Chapter 3

This cromlech, known as Kit's Coty House, consists of three upright dolmens of sandstone, with a fourth, much larger, crossing them above horizontally. In a neighbouring field there is another group of stones, scattered in disarray amongst the brushwood, to which, as also to Stonehenge and other so-called "Druidical" remains, there attaches the local superstition that they cannot be counted. It would be pleasanter to believe that the current story, to which reference has already been made, that Dickens was poking fun at the antiquarian's reverence for this hoary relic in his narrative of Mr. Pickwick's "BIL STUMPS" inscription, is altogether erroneous. Certainly it is open to anyone who wishes to be incredulous, for there is as much dissimilarity as possible between the massive cromlech near Aylesford and the small slab that Mr. Pickwick discovered at Cobham.

The most salient feature in the Medway valley between Rochester and Maidstone is the height of Blue Bell, or Upper Bell. Here Dickens, who, as he said, had come to realize that the Rochester to Maidstone road passed through some of the most beautiful scenery in England, would often picnic with his visitors. Undulating slopes of pasture and cornfields, hop gardens, orchards, and woodlands, with many a deep-sunk lane embowered in overarching trees that rise from hedgerow clusters of dog-rose, ivy, and honeysuckle, and with snugly nestling homesteads and quaintly-cowled "oast-houses" sprinkled here and there, sweep across the valley, through which the river winds in sinuous curves, onwards to a long range of hills upon the skyline.

Somewhere in this district Dickens came across the types of the oldfashioned and jovially comfortable home of the English yeoman, represented by his Manor Farm, Dingley Dell, and of the little country town, represented by the Muggleton of _Pickwick_, in which local enthusiasm for cricket was ardent, if the standard of skill was somewhat low. The most plausible identification of the home of Mr. Wardle is with Cobtree Hall, which divides the parishes of Boxley and Allington, and it is probable that the original of Muggleton was Town Malling, which is also known as West Malling.

In the Jubilee Edition of _Pickwick_ Mr. Charles Dickens the Younger introduced a woodcut of High Street, Town Malling, with a note to the following effect:--

"Muggleton, perhaps, is only to be taken as a fancy sketch of a small country town; but it is generally supposed, and probably with sufficient accuracy, that, if it is in any degree a portrait of any Kentish town, Town Malling, a great place for cricket in Mr. Pickwick's time, sat for it."

Town Malling does not correspond with the description of Muggleton in its distance from Rochester. It is only seven and a half, instead of fifteen miles, from Rochester. And it is not a corporate town. But:

"Everybody whose genius has a topographical bent knows perfectly well that Muggleton is a corporate town, with a mayor, burgess and freemen, and anybody who has consulted the addresses of the mayor to the freemen, or the freemen to the mayor, or both to the corporation, or all three to Parliament, will learn from thence what they ought to have known before, that Muggleton is an ancient and loyal borough, mingling a zealous advocacy of Christian principles with a devoted attachment to commercial rights; in demonstration whereof, the mayor, corporation, and other inhabitants have presented, at divers times, no fewer than one thousand four hundred and twenty petitions against the continuance of negro slavery abroad, and an equal number against any interference with the factory system at home; sixty-eight in favour of the sale of livings in the Church, and eighty-six for abolishing Sunday trading in the street."

If Town Malling has not had so distinguished a political history as that which Dickens assigned to Muggleton, it has a pretty cricket ground, not far removed from the High Street, and the reputation of having in past years distinguished itself in the local cricket of this district of Kent. It is not difficult to believe, then, that Dumkins and Podder here made their gallant stand for All Muggleton against the Dingley Dellers, and that at the Swan--otherwise the Blue Lion--the Pickwick fellowship shared the conviviality of the rival teams, until Mr. Snodgrass's notes of the evening's transactions faded away into a blur in which there was an indistinct reference to "broiled bones" and "cold without". The stately ruins of a Benedictine Abbey, founded by Bishop Gundulf, give to the town an attraction of a severer kind.

