  Dickens’s earlier sketches (which bore no signature until August, 1834, when he adopted the pseudonym of “Boz”) were penned when living with his father in Bentinck Street. At first they yielded no honorarium; but as soon as he received a modest fee for them in addition to his salary as a reporter, he exhibited a sense of independence in resolving to take the apartments in Buckingham Street, whence he presently removed to more commodious chambers in Furnival’s Inn, Holborn. He was then twenty-two years of age, and still on the staff of the Morning Chronicle, and from Christmas, 1834, he rented a “three-pair back” at No. 13, Furnival’s Inn. One of his earliest (undated) letters bears the address of Furnival’s Inn, in which he informs his future brother-in-law, Henry Austin, that he is about to start on a journey, alone and in a gig, to Essex and Suffolk—evidently on journalistic business for the Morning Chronicle—and expresses a belief that he would be spilt before paying a turnpike, or run over a child before reaching Chelmsford; his journey covered the same ground as that performed by Mr. Pickwick in his drive by coach to Ipswich. Twelve months His rooms at No. 15 were a decided improvement on these, and he probably had them in his mind when referring to Furnival’s Inn in “Martin Chuzzlewit” and to John Westlock’s apartments there, “two stories up”: “There are snug chambers in those Inns where the bachelors live, and, for the dissolute fellows they pretend to be, it is quite surprising how well they get on.... His rooms were the perfection of neatness and convenience.... There is little enough to see in Furnival’s Inn. It is a shady, quiet place, echoing to the footsteps of the stragglers who have business there, and rather monotonous and gloomy on Sunday evenings.” It does not require much stretch of imagination to believe that the description of Traddles’ chambers in Gray’s Inn (vide “David Copperfield,” chap. lix.) was drawn from these very apartments, or to realize the probability that the reference to Traddles and his lovely girl guests is a reminiscence of Dickens’s own. YORK HOUSE, 15 BUCKINGHAM STREET, STRAND. (Page 45.) This humble abode ever remained in his memory as a hallowed spot, cherished by the fact that here he received the commission to write “Pickwick” and penned the opening chapters, by which immortal achievement he suddenly leaped into fame; but also by another interesting and very personal recollection, namely, that it was the scene of his early domestic life. For, be it remembered, the publication of the first number of “Pickwick” (April, 1836) synchronized with his marriage, the lady of his choice being Catherine Thomson Hogarth, eldest daughter of George Hogarth, one of his colleagues on the staff of the Morning Chronicle, the ceremony being performed at the Church of St. Luke, Chelsea, of which parish the Rev. Charles Kingsley (father of the author of “Westward Ho!”) then officiated as rector. The honeymoon over, Dickens and his bride returned to London, and made their home at No. 15, Furnival’s Inn, where their eldest child, Charles, was born. Here his favourite sister-in-law, Mary Hogarth, sometimes stayed with the youthful couple, her amiable and delightful disposition proving a very joy in the little household; her premature death in 1837, in Doughty Street, at the age of seventeen, so unnerved her admiring brother-in-law that the course of “Pickwick” and “Oliver Twist” (produced almost simultaneously) was temporarily interrupted, and writing presently to Mrs. Hogarth from his next abode, he said: “I wish you could know how I weary now for the three rooms in Furnival’s Inn, and how I miss that pleasant smile and those sweet words which, bestowed upon our evening’s work, on our merry banterings round the fire, were more precious to me than the applause of a whole world would be.” Here, too (as already mentioned), lived John Westlock when visited by Tom Pinch, and it was the scene, also, of certain incidents in “The Mystery of Edwin Drood.” Does not Mr. Grewgious (whose chambers were “over the way” at Staple Inn) tell us that It was once an Inn of Chancery attached to Lincoln’s Inn, deriving its name from Sir William Furnivall, who owned much property hereabouts. About 1818 it became a series of chambers wholly unconnected with any Inn of Court, and in that year was entirely rebuilt by Peto. On the right-hand side of the Square, as immediately entered from Holborn, the house (No. 15) containing the bright little rooms once tenanted by Dickens was easily identified in later years by the medallion above the ground-floor windows which notified the fact; this