The Dickens Country :: CHAPTER VII. IN THE NORTH.

CHAPTER VII. IN THE NORTH.

In 1837 Dickens’s thoughts were concentrated upon a new serial story, “Nicholas Nickleby,” in which he determined to expose the shortcomings of cheap boarding-schools then flourishing in Northern England, his first impressions of which were picked up when, as a child, he sat “in by-places, near Rochester Castle, with a head full of Partridge, Strap, Tom Pipes, and Sancho Panza.” The time had arrived (he thought) when, by means of his writings, he could secure a large audience, to whom he might effectively present the actual facts concerning the alleged cruelties customarily practised at those seminaries of which he had heard so much. Having thus resolved to punish the culprits by means of his powerful pen, and, if possible, to suppress the evils of the system they favoured, the novelist and his illustrator, “Phiz,” departed from London by coach on a cold winter’s day in January, 1838, for Greta Bridge, in the North Riding, with the express intention of obtaining authoritative information regarding the subject of the schools, for in that locality were situated some of the most culpable of those institutions. Greta Bridge takes its name from a lofty bridge of one arch, erected on the line of Watling Street, upon the site of a more ancient structure, over the river Greta, a little above its junction with the Tees.

The parish of Rokeby, in the petty sessional division of Greta Bridge, is celebrated as the scene of Sir Walter Scott’s poem, “Rokeby,” which was written on the spot, and does no more than justice to the beautiful scenery of the neighbourhood.

Dickens and “Phiz” broke their journey at Grantham, at which town they arrived late on the night of January 30, and put up at the George—“the very best inn I have ever put up at.” Early the next morning they continued their journey by the Glasgow mail, “which charged us the remarkably low sum of £6 fare for two places inside.” Snow began to fall, and the drifts grew deeper, until there was “no vestige of a track” over the wild heaths as the coach approached the destination of the two fellow-travellers, who were half frozen on their arrival at Greta Bridge. In the story the author gives the name of the hostelry where Squeers and his party alighted from the coach as the George and New Inn; but, in so doing, he indulges in an artistic license, for he thus bestows upon one house the respective signs of two distinct inns at Greta Bridge, situated about half a mile from each other. The George stands near the bridge already referred to, the public portion of the premises having since been converted into a private residence. The New Inn has also been changed, and is now a farmhouse called Thorpe Grange; built before the railway era for Mr. Morrit, the landlord of the George, it not only rivalled the older establishment, but absorbed its custom, the owner claiming it as the veritable inn of Dickens’s story.[67] It seems very probable that the novelist himself put up at the New Inn during his brief tour of investigation in 1838; writing thence to his wife at this date, he said that at 11 p.m. the mail reached “a bare place with a house standing alone in the midst of a dreary moor, which the guard informed us was Greta Bridge. I was in a perfect agony of apprehension, for it was fearfully cold, and there were no outward signs of anybody being up in the house. But to our great joy we discovered a comfortable room, with drawn curtains and a most blazing fire. In half an hour they gave us a smoking supper and a bottle of mulled port (in which we drank your health), and then we retired to a couple of capital bedrooms, in each of which there was a rousing fire halfway up the chimney. We have had for breakfast toast, cakes, a Yorkshire pie, a piece of beef about the size and much the shape of my portmanteau, tea, coffee, ham and eggs, and are now going to look about us....”[68] After exploring the immediate neighbourhood, Dickens, accompanied by “Phiz,” went by post-chaise to Barnard Castle, four miles from Greta Bridge, and just over the Yorkshire border, there to deliver a letter given to him by Mr. Smithson (a London solicitor, who had a Yorkshire connection), and to visit the numerous schools thereabouts. This letter of introduction bore reference (as the author explains in his preface to “Nicholas Nickleby”) to a supposititious little boy who had been left with a widowed mother who didn’t know what to do with him; the poor lady had thought, as a means of thawing the tardy compassion of her relations on his behalf, of sending him to a Yorkshire school. “I was the poor lady’s friend, travelling that way; and if the recipient of the letter could inform me of a school in his neighbourhood, the writer would be very much obliged.” The result of this “pious fraud” (as Dickens himself termed it) has become a matter of history. The person to whom the missive was addressed was a farmer (since identified as John S——, of Broadiswood), who appears in the story as honest John Browdie. Not being at home when the novelist called upon him, he journeyed through the snow to the inn where Dickens was staying, and entreated him to advise the widow to refrain from sending her boy to any of those wretched schools “while there’s a harse to hoold in a’ Lunnun, or a goother to lie asleep in!” The old coaching-house where this memorable interview is believed to have taken place was the still existing Unicorn at Bowes. Another inn associated with this tour of inspection is the King’s Head, Barnard Castle,[69] where Dickens made a brief stay, and where he observed, across the way, the name of “Humphreys, clockmaker,” over a shop door, this suggesting the title of his next work, “Master Humphrey’s Clock.”

It was at Bowes where he obtained material which served him for depicting the “internal economy” of Dotheboys Hall, in the school presided over by William Shaw, who, it has since transpired, was by no means the worst of his tribe. As a matter of fact, he won respect from his neighbours, and is remembered by many of his pupils (some of whom attained high positions in various professions) as a worthy and much injured man. In “Nicholas Nickleby,” however, he became a scapegoat for others who thoroughly deserved the punishment inflicted upon Shaw. Even to-day many of the people at Bowes regard Dickens’s attack as unjust so far as that particular schoolmaster is concerned, and visitors to the place are advised to refrain from alluding to Dotheboys Hall.

There is no lack of evidence to prove the general accuracy of the novelist’s description, and to him we owe a deep debt of gratitude for so successful an attempt to annihilate those terrible “Caves of Despair.” Bowes is situated high up on the moorland, and may now be reached by railway from Barnard Castle. The village consists principally of one street nearly three-quarters of a mile in length, running east to west, and is lighted with oil lamps, under a village lighting committee. Shaw’s house (known generally as Dotheboys Hall until recent times) stands at the western extremity of Bowes. The present tenants have altered somewhat the original appearance of the house by attempting to convert it into a kind of suburban villa—in fact, it is now called “The Villa.” Prior to these structural changes it was a long, low building of two storeys. The classroom and dormitories were demolished a few years ago, but the original pump, at which Shaw’s pupils used to wash, is still in the yard at the back of the house, and an object of great interest to tourists.

