school of science and art, a dedication to public use which
+commemorates the Jubilee of Queen Victoria in 1887. The Corporation
+Museum is an even more interesting and beautiful structure. It was
+Chillington Manor House, a seat of the Cobham family, and, though it has
+had a new wing annexed to it, it is an exceptionally well preserved and
+beautiful example of Elizabethan domestic architecture, with its
+latticed windows, jutting gables, elaborately moulded timber, and
+pillared chimneys. In the panel of an oak fireplace is a carved head of
+Dickens, by a local carver named Hughes, who was employed at Gadshill
+Place. To Maidstone Jail Dickens proposed to carry Sir Luke Fildes, in
+order that he might make a picture of Jasper in the condemned cell, and
+do something which would surpass Cruikshank's illustration to _Oliver
+Twist_, in which Fagin's terror-stricken vigil in the murderer's cell is
+portrayed.
+
+At Maidstone the southern limit may be considered to have been reached
+of the district of Kent which can be distinguished as "Dickens-land" in
+the most intimate sense, as lying within the radius of the novelist's
+habitual walks and drives from his residence at Gadshill. It does not
+enter into the scope of this brief essay to describe topographically
+other parts of Kent. But it will be excusable to glance very slightly at
+Dickens's associations with Canterbury--though this is the subject of a
+separate monograph in this series--Broadstairs, Deal, Dover, and the
+famous London-to-Dover road through Rochester, Chatham, and Canterbury.
+
+[Illustration: JASPER'S GATEWAY]
+
+No one, perhaps, who has ever read _Little Dorrit_, whatever else in the
+novel may slip the memory, fails to recall the oracular utterance of
+Mr. F.'s aunt that "There's milestones on the Dover road". To the
+opening of _A Tale of Two Cities_ the colour and atmosphere of the time
+in which it is set, and of the drama which is to be developed, are given
+at once by the alarm of the passengers of the Dover coach as they walk
+up Shooter's Hill to ease the horses, when the furious galloping of a
+horseman is heard behind them--the supposed highwayman proving to be,
+however, Jerry Cruncher, messenger at Tellson's Bank by day, and at
+night an "agricooltural character" of ghoulish avocations. David
+Copperfield trudged the Dover road, footsore and hungry, when he left
+Murdstone and Grinby's blacking warehouse to throw himself on the
+compassion of Betsy Trotwood, "and got through twenty-three miles on the
+straight road" to Rochester and Chatham on a certain Sunday. Afterwards,
+when he had found a home and a protecting providence with his aunt, he
+met with his "first fall in life" on the Canterbury coach, being asked
+by the coachman to resign the box seat to a seedy gentleman, who
+proclaimed that "'Orses and dogs is some men's fancy. They're wittles
+and drink to me."
+
+     "I have always considered this as the first fall I had in life.
+     When I booked my place at the coach office, I had had 'Box Seat'
+     written against the entry, and had given the bookkeeper half a
+     crown. I was got up in a special greatcoat and shawl, expressly to
+     do honour to that distinguished eminence; had glorified myself upon
+     it a good deal; and had felt that I was a credit to the coach. And
+     here, in the very first stage, I was supplanted by a shabby man
+     with a squint, who had no other merit than smelling like a livery
+     stables, and being able to walk across me, more like a fly than a
+     human being, while the horses were at a canter."
+
+Pip, in _Great Expectations_, makes many expeditions to and fro on the
+Dover road, between Rochester and London, and on one of them, riding
+outside, has the two convicts, bound for the hulks moored off the
+marshes, as fellow passengers on the back seat.
+
+At Canterbury it is not possible to establish the identity of Dr.
+Strong's house--"a grave building in a courtyard, with a learned air
+about it that seemed very well suited to the stray rooks and jackdaws
+who came down from the Cathedral towers, and walked with a clerkly
+bearing on the grass plot"--but Canon Benham has asserted his conviction
+that Mr. Wickfield's house--where David made the acquaintance of Agnes
+and of Uriah Heap--is at the corner of Broad Street and Lady Wotton's
+Green, though it is another residence, by the West Gate, which is
+represented on the picture postcards.
