[1]Almost the whole of the Isle of Portsea, with the old parishes of Portsmouth and Portsea, is now included in the Borough of Portsmouth, Landport being one of the divisions of the ancient parish of Portsea; while the old Portsmouth parish still remains but a small one, that of Portsea is of considerable dimensions, and divided into several parishes. One of the streets east of Commercial Road is called “Dickens Street,” in honour of the novelist.
[2]“The Mudfog Papers.”
[3]Christmas Number of Household Words, 1854.
[4]“David Copperfield,” chap. xiii.
[5]“One Man in a Dockyard” (Household Words, September 6, 1851).
[6]“One Man in a Dockyard” (Household Words, September 6, 1851).
[7]“The Wreck of the Golden Mary” (Christmas Number of Household Words, 1856).
[8]See “The Guest” in the Christmas Number of Household Words, 1855.
[9]See “The Guest” in the Christmas Number of Household Words, 1855; Langton’s “Childhood and Youth of Charles Dickens,” 1883.
[10]“David Copperfield,” chap. ii.
[11]Household Words, April 6, 1850.
[12]Household Words, Christmas Number, 1852.
[13]“David Copperfield,” chap. iv.
[14]Ibid.
[15]“Great Expectations,” chap. xix.
[16]All the Year Round, June 30, 1860.
[17]Vide “St. Pancras, Past and Present,” by Frederick Muller, 1874.
[18]To Mr. R. B. Prosser (editor of St. Pancras Notes and Queries) I am indebted for much useful information respecting the early London homes of Charles Dickens. He has discovered that in the parish rate-book for October 8, 1823, the name of John Dickens appears as the tenant of No. 16, Bayham Street, and also at No. 18; in the next rate-book (January 21, 1824) No. 16 is marked “empty.” In 1866 the Metropolitan Board of Works renumbered Bayham Street (then consisting of about a hundred and fifty houses), incorporating therewith Bayham Street South and Fleming Place.
[19]The Fox-under-the-Hill stood at the foot of Ivy Bridge Lane, which formed a boundary between Westminster City and the Liberty of the Duchy of Lancaster (Savoy). Between Salisbury Stairs (adjoining the little tavern) and London Bridge there plied three halfpenny steamboats, named respectively the Ant, the Bee, and the Cricket, whereof the latter two came to an untimely end. The building of the Hotel Cecil has wiped out Cecil and Salisbury Streets, and entirely transformed this locality, including the destruction of the quaint ale-house itself.
[20]Possibly a mistake of the rate-collector. The name Roylance is not uncommon in the district.
[21]In 1820 Seymour Street, with the site of Euston Square Station, was a huge brick-field, with a solitary “wine vaults” stuck in the middle of it.
[22]A writer in Hone’s “Year-Book,” 1826, says: “Somers Town is full of artists, as a reference to the Royal Academy Catalogue will evince. In Clarendon Square still lives, I believe, Scriven, the engraver, an artist of great ability and, in his day, of much consideration. In the same neighbourhood dwells the venerable Dr. Wilde, who may be justly termed the best engraver of his age for upwards of half a century.”
W. H. Wills (assistant editor on All the Year Round), in recalling Somers Town of this period, refers to its “aristocracy,” and to the Polygon as its “Court centre,” situated in the middle of Clarendon Square. “In and around it,” he says, “Art and Literature nestled in cosy coteries, with half-pay officers (including one Peninsular Colonel), city merchants, and stockbrokers.... The most eminent historical engravers of that day dated their works, ‘as the Act directs,’ from Somers Town.” Theodore Hook lived in Clarendon Square, and Peter Pindar, Sir Francis Burdett, with other notabilities, in close proximity thereto.
The houses which comprised the Polygon prior to 1890 were demolished by the Midland Railway Company in the following year, and the buildings now occupying the site were erected by the Company for habitation by persons of the labouring class who were displaced by the acquisition of the property.
[23]Another popular novelist, William Black, also lived in this house, and, it is believed, in the selfsame rooms.