Nearly all provincial towns in England were visited by Dickens during his acting and reading tours, and many can boast of more intimate relations with the novelist. It was from Liverpool, on January 4, 1842, that he embarked on board the Britannia for the United States—his first memorable visit to Transatlantic shores—and in 1844 he presided at a great public meeting held in the Mechanics’ Institution, then sadly in need of funds, on which occasion he delivered a powerful speech in support of the objects of that foundation. Referring to the building, he said: “It is an enormous place. The lecture-room ... will accommodate over thirteen hundred people.... I should think it an easy place to speak in, being a semicircle with seats rising one above another to the ceiling.”

Respecting this function, we learn from a contemporary report that long before the hour appointed for the opening of the doors the street was crowded with persons anxious to obtain admission, so anxious were they to see and hear the young man (then only in his thirty-third year) who had given them “Pickwick,” “Oliver Twist,” and “Nicholas Nickleby.” At the termination of his speech a vote of thanks was accorded to the novelist, who, in replying thereto, concluded his acknowledgments by quoting the words of Tiny Tim, “God bless us every one.” An interesting incident lay in the fact that the young lady who presided at the pianoforte was Miss Christina Weller, who, with her father, was introduced to the author of “Pickwick,” thus causing considerable merriment.

DOTHEBOYS HALL, BOWES. (Page 126.)
Visited by Dickens when writing “Nicholas Nickleby.”

In 1847 Dickens and his distinguished company of amateur actors gave a representation in Liverpool of Ben Jonson’s comedy, “Every Man in His Humour,” for the benefit of Leigh Hunt. The Reading tours in the fifties and sixties again called him to that busy mercantile centre, one of the readings taking place in St. George’s Hall—“the beautiful St. George’s Hall,” as he described it: “brilliant to see when lighted up, and for a reading simply perfect.” One of the closing incidents of his life was the great Liverpool banquet, which took place on April 10, 1869, in St. George’s Hall, after his country Readings, the late Marquis of Dufferin presiding, the function being made memorable by an eloquent speech by the novelist, replying to a remonstrance from Lord Houghton against his (Dickens’s) objection to entering public life.[70] While sojourning at Liverpool he usually stayed at the Adelphi Hotel. In 1844 he made Radley’s Hotel his headquarters.

It is quite in accordance with our expectations to find frequent mention of Liverpool throughout Dickens’s works. For descriptive passages we must turn to the pages of “Martin Chuzzlewit” and certain of his minor writings, where we discover interesting and important references “to that rich and beautiful port,” as he calls it in one instance. Apropos of the return to England of Martin Chuzzlewit the younger and his faithful companion Mark Tapley after their trying experiences in the New Country, the novelist, in thus depicting Liverpool and the Mersey, doubtless records his own impressions of some two years previous on his arrival there at the termination, in 1842, of his American tour:

“It was mid-day and high-water in the English port for which the Screw was bound, when, borne in gallantly upon the fulness of the tide, she let go her anchor in the river.

“Bright as the scene was—fresh, and full of motion; airy, free, and sparkling—it was nothing to the life and exaltation in the hearts of the two travellers at sight of the old churches, roofs, and darkened chimney-stacks of home. The distant roar that swelled up hoarsely from the busy streets was music in their ears; the lines of people gazing from the wharves were friends held dear; the canopy of smoke that overhung the town was brighter and more beautiful to them than if the richest silks of Persia had been waving in the air. And though the water, going on its glistening track, turned ever and again aside to dance and sparkle round great ships, and heave them up, and leaped from off the blades of oars, a shower of diving diamonds, and wantoned with the idle boats, and swiftly passed, in many a sporting chase, through obdurate old iron rings, set deep into the stonework of the quays, not even it was half so buoyant and so restless as their fluttering hearts, when yearning to set foot once more on native ground.”

In one of “The Uncommercial Traveller” papers (1860) will be found this vivid pen-picture of the slums of Liverpool, favoured by seafaring men of the lower class, a district probably little altered since those lines were penned:

“A labyrinth of dismal courts and blind alleys, called ‘entries,’ kept in wonderful order by the police, and in much better order than by the Corporation, the want of gaslight in the most dangerous and infamous of these places being quite unworthy of so spirited a town.... Many of these sailors’ resorts we attained by noisome passages so profoundly dark that we felt our way with our hands. Not one of the whole number we visited was without its show of prints and ornamental crockery, the quantity of the latter, set forth on little shelves and in little cases in otherwise wretched rooms, indicating that Mercantile Jack must have an extraordinary fondness for crockery to necessitate so much of that bait in his traps ... etc.”[71]

With the characteristics of that other great Lancashire town, Manchester, the novelist became, perhaps, even more intimate. “Manchester is (for Manchester) bright and fresh,” he wrote to Miss Hogarth from the Queen’s Hotel in 1869, where he stayed on the occasion of his Farewell Readings in the provinces, and where the chimney of his sitting-room caught fire and compelled him to “turn out elsewhere to breakfast.” Long before this date—that is, in 1843—the people of Manchester were first privileged to meet him on the occasion of a bazaar in the Free Trade Hall in aid of the fund for improving the financial condition of the AthenÆum, then sadly in debt. The bazaar was followed by a soirÉe, held in the same building, under the presidency of Dickens, who then delivered a speech which has been described as “a masterpiece of graceful eloquence.” The subject thereof forcibly appealed to him—viz., the education of the very poor, for he did not believe in the old adage that averred a little learning to be a “dangerous thing,” but rather that the most minute particle of knowledge is preferable to complete and consummate ignorance. This memorable function is noteworthy also by reason of the fact that among the speakers who addressed the vast audience were Disraeli and Cobden. Dickens expressed a wish to become a member of the AthenÆum, but left Manchester without going through the necessary formalities—an oversight soon rectified, however.