+
+The Royal Fountain Hotel in St. Margaret's Street (formerly the Watling
+Street) is recognized as the County Inn at which Mr. Dick used to sleep
+when he went over to Canterbury to visit David Copperfield at Dr.
+Strong's school. All the little bills which he contracted there, it will
+be remembered, were referred to Miss Trotwood before they were paid; a
+circumstance which caused David to think "that Mr. Dick was only
+allowed to rattle his money, and not to spend it". A less pretentious
+establishment, the "little inn" where Mr. Micawber put up on his first
+visit to Canterbury, and "occupied a little room in it partitioned off
+from the commercial, and strongly flavoured with tobacco smoke", is
+probably the Sun Inn in Sun Street. Here Mr. and Mrs. Micawber
+entertained David to "a beautiful little dinner"--
+
+     "Quite an elegant dish of fish; the kidney end of a loin of veal
+     roasted; fried sausage meat; a partridge and a pudding. There was
+     wine, and there was strong ale; and after dinner Mrs. Micawber made
+     us a bowl of hot punch with her own hands."
+
+Local tradition at Broadstairs used to point to Fort House, on the cliff
+by the Coastguard Station, as the holiday residence at which Dickens
+wrote most of _Bleak House_. But though it has been rechristened from
+the title of the novel, by an owner who demolished Dickens's summer
+home, and built the existing pseudo-Gothic structure on its foundations,
+no part of _Bleak House_ was written at Broadstairs. Dickens, however,
+for many summers, visited the little town on the curving bay between
+Margate and Ramsgate; the Albion Hotel, where he notes that "the
+landlord has delicious hollands", No. 12 (now 31) High Street, and Lawn
+House, near Fort House, receiving him at different times. At Broadstairs
+he wrote a portion of _Pickwick_, of _Nicholas Nickleby_, and _The Old
+Curiosity Shop_, and he also stayed there while engaged on the _American
+Notes_, _Dombey and Son_, and _David Copperfield_. He forsook it at
+last, because it had become too noisy, but he has left an agreeable
+picture of it in _Our Watering Place_; but a passage in a letter to
+Forster invests it with still gayer colours:
+
+     "It is the brightest day you ever saw. The sun is sparkling on the
+     water so that I can hardly bear to look at it. The tide is in, and
+     the fishing boats are dancing like mad. Upon the green-topped
+     cliffs the corn is cut and piled in shocks; and thousands of
+     butterflies are fluttering about, taking the bright little red
+     flags at the mastheads for flowers, and panting with delight
+     accordingly."
+
+To the characters and the _mise en scene_ of his novels, however,
+Broadstairs appears to have contributed nothing, except that the lady
+whose aversion to donkeys furnished so strong an idiosyncrasy to Miss
+Betsy Trotwood's character was a native, not of Dover, as in the novel,
+but of Broadstairs.
+
+Dover, besides giving a local habitation to David's aunt, is associated
+with _The Tale of Two Cities_, since it was here that Mr. Lorry made the
+startling revelation to Miss Manette that her father had been "Recalled
+to Life". The vignette of eighteenth-century Dover is executed with true
+Dickensian verve:
+
+[Illustration: CHALK CHURCH]
+
+     "The little narrow, crooked town of Dover hid itself away from the
+     beach, and ran its head into the chalk cliffs like a marine
+     ostrich. The beach was a desert of heaps of sea and stones tumbling
+     wildly about, and the sea did what it liked, and what it liked was
+     destruction. It thundered at the town, and thundered at the cliffs,
+     and brought the coast down, madly. The air among the houses was of
+     so strong a piscatory flavour that one might have supposed sick
+     fish went up to be dipped in it, as sick people went down to be
+     dipped in the sea. A little fishing was done in the port, and a
+     quantity of strolling about by night, and looking seaward:
+     particularly at those times when the tide made, and was near flood.
