When workmen were engaged in lowering the road opposite the old “George” Inn, that stands so boldly and with such a fine last-century air on the hill brow, they opened a tumulus which was found to contain, at a depth of only eighteen inches, the well-preserved skeletons of sixteen men, the victims of some prehistoric fray. Their feet were all placed towards the Down goes the road in a long steady slope, flanked by the great forts of Purbrook and Widley, whose dingy red-brick walls and embrasures command the entrance to the harbour. Away, to right and left, for a distance of seven miles, runs a succession of these forts, from Fareham to Purbrook, cresting the ridge of the long hill, connected by telegraph, and furnished with extensive barrack accommodation. Cosham village comes next, crouching at the foot of the ridge, with the great guns high overhead to the rearwards: Cosham, neither town nor village; busy enough for a town, sufficiently quaint for a village; with a railway-crossing barring the road; a station adjoining it; the tramp of soldiers re-echoing, and the blare of bugles familiar in the ears of the people all day and every day. SUBURBS These are suburbs indeed, with the beginnings of pavements and the terminus of a tramway that runs from here, a distance of three miles, to Portsmouth itself. We cross over the bridges that span salty channels, oozy and redolent of ocean and sea-weed during the hours of ebb. Here we are immediately confronted with the ceinture of forts that embraces Now come Hilsea Barracks, with Hilsea Post Office opposite, and further on, opposite the “Green Posts” Inn, an obelisk, marking the eighteenth-century bounds of the borough of Portsmouth, with the inscription, “Burgi de Portesmuth Limes MDCCXCIX. Rev. G. Cuthbert praetore.” And so by stages through North End into Landport, past ever-growing settlements and suburban wildernesses where new-built rows of hutches miscalled villas look out upon market-gardens and those forlornest of fields already marked out for “building sites,” but still innocent of houses; where builders’ refuse cumbers the ground, and where muddy pools, islanded with piles of broken and slack-baked bricks, and wrinkled into furious wavelets by the blusterous winds, resemble miniature seas in which (to aid the resemblance) lie the discarded iron pots and kettles of Portsmouth households, their spouts and handles rising above the waters like the vestiges of so many wrecked ironclads. Successive eras of suburb-rearing are most readily to be noted. First come the red-bricked suburbs still in the making; then those of the ’60’s and the ’70’s, brown-bricked and grey-stuccoed; and then the settlements of a period ranging from 1840 to 1860, Following upon this suburban stratum come the ‘ROADS’ v. ‘STREETS’ Here, where we come into Landport, we also come into the less affected region of “streets.” In the newer suburbs nothing less than “roads” will serve the turn of the jerry-builder; his ambitious phraseology soars far above what he thinks to be the more plebeian “street”; but perhaps, after all, he is wise in his generation, and is amply justified by the preferences of his clients; and if that is the situation, let us by all means condole with him as a much-maligned man, who does not what he would, but what he must. Here, too, in these beginnings of the old town, shops jostle villas with “grounds,” and they in turn elbow artisans’ dwellings, where children swing with improvised swings of clothes-lines on the railings, and manufacture mud-pies in the “gardens”; sticking them afterwards upon the shutters of those ultimate shops of the suburbs which seem to be in a chronic state of bankruptcy, and hold out no hopes of a living It was in these purlieus that Charles Dickens was born, at 387 Mile End Terrace, Commercial Road, Landport, on February 7, 1812; the son of Mr. John Dickens, Navy pay-clerk, who is supposed to be portrayed in the character of Micawber—no flattering portraiture of a father by his son. Writers who have fallen under the spell of Dickens have tried to do some sort of poetic representation of his birthplace; and, truth to tell, they have failed, because there never was any poetry at all about the place,—and probably never will be any, so long as its scrubby brick front and paltry fore-court last: while as regards Dickens himself, he was a very excellent business man among authors, and as little poetic as can well be imagined. |