From Town Malling to Cobtree Hall, supposing the double identification to be correct, should be a walk of not above two miles "through shady lanes and sequestered footpaths", the delightful scenery of which made Mr. Pickwick feel regret to arrive in the main street of "Muggleton". The distance, however, is in fact something more than two miles as the crow flies. Cobtree Hall is a green-muffled Elizabethan mansion, of red brick, faced with stone, and looks out over an undulating country of orchards and hop fields. It has been altered and enlarged since the days of _Pickwick_, but the kitchen is just such another large, oldfashioned kitchen as befits the Christmas games and wassail that had been kept up at Manor Farm, Dingley Dell, "by old Wardle's forefathers from time immemorial". The dining-room, though modernized, has a massive marble mantlepiece not unsuited to that "capacious chimney up which you could have driven one of the new patent cabs, wheels and all", and in which a blazing fire used to roar every evening, not only when its warmth was grateful, but for a symbol, as it were, of old Wardle's attachment to his fireside. This was the kind of antiquity which made the most direct appeal to Dickens's sentiment and imagination--not a remote and historic antiquity, but the furthest extent of a living link between the Present and the Past. In many an old house of Kentish yeoman or squire Dickens would have seen some such long, dark-panelled room as the best sitting-room at Manor Farm, with four-branched, massive silver candlesticks in all sorts of recesses and on all kinds of brackets; with samplers and worsted landscapes of ancient date on the walls; with a very old lady in lofty cap and faded silk gown in the chimney corner, where she had sat on her little stool as a girl more than half a century before, and with a hearty, rubicund host presiding over a mighty bowl of wassail, something smaller than an ordinary washhouse copper, in which the hot apples would "hiss and bubble with a rich look and a jolly sound that were perfectly irresistible". Or when the carpet was up, the candles burning brightly, and family, guests, and servants were all ranged in eager lines, longing for the signal to start an oldfashioned country dance as, from a shady bower of holly and evergreens at the upper end of the room, the two best fiddles and only harp of the nearest market town prepared to strike up, it is no wonder that such a lover of unspoilt, natural manners as Boz declared, "If any of the old English yeomen had turned into fairies when they died, it was just the place in which they would have held their revels."

A triangular piece of ground, with a sprinkling of elms about it, is all that is left of the rookery in which Mr. Tupman met with an accident from the unskilful marksmanship of Winkle. At the back of the house is the pond where Mr. Winkle's reputation as a sportsman led him into another catastrophe, and his skating exposed itself as of anything but a graceful and "swan-like" style; where, too, Mr. Pickwick revived the sliding propensities of his boyhood with infinite zest until the ice gave way with a "sharp, smart crack", and Mr. Pickwick's hat, gloves, and handkerchief, floating on the surface, were all of Mr. Pickwick that anyone could see.

Cobtree Hall, it has been mentioned, divides the parishes of Boxley and Allington, the initials of which are carved on a beam in the kitchen that suggests Phiz's plate of "Christmas Eve at Mr. Wardle's". In Aylesford the tomb of the prototype, according to local tradition, of "Mr. Wardle" bears the inscription, "Also to the memory of Mr. W. Spong, late of Cobtree, in the Parish of Boxley, who died November 15th, 1839". Boxley village is near the ancient Pilgrims' Road to Canterbury, and here Alfred Tennyson stayed in 1842. Park House, nearer the Medway, was the home of Edward Lushington, who married Tennyson's sister Cecilia, and in its grounds Tennyson found the setting for the prologue to the "Princess". The "happy faces" of "the multitude, a thousand heads", by which the "sloping pasture" was "sown", under "broad ambrosial aisles of lofty lime", had probably come from Maidstone on the annual jaunt of that town's Mechanics' Institute. The village of Allington stands on the other side of the Medway, though the boundaries of the parish extend beyond the right bank of the river. Allington Castle, which the Medway half-encircles with a sweeping bend, was one of the seven chief castles of Kent. It was here that Sir Thomas Wyatt, the elder, diplomatist, poet, and lover of Anne Boleyn, who with the gallant and ill-fated Surrey "preluded", in a more exact sense than it could be said of Chaucer, "those melodious bursts that fill the spacious times of great Elizabeth", was able to proclaim, in an epistle to "Mine own John Poins":

"I am here in Kent and Christendome, Among the Muses where I read and rhyme".

