Externally, the main building of Gad’s Hill Place underwent but little alteration, presenting throughout the period of the owner’s occupation much the same appearance as when he knew it in the days of his childhood, the back of the building becoming gradually hidden from view by clustering masses of ivy and Virginia creeper. One of the bedrooms was transformed into a study, which he lined with books and occasionally wrote in; but the study proper (called by him the library) was the front room on the ground-floor, on the right of the entrance-hall, rendered familiar by the large engraving published in the Graphic at the time of the novelist’s death. With regard to this study, or library, it may be mentioned that it was his delight to be surrounded by a variety of objects for his eye to rest upon in the intervals of actual writing, prominent among them being a bronze group representing a couple of frogs in the act of fighting a duel with swords, and a statuette of a French dog-fancier, with his living stock-in-trade tucked under his arms and in his pockets, while a vase of flowers invariably graced his writing-table. A noteworthy feature of his sanctum was the door, the inner side of which he disguised by means of imitation book-backs, transferred thither from Tavistock House; these are still preserved as a “fixture.” These book-backs, with their humorous titles, create considerable interest and amusement for such as are privileged to enter the apartment so intimately associated with “Boz.”

Among those invited to his attractive “Kentish freehold,” as Dickens frequently termed it, “where cigars and lemons grew on all the trees,” was Sir Joseph Paxton, the famous landscape gardener and designer of the Crystal Palace. Hans Andersen, another honoured guest, received most agreeable impressions of Gad’s Hill Place. He described the breakfast-room as “a model of comfort and holiday brightness. The windows were overhung, outside, with a profusion of blooming roses, and one looked out over the garden to green fields and the hills beyond Rochester.” Dickens’s happiest hours in his Gad’s Hill home were those when it was filled with cherished friends, both English and American, to whom he played the part of an ideal host, devoting the greater portion of each day to their comfort and amusement, and accompanying them on pedestrian excursions to Rochester and other favourite localities in the neighbourhood, or driving with them to more remote places, such as Maidstone and Canterbury. But what seemed to afford him the utmost delight were the walks with friends to the charming village of Cobham, there to refresh at the famous Leather Bottle, the quaint roadside alehouse where, as every reader of “Pickwick” remembers, the disconsolate Mr. Tupman was discovered at the parlour table having just enjoyed a hearty meal of “roast fowl, bacon, ale, and etceteras, and looking as unlike a man who had taken his leave of the world as possible.” The Pickwickian traditions of this popular house of refreshment are maintained by the enthusiastic landlord, who realizes the importance of preserving the Dickensian associations. The room in which Mr. Tupman drowned his sorrows in the comfort afforded by a substantial meal remains practically the same to-day, with this difference, that the walls are covered with portraits, engravings, autograph letters, and other interesting items relating to the novelist and his writings—a veritable Dickens museum. Cobham Hall, the Elizabethan mansion of Lord Darnley, with its magnificent park, where the Fechter chÂlet was re-erected after Dickens’s death, and especially Cobham Woods, always proved irresistible attractions to the “Master,” and he and his dogs enjoying their constitutional were a familiar sight to his neighbours.

The villages of Shorne and Chalk, with their ancient churches and peaceful churchyards, he frequently visited with “a strange recurring fondness.” Mr. E. Laman Blanchard has recorded that he often met, and exchanged salutations with, Dickens during his pedestrian excursions on the highroad leading from Rochester to Gravesend, and generally they passed each other at about the same spot—at the outskirts of the village of Chalk, where a picturesque lane branched off towards Shorne and Cobham. “Here,” says Mr. Blanchard, “the brisk walk of Charles Dickens was always slackened, and he never failed to glance meditatively for a few moments at the windows of a corner house on the southern side of the road, advantageously situated for commanding views of the river and the far-stretching landscape beyond. It was in that house he lived immediately after his marriage, and there many of the earlier chapters of ‘Pickwick’ were written.”

The village of Cooling, standing so bleak and solitary in the Kentish fenland bordering the southern banks of the Thames, possessed a weird fascination for “Boz.” Here, in the midst of those dreary marshes, much of the local colouring of “Great Expectations” was obtained. Indeed, the story opens with the night scene between Pip and the escaped convict in Cooling churchyard, and in the same chapter we have Pip’s early impressions of the strange and desolate neighbourhood in which he lived with Mr. and Mrs. Joe Gargery. “Ours was the marsh country, down by the river, within, as the river wound, twenty miles from the sea. My first most vivid and broad impression of the identity of things seems to me to have been gained on a memorable raw afternoon towards evening. At such a time I found out for certain that this bleak place overgrown with nettles was the churchyard, and that Philip Pirrip, late of this parish, and also Georgina, wife of the above, were dead and buried; and that Alexander, Bartholomew, Abraham, Tobias, and Roger, infant children of the aforesaid, were also dead and buried; and that the dark, flat wilderness beyond the churchyard, intersected with dykes, and mounds, and gates, with scattered cattle feeding on it, was the marshes; and that the low leaden line beyond was the river; and that the distant savage lair, from which the wind was rushing, was the sea; and that the small bundle of shivers growing afraid of it all, and beginning to cry, was Pip.”

