The Dickens Country :: CHAPTER IV. IN THE WEST COUNTRY.

CHAPTER IV. IN THE WEST COUNTRY.

Dickens first made acquaintance with many provincial towns during his early newspaper days, when, as a reporter, he galloped by road in post-chaises, both by day and night, to remote parts of the country, meeting with strange adventures, sometimes experiencing awkward predicaments, from which he invariably succeeded in extricating himself and in reaching his destination in good time for publication, his carefully-prepared notes being transcribed, not infrequently, during “the smallest hours of the night in a swift-flying carriage and pair,” by the light of a blazing wax-candle. In 1845, when recalling his reporting days, he informed Forster that he “had to charge for all sorts of breakages fifty times in a journey without question,” as the ordinary results of the pace he was compelled to travel. He had charged his employers for everything but a broken head, “which,” he naÏvely added, “is the only thing they would have grumbled to pay for.” One of the foremost of these expeditions took place in 1835, when he and a colleague, Thomas Beard, journeyed by express coach to Bristol to report, for the Morning Chronicle, the political speeches in connection with Lord John Russell’s Devon contest. He lodged at the Bush Inn, where that “ill-starred gentleman,” Mr. Winkle, took up his quarters when fleeing from the wrath of the infuriated Dowler, as set forth in the thirty-eighth chapter of “Pickwick.” We are told that Mr. Winkle found Bristol “a shade more dirty than any place he had ever seen”; that, at the time referred to (nearly eighty years ago), the pavements of that city were “not the widest or cleanest upon earth,” its streets were “not altogether the straightest or least intricate,” and their “manifold windings and twistings” greatly puzzled Mr. Winkle, who, when exploring them, lost his way, with the result that he unexpectedly came upon his old acquaintances, Bob Sawyer and Ben Allen, the former occupying a newly-painted tenement (not identified), which had been recently converted into “something between a shop and a private house,” with the word “Surgery” inscribed above the window of what had been the front parlour. At the Bush tavern the fugitive was discovered by Sam Weller, who had received peremptory orders from “the governor” to follow and keep him in sight until Mr. Pickwick arrived on the scene. The Bush no longer exists; it stood in Corn Street, near the Guildhall, and was taken down in 1864, the present Wiltshire Bank marking the site. It will be remembered that it was to Clifton, on the outskirts of Bristol, where Arabella Allen was sent by her brother (who regarded himself as “her natural protector and guardian”) to spend a few months at an old aunt’s, “in a nice dull place,” in order to break her to his will that she should marry Bob Sawyer (“late Nockemorf”). Hither Sam Weller went in quest of her, walking (as we are told) “up one street and down another—we were going to say, up one hill and down another, only it’s all uphill at Clifton”—and, after struggling across the Downs, “against a good high wind,” eventually arrived at “several little villas of quiet and secluded appearance,” at one of which he, too, met a familiar acquaintance in “the pretty housemaid from Mrs. Nupkins’s,” who proved a valuable guide to the whereabouts of Miss Allen. In 1866 and 1869 Dickens gave public readings at Clifton, staying on the former occasion at the Down Hotel. The suspension bridge across the Avon is the old Hungerford Bridge, removed in 1863, and the sight of it at the time of his later visits to Clifton must have recalled to Dickens the troubled period of his boyhood at the blacking factory.

The occasion of the Bristol reporting expedition in 1835 is also memorable for the fact that it marks the date of Dickens’s first visit to the contiguous city of Bath, which plays a still more important part in the Transactions of the Pickwick Club. At Bath he had to prepare a report of a political dinner given there by Lord John Russell, and to despatch it “by Cooper Company’s Coach, leaving the Bush (Bristol) at half-past six next morning.” It was sharp work, as Russell’s speech at the banquet had to be transcribed by Dickens for the printers while travelling by the mail-coach viÂ Marlborough for London; this necessitated for himself and Thomas Beard the relinquishment of sleep and rest during two consecutive days and nights. It is fair to suppose that on one of his early reporting expeditions to the West of England Dickens put up for a night at the quaint little roadside inn near Marlborough Downs, which he so carefully describes in the Bagman’s Story in “Pickwick.”