Hither there comes, in Tennyson's "Queen Mary", to Sir Thomas Wyatt, the younger, his man William, with news of "three thousand men on Penenden heath all calling after you, and your worship's name heard into Maidstone market, and your worship the first man in Kent". And Wyatt sets out to lead a rising which will end on Tower Hill, and setting out, looks back and cries:

"Ah, grey old castle of Allington, green field Beside the brimming Medway, it may chance That I shall never look upon you more".

"The brimming Medway."--the epithet is as just as Tennyson's descriptive epithet almost invariably proves to be. For at Allington the Medway, which from Aylesford Bridge to Allington Lock has dwindled to a narrow stream, swells out into a broad expanse, where many boats can easily move abreast. If the Cloisterham Weir of _Edwin Drood_ were really the nearest weir on the Medway to Rochester, then Allington Lock would be the place. But it has been pointed out on an earlier page that the distances do not tally in the novel and in actuality, and Dickens may have had in mind the weir on Snodland Brook.

The country round Maidstone abounds in the "happy valleys" portrayed in the epilogue to the "Princess", with "grey halls alone among their massive groves", and "here and there a rustic tower Half lost in belts of hop and breadths of wheat". The gyres and loops of the Medway, too, afford through the screen of woodlands and orchards "the shimmering glimpses of a stream". To the credulous enthusiasm of an early eighteenth-century native of Strood, that Anne Pratt who did for English wild flowers what White of Selborne did for English wild birds, "travellers who have beheld in other lands the various scenes of culture--the olive grounds of Spain or Syria, the vineyards of Italy, the cotton plantations of India, or the rose fields of the East--have generally agreed that not one of them all equals in beauty our English hop gardens". To Dickens himself such a panegyric of the Kentish hop gardens would have scarcely seemed exaggeration, but he would have hastened to add the dismal antithesis of the missionary bishop--"Only man is vile". He had barely settled-in at Gadshill Place when he wrote:--

"Hop-picking is going on, and people sleep in the garden, and breathe in at the keyhole of the house door. I have been amazed, before this year, by the number of miserable base wretches, hardly able to crawl, who go hop-picking. I find it is a superstition that the dust of the newly picked hop, falling freshly into the throat, is a cure for consumption. So the poor creatures drag themselves along the roads, and sleep under wet hedges, and get cured soon and finally."

The county town of Kent is situated not only on the Medway, but on the pilgrim road to Canterbury, and of a monastic hospital for pilgrims and other poor travellers there still survive some relics. Overlooking the river stand some fine old houses, and the conspicuous grey square tower of All Saints, built by the proud Archbishop Courtenay, the enemy of Wicliffe, in the fourteenth century. Here is the tomb of Grocyn, that "lord of splendid lore Orient from old Hellas' shore", who was appointed master of the collegiate church in 1506. One of the sixteen palaces that the Archbishops of Canterbury could boast in days gone by is preserved as the local school of science and art, a dedication to public use which commemorates the Jubilee of Queen Victoria in 1887. The Corporation Museum is an even more interesting and beautiful structure. It was Chillington Manor House, a seat of the Cobham family, and, though it has had a new wing annexed to it, it is an exceptionally well preserved and beautiful example of Elizabethan domestic architecture, with its latticed windows, jutting gables, elaborately moulded timber, and pillared chimneys. In the panel of an oak fireplace is a carved head of Dickens, by a local carver named Hughes, who was employed at Gadshill Place. To Maidstone Jail Dickens proposed to carry Sir Luke Fildes, in order that he might make a picture of Jasper in the condemned cell, and do something which would surpass Cruikshank's illustration to _Oliver Twist_, in which Fagin's terror-stricken vigil in the murderer's cell is portrayed.