+     Small tradesmen, who did no business whatever, sometimes
+     unaccountably realized large fortunes, and it was remarkable that
+     nobody in the neighbourhood could endure a lamplighter."
+
+It was to Dover that Dickens went when he was labouring with unusual
+difficulty over _Bleak House_, and lamenting his inability to "grind
+sparks out of this dull anvil". At Dover, on his Second Series of
+Readings, he found "the audience with the greatest sense of humour", and
+"they laughed with such really cordial enjoyment, when Squeers read the
+boy's letters, that the contagion" was irresistible even to Dickens
+himself.
+
+Deal, as it was in 1853, is rapidly but vigorously sketched in chapter
+xlv of _Bleak House_. Esther Summerson arrives from a night journey by
+coach, eager and anxious to help, if possible, Richard Carstone, the
+unhappy victim of the fatal chancery lawsuit:
+
+     "At last we came into the narrow streets of Deal; and very gloomy
+     they were, upon a raw misty morning. The long flat beach, with its
+     little irregular houses, wooden and brick, and its litter of
+     capstans, and great boats, and sheds, and bare upright poles with
+     tackle and blocks, and loose gravelly waste places overgrown with
+     grass and weeds, wore as dull an appearance as any place I ever
+     saw. The sea was heaving under a thick white fog; and nothing else
+     was moving but a few early rope-makers, who, with the yarn twisted
+     round their bodies, looked as if, tired of their present state of
+     existence, they were twisting themselves into cordage. But when we
+     got into a warm room in an excellent hotel, and sat down,
+     comfortably washed and dressed, to an early breakfast (for it was
+     too late to think of going to bed), Deal began to look more
+     cheerful.... Then the fog began to rise like a curtain; and numbers
+     of ships, that we had had no idea were near, appeared. I don't know
+     how many sail the waiter told us were then lying in the Downs. Some
+     of these vessels were of grand size: one was a large Indiaman, just
+     come home; and when the sun shone through the clouds, making
+     silvery pools in the dark sea, the way in which these ships
+     brightened, and shadowed, and changed, amid a bustle of boats
+     putting off from the shore to them, and from them to the shore, and
+     a general life and motion in themselves and everything around them,
+     was most beautiful."
+
+That Dickens was essentially a "Kentish Man", in spite of the absence of
+a birth qualification, in spite, too, of his long residence in London,
+and of his peculiarly intimate knowledge of the byways and nooks and
+corners of London, ample proof has by this time been given. To this,
+however, may be added Forster's significant statement that, "Excepting
+always the haunts and associations of his childhood, Dickens had no
+particular sentiment of locality, and any special regard for houses he
+had lived in was not a thing noticeable in him". This was not
+surprising. The conditions of life in a modern capital under most
+circumstances, but especially for anyone who has made many removes, tend
+to produce the impression that a man's rooftree only represents the
+transient shelter of a caravanserai, rather than an abiding habitation
+on which memory has stamped indelible traces. Nor can even the most
+extended associations of maturity take the place of the imperishable
+links forged in the most susceptible years of fresh and sensitive
+childhood. For Dickens this vital distinction was emphasized both by
+natural idiosyncrasy and by the pressure of events which shaped his
+destiny.
+
+     "If it should appear," he says, speaking of himself under the mask
+     of David Copperfield, "from anything I may set down in this
+     narrative, that I was a child of close observation, or that as a
+     man I have a strong memory of my childhood, I undoubtedly lay claim
+     to both of these characteristics."