“It was a strange old place, built of a kind of shingle, inlaid, as it were, with cross-beams, with gable-topped windows projecting over the pathway, and a low door with a dark porch, and a couple of steep steps leading down into the house, instead of the modern fashion of half a dozen shallow ones leading up to it.” Like Tom Smart, the hero of the story, he doubtless slept in the selfsame apartment, with its “big closets, and a bed which might have served for a whole boarding-school, to say nothing of a couple of oaken presses that would have held the baggage of a small army.” Nay, he may even have experienced Tom Smart’s strange hallucination in regard to the ancient armchair, apparently assuming in the uncertain light of the chamber fire the outlines of a strangely-formed specimen of humanity, although probably he did not go so far as to enter into conversation with this remarkable bedroom companion, as did the Bagman, whose vivid imagination, aided by the narcotic effects of his noggins of whisky, enabled him to impart a spiciness to his narrative. From the detailed manner in which Dickens portrays this old-fashioned alehouse, we are justified in conjecturing that such a place really existed during the thirties, and attempts have been made to identify it, for we need not take for granted the statement in “Pickwick” that the place had been pulled down. From inquiries which I instituted on the subject, a local correspondent informs me that the Marquis of Ailesbury’s Arms at Clatford somewhat answered to the description prior to extensive structural alterations effected about twenty years ago.

Another investigator considers that the inn at Beckhampton, the Catherine Wheel, fulfils most of the requirements. With this conclusion, however, the Rev. W. H. Davies, of Avebury, is not disposed to agree, and the late Rev. A. C. Smith, in his “British and Roman Antiquities,” tells us that the inn which formerly existed at Shepherd’s Shord (or Shore) was the one referred to by Dickens, and that at the time of the publication of “Pickwick” everybody in Wiltshire so identified it. Another suggestion is that the original of Tom Smart’s house of call was the Kennett Inn at Beckhampton, which, according to a drawing of the place, answers the descriptions even better than those already mentioned, although it stood upon the wrong side of the road. We ought, I think, to accept the local opinion of Pickwickian days, and fix the scene of the Bagman’s adventure at Shepherd’s Shore.[48]

Remembering what little leisure he must have had in the midst of political turmoil and journalistic responsibilities while at Bath, it is indeed surprising to find how truthful a presentment of that delightful city is achieved in “Pickwick.” On the occasion in question he put up at a small hotel, the Saracen’s Head, a quaint-looking, unpretentious building still existing in Broad Street, its two red-tiled gables and stuccoed front facing that thoroughfare. The landlady relates that Dickens, owing to the fact that all the bedrooms of the house were occupied on his arrival at a late hour, had to be accommodated with a room over some stables or outbuildings at the farther end of the inn yard, overlooking Walcot Street.[49] Visitors are shown a curious two-handled mug which the novelist is believed to have used, and the bedroom once occupied by him, and containing the old four-post bedstead upon which he slept; while in another room, low and raftered, is to be seen the stiff wooden armchair in which he sat!—relics that are deservedly cherished and handed down as heirlooms.

Bath is frequently referred to in the novelist’s writings, and, judging by a particular allusion to the historic town, it seems not to have left a very favourable impression on his mind, for he there mentions it as “that grass-grown city of the ancients.”[50] At a subsequent date he remarked: “Landor’s ghost goes along the silent streets here before me.... The place looks to me like a cemetery which the dead have succeeded in rising and taking. Having built streets of their old gravestones, they wander about scantly trying to ‘look alive.’ A dead failure.”[51] He had a pleasant remembrance of Walter Savage Landor at No. 35, St. James’s Square, upon which a tablet was fixed in 1903 recording the fact of a visit paid to him by the novelist on the latter’s birthday, February 7, 1840, on which occasion he was accompanied by Mrs. Dickens, Maclise, and Forster, the party remaining there until the end of the month. We are assured by his biographer that it was during this visit to Bath “that the fancy which was shortly to take the form of Little Nell first occurred to its author.” The girl-heroine of “The Old Curiosity Shop” was an immense favourite with Landor, who in after-years emphatically declared that the one mistake of his life was that he had not purchased the house in which the conception of her dawned upon Dickens, and then and there burned it to the ground, so that no meaner associations should desecrate it.