[24]The office of the Morning Chronicle was at No. 332, Strand, opposite Somerset House, the building having been recently demolished for improvements in widening the thoroughfare.
[25]Reprinted as “Mr. Minns and his Cousin” in “Sketches by Boz.”
[26]A writer in Middlesex and Hertfordshire Notes and Queries, July, 1895, states that Dickens also occupied for some months a suite of rooms in Wood’s Hotel (Furnival’s Inn) on the first-floor, south-east corner of the main building.
[27]The date of Edmund Yates’s residence here was 1854 et seq. The rent of his house (he says) was £70 a year, “on a repairing lease” (which means an annual outlay of from £25 to £30 to keep the bricks and mortar and timbers together), and the accommodation consisted of a narrow dining-room, a little back bedroom, two big drawing-rooms, two good bedrooms, three attics, with kitchen and cellar in the basement. This description conveys an idea of the character and rental value of Dickens’s home, five doors distant.
[28]The property hereabouts is owned by the Doughty family, and belongs to the notorious Tichborne estate.
[29]I am indebted for many of these particulars to Mr. E. J. Line, author of an illustrated article entitled “The Thames Valley of Charles Dickens,” printed in the Richmond and Twickenham Times, December 24, 1903.
[30]“Jack Straw’s Castle, also known as the Castle Hotel, which stands on elevated ground near the large pond and the flagstaff, has been somewhat modernized of late years. It has been generally supposed that the name of this hostelry is derived from the well-known peasant leader in the terrible rising of Richard II.’s time; but Professor Hales assures us there is no sufficient authority for the tradition, for the present designation is perhaps not older than the middle of the eighteenth century, the original sign being most likely The Castle, without any preceding genitive, Richardson, for example, thus referring to it in ‘Clarissa Harlowe,’ 1748. For the connection of Jack Straw with Hampstead there is apparently no historic defence.”—The Home Counties Magazine, April, 1899.
[31]Serjeant (afterwards Justice) Talfourd, to whom “Pickwick” was dedicated. He composed a sonnet “To Charles Dickens, on his ‘Oliver Twist,’” and declared that this story was the most delightful he had ever read.
[32]“Some Recollections of Mortality,” first printed in All the Year Round, May 16, 1863.
[33]This church figures prominently in Hogarth’s paintings of “The Rake’s Progress.” It was the scene also of Byron’s baptism and of the marriage of the Brownings.
Apropos, it may be mentioned that in 1843, during Dickens’s residence in the parish of St. Marylebone, he took sittings for a year or two in the Little Portland Street Unitarian Chapel, for whose officiating minister, Edward Tagart, he had a warm regard, which continued long after he had ceased to be a member of the congregation.
[34]“A Week’s Tramp in Dickens Land,” by W. R. Hughes, 1891.
[35]The Euston and Victoria Hotel no longer exists. It stood in Euston Grove, at No. 14, Euston Square (north side).
[36]No. 1, Devonshire Terrace was at one time the home of George du Maurier, the well-known Punch artist. It is now partly utilized as solicitors’ offices.
[37]The artist removed to another residence in the Square, not more than a couple of houses from that of Dickens.
[38]I.e., no workmen.
[39]First printed in “The Letters of Charles Dickens.”
[40]First printed in “The Letters of Charles Dickens.”
[41]Tavistock House was for many years the residence of James Perry (editor of Dickens’s old paper, the Morning Chronicle, in its best days), and was then noted for its reunions of men of political and literary distinction. Eliza Cook, the poetess, also lived in Tavistock House when she left Greenhithe, Kent, and Mary Russell Mitford (authoress of “Our Village”) became an honoured guest there in 1818. The house was afterwards divided, and the moiety, which still retained the name of Tavistock, became the home of Frank Stone.
From the front windows of Tavistock House, which stood immediately on the right on entering the railed-in garden or square, the spire of St. Pancras Church was plainly visible, being but a short distance away. The pillars of the gateway leading to the enclosure were (and are) surmounted by quaint lamps with iron supports. Dickens held the lease from the Duke of Bedford at a “peppercorn” ground-rent.