+
+The change from Chatham and Rochester to London was indissolubly
+connected in his mind with a change in the family fortunes that deprived
+him of the ordinary advantages and pleasures open to any average boy of
+even the lower middle classes. It ushered in a period of misery and
+degradation that he could never recall without acute suffering. The few
+years of happiness which he enjoyed before he was carried away to London
+in the stage coach "Commodore", at the age of nine, were divided from a
+strenuous and successful manhood by so dark a gulf as to concentrate all
+the powers of recollection upon them with a desperate kind of intensity.
+It was the realization of a childish ambition conceived in that halcyon
+era which drew him to Gadshill, and he returned again and again to the
+contemplation of his earliest dreams and imaginings. He wrote from
+Gadshill of his old nurse--the original, it can hardly be doubted, of
+Peggotty:--
+
+     "I feel much as I used to do when I was a small child, a few miles
+     off [i.e. at Ordnance Terrace, Chatham], and somebody--_who_, I
+     wonder, and which way did _she_ go when she died?--hummed the
+     evening hymn, and I cried on the pillow--either with the remorseful
+     consciousness of having kicked somebody else, or because still
+     somebody else had hurt my feelings in the course of the day".
+
+For the second number of _Household Words_, when he "felt an uneasy
+sense of there being a want of something tender, which would apply to
+some universal household knowledge", he composed a little paper about "a
+child's dream of a star". It was the story of a brother and sister,
+constant child companions, who used to make friends of a star, watching
+it together until they knew when and where it would rise, and always
+bidding it good-night, so that when the sister dies, the lonely brother
+still connects her with the star, which he then sees opening as a sea
+of light, and its rays making a shining pathway from earth to heaven. It
+was his sister Fanny, who had often wandered with him at night in St.
+Mary's Churchyard, near their home at Chatham, looking up at the stars,
+and her death, shortly before the paper was written, had revived the
+fancy of childhood. In _The Uncommercial Traveller_ he revisits
+"Dullborough", and the first discovery he makes is that the station has
+swallowed up the playing field of the school to which he went during his
+last two years at Chatham.
+
+[Illustration: SHORNE CHURCH]
+
+     "It was gone. The two beautiful hawthorn trees, the hedge, the
+     turf, and all those buttercups and daisies, had given place to the
+     stoniest of jolting roads; while, beyond the station, an ugly dark
+     monster of a tunnel kept its jaws open, as if it had swallowed them
+     and were ravenous for more destruction. The coach that had carried
+     me away, was melodiously called Timpson's Blue-eyed Maid [it was
+     really called the 'Commodore'], and belonged to Timpson, at the
+     coach office up street; the locomotive engine that had brought me
+     back was called severely No. 97, and belonged to S.E.R., and was
+     spitting ashes and hot water over the blighted ground.... Here, in
+     the haymaking time, had I been delivered from the dungeons of
+     Seringapatam, an immense pile (of haycock), by my countrymen, the
+     victorious British (boy next door and his two cousins), and had
+     been recognized with ecstasy by my affianced one (Miss Green), who
+     had come all the way from England (second house in the terrace) to
+     ransom me and marry me."
+
+In playful vein Dickens professes to record his disappointment at
+failing to receive any recognition from a "native", in the person of a
+phlegmatic greengrocer, when he revisits Rochester, and revives the
+associations of haunts beloved in childhood.
+
+     "Nettled by his phlegmatic conduct, I informed him that I had left
+     the town when I was a child. He slowly returned, quite unsoftened,
+     and not without a sarcastic kind of complacency, Had I? Ah! and did
+     I find it had got on tolerably well without me? Such is the
+     difference (I thought when I had left him a few hundred yards
+     behind, and was by so much in a better temper) between going away
+     from a place and remaining in it. I had no right, I reflected, to
+     be angry with the greengrocer for his want of interest; I was
+     nothing to him; whereas he was the town, the cathedral, the bridge,
+     the river, my childhood, and a large slice of my life, to me."
+
+That is one side of the medal, but the other is displayed in _David
+Copperfield_, when little Mr. Chillip, the doctor, welcomes David back
+to England:
+
+     "'We are not ignorant, sir,' said Mr. Chillip, slowly shaking his
+     little head again, 'down in our part of the country, of your fame.