At Maidstone the southern limit may be considered to have been reached of the district of Kent which can be distinguished as "Dickens-land" in the most intimate sense, as lying within the radius of the novelist's habitual walks and drives from his residence at Gadshill. It does not enter into the scope of this brief essay to describe topographically other parts of Kent. But it will be excusable to glance very slightly at Dickens's associations with Canterbury--though this is the subject of a separate monograph in this series--Broadstairs, Deal, Dover, and the famous London-to-Dover road through Rochester, Chatham, and Canterbury.

No one, perhaps, who has ever read _Little Dorrit_, whatever else in the novel may slip the memory, fails to recall the oracular utterance of Mr. F.'s aunt that "There's milestones on the Dover road". To the opening of _A Tale of Two Cities_ the colour and atmosphere of the time in which it is set, and of the drama which is to be developed, are given at once by the alarm of the passengers of the Dover coach as they walk up Shooter's Hill to ease the horses, when the furious galloping of a horseman is heard behind them--the supposed highwayman proving to be, however, Jerry Cruncher, messenger at Tellson's Bank by day, and at night an "agricooltural character" of ghoulish avocations. David Copperfield trudged the Dover road, footsore and hungry, when he left Murdstone and Grinby's blacking warehouse to throw himself on the compassion of Betsy Trotwood, "and got through twenty-three miles on the straight road" to Rochester and Chatham on a certain Sunday. Afterwards, when he had found a home and a protecting providence with his aunt, he met with his "first fall in life" on the Canterbury coach, being asked by the coachman to resign the box seat to a seedy gentleman, who proclaimed that "'Orses and dogs is some men's fancy. They're wittles and drink to me."

"I have always considered this as the first fall I had in life. When I booked my place at the coach office, I had had 'Box Seat' written against the entry, and had given the bookkeeper half a crown. I was got up in a special greatcoat and shawl, expressly to do honour to that distinguished eminence; had glorified myself upon it a good deal; and had felt that I was a credit to the coach. And here, in the very first stage, I was supplanted by a shabby man with a squint, who had no other merit than smelling like a livery stables, and being able to walk across me, more like a fly than a human being, while the horses were at a canter."

Pip, in _Great Expectations_, makes many expeditions to and fro on the Dover road, between Rochester and London, and on one of them, riding outside, has the two convicts, bound for the hulks moored off the marshes, as fellow passengers on the back seat.

At Canterbury it is not possible to establish the identity of Dr. Strong's house--"a grave building in a courtyard, with a learned air about it that seemed very well suited to the stray rooks and jackdaws who came down from the Cathedral towers, and walked with a clerkly bearing on the grass plot"--but Canon Benham has asserted his conviction that Mr. Wickfield's house--where David made the acquaintance of Agnes and of Uriah Heap--is at the corner of Broad Street and Lady Wotton's Green, though it is another residence, by the West Gate, which is represented on the picture postcards.

The Royal Fountain Hotel in St. Margaret's Street (formerly the Watling Street) is recognized as the County Inn at which Mr. Dick used to sleep when he went over to Canterbury to visit David Copperfield at Dr. Strong's school. All the little bills which he contracted there, it will be remembered, were referred to Miss Trotwood before they were paid; a circumstance which caused David to think "that Mr. Dick was only allowed to rattle his money, and not to spend it". A less pretentious establishment, the "little inn" where Mr. Micawber put up on his first visit to Canterbury, and "occupied a little room in it partitioned off from the commercial, and strongly flavoured with tobacco smoke", is probably the Sun Inn in Sun Street. Here Mr. and Mrs. Micawber entertained David to "a beautiful little dinner"--

"Quite an elegant dish of fish; the kidney end of a loin of veal roasted; fried sausage meat; a partridge and a pudding. There was wine, and there was strong ale; and after dinner Mrs. Micawber made us a bowl of hot punch with her own hands."