house and its neighbour were more ornate than the rest, by reason of the series of Ionic pilasters between the windows. The whole of Furnival’s Inn was swept away in 1898, and the site covered by an extension of the premises of the Prudential Insurance Company; thus, alas! disappears an extremely interesting Dickens landmark, so intimately associated with the novelist and his writings. Dickens must have relinquished his tenancy of the chambers in Furnival’s Inn before the actual term had expired, the assumption being that he had taken them on a short lease, as, according to the official record, he continued to pay rent until February 1839. Two years previously, finding this accommodation Yates, in his “Recollections and Experiences,” recalls the Doughty Street of his day (and of Dickens’s) as “a broad, airy, wholesome street; none of your common thoroughfares, to be rattled through by vulgar cabs and earth-shaking Pickford vans, but a self-included property, with a gate at each end, and a lodge with a porter in a gold-laced hat and the Doughty arms No. 48, Doughty Street (where his daughters Mary and Kate were born) is situated on the east side of the street, and contains twelve rooms—a single-fronted, three-storied house, with a railed-in area in front and a small garden at the rear. A tiny little room on the ground-floor, facing the garden, is believed to have been the novelist’s study, in which he wrote the latter portion of “Pickwick,” and practically the whole of “Oliver Twist” and “Nicholas Nickleby.” The summer months he customarily spent away from home, taking his work with him, and thus a few chapters of these books were penned at Broadstairs, at Twickenham Park, and at Elm Cottage (now called Elm Lodge), Petersham, a pretty little rural retreat rented by him in the summer of 1839, a locality to which he then referred as “those remote and distant parts, with the chain of mountains formed by Richmond Hill presenting an almost insurmountable barrier between me and the busy world.” 15 FURNIVAL’S INN, HOLBORN. (Page 50.) At Elm Cottage he frequently enjoyed the society of his friends—Maclise, Landseer, Ainsworth, Talfourd, and the rest—many of whom joined in athletic competitions organized by their energetic host in the extensive grounds, among other frivolities being a balloon club for children, of which Forster was elected president on condition that he supplied all the balloons. Elm Cottage (Lodge) is now a school, screened from the public road by a high wooden fence and a barrier of elm-trees; it is a heavy-looking structure, roofed with red tiles, and at the rear is Sudbrook Lane. The novelist’s first country home, however, was at No. 4, Ailsa Park Villas, Twickenham, still standing in the Isleworth Road, It was during the Doughty Street days that Dickens, in order to relieve the mental tension, indulged in many enjoyable jaunts into the country with Forster, these acting as a stimulant to fresh exertion. He either rode on horseback or walked to such outlying districts as Hampstead, Barnet, or 48 DOUGHTY STREET. (Page 54.) The associations of the novelist with No. 48, Doughty Street are perpetuated not only in the name “Dickens House” recently bestowed upon it, but by the tablet affixed thereon by the London County Council in December last—truly, a long-delayed tribute, and especially deserving in this case owing to the fact that it is the only London home of Charles Dickens which survives intact structurally. It was here that in September, 1838, Forster lunched with him, and then to sit, read, or work, “or do something” (as the author expressed it in his note of invitation), “while I write the last chapter of ‘Oliver,’ which will be arter a lamb chop.” “How well I remember that evening!” observes his friend, “and our talk of what should be the fate of Charley Bates, on behalf of whom (as, indeed, for the Dodger, too) Talfourd Writing to his friend Macready, the actor, in November, 1839, Dickens said: “You must come and see my new house when we have it to rights.” He had just completed the last number of “Nicholas Nickleby,” when he decided to leave Doughty Street for a more commodious residence in a more exclusive JACK STRAW’S CASTLE, HAMPSTEAD, CIRCA 1835. (Page 56.) A contemporary drawing of the house by Daniel Maclise, R.A., represents it as detached and standing in its own grounds, with a wrought-iron entrance-gate surmounted by a lamp-bracket; the building consisted of a basement, two stories, and an attic. There are only three houses in the Terrace, and immediately beyond is the burial-ground of St. Marylebone Church. In a stable on the south side of the garden were