+     There must be great excitement here, sir,' said Mr. Chillip,
+     tapping himself on the forehead with his forefinger. 'You must find
+     it a trying occupation, sir!'"
+
+A feature of Dickens's literary manner, so insistent that the most
+superficial reader cannot miss it, is the individual and almost human
+aspect which a street or a landscape, a house or a room, takes on in his
+description. A typical example may be selected in Mr. Wickfield's
+house--
+
+     "A very old house bulging out over the road; a house with long, low
+     lattice windows bulging out still farther, and beams with carved
+     heads on the ends bulging out too, so that I fancied the whole
+     house was leaning forward, trying to see who was passing on the
+     narrow pavement below."
+
+It was the outcome of an acute nervous sensibility, amounting at times
+to an almost neurotic irritability, such as peeps out from his
+confession that the shape of Earl Grey's head, when he was a
+Parliamentary reporter in the Gallery, "was misery to me and weighed
+down my youth". This peculiarity of temperament had established itself
+when, a little delicate and highly strung child, he used to transfer the
+scenes and happenings of the novels to which he stole away from the
+other boys at their play, into the setting of his own existence, and
+"every barn in the neighbourhood, every stone in the church, and every
+foot of the churchyard, had some association of its own connected with
+these books, and stood for some locality made famous in them".
+
+There has seldom, perhaps, been such an absence of complexity in genius
+of a high order as there was in Dickens's character. But though there
+was no complexity, there were two very different aspects--acute
+sensibility was not incompatible with a virile and buoyant spirit. And
+so Dickens's associations with the country which he loved best and knew
+most intimately were, on the one side, those of a dreamy childhood, on
+the other, of a lusty zest in outdoor life and the rustic jollity of an
+old-world "Merry England". The sports and revels of Manor Farm, Dingley
+Dell, have all the exuberance of Lever's Irish novels. Dickens must have
+often taken part in merry-makings such as he describes, on flying visits
+that are not recorded in Forster, before he sat down to write about them
+during his honeymoon at Chalk. As the Master of Gadshill, his lithe,
+upright figure, clad in loose-fitting garments, and rather dilapidated
+shoes, was a familiar sight to all the country neighbours, as he swung
+along the shady lanes, banked high with hedges that were full of
+violets, purple and white, ferns, and lichens, and mosses. Often he
+would call at the oldfashioned "Crispin and Crispianus", on the north
+side of the London road just out of Strood, for a glass of ale, or a
+little cold brandy and water, and sit in the corner of the settle
+opposite the fireplace, looking at nothing but seeing everything. In the
+chapter on "Tramps" in _The Uncommercial Traveller_, he imagines himself
+to be the travelling clockmaker, who sees to something wrong with the
+bell of the turret stable clock up at Cobham Hall, and after being
+regaled in the enormous servants' hall with beef and bread, and powerful
+ale, sets off through the woods till the town lights appear right in
+front, and lies for the night at the ancient sign of Crispin and
+Crispianus. The floating population of the roads,--the travelling
+showman, the cheap jack, the harvest and hopping tramps, the young
+fellows who trudge along barefoot, their boots slung over their
+shoulders, their shabby bundles under their arms, their sticks newly cut
+from some roadside wood, and the truculently humorous tramp, who tells
+the Beadle: "Why, blow your little town! who wants to be in it? Wot does
+your dirty little town mean by comin' and stickin' itself in the road to
+anywhere?"--all are closely scanned and noted, as they mount or descend
+Strood Hill in perennial procession. Dickens was himself a sturdy and
+inveterate pedestrian. When he suffered from insomnia he would think
+nothing of rising in the middle of the night and taking a thirty miles'
+spin before breakfast.