In 1852, on the occasion of the inauguration of the Manchester Public Free Libraries, the novelist accepted an invitation to be present at an important meeting held at Campfield, the “first home” of these free libraries (formerly known as “The Hall of Science”); the meeting was attended by a number of distinguished men, including Bulwer Lytton, Thackeray, John Bright, Peter Cunningham, etc., and it naturally fell to Dickens to make a speech, having the use of literature as its theme. Thackeray, by the way, had prepared a careful oration, but, after delivering half a sentence, ignominiously sat down! Public oratory was not his forte. In 1858 Dickens presided at the annual meeting of the Institutional Association of Lancashire and Cheshire, held in the Manchester AthenÆum and the Free Trade Hall, and handed prizes to candidates from more than a hundred local mechanics’ institutes affiliated to the association. “Knowledge has a very limited power indeed,” he observed, in the speech delivered on behalf of the Manchester Mechanics’ Institute in Cooper Street, “when it informs the head alone; but when it informs the head and heart too, it has power over life and death, the body and the soul, and dominates the universe.” We are reminded that this peroration is an echo of words in “Hard Times” (written four years previously), and that his exhortation to the Manchester audience practically reproduced the leading thought in that powerful novel—a story which impelled the admiration of Ruskin, who, commenting upon it, said that the book “should be studied with close and earnest care by persons interested in social questions.” In “Hard Times” Manchester is disguised as matter-of-fact Coketown, and the presentment is easily recognisable:

“It was a town of red brick, or of brick that would have been red if the smoke and ashes had allowed it; but, as matters stood, it was a town of unnatural red and black, like the painted face of a savage. It was a town of machinery and tall chimneys, out of which interminable serpents of smoke trailed themselves for ever and ever, and never got uncoiled. It had a black canal in it, and a river that ran purple with evil-smelling dye, and vast piles of building full of windows, where there was a rattling and a trembling all day long, and where the piston of the steam-engine worked monotonously up and down, like the head of an elephant in a state of melancholy madness. It contained several large streets, all very like one another, and many small streets, still more like one another, inhabited by people equally like one another, who all went in and out at the same hours, with the same sound upon the same pavements, to do the same work, and to whom every day was the same as yesterday and to-morrow, and every year the counterpart of the last and the next. These attributes of Coketown were in the main inseparable from the work by which it was sustained; against them were to be set off comforts of life which found their way all over the world, and elegancies of life which made we will not ask how much of the fine lady, who could scarcely bear to hear the place mentioned. You saw nothing in Coketown but what was severely workful....

“In the hardest working part of Coketown; in the innermost fortifications of that ugly citadel, where Nature was as strongly bricked out as killing airs and gasses were bricked in; at the heart of the labyrinth of narrow courts upon courts, and close streets upon streets, which had come into existence piecemeal, every piece in a violent hurry for some one man’s purpose, and the whole one unnatural family, shouldering, and trampling, and pressing one another to death; in the last close nook of the great exhausted receiver, where the chimneys, for want or air to make a draught, were built in an immense variety of stunted and crooked shapes, as though every house put out a sign of the kind of people who might be expected to be born in it.”

Of Coketown on a sunny midsummer day (for “there was such a thing sometimes, even in Coketown”) the author exhibits a realistic picture. “Seen from a distance in such weather, Coketown lay shrouded in a haze of its own, which appeared impervious to the sun’s rays. You only knew the town was there because you knew there could have been no such sulky blotch upon the prospect without a town. A blur of soot and smoke, now confusedly bending this way, now that way, now aspiring to the vault of heaven, now murkily creeping along the earth as the wind rose and fell or changed its quarter—a dense, formless jumble, with sheets of cross-light in it, that showed nothing but masses of darkness. Coketown in the distance was suggestive of itself, though not a brick of it could be seen ... the streets were hot and dusty on the summer day, and the sun was so bright that it even shone through the heavy vapour drooping over Coketown, and could not be looked at steadily. Stokers emerged from low underground doorways and factory yards, and sat on steps, and posts, and palings, wiping their swarthy visages, and contemplating coals. The whole town seemed to be frying in oil. There was a stifling smell of hot oil everywhere. The steam-engines shone with it; the dresses of the Hands were soiled with it; the mills throughout their many stories oozed and trickled it. The atmosphere of those Fairy palaces[72] was like the breath of the simoon, and their inhabitants, wasting with heat, toiled languidly in the desert. But no temperature made the melancholy-mad elephants more mad or more sane. Their wearisome heads went up and down at the same rate, in hot weather and cold, wet weather and dry, fair weather and foul. The measured motion of their shadows on the walls was the substitute Coketown had to show for the shadows of rustling woods; while for the summer hum of insects it could offer, all the year round, from the dawn of Monday to the night of Saturday, the whir of shafts and wheels.

“Drowsily they whirred all through this sunny day, making the passenger more sleepy and more hot as he passed the humming walls of the mills. Sun-blinds and sprinklings of water a little cooled the main streets and shops, but the mills and the courts and the alleys baked at a fierce heat. Down upon the river, that was black and thick with dye, some Coketown boys, who were at large—a rare sight there—rowed a crazy boat, which made a spurious track upon the water as it jogged along, while every dip of an oar stirred up vile smells.”[73]

Apropos of “Hard Times,” it may be mentioned that in 1854 Dickens stayed at the Bull Hotel in Preston, when he visited that town expressly for the purpose of witnessing the effects of a strike in a manufacturing town. He failed, however, to secure much material here for the story, for he wrote: “Except the crowds at the street-corners reading the placards pro and con, and the cold absence of smoke from the mill-chimneys, there is very little in the streets to make the town remarkable.” He expected to find in Preston a model town, instead of which it proved to be, in his estimation, a “nasty place,” while to the Bull he referred in disrespectful terms as an “old, grubby, smoky, mean, intensely formal red-brick house, with a narrow gateway and a dingy yard.” Preston figures in the early chapters of “George Silverman’s Explanation,” a cellar in that town being the birthplace of the principal character, the Rev. George Silverman.

THE RED LION, BARNET. (Page 173.)
Dickens and Forster dined here in March, 1838, to celebrate the birth of Miss Mary (Mamie) Dickens.

Reverting to Manchester, it must not be forgotten that Dickens, in the capacity of an actor, journeyed thither four times, appearing with his amateur company first at the Theatre Royal in 1847 for the benefit of Leigh Hunt, twice in 1852 at the Old Free Trade Hall, and again in that building in 1857. Needless to say, the performances attracted vast and enthusiastic audiences, and were eminently successful both artistically and financially.