kept the two ravens that inspired the conception of Grip in “Barnaby Rudge,” of which famous bird they were the “great originals.” Longfellow, after visiting the novelist here in 1841, said in a letter to a friend: “I write this from Dickens’s study, the focus from which so many luminous things have radiated. The raven croaks in the garden, and the ceaseless roar of London fills my ears.” The first raven died in 1841 from the effects (it was believed) of a meal of white paint; he was quickly succeeded by an older and a larger raven (“comparatively of weak intellect”), whose decease in 1845 was similarly premature, probably owing to “the same illicit taste for putty and paint which had been fatal to his predecessor.” “Voracity killed him,” said Dickens, “as it did Scott’s; he died unexpectedly by the kitchen fire. He kept his eye to the last upon the meat as it roasted, and suddenly turned over on his back with a sepulchral cry of ‘Cuckoo.’” The novelist occupied No. 1, Devonshire Terrace (the scene of many of his literary triumphs) for a period of about twelve years—the happiest period of his life—and there wrote some of the best of his stories, including “The Old Curiosity Shop,” “Barnaby Rudge,” “Martin Chuzzlewit,” “Dombey and Son,” and “David Copperfield,” the latter the most delightful of all his books, and his own favourite. Here also he composed those ever-popular Yule-tide annuals, “A Christmas Carol,” “The Cricket on the Hearth,” and “The Haunted Man.” The friends which the fame of the young author At Devonshire Terrace four sons were born to him, viz., Walter Landor, Francis Jeffrey, Alfred Tennyson, Henry Fielding, and one daughter, Dora Annie, who survived only a few months. On particular occasions, owing to a prolonged absence from England, he let this house firstly to General Sir John Wilson in 1842 (when he first visited America); secondly, to a widow lady, who agreed to occupy it during his stay in Italy in 1844; Dickens and his family left England for Italy in July, 1844, remaining abroad for a period of twelve months. In November, however, he made a quick journey to London, in order to test the effect of a reading aloud of his just completed Christmas book, “The Chimes,” before a few friends assembled for that purpose at Forster’s residence, Lincoln’s Inn Fields, which, as readers of “Bleak House” may remember, is introduced into that story as Mr. Tulkinghorn’s Chambers. The pleasurable interlude over, the novelist returned to Genoa, there remaining until June, 1845, when, homesick and eager to renew the “happy old walks and old talks” with his friends in the “dear old home,” he gladly settled down again in Devonshire Terrace. But only eleven months elapsed before he departed for Switzerland, where he rented a little villa called Rosemont at Lausanne; here he embarked upon a new story, “Dombey and Son,” and wrote “The Battle of Life.” His stay on the Continent was unexpectedly curtailed by the illness from scarlet fever of his eldest son Charles, then at King’s College school in London, whereupon, at the end of February, 1847, the novelist and his wife hastily made their way to the bedside of their sick boy, taking up their abode at the Victoria Hotel, Euston Square, 1 DEVONSHIRE TERRACE. (Page 58.) Writing to Mrs. Hogarth from Chester Place (the number is not recorded), he said: “This house is very cheerful on the drawing-room floor and above, looking into the park on one side and Albany Street on the other.” Early in 1848 Devonshire Terrace was quitted by Sir James Duke, and Dickens returned to London from Brighton (where he had been spending two or three weeks) joyfully to enter into possession once more of his own home, taking with him for completion an important chapter of “Dombey and Son.” The lease of this house expired in 1851, the last book written there being “David Copperfield,” at 9 OSNABURGH TERRACE. (Page 62.)
Other letters followed, testifying to the highly nervous condition and impatience of the writer, who in certain of these characteristic missives, said: “I am perpetually wandering (in fancy) up and down the house (Tavistock House) and tumbling over the workmen; when I feel that they are gone to dinner, I become low; when I look forward to their total abstinence on Sundays, I am wretched. The gravy at dinner has a taste of glue in it. I smell paint in the sea. Phantom lime attends me all the day long. I dream that I am a carpenter, and can’t partition off the hall. I frequently dance (with a distinguished company) in the dressing-room, and fall in the kitchen for want of a pillar.... I dream, also, of the workmen every night. They make faces at