+
+[Illustration: THE LEATHER BOTTLE, COBHAM]
+
+     "Coming in just now," he wrote in his third year at Gadshill,
+     "after twelve miles in the rain, I was so wet that I have had to
+     change and get my feet into warm water before I could do anything."
+
+In February, 1865, he wrote:
+
+     "I got frost-bitten by walking continually in the snow, and getting
+     wet in the feet daily. My boots hardened and softened, hardened and
+     softened, my left foot swelled, and I still forced the boot on; sat
+     in it to write, half the day; walked in it through the snow, the
+     other half; forced the boot on again next morning; sat and walked
+     again; and being accustomed to all sorts of changes in my feet,
+     took no heed. At length, going out as usual, I fell lame on the
+     walk, and had to limp home dead lame, through the snow, for the
+     last three miles--to the remarkable terror, by the way, of the two
+     big dogs."
+
+It is hardly necessary to say that Dickens never so absorbed the local
+spirit and genius of that part of rural England which he knew and loved
+best as the Brontes absorbed the spirit of the Yorkshire moorlands, or
+Mr. Hardy the spirit of Wessex, or Mr. Eden Phillpotts the spirit of
+Dartmoor, or Sir A. Quiller-Couch the spirit of the "Delectable Duchy".
+He was too busy and preoccupied a man for this, and had too much of his
+life and work behind him, when he made his permanent home in
+"Dickens-land". And Gadshill was too near to the bustle and stir of
+Chatham to furnish a purely idyllic environment or entirely
+unsophisticated rusticity. But it is not unduly fanciful to discover the
+influence of Kentish scenery, with its bright, clear atmosphere, its
+undulating slopes of green woodland and green hop fields, pink-and-white
+orchards, and golden harvests--the prettiest though not the most
+beautiful scenery in England--upon his conception of a typical
+
+           "English home--grey twilight pour'd
+       On dewy pastures, dewy trees,
+   Softer than sleep--all things in order stored,
+       A haunt of ancient Peace".
+
+Though no local name is attached to it, and no local tradition
+identifies it with any particular spot, there is no difficulty in fixing
+in the very heart of "Dickens-land" the picture upon which the "Battle
+of Life" is opened: the joyous dance of two girls, "quite unconstrained
+and careless", "in one little orchard attached to an old stone house
+with a honeysuckle porch", "while some half-dozen peasant women standing
+on ladders, gathering the apples from the trees, stopped in their work
+to look down, and share their enjoyment".
+
+     "As they danced among the orchard trees, and down the groves of
+     stems and back again, and twirled each other lightly round and
+     round, the influence of their airy motion seemed to spread and
+     spread, in the sunlighted scene, like an expanding circle in the
+     water. Their streaming hair and fluttering skirts, the elastic
+     grass beneath their feet, the boughs that rustled in the morning
+     air--the flushing leaves, their speckled shadows on the soft green
+     ground--the balmy wind that swept along the landscape, glad to turn
+     the distant windmill, cheerily--everything between the two girls,
+     and the man and team at plough upon the ridge of land, where they
+     showed against the sky as if they were the last things in the
+     world--seemed dancing too."
+
+Something, too, of the love of good cheer, quaint old Christmas customs,
+of junketings in ancient farmhouse kitchens and the parlours of ancient
+hostelries, which has made Dickens the early Victorian apostle of
+Yuletide "wassail", can be derived from his having "powlert up and down"
+in a county abounding with comfortable manor houses and cosy inns. It is
+a ripe and mellow tradition of good cheer, that is quite distinct from
+the bovine stolidity of a harvest home in George Eliot's Loamshire or
+the crude animalism of Meredith's Gaffer Gammon. For Kent, even from
+the time of Caesar's Commentaries, has been "the civil'st place of all
+the isle".
