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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.

     "'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