[42]The portrait-bust was probably that executed in marble by Dickens’s beloved friend Angus Fletcher (“Poor Kindheart,” as the novelist called him), whose mother was an English beauty and heiress. He died in 1862. At the sale of Dickens’s effects in 1870, the bust realized fifty-one guineas, and it would be interesting to know its present destination. The pair of reliefs after Thorwaldsen were disposed of on the same occasion for eight and a half guineas.
[43]“Mary Boyle—Her Book,” 1901.
[44]I quote the opening lines of this eccentric effusion:
“‘Great men,’ no doubt, have a great deal to answer for. No one will deny that. Their ‘genius,’ which brings them to the front, and which causes men, women, and children to worship them for the pleasure their beautiful gifts procure to eyes, ears, and senses, brings them all much responsibility.
“But who would ever have imagined that their dwellings may bring grave responsibility and grave trouble to those who take up their abode in a house which the presence of their genius has hallowed? I live in Tavistock House, Tavistock Square, London—a dear house, in a nice, quiet, shady garden, where grow fine large old plantains (out of the Square proper), and where in summer, from every window of the house, you may imagine yourself in the country—the real country! That sounds very grand and luxurious in London; and though the mere fact of living in the house has very nearly brought upon me the most terrible fate which can befall a human being nowadays—namely, that of a sane person shut up in a lunatic asylum, put there for the purpose of being slowly or ‘accidentally’ murdered—I cling to the spot because I have spent the happiest, the most interesting, and the most illumined part of my life there; also days of the most bitter anguish, the most heart-crushing despair, when I was obliged to leave the dear home and husband for some time, because I could not stop crying. The thought of my loss and the shipwreck of my life was too vivid, too much for me. I went away and returned when I had got calm enough to restrain my tears, but with the sun set for ever on what remained to me of the summer of middle life. I love the dear home, too, because my darling puggies are buried in the garden under the mulberry-tree, without a tombstone, alas! because ever since they died I have been planning to have a pretty monument made to mark the spot where they lay, and that when I have thought I could afford myself that pleasure somebody has generally stolen my money ... and I have to put off ordering the intended work of art, which I mean it to be, till I feel ‘flush’ again. I was a slave to my dear Dan for nearly thirteen years, and I think I must have loved that dog as much as anybody ever loved anything in this world.
“I must not let you wonder too long what I am driving at, my readers, by telling you that, through the mere fact of living in what had been a house where a great man had lived, I nearly got locked up in a lunatic asylum. You must think me insane, I fancy, to say such a thing, and I must confess that you might guess every mortal and immortal thing under the sun, but you would never guess how this most frightful occurrence took place.
“Those who have read Charles Dickens’s ‘Life,’ by Mr. Forster, will know that he is the ‘great man’ who had lived at Tavistock House for twelve [ten] years. People from all parts of the world have come to look at the house Charles Dickens lived in, and see the interior of the house, a request which I have frequently complied with.”
On another page Mrs. Weldon says: “Although three keepers got into Tavistock House and actually laid hold of me, I escaped their delicate intentions, as I consider, by a merciful interposition of Providence....”
At the Dickens Birthday Celebration, the dancers were attired in the costumes of Dickens characters, and Mrs. Weldon appeared in wig and gown—a very fascinating Serjeant Buzfuz.
[45]The neuralgic pain in his foot, originating, he believed, in a prolonged walk in the snow, continued to cause acute suffering, and completely prostrated him at intervals.
[46]At Sotheby’s, on December 4, 1902, were sold the office table, two chairs, and a looking-glass, which for many years were in daily requisition by Dickens at the office of All the Year Round.
[47]Mr. Percy Fitzgerald, in the St. James’s Gazette, March 6, 1899.
[48]These interesting conjectures are culled from the Wiltshire Advertiser, February 4, 1904.