MILE END COTTAGE, ALPHINGTON. (Page 94.)
Taken by Dickens in 1839 for his parents’ use. “The house is on the high road to Plymouth, and the situation is charming” (letter to Mr. Thomas Mitton).

Brief as his stay in Bath undoubtedly was in the capacity of reporter for the Morning Chronicle in 1835, he, nevertheless, made excellent use of his abnormal powers of observation in spite of professional activities, his retentive memory enabling him to reproduce in “The Pickwick Papers” a few months afterwards those typical scenes in the social life of Bath of that period, which has since undergone many changes, Mr. Pickwick being almost the last to witness the peculiarities of Bath society as described by the novel-writers of a century or so ago. Dickens noticed, among other topographical features, the steepness of Park Street, which (he said) “was very much like the perpendicular streets a man sees in a dream, which he cannot get up for the life of him.” He remembered, too, that the White Hart Hotel (the proprietor of which establishment was the Moses Pickwick who owned the very coach on which Sam Weller saw inscribed “the magic name of Pickwick”) stood “opposite the great Pump Room, where the waiters, from their costume, might be mistaken for Westminster boys, only they destroy the illusion by behaving themselves so much better.”[52] The White Hart flourished in Stall Street, and until 1864 (when the house was given up) the waiters wore knee-breeches and silk stockings, and the women servants donned neat muslin caps. The old coaching inn, alas! no longer exists, and its site is indicated by the Grand Pump Room Hotel, the original carved sign of a white hart being preserved and still used over the door of an inn of the same name in Widcombe, a suburb of Bath.

The pen-pictures of scenes at the Assembly Rooms and Pump Rooms are admirably rendered in the pages of “Pickwick,” and we feel convinced that the author must have witnessed them.

“Bath being full, the company and the sixpences for tea poured in in shoals. In the ball-room, the long card-room, the octagonal card-room, the staircases, and the passages, the hum of many voices and the sound of many feet were perfectly bewildering. Dresses rustled, feathers waved, lights shone, and jewels sparkled. There was the music—not of the quadrille band, for it had not yet commenced, but the music of soft, tiny footsteps, with now and then a clear, merry laugh, low and gentle, but very pleasant to hear in a female voice, whether in Bath or elsewhere. Brilliant eyes, lighted up with pleasurable expectations, gleamed from every side; and look where you would, some exquisite form glided gracefully through the throng, and was no sooner lost than it was replaced by another as dainty and bewitching.

“In the tea-room, and hovering round the card-tables, were a vast number of queer old ladies and decrepit old gentlemen, discussing all the small-talk and scandal of the day, with a relish and gusto which sufficiently bespoke the intensity of the pleasure they derived from the occupation. Mingled with these groups were three or four matchmaking mammas, appearing to be wholly absorbed by the conversation in which they were taking part, but failing not from time to time to cast an anxious sidelong glance upon their daughters, who, remembering the maternal injunction to make the best of their youth, had already commenced incipient flirtations in the mislaying of scarves, putting on gloves, setting down cups, and so forth—slight matters apparently, but which may be turned to surprisingly good account by expert practitioners.

“Lounging near the doors, and in remote corners, were various knots of silly young men, displaying various varieties of puppyism and stupidity, amusing all sensible people near them with their folly and conceit, and happily thinking themselves the objects of general admiration—a wise and merciful dispensation which no good man will quarrel with.

“And, lastly, seated on some of the back benches, where they had already taken up their positions for the evening, were divers unmarried ladies past their grand climacteric, who, not dancing because there were no partners for them, and not playing cards lest they should be set down as irretrievably single, were in the favourable situation of being able to abuse everybody without reflecting on themselves. In short, they could abuse everybody, because everybody was there. It was a scene of gaiety, glitter, and show, of richly-dressed people, handsome mirrors, chalked floors, girandoles, and wax-candles; and in all parts of the scene, gliding from spot to spot in silent softness, bowing obsequiously to this party, nodding familiarly to that, and smiling complacently on all, was the sprucely-attired person of Angelo Cyrus Bantam, Esquire, Master of the Ceremonies” (chap. xxxv.).