me, and won’t do anything.... Oh! if this were to last long; the distractions of the new book, the whirling of the story through one’s mind, escorted by workmen, the imbecility, the wild necessity of beginning to write, the not being able to do so, the—O! I should go——O!” The house, after all, was not ready to receive him at the stipulated time, for it proved to be as difficult to get the workmen off the premises as to get them on, and at the end of October they were still busy in their own peculiar manner, the painters mislaying their brushes every five minutes, and chiefly whistling in the intervals, while the carpenters “continued to look sideways with one eye down pieces of wood, as if they were absorbed in the contemplation of the perspective of the Thames Tunnel, and had entirely relinquished the vanities of this transitory world.” With white lime in the kitchens, blank paper constantly spread on drawing-room walls and shred off again, men clinking at the new stair-rails, Irish Tavistock House, The exterior of Tavistock House (pulled down “In Tavistock Square stands Tavistock House. This and the strip of garden in front are shut out from the thoroughfare (Gordon Place, on the east side) by an iron railing. A large garden, with a grass plot and high trees, stretches behind the house, and gives it a countrified look in the midst of this coal and gas-steaming London. In the passage from street to garden hung pictures and engravings. Here stood a marble bust of Dickens, so like him, so youthful and handsome; and over a bedroom door were inserted the bas-reliefs of Night and Day, after Thorwaldsen. Dickens’s eldest daughter, in recalling her father’s study at Tavistock House, remembered it as being larger and more ornate than his previous sanctum, and describes it as “a fine large room, opening into the drawing-room by means of sliding doors. When the rooms were thrown together,” she adds, “they gave my father a promenade of considerable length for the constant indoor walking which formed a favourite recreation for him after a hard day’s writing.” Here were wholly or partly written some of his best stories—viz., “Bleak House,” “Hard Times,” “Little Dorrit,” “A Tale of Two Cities,” and “Great Expectations,” his labours being agreeably diversified by private theatricals. With a view to possibilities of this kind, he caused the school-room (on the ground-floor at the back of the house) to be adapted for such entertainments by having a stage erected and a platform built outside the window for scenic purposes. His older children (the last of the family, Edward Bulwer Lytton, was born in Tavistock House, 1852) had now attained an age that justified a demand for a special form of home amusement, and this met with a ready response from an indulgent father, who, mainly, if not entirely, for their delight, arranged for a series of juvenile theatricals, which began on the first Twelfth Night there (the eldest son’s fifteenth birthday) with a performance of Fielding’s burlesque, “Tom Thumb,” with Mark Lemon and Dickens himself in the cast. Thackeray, who was present, thoroughly enjoyed the fun, rolling off his seat in a burst of laughter at the For the time being, the house was given up to theatrical preparations; the schoolroom became a painter’s shop; there was a gasfitters shop all over the basement; the topmost rooms were devoted to dressmaking, and the novelist’s dressing-room to tailoring, while he himself at intervals did his best to write “Little Dorrit” in corners, “like the Sultan’s groom, who was turned upside-down by the genii.” The most remarkable performances at “The Smallest Theatre in the World”! (for so the play-bills described it) were the presentations of “The Lighthouse” and “The Frozen Deep,” plays specially written by Wilkie Collins, for which the scenes were painted by Clarkson Stanfield, R.A., one of these beautiful works of art (depicting the Eddystone Lighthouse) realizing a thousand guineas after the novelist’s death! These theatrical entertainments, continued on Twelfth Nights for many years, were witnessed and enjoyed by many notabilities of London (Carlyle among them), and created quite a public sensation. Dickens’s cherished friend, the late Miss Mary Boyle, had vivid and pleasing recollections of Tavistock House and the master spirit who presided over it. TAVISTOCK HOUSE. (Page 70.) “The very sound of the name,” she says, “is replete to me with memories of innumerable evenings passed in the most congenial and delightful intercourse—dinners where the guests vied with each other in brilliant conversation, whether intellectual, witty, or sparkling; evenings devoted to