The Free Trade Hall, too, was the scene of his public Readings in Manchester, and it is recorded that he was accustomed to stay at Old Trafford as the guest of Mr. John Knowles, of the Theatre Royal. This large house was then surrounded by an extensive wood, and considered to be a lonely and remote place, but is now near a network of railways, and the reverse of rural.[74]

About the year 1841 Charles Dickens’s elder sister Fanny (nearly two years his senior) married Henry Burnett, an accomplished operatic singer, who had retired from performing on the stage, and taken up his abode in Manchester as an instructor in music, Mrs. Burnett, herself a musician of considerable acquirements, assisting her husband in conducting the choir of Rusholme Road Congregational Chapel, where they worshipped, and the pastor of which was the Rev. James Griffin, who has recorded in print his recollections of the Burnetts. There is, consequently, a link of a distinctly personal kind connecting Dickens with Manchester, which is made additionally interesting by the fact that the little crippled son of the Burnetts (who lived in Upper Brook Street) was the prototype of Paul Dombey. It may be added that Mr. Burnett unconsciously posed for some of the characteristics of Nicholas Nickleby, while in Fanny Dorrit there are certain indications suggesting that her portrait was inspired by the novelist’s sister.

In a literary sense, Manchester can boast of other Dickensian associations, for here resided the originals of the delightful Cheeryble Brothers, who (the author assures us in his preface to “Nicholas Nickleby”) were “very slightly and imperfectly sketched” from life. “Those who take an interest in this tale,” he adds, “will be glad to learn that the Brothers Cheeryble live; that their liberal charity, their singleness of heart, their noble nature, and their unbounded benevolence, are no creation of the author’s brain, but are prompting every day (and oftenest by stealth) some munificent deed in that town of which they are the pride and honour.” The actual models whence he portrayed the Cheerybles with approximate accuracy were the brothers Grant, William and Daniel, merchants, of Ramsbottom and Manchester, with whom the novelist declared he “never interchanged any communication in his life.” From evidence recently forthcoming, however, we learn that in 1838 (the year prior to the publication of “Nickleby”) he and Forster were the guests of Mr. Gilbert Winter, of Stocks House, Cheetham Hill Road, Manchester, to whom they went with a letter of introduction from Harrison Ainsworth. Stocks House (demolished in 1884) was formerly surrounded by a moat, a portion of which was filled up at the time of the construction of the old road to Bury, the fine old mansion probably representing the manor-house of Cheetham Manor, given as a reward to the Earls of Derby after the Battle of Bosworth Field. It was at Stocks House that Dickens became acquainted with the Grants; indeed, Forster practically admits this when he says: “A friend now especially welcome was the novelist Mr. Ainsworth, with whom we visited, during two of those years (1838 and 1839), friends of art and letters in his native Manchester, from among whom Dickens brought away the Brothers Cheeryble....” The Rev. Hume Elliot informs us that although William and Daniel Grant had residences in Manchester, they preferred to live together at Springside, Ramsbottom, “which they made a veritable home of hospitality and good works,”[75] and it is fair to assume that Dickens must have seen at their home the original of David, “the apoplectic butler,” or ascertained from an authentic source the peculiarities of Alfred, who served the Grants in a like capacity and possessed similar idiosyncrasies.

There are two houses in Manchester associated with the Grants. One of these, now a parcel-receiving office of the London and North-Western Railway Company, is in Mosley Street, and the other (a more important place) stands at the lower end of Cannon Street (No. 15), a large, roomy warehouse, occupied by a paper dealer, who caused the name “Cheeryble House” to be placed on the front of the building.[76]

The rare combination of the qualities of charity and humanity with sound business instincts, such as are ascribed to the Cheeryble Brothers, was exactly true of the Grants. On the death of William Grant (the elder brother) in 1842, the novelist (writing from Niagara Falls to his American friend, Professor Felton), said: “One of the noble hearts who sat for the Cheeryble Brothers is dead. If I had been in England I would certainly have gone into mourning for the loss of such a glorious life. His brother is not expected to survive him. [He died in 1855, at the age of seventy-five.] I am told that it appears from a memorandum found among the papers of the deceased that in his lifetime he gave away £600,000, or three million dollars.” There is a marble tablet to the memory of William Grant in St. Andrew’s Presbyterian Church, Ramsbottom, recording his “vigour of understanding, his spotless integrity of character, and his true benevolence of heart.... If you are in poverty,” the inscription continues, “grieve for the loss of so good a friend; if born to wealth and influence, think of the importance of such a trust, and earn in like manner by a life of charitable exertion the respect and love of all who knew you, and the prayers and blessings of the poor.” Honoured descendants of the two philanthropists are still surviving in the city which cherishes their memory.

In 1847 the novelist presided at a meeting of the Mechanics’ Institute in Leeds, thus proving his practical interest in the welfare of working men—an interest again testified in 1855, when he visited Sheffield for the purpose of reading the “Christmas Carol” in the Mechanics’ Hall on behalf of the funds of the Institute in that busy town. After the reading, the Mayor begged his acceptance of a handsome service of table cutlery and other useful articles of local manufacture, the gift of a few gentlemen in Sheffield, as a substantial manifestation of their gratitude to him.

In a letter to Wilkie Collins, dated August 29, 1857, Dickens said: “I want to cast about whether you and I can go anywhere—take any tour—see anything—whereon we could write something together. Have you any idea tending to any place in the world? Will you rattle your head and see if there is any pebble in it which we could wander away and play at marbles with?” This was written just after the conclusion of the readings and theatrical performances in aid of the Douglas Jerrold fund, Dickens experiencing a sense of restlessness when the excitement attending them had subsided, and seeming anxious “to escape from himself” by means of a pilgrimage with a congenial companion, and such as might provide material for a series of papers in Household Words. Arrangements were speedily made with this object, and the two friends started forthwith “on a ten or twelve days’ expedition to out-of-the-way places, to do (in inns and coast corners) a little tour in search of an article and in avoidance of railroads.” They decided for a foray upon the fells of Cumberland, Dickens having discovered (in “The Beauties of England and Wales” and other topographical works) descriptions of “some promising moors and bleak places thereabout.” To the Lake district they accordingly departed in September, and their adventures are related in “The Lazy Tour of Two Idle Apprentices” (published in Household Words during the latter part of the same year), the authors skilfully collaborating in the preparation of the record, nearly all the descriptive passages emanating from the pen of Dickens. Almost the first thing attempted by the travellers was the climbing of Carrock Fell, “a gloomy old mountain 1,500 feet high.” “Nobody goes up,” said Dickens to Forster; “guides have forgotten it.” The proprietor of a little inn, however, volunteered his services as guide, and the party of enthusiasts ascended in a downpour of rain. The Two Idle Apprentices (who bear the respective names Francis Goodchild and Thomas Idle, the former being the pseudonym favoured by Dickens) concluded that to perform the feat “would be the culminating triumph of Idleness.” “Up hill and down hill, and twisting to the left, and with old Skiddaw (who has vaunted himself a great deal more than his merits deserve, but that is rather the way of the Lake country) dodging the apprentices in a picturesque and pleasant manner. Good, weatherproof, warm, pleasant houses, well white-limed, scantily dotting the road.... Well-cultivated gardens attached to the cottages.... Lonely nooks, and wild; but people can be born, and married, and buried in such nooks, and can live, and love, and be loved there as elsewhere, thank God!” The village is portrayed as consisting of “black, coarse-stoned, rough-windowed houses, some with outer staircases, like Swiss houses, a sinuous and stony gutter winding up hill and round the corner by way of street.”[77] The ascent of the mountain was safely achieved, but during the descent Collins unfortunately fell into a watercourse and sprained his ankle, an accident which proved to be a serious hindrance. They slept that night at Wigton, which (we are told) “had no population, no business, no streets to speak of.” In Household Words may be found an elaborate, amusing (but doubtless accurate) description of Wigton marketplace as seen at night nearly fifty years ago, and written with Dickens’s customary power, illustrating his marvellous acuteness of observation:

“Wigton market was over, and its bare booths were smoking with rain all down the street.... ‘I see,’ said Brother Francis, ‘what I hope and believe to be one of the most dismal places ever seen by eyes. I see the houses with their roofs of dull black, their stained fronts, and their dark-rimmed windows, looking as if they were all in mourning. As every little puff of wind comes down the street, I see a perfect train of rain let off along the wooden stalls in the market-place and exploded against me. I see a very big gas-lamp in the centre, which I know, by a secret instinct, will not be lighted to-night. I see a pump, with a trivet underneath its spout whereon to stand the vessels that are brought to be filled with water. I see a man come to the pump, and he pumps very hard; but no water follows, and he strolls empty away.... I see one, two, three, four, five linen-drapers’ shops in front of me. I see a linen-draper’s shop next door to the right, and there are five more linen-drapers’ shops round the corner to the left. Eleven homicidal linen-drapers’ shops within a short stone’s-throw, each with its hands at the throats of all the rest! Over the small first-floor of one of these linen-drapers’ shops appears the wonderful inscription: BANK.... I see a sweet-meat shop, which the proprietor calls a ‘Salt Warehouse.’... And I see a watchmaker’s, with only three great pale watches of a dull metal hanging in his window, each on a separate pane.

“... There is nothing more to see, except the curl-paper bill of the theatre ... and the short, square, chunky omnibus that goes to the railway, and leads too rattling a life over the stones to hold together long. Oh yes! Now I see two men with their hands in their pockets ... they are looking at nothing very hard, very hard ... they spit at times, but speak not. I see it growing darker, and I still see them, sole visible population of the place, standing to be rained upon, with their backs towards me, and looking at nothing very hard.

“... The murky shadows are gathering fast, and the wings of evening and the wings of coal are folding over Wigton.... And now the town goes to sleep, undazzled by the large unlighted lamp in the market-place; and let no man wake it.”[78]

From Wigton the friends proceeded to Allonby, on the coast of Cumberland, here resolving to begin their writing, to record their impressions while fresh in their minds. They found a comfortable lodging, a “capital little homely inn,” the Ship, overlooking the watery expanse, and by a curious coincidence the landlady previously lived at Greta Bridge, Yorkshire, when Dickens went there in quest of the cheap boarding-schools.

THE ALBION HOTEL, BROADSTAIRS. (Page 189.)
Dickens stayed at this hotel on several occasions, and in 1839 lodged at a house “two doors from the Albion,” and there “Nickleby” was finished.

The Ship still flourishes as a “family and commercial hotel and posting-house, commanding extensive views of the Solway Firth and the Scottish hills.” Dickens thought Allonby the dullest place he ever entered, rendered additionally dull by “the monotony of an idle sea,” and in sad contrast to the expectations formed of it. “A little place with fifty houses,” said Dickens in a letter home, “five bathing-machines, five girls in straw hats, five men in straw hats, and no other company. The little houses are all in half-mourning—yellow stone or white stone, and black; and it reminds me of what Broadstairs might have been if it had not inherited a cliff, and had been an Irishman.”

In the opinion of Mr. Francis Goodchild, Allonby was the most “delightful place ever seen.” “It was what you might call a primitive place. Large? No, it was not large. Who ever expected it would be large? Shape? What a question to ask! No shape. Shops? Yes, of course (quite indignant). How many? Who ever went into a place to count the shops? Ever so many. Six? Perhaps. A library? Why, of course (indignant again). Good collection of books? Most likely—couldn’t say—had seen nothing in it but a pair of scales. Any reading-room? Of course there was a reading-room! Where? Where! Why, over there. Where was over there? Why, there! Let Mr. Idle carry his eye to that bit of waste ground above high-water mark, where the rank grass and loose stones were most in a litter, and he could see a sort of a long ruinous brick loft, next door to a ruinous brick outhouse, which loft had a ladder outside to get up by. That was the reading-room, and if Mr. Idle didn’t like the idea of a weaver’s shuttle throbbing under a reading-room, that was his look-out. He was not to dictate, Mr. Goodchild supposed (indignant again), to the company.” In short, he declared that “if you wanted to be primitive, you could be primitive here, and if you wanted to be idle, you could be idle here,” as were the local fishermen, who (apparently) never fished, but “got their living entirely by looking at the ocean.” The “public buildings” at Allonby were the two small bridges over the brook “which crawled or stopped between the houses and the sea.” As if to make amends for these shortcomings, Nature provided fine sunsets at Allonby, “when the low, flat beach, with its pools of water and its dry patches, changed into long bars of silver and gold in various states of burnishing,” “and there were fine views, on fine days, of the Scottish coast.”[79]

From Allonby the two apprentices proceeded to the county town, Carlisle, putting up at “a capital inn,” kept by a man named Breach.

LAWN HOUSE, BROADSTAIRS. (Page 193.)
Dickens occupied Lawn House in the summer of 1840, and the archway is mentioned in a letter to his wife dated September 3, 1850.