Local tradition at Broadstairs used to point to Fort House, on the cliff by the Coastguard Station, as the holiday residence at which Dickens wrote most of _Bleak House_. But though it has been rechristened from the title of the novel, by an owner who demolished Dickens's summer home, and built the existing pseudo-Gothic structure on its foundations, no part of _Bleak House_ was written at Broadstairs. Dickens, however, for many summers, visited the little town on the curving bay between Margate and Ramsgate; the Albion Hotel, where he notes that "the landlord has delicious hollands", No. 12 (now 31) High Street, and Lawn House, near Fort House, receiving him at different times. At Broadstairs he wrote a portion of _Pickwick_, of _Nicholas Nickleby_, and _The Old Curiosity Shop_, and he also stayed there while engaged on the _American Notes_, _Dombey and Son_, and _David Copperfield_. He forsook it at last, because it had become too noisy, but he has left an agreeable picture of it in _Our Watering Place_; but a passage in a letter to Forster invests it with still gayer colours:

"It is the brightest day you ever saw. The sun is sparkling on the water so that I can hardly bear to look at it. The tide is in, and the fishing boats are dancing like mad. Upon the green-topped cliffs the corn is cut and piled in shocks; and thousands of butterflies are fluttering about, taking the bright little red flags at the mastheads for flowers, and panting with delight accordingly."

To the characters and the _mise en scene_ of his novels, however, Broadstairs appears to have contributed nothing, except that the lady whose aversion to donkeys furnished so strong an idiosyncrasy to Miss Betsy Trotwood's character was a native, not of Dover, as in the novel, but of Broadstairs.

Dover, besides giving a local habitation to David's aunt, is associated with _The Tale of Two Cities_, since it was here that Mr. Lorry made the startling revelation to Miss Manette that her father had been "Recalled to Life". The vignette of eighteenth-century Dover is executed with true Dickensian verve:

"The little narrow, crooked town of Dover hid itself away from the beach, and ran its head into the chalk cliffs like a marine ostrich. The beach was a desert of heaps of sea and stones tumbling wildly about, and the sea did what it liked, and what it liked was destruction. It thundered at the town, and thundered at the cliffs, and brought the coast down, madly. The air among the houses was of so strong a piscatory flavour that one might have supposed sick fish went up to be dipped in it, as sick people went down to be dipped in the sea. A little fishing was done in the port, and a quantity of strolling about by night, and looking seaward: particularly at those times when the tide made, and was near flood. Small tradesmen, who did no business whatever, sometimes unaccountably realized large fortunes, and it was remarkable that nobody in the neighbourhood could endure a lamplighter."

It was to Dover that Dickens went when he was labouring with unusual difficulty over _Bleak House_, and lamenting his inability to "grind sparks out of this dull anvil". At Dover, on his Second Series of Readings, he found "the audience with the greatest sense of humour", and "they laughed with such really cordial enjoyment, when Squeers read the boy's letters, that the contagion" was irresistible even to Dickens himself.

Deal, as it was in 1853, is rapidly but vigorously sketched in chapter xlv of _Bleak House_. Esther Summerson arrives from a night journey by coach, eager and anxious to help, if possible, Richard Carstone, the unhappy victim of the fatal chancery lawsuit:

"At last we came into the narrow streets of Deal; and very gloomy they were, upon a raw misty morning. The long flat beach, with its little irregular houses, wooden and brick, and its litter of capstans, and great boats, and sheds, and bare upright poles with tackle and blocks, and loose gravelly waste places overgrown with grass and weeds, wore as dull an appearance as any place I ever saw. The sea was heaving under a thick white fog; and nothing else was moving but a few early rope-makers, who, with the yarn twisted round their bodies, looked as if, tired of their present state of existence, they were twisting themselves into cordage. But when we got into a warm room in an excellent hotel, and sat down, comfortably washed and dressed, to an early breakfast (for it was too late to think of going to bed), Deal began to look more cheerful.... Then the fog began to rise like a curtain; and numbers of ships, that we had had no idea were near, appeared. I don't know how many sail the waiter told us were then lying in the Downs. Some of these vessels were of grand size: one was a large Indiaman, just come home; and when the sun shone through the clouds, making silvery pools in the dark sea, the way in which these ships brightened, and shadowed, and changed, amid a bustle of boats putting off from the shore to them, and from them to the shore, and a general life and motion in themselves and everything around them, was most beautiful."