music or theatricals. First and foremost of that magic circle was the host himself, always ‘one of us,’ who invariably drew out what was best and most characteristic in others.... I can never forget one evening, shortly after the arrival at Tavistock House, when we danced in the New Year. It seemed like a page cut out of the ‘Christmas Carol,’ as far, at least, as fun and frolic went.” It was while living at Tavistock House that Dickens devised the series of imitation book-backs with incongruous titles which were to serve as a decorative feature in his study, and were afterwards transferred, together with Clarkson Stanfield’s scenery, to his next home. Here, too, he gave sittings for his portrait to E. M. Ward, R.A., in 1854, in which is seen the strongly-contrasting tints of curtains, carpet, and other accessories, indicating the great writer’s passion for colour. The background and other details in the portrait by Mr. W. P. Frith, R.A., in 1859, were also painted in Dickens’s study at Tavistock House while he was at work. It has been suggested that the novelist probably found this residence a little too convenient for friends and other callers, whose unexpected visits somewhat interrupted him, and that this may have been a reason for his exodus into the country. In 1855 the novelist ascertained that a picturesque house at Gad’s Hill, near Rochester, the possession 5 HYDE PARK PLACE (NOW 5 MARBLE ARCH). (Page 77.) In 1885 and subsequently Tavistock House was occupied as a Jewish College, and it is worthy of note that prior to that date it was tenanted by Gounod, the composer, and by Mrs. Georgina Weldon, the well-known lady litigant, who in 1880 privately issued an extraordinary pamphlet entitled “The Ghastly Consequences of Living in Charles Dickens’s House,” where she dilates upon an attempt made to forcibly convey her to a lunatic asylum. Tavistock House, with its neighbours Bedford House and Russell House, were razed to the ground about four years ago, and the land, to be let on a building lease, is still a desolate waste. Although definitely settled at Gad’s Hill, Dickens decided upon taking a furnished house in town for a few months of the London season for the sake of his daughters, then young ladies just emerged from their teens, and the younger of whom was then engaged to be married. Accordingly, in the spring months of 1861 we find him and his household established at No. 3, Hanover Terrace, Regent’s Park, a retired spot adjoining the western side of the Park. In February, 1862, he made an exchange of houses for three months with his friends Mr. and Mrs. Hogge, they going to Gad’s Hill, and he and his family to Mr. Hogge’s house at No. 16, Hyde Park Gate, South Kensington Gore (south side of Kensington High Street); for, as the novelist explained, For the spring of 1865 a furnished house was taken at No. 16, Somers Place, north of Hyde Park (between Cambridge Square and Southwick Crescent), which Dickens, with his sister-in-law and daughter, occupied from the beginning of March until June, while Gad’s Hill Place was being “gorgeously painted,” as he informed Macready, with a further intimation that, owing to great suffering in his foot, he was a terror to the household, likewise to all the organs and brass bands in this quarter. In 1866 he rented for the spring a furnished house at No. 6, Southwick Place, Hyde Park Square (contiguous to his former residence in Somers Place), and early in January, 1870 (five months before his death), he took for the season the classic-fronted mansion of his friends Mr. and Mrs. Milner-Gibson, at No. 5, Hyde Park Place, apropos of which he said in a letter to his American friend James T. Fields: “We live here (opposite the Marble Arch) in a charming house until the 1st of June, and then return to Gad’s.... I have a large room here, with three fine windows, overlooking the Park, unsurpassable for airiness and cheerfulness.” This house was Charles Dickens’s last London At Hyde Park Place he wrote a considerable portion of the unfinished fragment of “The Mystery of Edwin Drood,” and made the acquaintance, through his friend Sir John Millais, of the illustrator of that story, Mr. Luke Fildes, now the well-known Royal Academician, who cherishes the most pleasant recollections of the collaboration. We learn that in 1867 and 1869 Dickens did not take a house in London, as was customary in these later years. In May of 1869 he stayed with his daughter and sister-in-law for two or three weeks at the St. James’s Hotel (now the Berkeley), at the corner of Berkeley Street, Piccadilly, having promised to be in London at the time of the arrival of a number