Carlisle “looked congenially and delightfully idle.... On market morning Carlisle woke up amazingly, and became (to the two idle apprentices) disagreeably and reproachfully busy. There were its cattle-market, its sheep-market, and its pig-market down by the river, with raw-boned and shock-headed Rob Roys hiding their Lowland dresses beneath heavy plaids, prowling in and out among the animals, and flavouring the air with fumes of whisky. There was its corn-market down the main street, with hum of chaffering over open sacks. There was its general market in the street, too, with heather brooms, on which the purple flower still flourished, and heather baskets primitive and fresh to behold. With women trying on clogs and caps at open stalls, and ‘Bible stalls’ adjoining. With ‘Dr. Mantle’s Dispensary for the Cure of all Human Maladies and no charge for advice,’ and with ‘Dr. Mantle’s Laboratory of Medical, Chemical, and Botanical Science,’ both healing institutions established on one pair of trestles, one board, and one sun-blind. With the renowned phrenologist from London begging to be favoured (at 6d. each) with the company of clients of both sexes, to whom, on examination of their heads, he would make revelations ‘enabling him or her to know themselves.’”[80] Maryport, a few miles south of Allonby, was also inspected, and is described as “a region which is a bit of waterside Bristol, with a slice of Wapping, a seasoning of Wolverhampton, and a garnish of Portsmouth”—in fact, a kind of topographical salad. To the supposititious query addressed to it by one of the apprentices, “Will you come and be idle with me?” busy Maryport metaphorically shakes its head, and sagaciously answers in the negative, for she declares: “I am a great deal too vaporous, and a great deal too rusty, and a great deal too muddy, and a great deal too dirty altogether; and I have ships to load, and pitch and tar to boil, and iron to hammer, and steam to get up, and smoke to make, and stone to quarry, and fifty other disagreeable things to do, and I can’t be idle with you.” Thus thrown upon his own resources, this idle apprentice goes “into jagged uphill and downhill streets, where I am in the pastry-cook’s shop at one moment, and next moment in savage fastnesses of moor and morass, beyond the confines of civilization, and I say to those murky and black-dusty streets: ‘Will you come and be idle with me?’ To which they reply: ‘No, we can’t indeed, for we haven’t the spirits, and we are startled by the echo of your feet on the sharp pavement, and we have so many goods in our shop-windows which nobody wants, and we have so much to do for a limited public which never comes to us to be done for, that we are altogether out of sorts, and can’t enjoy ourselves with anyone.’ So I go to the Post-office and knock at the shutter, and I say to the Postmaster: ‘Will you come and be idle with me?’ This invitation is refused in cynical terms: ‘No, I really can’t, for I live, as you may see, in such a very little Post-office, and pass my life behind such a very little shutter, that my hand, when I put it out, is as the hand of a giant crammed through the window of a dwarf’s house at a fair, and I am a mere Post-office anchorite in a cell made too small for him, and I can’t get in, even if I would.’”[81] Maryport of to-day differs considerably from Maryport of nearly half a century since, and it is doubtful if its inhabitants will recognise the presentment.

Hesket-New-Market, “that rugged old village on the Cumberland Fells,” was included in this itinerary of irresponsible travelling, and of the ancient inn where Idle and Goodchild sojourned, and of the contents of their apartments, we have quite a pre-Raphaelite picture:

“The ceiling of the drawing-room was so crossed and recrossed by beams of unequal lengths, radiating from a centre in the corner, that it looked like a broken star-fish.... It had a snug fireside, and a couple of well-curtained windows, looking out upon the wild country behind the house. What it most developed was an unexpected taste for little ornaments and nick-nacks, of which it contained a most surprising number.... There were books, too, in this room.... It was very pleasant to see these things in such a lonesome byplace; so very agreeable to find these evidences of taste, however homely, that went beyond the beautiful cleanliness and trimness of the house; so fanciful to imagine what a wonder the room must be to the little children born in the gloomy village—what grand impressions of it those of them who became wanderers over the earth would carry away; and how, at distant ends of the world, some old voyagers would die, cherishing the belief that the finest apartment known to man was once in the Hesket-New-Market Inn, in rare old Cumberland.”[82] Dickens does not give the name of the inn, but I have ascertained that it was the Queen’s Head, and that it is now a dwelling-house, having the curious-timbered ceiling intact, and still retaining its old-fashioned character. An enclosure, fronting the building, has been planted with shrubs by the present occupier, where it used to be paved and open to the street—“a sinuous and stony gutter winding uphill and round the corner,” as Dickens termed the roadway through the still quaint and interesting village of Hesket-New-Market.

On September 12, 1857, Dickens announced that he and his companion were on their way to Doncaster, en route for London. Breaking the journey at Lancaster, they stopped at another delightful hostelry, the King’s Arms in Market Street. “We are in a very remarkable old house here,” wrote Dickens to his sister-in-law, “with genuine old rooms and an uncommonly quaint staircase. I have a state bedroom, with two enormous red four-posters in it, each as big as Charley’s room at Gad’s Hill.”[83] A more detailed description, however, appears in the printed record, where we read that “the house was a genuine old house of a very quaint description, teeming with old carvings and beams, and panels, and having an excellent old staircase, with a gallery or upper staircase cut off from it by a curious fence-work of old oak, or of the old Honduras mahogany wood. It was, and is, and will be for many a long year to come, a remarkably picturesque house; and a certain grave mystery lurking in the depth of the old mahogany panels, as if they were so many deep pools of dark water—such, indeed, as they had been much among when they were trees—gave it a very mysterious character after nightfall.”[84]

In “The Lazy Tour” some particulars are given concerning a curious custom at the King’s Arms, where they give you bride-cake every day after dinner. This melodramatic love-story is presented in the form of a narrative by one of the half-dozen “noiseless old men in black” who acted as waiters at the inn, whence we learn that the strange custom originated in the traditional murder, by poison, of a young bride in an apartment afterwards known as the Bride’s Chamber, the criminal being subsequently hanged at Lancaster Castle. Around the legend, in which money and pride and greed and cruel revenge play a prominent part, Dickens threw the halo of his wondrous fancy, and so stimulated public interest in the hostelry that visitors thereto were eager to see the alleged haunted chamber with its antique bedstead of black oak, and to taste the bride-cake in memory of the unfortunate young woman.