+
+That is the aspect of Dickens's country on the one side--the side which,
+some years before he established himself at Gadshill, he mapped out,
+already knowing it intimately, to show to Forster in a brief excursion:
+
+     "You will come down booked for Maidstone (I will meet you at
+     Paddock-wood), and we will go thither in company over a most
+     beautiful little line of railroad. The eight miles walk from
+     Maidstone to Rochester, and a visit to the Druidical altar on the
+     wayside, are charming. This could be accomplished on the Tuesday;
+     and Wednesday we might look about us at Chatham, coming home by
+     Cobham on Thursday."
+
+The other side--the dreary marshes lying between the Medway and the
+Thames, a dark, flat wilderness intersected by dykes and mounds and
+gates--had associations not less intimate. In _David Copperfield_
+Dickens transferred the dreams and the events of his childhood to an
+alien setting. In _Great Expectations_ he invents a fictitious story in
+harmony with scenes in which he delighted to retrace his childish
+memories. Again, the amphibian creatures which he lightly sketches in
+_Great Expectations_, and more elaborately in _Our Mutual Friend_, had
+first impressed themselves on his imagination as he rambled, a tiny,
+eager-eyed boy, about the dockyards and waterside alleys of Chatham, or
+made trips to Sheerness with "Mr. Micawber", that is to say, his
+father, in the Navy Pay yacht, though he long afterwards pursued his
+studies of them more exhaustively at Wapping and the Isle of Dogs, and
+in expeditions with the Thames police. It was from a walk with Leech
+through Chatham by-streets that he gathered the hint of Charley Hexam
+and his father, for _Our Mutual Friend_, from the sight of "the
+uneducated father in fustian and the educated boy in spectacles".
+
+But when Dickens took Rochester once more for the background of a story
+in _Edwin Drood_ there seems, to us in our knowledge of the event,
+something almost ominous. It suggests Waller's famous simile of the stag
+that returns to die where it was roused. Dickens's last visit to the
+town was to stimulate his imagination for the conference between
+Datchery and the Princess Puffer at the entrance to the "Monks'
+Vineyard". On the last day of his life he was busy, in the chalet in the
+garden at Gadshill Place, embodying the fancies which he had gathered
+and fused on that last visit. On the last page which he was to write he
+endeavoured to record--for the last time--his sense of the atmosphere of
+the old city.
+
+     "A brilliant morning shines on the old city. Its antiquities and
+     ruins are surpassingly beautiful, with the lusty ivy gleaming in
+     the sun, and the rich trees waving in the balmy air. Changes of
+     glorious light from moving boughs, songs of birds, scents from
+     gardens, woods, and fields--or, rather, from the one great garden
+     of the whole of the cultivated island in its yielding
+     time--penetrate into the Cathedral, subdue its earthy odour, and
+     preach the Resurrection and the Life. The cold stone tombs of
+     centuries ago grow warm, and flecks of brightness dart into the
+     sternest marble corners of the building, fluttering there like
+     wings."
+
+On the eve of that last day he had more than once expressed his
+satisfaction at having finally abandoned all intention of exchanging
+Gadshill for London. He had done this still more impressively a few days
+before.
+
+     "While he lived, he said, he should wish his name to be more and
+     more associated with the place; and he had a notion that when he
+     died, he should like to lie in the little graveyard belonging to
+     the Cathedral at the foot of the Castle wall."
+
+Half of his wish had to go unfulfilled; the other half has been realized
+in a different but a profounder sense than that in which it is
+conceived. While he lives, in the creations of his humour and pathos,
+airy things of fun and frolic, tenderness and tears, his name is more
+and more associated "with the scenes"--to borrow the words of the
+memorial tablet in Rochester Cathedral--"in which his earliest and his
+latest years were passed", scenes that "from the associations ... which
+extended over all his life" have the best right to be known as
+"Dickens-land".
+
+_Printed by Blackie & Son, Ltd., Glasgow_
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Transcriber's note
+
+
+The following changes have been made to the text:
+
+Page 19: "by an unbridgable chasm" changed to "by an unbridgeable
+chasm".
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Dickens-Land, by J. A. Nicklin
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