[49]“The Real Dickens Land,” by H. Snowden Ward, 1903.
[50]“Bleak House,” chap. lvi.
[51]Letter to Forster, January 27, 1869.
[52]“The Pickwick Papers,” chap. xxxiv.
[53]“The Letters of Charles Dickens.”
[54]“... A strong place perched upon the top of a high rock, around which, when the tide is in, the sea flows, leaving no road to the mainland.”—“A Child’s History of England,” chap. ix.
[55]In the early part of the last century the Logan, or Rocking, Stone could be easily swayed to and fro, its poise being so accurate that a hand-push would set it in motion and cause it to rock. In April, 1824, this huge rock was overthrown by a party of sailors, and, filled with remorse for this foolish act, the leader of the party (Lieutenant Goldsmith, nephew of the poet) determined to replace it at his own expense, the stone being swung back with pulleys to its original resting-place in November of the same year, amid great local rejoicing. But its rocking propensities were sadly diminished, and at the present time have ceased altogether.
[56]“The Letters of Charles Dickens.”
[57]Forster’s “Life of Dickens.”
[58]“The Letters of Charles Dickens.”
[59]Thackeray wrote some of the early numbers of “Vanity Fair” at the Old Ship Inn, and caused George Osborne and his bride to spend the first few days of their married life there.
[60]“The Letters of Charles Dickens.” This passage reminds us of the following contemporary reference in “Vanity Fair,” chap. xxii.: “But have we any leisure for a description of Brighton?—for Brighton, a clean Naples, with genteel lazzaroni; for Brighton, that always looks brisk, gay, and gaudy, like a harlequin’s jacket....”
[61]Vide “Mary Boyle—Her Book,” 1901. Miss Boyle, an intimate friend of Dickens, pleasingly records her recollections of Dr. Everard’s school, where, as a girl, she was very popular among his pupils, and much in request at the dances. Her partners included the late and the present Lords Northampton, Mr. Frederick Leveson-Gower, and her cousins, the sons of Sir Augustus Clifford.
[62]“The Letters of Charles Dickens.”
[63]See Punch, August 25, 1849. In the background of the drawing are represented the ruins of Cook’s Castle.
[64]In March, 1902, the Great White Horse was sold by public auction, and purchased by the lessee for £14,500.
[65]“The Letters of Charles Dickens.”
[66]For this information I am indebted to Dr. John Bately, of Gorleston, who has made a careful study of the subject, and to whom I am similarly obliged for useful suggestions respecting “Blunderstone Rookery,” the original of which (he is convinced) is the Rectory, not the Hall. Is it not probable that Dickens combined the features of both places, and so produced a composite portrait?
[67]The Morrit Arms is now the only establishment of the kind in Greta Bridge.
[68]“Letters of Charles Dickens.”
[69]The King’s Head, in the Market Place, Barnard Castle, has been enlarged since 1838, but the older portion remains much as it was then.
[70]See “The Speeches of Charles Dickens.”
[71]“Poor Mercantile Jack,” in All the Year Round, March 10, 1860.
[72]Elsewhere in the book the author tells us that the great factories looked like Fairy palaces when illumined at night.
[73]The late Mr. Robert Langton, author of “The Childhood and Youth of Charles Dickens,” states that Dickens, in “Hard Times,” is unsuccessful in his attempt to render the Lancashire dialect—that the utterances put into the mouths of Stephen Blackpool and others in the book “are very far from being correct,” a matter upon which, from his long residence in Manchester, that critic is qualified to speak. Mr. Langton points out that the inscription on the sign of the Pegasus’ Arms, at which inn Sleary’s circus company put up, “Good malt makes good beer,” etc., was taken from an old sign, the Malt Shovel, existing until 1882 at the foot of Cheetham Hill.
[74]See the Manchester Evening Chronicle, January 7, 1904. In this paper were published during 1903-1904 a series of interesting articles on “Dickens and Manchester,” whence some of these details are culled.