FORT HOUSE, BROADSTAIRS. (Page 194.)
As it was before the recent alterations. The “airy nest” of Dickens, 1850-1851. A portion of “David Copperfield” was written here.

Externally, the old King’s Arms (situated at the corner of Market Street and King’s Street) was not of a picturesque character, although a certain quiet dignity was imparted to the stone frontage by the broad windows extending from roof to basement, and by the pillared doorway of the principal entrance. When Mr. Sly left the old place in 1879, it was pulled down, and a kind of commercial hotel erected on the site, which narrowly escaped destruction by fire in 1897. After his day the custom of having bride-cake was discontinued, but it is interesting to know that the famous oak bedstead (upon which Dickens himself slept) is in the safe possession of the Duke of Norfolk, for whom it was purchased at a high price when the old oak fittings, etc., were disposed of about twenty-seven years since. Mr. Sly, who died in 1896, never tired of recalling the visit of Charles Dickens and Wilkie Collins, and the former delighted the worthy landlord by presenting him with a signed portrait of himself, inscribed, “To his good friend Mr. Sly,” which is still retained by the family as a cherished memento. Shortly after the publication of “The Lazy Tour” Mr. Sly obtained permission to reprint the descriptive chapter by Dickens, for presentation to his guests; the pamphlet contained illustrations representing the entrance-hall and staircase, and this prefatory note: “The reader is perhaps aware that Mr. Charles Dickens and his friend Mr. Wilkie Collins, in the year 1857, visited Lancaster, and during their sojourn stopped at Mr. Sly’s, King’s Arms Hotel. In the October number of Household Words, under the title of ‘The Lazy Tour of Two Idle Apprentices,’ Mr. Dickens presents his readers with a remarkable story of a Bridal Chamber, from whence the following extracts are taken.” Mr. J. Ashby-Sterry, writing in 1897, alludes to the King’s Arms as “a rare old place, full of antique furniture, curios, and musical bedsteads,” and says that its proprietor, Mr. Sly (who died about a year previously), who took the greatest pride in his admirable old inn, liked nothing better than taking an appreciative visitor over the place and giving amusing reminiscences of the memorable visit of the authors of “Pickwick” and “The Woman in White.”

3 ALBION VILLAS, FOLKESTONE. (Page 199.)
“A very pleasant house, overlooking the sea.” The opening chapters of “Little Dorrit” were written here. The conservatory is a modern addition.

THE WOODEN LIGHTHOUSE, FOLKESTONE HARBOUR. (Page 200.)
“I may observe of the very little wooden lighthouse, that when it is lighted at night—red and green—it looks like a medical man’s” (“Out of Town”).

With regard to Lancaster itself, it would seem that Dickens’s opinion (as expressed by Francis Goodchild) then was “that if a visitor on his arrival (there) could be accommodated with a pole which could push the opposite side of the street some yards farther off, it would be better for all parties”; but, while “protesting against being obliged to live in a trench,” he conceded Lancaster to be a pleasant place—“a place dropped in the midst of a charming landscape, a place with a fine ancient fragment of castle, a place of lovely walks, a place possessing staid old houses richly fitted with old Honduras mahogany, which had grown so dark with time that it seems to have got something of a retrospective mirror-quality into itself, and to show the visitor, in the depths of its grain, through all its polish, the hue of the wretched slaves who groaned long ago under old Lancaster merchants. And Mr. Goodchild adds that the stones of Lancaster do sometimes whisper even yet of rich men passed away—upon whose great prosperity some of these old doorways frowned sullen in the brightest weather—that their slave-gain turned to curses, as the Arabian Wizard’s money turned to leaves, and that no good ever came of it even unto the third and fourth generation, until it was wasted and gone.”[85] Concerning the lunatic asylum at Lancaster there is a note of approval: “An immense place ... admirable offices, very good arrangements, very good attendants,” followed by this truly Dickensian touch of sympathy and pathos: “Long groves of blighted men-and-women trees; interminable avenues of hopeless faces; numbers without the slightest power of really combining for any earthly purpose; a society of human creatures who have nothing in common but that they have all lost the power of being humanly social with one another.”[86]

From Lancaster Francis Goodchild and Thomas Idle took train to Leeds, “of which enterprising and important commercial centre it may be observed with delicacy that you must either like it very much or not at all.” Next day, the first of the Race Week, they proceed to Doncaster, and put up at that noted establishment the Angel, still flourishing in the principal thoroughfare as of yore. Here they had “very good, clean, and quiet apartments” on the second floor, looking down into the main street, Dickens describing his own bedroom as “airy and clean, little dressing-room attached, eight water-jugs (I never saw such a supply), capital sponge-bath, perfect arrangement, and exquisite neatness.”[87] That great annual festival known as Race Week had just begun, and the streets of Doncaster were full of jockeys, betting men, drunkards, and other undesirable persons, from morning to night—and all night. From their windows the apprentices gazed with interest and wonderment upon the motley assemblage, for this was their first experience of the St. Leger and its saturnalia.

THE AULA NOVA AND NORMAN STAIRCASE, PART OF THE KING’S SCHOOL, CANTERBURY. (Page 203.)
The oldest public school in England, dating from the seventh century, and the original of Dr. Strong’s in “David Copperfield.”

HOUSE ON LADY WOOTTON’S GREEN, CANTERBURY. (Page 203.)
Identified as the private residence of Dr. Strong in “David Copperfield.”

We are assured by Forster that the description here given in “The Lazy Tour” of Doncaster and the races emanated from the pen of Wilkie Collins; I venture, however, to believe that Dickens is more likely to have composed the chapter in question, for not only is it written in his characteristic vein, but we find that when at Doncaster Thomas Idle (i.e., Collins) continued to suffer severely from the accident to his ankle, which practically incapacitated him, and evidently prevented him from witnessing the races. In a letter written at this time Dickens remarks: “I am not going to the course this morning, but have engaged a carriage (open, and pair) for to-morrow and Friday.... We breakfast at half-past eight, and fall to work for H. W. afterwards. Then I go out, and—hem! look for subjects.” The first person singular here is significant, indicating as it does that Collins did not accompany his friend to the scenes so vividly and realistically portrayed in the final chapter of the “Tour.” In respect of the visit to Doncaster, a remarkable incident may be noted. Dickens, who knew nothing (and cared less) about matters relating to the turf, invested in a “c’rect card” containing the names of the horses and jockeys, and, merely for the fun of the thing, wrote down three names for the winners of the three chief races, “and, if you can believe it (he said to Forster) without your hair standing on end, those three races were won, one after another, by those three horses!”[88] It was the St. Leger Day, which brought ill-fortune to many, so that Dickens’s “half-appalling kind of luck” seemed to him especially to be a “wonderful, paralyzing coincidence.” He sincerely believed that if a boy with any good in him, but with a damning propensity to sporting and betting, were taken to the Doncaster Races soon enough, it would cure him, so terrible is the revolting exhibition of rascality and the seamy side of humanity.