“The great pump-room is a spacious saloon, ornamented with Corinthian pillars, and a music gallery, and a Tompion clock, and a statue of Nash, and a golden inscription, to which all the water-drinkers should attend, for it appeals to them in the cause of a deserving charity. There is a large bar with a marble vase, out of which the pumper gets the water; and there are a number of yellow-looking tumblers, out of which the company gets it; and it is a most edifying and satisfactory sight to behold the perseverance and gravity with which they swallow it. There are baths near at hand, in which a part of the company wash themselves; and a band plays afterwards to congratulate the remainder on their having done so. There is another pump-room, into which infirm ladies and gentlemen are wheeled, in such an astonishing variety of chairs and chaises that any adventurous individual who goes in with the regular number of toes is in imminent danger of coming out without them; and there is a third, into which the quiet people go, for it is less noisy than either. There is an immensity of promenading, on crutches and off, with sticks and without, and a great deal of conversation, and liveliness, and pleasantry.... At the afternoon’s promenade ... all the great people, and all the morning water-drinkers, meet in grand assemblage. After this, they walked out or drove out, or were pushed out in bath-chairs, and met one another again. After this, the gentlemen went to the reading-rooms and met divisions of the mass. After this, they went home. If it were theatre night, perhaps they met at the theatre; if it were assembly night, they met at the rooms; and if it were neither, they met the next day. A very pleasant routine, with perhaps a slight tinge of sameness” (chap. xxxvi.).

The citizens of Bath are naturally proud of its Pickwickian associations; Mr. Pickwick’s lodging in the Royal Crescent is pointed out, as well as the actual spot in the Assembly Rooms where he played whist, while the veritable rout seats of that time are preserved and cherished. The Royal Hotel, whence Mr. Winkle hurriedly departed by coach for Bristol, has shared the fate of the White Hart; indeed, Mr. Snowden Ward avers that there was no Royal Hotel in Bath in Dickens’s time, and that he probably refers to the York House Hotel, frequently patronized by royalty, and once at least by the novelist himself. We may still look, however, upon the “small greengrocer’s shop” where Bath footmen used to hold their social evenings, and memorable as the scene of the “leg-o’-mutton swarry.” It is now the Beaufort Arms, in a narrow street out of Queen’s Square, Bath, and within a short distance of No. 12 in the Square, the residence of Angelo Cyrus Bantam, Esq., Master of the Ceremonies, who welcomed Mr. Pickwick to Ba-ath.

In the course of an interesting speech delivered in 1865 at the second annual dinner of the Newspaper Press Fund, Dickens made an interesting allusion to the Devonshire political contest of thirty years previously, and to the part he took in it as a Chronicle reporter. “The very last time I was at Exeter,” he said, “I strolled into the Castle yard, there to identify, for the amusement of a friend, the spot on which I once ‘took,’ as we used to call it, an election speech of Lord John Russell ... in the midst of a lively fight maintained by all the vagabonds in that division of the county, and under such a pelting rain that I remember two good-natured colleagues, who chanced to be at leisure, held a pocket-handkerchief over my note-book, after the manner of a state canopy in an ecclesiastical procession.” In 1839 a mission of a very different character caused him to journey to “the capital of the West” (as that city has been denominated), his object being to arrange a new home for his parents in that locality. Making his headquarters at the New London Inn (where he had Charles Kean’s sitting-room), he soon discovered a suitable residence about a mile south from the city boundary on the highroad to Plymouth, Mile End Cottage, which is really divided into two portions, one-half being then occupied by the landlady, and the other being available for the new tenants. Dickens, when writing to Forster, described the place as “two white cottages,” and respecting the accommodation here provided for his parents, he said: “I almost forget the number of rooms, but there is an excellent parlour, which I am furnishing as a drawing-room, and there is a splendid garden.” In a letter to his friend Thomas Mitton he dilates more fully upon the attractions of the cottage and its environment. “I do assure you,” he observed, “that I am charmed with the place and the beauty of the country round about, though I have not seen it under very favourable circumstances.... It is really delightful, and when the house is to rights and the furniture all in, I shall be quite sorry to leave it.... The situation is charming; meadows in front, an orchard running parallel to the garden hedge, richly-wooded hills closing in the prospect behind, and, away to the left, before a splendid view of the hill on which Exeter is situated, the cathedral towers rising up into the sky in the most picturesque manner possible. I don’t think I ever saw so cheerful and pleasant a spot....”[53] It will be remembered that “Nicholas Nickleby” opens with a reference to “a sequestered part of the county of Devonshire” (sic), where lived one Mr. Godfrey Nickleby, the grandfather of the hero of the story; and there is no doubt that the home of Mrs. Nickleby’s friends, the Dibabses, as pictured by that lady in the fifty-fifth chapter, was identical with the tenement in which Mr. and Mrs. John Dickens found a temporary lodgment—“the beautiful little thatched white house one story high, covered all over with ivy and creeping plants, with an exquisite little porch with twining honeysuckle, and all sorts of things.”

