Part 2 (1/2)
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 circ.u.mstance which caused David to think ”that Mr. d.i.c.k 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 part.i.tioned 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 d.i.c.kens wrote most of _Bleak House_. But though it has been rechristened from the t.i.tle of the novel, by an owner who demolished d.i.c.kens's summer home, and built the existing pseudo-Gothic structure on its foundations, no part of _Bleak House_ was written at Broadstairs. d.i.c.kens, 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 pa.s.sage 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 fis.h.i.+ng boats are dancing like mad. Upon the green-topped cliffs the corn is cut and piled in shocks; and thousands of b.u.t.terflies 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 a.s.sociated 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 d.i.c.kensian verve:
[Ill.u.s.tration: 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 fis.h.i.+ng was done in the port, and a quant.i.ty 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 n.o.body in the neighbourhood could endure a lamplighter.”
It was to Dover that d.i.c.kens 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 d.i.c.kens 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 gra.s.s 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 s.h.i.+ps, 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 s.h.i.+ps brightened, and shadowed, and changed, amid a bustle of boats putting off from the sh.o.r.e to them, and from them to the sh.o.r.e, and a general life and motion in themselves and everything around them, was most beautiful.”
That d.i.c.kens 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 a.s.sociations of his childhood, d.i.c.kens 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 circ.u.mstances, 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 a.s.sociations of maturity take the place of the imperishable links forged in the most susceptible years of fresh and sensitive childhood. For d.i.c.kens 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 cla.s.ses. 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 Gads.h.i.+ll, and he returned again and again to the contemplation of his earliest dreams and imaginings. He wrote from Gads.h.i.+ll 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 s.h.i.+ning pathway from earth to heaven. It was his sister f.a.n.n.y, 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.
[Ill.u.s.tration: SHORNE CHURCH]
”It was gone. The two beautiful hawthorn trees, the hedge, the turf, and all those b.u.t.tercups 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 hayc.o.c.k), 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 d.i.c.kens 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 a.s.sociations 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!'”