Chapter II: Part 2

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":

"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.

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:

"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.

"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.

"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_

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Transcriber's note

The following changes have been made to the text:

Page 19: "by an unbridgable chasm" changed to "by an unbridgeable chasm".