Charles Dickens’s return to England at the end of his triumphant progress through the United States in 1842 was the occasion for a special celebration, which assumed the form of a holiday trip in Cornwall with his cherished friends Stanfield, Maclise, and Forster. They chose Cornwall for the excursion because it transpired that this “desolate region,” as Dickens termed it, was unfamiliar to them, and would therefore enhance their enjoyment. The decision to make Cornwall their destination suggested to Dickens the idea of opening his new book, “Martin Chuzzlewit,” on that rugged coast, “in some terrible dreary, iron-bound spot,” and to select the lantern of a lighthouse (probably the Longship’s, off Land’s End) as the opening scene; but he changed his mind. This expedition in the late summer lasted nearly three weeks, it proving a source of such unexpected and unabated attraction that the merry party felt loath to return to town. Railways were not of much use to them, as they did not penetrate to the remote districts which the travellers desired to visit. Post-horses were therefore requisitioned, and when the roads proved inaccessible to these, pedestrianism was perforce resorted to. They visited Tintagel, and explored every part of mountain and sea “consecrated by the legends of Arthur.” They ascended to the cradle of the highest pinnacle of Mount St. Michael,[54] and descended in several mines; but above all the marvels of land and sea, that which yielded the most lasting impression was a sunset at Land’s End, concerning which Forster says: “There was something in the sinking of the sun behind the Atlantic that autumn afternoon, as we viewed it together from the top of the rock projecting farthest into the sea, which each in his turn declared to have no parallel in memory.” The famous Logan Stone, too, was not forgotten. Writing subsequently to Forster, the novelist said: “Don’t I still see the Logan Stone, and you perched on the giddy top, while we, rocking it on its pivot, shrank from all that lay concealed below!” For Forster possessed the necessary courage and agility (lacking in the rest) to mount the huge swaying stone, the feat being immortalized by Stanfield in a sketch bequeathed to the Victoria and Albert Museum.[55] Lastly, the waterfall at St. Wighton was visited, memorable for the fact that a painting of it (from a sketch made on this occasion) appears as the background to Maclise’s picture of “A Girl at a Waterfall,” the figure being depicted from a sister-in-law of Dickens. The novelist, while the glow of enjoyment was yet upon him, could not resist dilating upon the exhilarating effect induced by this glorious holiday in the midst of natural scenery, then witnessed by the joyous quartette for the first time; and the following letter, addressed to his American friend, Professor Felton, fittingly concludes these references to the event which he ever recalled with delight: “Blessed star of the morning, such a trip as we had into Cornwall, just after Longfellow went away!... We went down into Devonshire by the railroad, and there we hired an open carriage from an innkeeper, patriotic in all Pickwick matters, and went on with post-horses. Sometimes we travelled all night, sometimes all day, sometimes both. I kept the joint-stock purse, ordered all the dinners, paid all the turnpikes, conducted facetious conversations with the post-boys, and regulated the pace at which we travelled. Stanfield (an old sailor) consulted an enormous map on all disputed points of wayfaring, and referred, moreover, to a pocket-compass and other scientific instruments. The luggage was in Forster’s department, and Maclise, having nothing particular to do, sang songs. Heavens! if you could have seen the necks of bottles—distracting in their immense varieties of shape—peering out of the carriage pockets! If you could have witnessed the deep devotion of the post-boys, the wild attachment of the hostlers, the maniac glee of the waiters! If you could have followed us into the earthy old churches we visited, and into the strange caverns on the gloomy seashore, and down into the depths of mines, and up to the tops of giddy heights, where the unspeakably green water was roaring I don’t know how many hundred feet below! If you could have seen but one gleam of the bright fires by which we sat in the big rooms of ancient inns at night until long after the small hours had come and gone, or smelt but one steam of the hot punch,... which came in every evening in a huge, broad, china bowl! I never laughed in my life as I did on this journey. It would have done you good to hear me. I was choking and gasping and bursting the buckle off the back of my stock all the way, and Stanfield ... got into such apoplectic entanglements that we were often obliged to beat him on the back with portmanteaus before we could recover him. Seriously, I do believe that there never was such a trip. And they made such sketches, those two men, in the most romantic of our halting-places, that you could have sworn we had the Spirit of Beauty with us, as well as the Spirit of Fun....”[56]