of American friends; in order, too, that he might be near his London doctor for a while, In 1867, having a series of Readings in town and country alternately, he decided to dispense with unnecessary travelling between Gad’s Hill and London by sleeping in bachelor quarters at the office of his weekly journal, All the Year Round, which succeeded the earlier publication, Household Words, in 1859. THE OFFICE OF “ALL THE YEAR ROUND,” The office of All the Year Round was then No. 11, Wellington Street, North Strand, and still exists as No. 26, Wellington Street, at the south corner of Tavistock Street, at its junction with Wellington Street. In 1872 the lessee of the property was unavailingly approached by emissaries from Chicago with the view of purchasing and transporting the building to the World’s Fair, as a memento of the novelist. For his own convenience Dickens furnished rooms here, The office of Household Words was situated in Wellington Street, Strand, nearly opposite the portico of the Lyceum Theatre, a short distance from the Strand on the right-hand side of the way, and was rendered somewhat conspicuous by a large bow window. This building stood on the site of a very old tenement, with which there was bound up a very weird London legend, setting forth how the room on the first-floor front was the identical apartment which had served Hogarth as the scene of the final tableau in “The Harlot’s Progress.” The novelist used to tell his contributors that he had often, while sitting in his editorial sanctum, conjured up mental On September 17, 1903, the London County Council’s housebreakers took possession of the old office of Household Words (whence in 1850 Dickens launched the first number of that periodical), and the building has since been sacrificed in the general scheme for providing a new thoroughfare from the Strand to Holborn. Dickens used the front-room on the first floor—that with a large bow window—as his editorial sanctum, and on busy nights he slept on the premises instead of returning to Gad’s Hill. Latterly this room was used as an office by the manager of the Gaiety Theatre. The projection of the new Kingsway and Aldwych has resulted in the inevitable evanishment of many Dickensian landmarks, for a glance at the plans of these thoroughfares now in course of construction shows that they will cover an important section of “Dickens’s London,” such as Clare Market, the New Inn, Portugal Street, Drury Lane, Sardinia Street, Kingsgate Street, etc. * * * * * * * * A brief mention of certain public and private institutions in London having more or less informal associations with Dickens will form a fitting conclusion to the present chapter. THE OFFICE OF “HOUSEHOLD WORDS,” WELLINGTON STREET, STRAND. (Page 80.) In 1838 the author of “Pickwick” (then lately completed) was elected a member of the AthenÆum Club, his sponsor being Mr. Serjeant Storks, and continued his membership of that very exclusive confraternity for the rest of his life. The late Rev. F. G. Waugh, author of a booklet on the AthenÆum Club, did not think that Dickens considered himself a popular member, probably because he seldom spoke to anyone unless previously addressed. When not taking his sandwich standing, his usual seat in the coffee-room was the table on the east side of the room, just south of the fireplace. “I believe,” says Mr. Waugh, in a letter to the present writer, “the last letter he wrote from here was to his son, who did not receive it till after his father’s death.” The club, which preserves the novelist’s favourite chair, was the scene, too, of a happy incident—the reconciliation of Thackeray and Dickens after a period of strained relationship. This occurred only a few days before the death of the author of “Vanity Fair,” when the two great writers, meeting by accident in the lobby of the club, suddenly turned and saw each other, “and the unrestrained impulse of both was to hold out the hand of forgiveness and fellowship.” “... In the hall, that trysting-place, Two severed friends meet face to face: ’Tis Boz and Makepeace, good and true (‘Behind the coats,’ hats not a few). A start, and both uncertain stand; Then each has clasped the other’s hand!” The Temple, practically unchanged since Dickens’s day, ever remained a favourite locality with him. When quite a young man, and popularly known as “Boz,” he entered his name among the students of the Inn of the Middle Temple, though he did not eat dinners there until many years later, and was never called to the Bar. The Daily News offices (the old building, not the existing ornate structure) in |
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