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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 <DW72> 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.

    