[75]“The County of the Cheerybles,” by the Rev. Hume Elliot.
[76]Many of these details are quoted from the Manchester Evening News, October 27, 1903.
[77]“The Lazy Tour of Two Idle Apprentices.”
[78]“The Lazy Tour of Two Idle Apprentices.”
[79]“The Lazy Tour of Two Idle Apprentices.”
[80]“The Lazy Tour of Two Idle Apprentices.”
[81]“The Lazy Tour of Two Idle Apprentices.”
[82]“The Lazy Tour of Two Idle Apprentices.”
[83]“The Letters of Charles Dickens.” It is now rumoured that, in the thinning-out process adopted by the Wigton magistrates, some of the oldest established licensed houses in the county are threatened with extinction, all of those in Hesket-New-Market being objected to. Happily, the house immortalized by Dickens will escape, being no longer an inn.
[84]“The Lazy Tour of Two Idle Apprentices.” We are told that “a portion of the lazy notes from which these lazy sheets are taken” was written at the King’s Arms Hotel.
[85]“The Lazy Tour of Two Idle Apprentices.”
[86]Ibid.
[87]“The Letters of Charles Dickens.”
[88]The successful horses on this day were ImpÉrieuse (St. Leger), Blanche of Middlebec (Municipal Stakes), Skirmisher (Her Majesty’s Plate), and Meta (Portland Plate).
[89]“The Letters of Charles Dickens.”
[90]“The Letters of Charles Dickens.”
[91]“The Letters of Charles Dickens.”
[92]In 1898 the Birthplace Visitors’ Books for May, 1821, to September, 1848, in which are preserved the autographs of Sir Walter Scott, Dickens, Washington Irving, and a host of celebrities, were sold at Sotheby’s auction-rooms, the four volumes realizing £56.
[93]“The Letters of Charles Dickens.”
[94]“The Letters of Charles Dickens.”
[95]I.e., an infant phenomenon, À la Crummles in “Nicholas Nickleby.”
[96]“The Letters of Charles Dickens.” The reference to “the Miss Snevellicci business” is an allusion to the theatrical incident in “Nicholas Nickleby,” chap. xxiv.
[97]The diary records, under date October 29, 1838: “Hatfield expenses on Saturday, £1 12s.”
[98]Christmas number of All the Year Round, 1863.
[99]“The Poor Man and his Beer” in All the Year Round, April 30, 1859.
[100]The Christmas number of All the Year Round, 1861.
[101]“Travelling Abroad.”
[102]Probably that portion descriptive of Cobham village and park was penned here. His landlord, Thomas White, was still living in 1883.
[103]Miller’s “Jottings of Kent,” 1871.
[104]It would seem, from the published correspondence of 1859, that the house (No. 40, Albion Street) occupied by him twenty years previously had been absorbed by the hotel.
[105]“The Letters of Charles Dickens.”
[106]“The Letters of Charles Dickens.”
[107]“Our Watering-Place,” first published in Household Words August 2, 1851, was reprinted as “Our English Watering-Place.”
[108]See the letter to Mrs. Charles Dickens, September 3, 1850.
[109]Ibid.
[110]“A Week’s Tramp in Dickens Land,” by W. R. Hughes, F.L.S.
[111]“Out of Town,” first printed in Household Words, September 29, 1855.
[112]“Out of Town.”
[113]In the same play, curiously enough, one of the minor characters is named “Gadshill.”
[114]“A Week’s Tramp in Dickens Land,” by W. R. Hughes, 1891.
[115]It is generally admitted that the tower of Rochester Cathedral is altogether out of harmony with the rest of this Norman edifice. It was designed by Cottingham, and erected in 1825 to replace the earlier tower, which was surmounted by a thick stunted spire. A fund has been raised to which the late Dean, Dr. Reynolds Hole, so generously contributed, for the purpose of substituting a tower approximating in character the older structure.
At the time of publication (December, 1904) the lowering and re-casing of the tower and the addition of a 66 ft. spire are completed.