“The marshes,” Pip continues, “were just a long black horizontal line then, ... and the river was just another horizontal line, not nearly so broad nor yet so black; and the sky was just a row of long angry red lines and dense black lines intermixed. On the edge of the river I could faintly make out the only two black things in all the prospect that seemed to be standing upright. One of these was the beacon by which the sailors steered—like an unhooped cask upon a pole—an ugly thing when you were near it; the other, a gibbet, with some chains hanging to it which had once held a pirate.” Then, in a later chapter, he refers to the old battery out on the marshes. “It was pleasant and quiet out there,” he says, “with the sails on the river passing beyond the earthwork, and sometimes, when the tide was low, looking as if they belonged to sunken ships that were still sailing on at the bottom of the water.”

Visitors to Cooling cannot fail to notice in the churchyard a long row of curious gravestones which mark the resting-place of members of the Comport family of Cowling Court (Cooling was originally called Cowling), these memorials dating from 1771, the year recorded on a large headstone standing in close proximity. These suggested to Dickens, of course, the idea of the “five little stone lozenges” under which the five little brothers of Pip lay buried. Within a short distance from the churchyard we may identify, in a short row of cottages, the original of Joe’s forge, while an old-fashioned inn with a weather-board exterior, and bearing the sign of the Horseshoe and Castle, is regarded as the prototype of the Three Jolly Bargemen, a favourite resort of Joe Gargery after his day’s work at the forge.

The ancient and picturesque city of Rochester, so beloved by Dickens and so replete with memories of the “Master,” deserves a chapter to itself. With the exception of London, no town figures so frequently or so prominently in his books as Rochester, from “The Pickwick Papers” to the unfinished romance of “The Mystery of Edwin Drood,” where it is thinly disguised as “Cloisterham.” Dickens’s acquaintance with Rochester began in the days of his boyhood, when he lived with his father at Chatham, and, as a natural result of his unusual powers of observation, he even then stored up his youthful impressions of the quaint old houses, the Cathedral, and its neighbour, the rugged ruins of the Norman Castle overlooking the Medway. How those juvenile impressions received something of a shock in after-years we are informed by Forster, for childhood exaggerates what it sees, and Rochester High Street he remembered as a thoroughfare at least as wide as Regent Street, whereas it proved to his maturer judgment to be “little better than a lane,” while the public clock in it, once supposed by him to be the finest clock in the world, proved eventually to be “as moon-faced and weak a clock as a man’s eyes ever saw.” Even the grave-looking Town Hall, “which had appeared to him once so glorious a structure” that he associated it in his mind with Aladdin’s palace, he reluctantly realized as being, in reality, nothing more than “a mere mean little heap of bricks, like a chapel gone demented.” “Ah! who was I,” he observes on reflection, “that I should quarrel with the town for being changed to me, when I myself had come back, so changed, to it? All my early readings and early imaginations dated from this place, and I took them away so full of innocent construction and guileless belief, and I brought them back so worn and torn, so much the wiser and so much the worse!”

Rochester has undergone many topographical changes (not necessarily for the better) since that memorable morning in 1827 when Mr. Pickwick leaned over the balustrades of the old stone bridge “contemplating nature and waiting for breakfast.” To begin with, the bridge itself has been demolished, and an elliptical iron structure takes its place. The view, too, which Mr. Pickwick admired of the banks of the Medway, with the cornfields, pastures, and windmills, is more obscured to-day by that discomforting symbol of commercialism, smoke, so constantly pouring from the ever-increasing number of lofty shafts appertaining to the various cement works which flourish here. From the other side of the bridge Mr. Pickwick could obtain a pleasant glimpse of the river, with its numerous sailing-barges, in the direction of Chatham; but the prospect, alas! is now completely blotted out by hideous railway viaducts. Happily, in spite of modern innovations, those who appreciate the old-world air of our English cities will find much to charm them in the precincts of the Cathedral, sufficiently remote from the bustle and noise of the High Street to enable it to preserve the quiet serenity which invariably encompasses our venerable minsters. Besides the picturesque stone gateways here, much remains in the High Street and elsewhere to remind us of what Rochester looked like in days of old; as Dickens writes in “The Seven Poor Travellers”: “The silent High Street of Rochester is full of gables, with old beams and timbers carved into strange faces.” Of these surviving specimens of ancient domestic architecture, many will regard Eastgate House as the most interesting from an archÆological point of view, while to the Dickens student there is an additional attraction in the fact that it is the original of the Nuns’ House in “Edwin Drood,” the boarding-school for young ladies over which Miss Twinkleton presided, and where Rosa Bud received her education.

For many years during the last century Eastgate House was actually in use as a ladies’ school, and eventually became the headquarters of the Rochester Men’s Institute. Quite recently the civic authorities, with commendable good sense, availed themselves of the opportunity of acquiring the property, which they have thoroughly and tastefully reinstated and converted into a public museum; and I must add to this statement the significant fact that a room has been permanently set apart for an exhibition of mementoes of Charles Dickens—both gifts and loans—thus, in a sense, stultifying the old proverb, that “a prophet is not without honour save in his own country.” On one of the inside beams of Eastgate House is carved the date “1591,” and the rooms are adorned with carved mantelpieces and plaster enrichments.