* * * * * * * *

Scotland may justly lay claim to an intimate association with Charles Dickens. With the picturesque streets of Edinburgh he first became familiar in 1834, during his reporting days, when he and his colleague, Thomas Beard, represented the Morning Chronicle at a grand banquet given at the Scottish capital in honour of the then Prime Minister, Earl Grey, the two young reporters going by sea from London to Leith. This fact explains how Dickens secured such an accurate presentment of the old town of Edinburgh as we find in “Pickwick,” in the forty-eighth chapter of which Arthur’s Seat is described as “towering, surly and dark, like some gruff genius, over the ancient city he has watched so long,” while Canongate (as seen by the hero of “The Story of the Bagman’s Uncle”) is represented as consisting of “tall, gaunt, straggling houses, with time-stained fronts, and windows that seemed to have shared the lot of eyes in mortals, and to have grown dim and sunken with age. Six, seven, eight stories high were the houses; story piled above story, as children build with cards, throwing their dark shadows over the roughly-paved road, and making the night darker. A few oil lamps were scattered at long distances, but they only served to mark the dirty entrance to some narrow close, or to show where a common stair communicated, by steep and intricate windings, with the various flats above.” We are told that Tom Smart’s uncle, on reaching the North Bridge connecting the old town with the new, “stopped for a minute to look at the strange irregular clusters of lights piled one above the other, and twinkling afar off so high that they looked like stars, gleaming from the castle walls on the one side and the Calton Hill on the other, as if they illuminated veritable castles in the air.”

The coach-yard (or rather enclosure) in Leith Walk, by which Tom had to pass on the way to his lodging, and where he saw the vision of the old mail-coach with its passengers, actually existed at that spot, and was owned by Mr. Croall, whose family disposed of the carriages and coaches, but subsequently owned all the cabs in the city. Dickens afterwards visited Edinburgh on at least four occasions, staying at the Waterloo Hotel in 1861 and at Kennedy’s in 1868, during his Reading tours, and on the latter occasion he observed: “Improvement is beginning to knock the old town of Edinburgh about here and there; but the Canongate and the most picturesque of the horrible courts and wynds are not to be easily spoiled, or made fit for the poor wretches who people them to live in.”[89] The Scott Monument he could not but regard as a failure, considering that it resembles the spire of a Gothic church taken off and stuck in the ground.

In 1841, on the eve of his departure for the United States, the “Inimitable Boz,” accompanied by his wife, made Scotland his destination for a summer holiday tour in “Rob Roy’s country,” as he termed it. He had thought of Ireland, but altered his mind. The novelist received a magnificent welcome, initiated by a public dinner in Edinburgh, at which Professor Wilson presided. During their brief stay in the Scottish capital Dickens found excellent accommodation at the Royal Hotel, which was consequently besieged, and he was compelled to take refuge in a sequestered apartment at the end of a long passage. His chambers here were “a handsome sitting-room, a spacious bedroom, and large dressing-room adjoining,” with another room at his disposal for writing purposes, while from the windows he obtained a noble view, in which the castle formed a conspicuous object. From Edinburgh he travelled to the Highlands, with intervals of rest, and thoroughly admired the characteristic scenery of the country. Especially was he impressed by the Pass of Glencoe, which he had often longed to see, and which he thought “perfectly terrible.” “The Pass,” he said, “is an awful place. It is shut in on each side by enormous rocks, from which great torrents come rushing down in all directions. In amongst these rocks on one side of the Pass ... there are scores of glens high up, which form such haunts as you might imagine yourself wandering in in the very height and madness of a fever. They will live in my dreams for years.... They really are fearful in their grandeur and amazing solitude.” Indeed, “that awful Glencoe,” as he called it, exercised a kind of fascination over him which proved irresistible, compelling him to revisit the spot the next day, when he found it “absolutely horrific,” for “it had rained all night, and ... through the whole glen, which is ten miles long, torrents were boiling and foaming, and sending up in every direction spray like the smoke of great fires. They were rushing down every hill and mountain side, and tearing like devils across the path, and down into the depths of the rocks.... One great torrent came roaring down with a deafening noise and a rushing of water that was quite appalling.... The sights and sounds were beyond description.” This and other adventures during his journeyings hereabouts were vividly described in letters to Forster, who has printed the major portion of them in his biography, and a very attractive record it is.

Before returning southward, the novelist became the recipient of an invitation to a public dinner at Glasgow; but, yearning for home, he pleaded pressing business connected with “Master Humphrey’s Clock,” then appearing in weekly numbers, promising, however, to return a few months later and accept the honour then. Illness unfortunately prevented the fulfilment of that promise, and six years elapsed (1847) before he made acquaintance with that city, when he performed the ceremony of opening the Glasgow AthenÆum, which was followed by a soirÉe in the City Hall. In 1858 he was recommended by some of the students for election as Lord Rector of Glasgow University, in opposition to his own wish, but received only a few votes.

THE SUN INN, CANTERBURY. (Page 203.)
“It was a little inn where Mr. Micawber put up, and he occupied a little room in it” (“David Copperfield”).

The same year found him again at Edinburgh, and giving, for charitable purposes, a public Reading of the “Carol” in the Music Hall there, at the conclusion of which the Lord Provost presented him with a massive silver wassail-cup, which he bequeathed to his eldest son, and which is now in the possession of Mr. W. H. Lever, of Port Sunlight, Cheshire. His paid Readings subsequently took him to the leading cities in Scotland, and in 1868 he wrote from the Royal Hotel, Glasgow (his customary quarters there): “The atmosphere of this place, compounded of mists from the Highlands and smoke from the town factories, is crushing my eyebrows as I write, and it rains as it never does rain anywhere else, and always does rain here. It is a dreadful place, though much improved, and possessing a deal of public spirit.”[90]

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