THE GEORGE INN, AMESBURY. (Page 100.)
“The Blue Dragon” of “Martin Chuzzlewit.”

Dickens, as already intimated, originally conceived the idea of opening the tale of “Martin Chuzzlewit” on the coast of Cornwall. Instead of this, however, we find, in the initial chapter of that story, that the scene is laid in a village near Salisbury. That he had previously made himself acquainted with Wiltshire is indicated in his correspondence with Forster in 1842, where he declared (for instance) that in beholding an American prairie for the first time he felt no such emotions as he experienced when crossing Salisbury Plain. “I would say to every man who can’t see a prairie,” he remarked, “go to Salisbury Plain, Marlborough Downs, or any of the broad, high, open lands near the sea. Many of them are fully as impressive, and Salisbury Plain is decidedly more so.”

Six years later he and Forster, with John Leech and Mark Lemon, procured horses at Salisbury, and “passed the whole of a March day in riding over every part of the plain, visiting Stonehenge, and exploring Hazlitt’s hut at Winterslow, the birthplace of some of his finest essays.”[57]

There are persons still living in the neighbourhood of Salisbury who remember Dickens’s quest for local colour with which to give a semblance of reality to his topographical descriptions in “Chuzzlewit.” “The fair old town of Salisbury” figures prominently in that story, and we must believe that his allusion (in the fifth chapter) to the grand cathedral derived inspiration from personal observation: “The yellow light that streamed in through the ancient windows in the choir was mingled with a murky red. As the grand tones (of the organ) resounded through the church, they seemed to Tom to find an echo in the depth of every ancient tomb, no less than in the deep mystery of his own heart.” He makes a curious mistake in the twelfth chapter when speaking of the “towers” of the old cathedral; but, of course, he knew perfectly well that the venerable fane is surmounted by a beautifully tapering spire, immortalized in one of Constable’s most remarkable pictures. The scene in Salisbury Market, so vividly portrayed in chapter v., could not have been penned except by an acute observer like Dickens; nothing escaped him, and he noted all the details of that busy scene, and stored them in his retentive memory in readiness for the pen-picture which he afterwards delineated so faithfully and so picturesquely.

The “little Wiltshire village,” described as being within an easy journey of Salisbury, has not been absolutely identified. Certain commentators opine that Amesbury is intended, while others consider it more probable that the novelist had in his mind the village of Alderbury, and that its principal inn, the Green Dragon, was the original of Mrs. Lupin’s establishment, concerning which that unprincipled adventurer, Montague Tigg, spoke with undisguised disparagement and contempt.

Clyx.com