Dickens-Land Part 1

d.i.c.kens-Land.

by J. A. Nicklin.

The central shrine of a literary cult is at least as often its hero's home of adoption as his place of birth. To the Wordsworthian, c.o.c.kermouth has but a faint, remote interest in comparison with Grasmere and Rydal Mount. Edinburgh, for all its a.s.sociations with the life and the genius of Scott, is not as Abbotsford, or as that beloved Border country in which his memory has struck its deepest roots. And so it is with d.i.c.kens. The accident of birth attaches his name but slightly to Landport in South-sea. The d.i.c.kens pilgrim treads in the most palpable footsteps of "Boz" amongst the landmarks of a Victorian London, too rapidly disappearing, and through the "rich and varied landscape" on either side of the Medway, "covered with cornfields and pastures, with here and there a windmill or a distant church", which d.i.c.kens loved from boyhood, peopled with the creatures of his teeming fancy, and chose for his last and most-cherished habitation.

What Abbotsford was to Scott, that, almost, to d.i.c.kens in his later years was Gads.h.i.+ll Place. From his study window in the "grave red-brick house" "on his little Kentish freehold"--a house which he had "added to and stuck bits upon in all manner of ways, so that it was as pleasantly irregular and as violently opposed to all architectural ideas as the most hopeful man could possibly desire"--he looked out, so he wrote to a friend, "on as pretty a view as you will find in a long day's English ride.... Cobham Park and Woods are behind the house; the distant Thames is in front; the Medway, with Rochester and its old castle and cathedral, on one side." On every side he could not fail to reach, in those brisk walks with which he sought, too strenuously, perhaps, health and relaxation, some object redolent of childish dreams or mature achievement, of intimate joys and sorrows, of those phantoms of his brain which to him then, as to hundreds of thousands of his readers since, were not less real than the men and women of everyday encounter.

On those seven miles between Rochester and Maidstone, which he discovered to be one of the most beautiful walks in England, he might be tempted to strike off at Aylesford for a short stroll to such a pleasant old Elizabethan mansion as Cobtree Hall, the very type, it may be, of Manor Farm, Dingley Dell, or for a longer tramp to Town Malling, from which he may well have borrowed many strokes for the picture of Muggleton, that town of st.u.r.dy Kentish cricket. Sometimes he would walk across the marshes to Gravesend, and returning through the village of Chalk, would pause for a retrospective glance at the house where his honeymoon was spent and a good part of _Pickwick_ planned. In the latter end of the year, when he could take a short cut through the stubble fields from Higham to the marshes lying further down the Thames, he would often visit the desolate churchyard where little Pip was so terribly frightened by the convict. Or, descending the long slope from Gads.h.i.+ll to Strood, and crossing Rochester Bridge--over the bal.u.s.trades of which Mr. Pickwick leaned in agreeable reverie when he was accosted by Dismal Jemmy--the author of _Great Expectations_ and _Edwin Drood_ would pa.s.s from Rochester High Street--where Mr. Pumblechook's seed shop looks across the way at Miss Twinkleton's establishment--into the Vines, to compare once more the impression on his unerring "inward eye" with the actual features of that Restoration House which, under another name, he a.s.signed to Miss Havisham, and so round by Fort Pitt to the Chatham lines. And there--who can doubt?--if he seemed to hear the melancholy wind that whistled through the deserted fields as Mr. Winkle took his reluctant stand, a wretched and desperate duellist, his thoughts would also stray to the busy dockyard town and "a blessed little room" in a plain-looking plaster-fronted house from which dated all his early readings and imaginings.

Between the "very small and not-over-particularly-taken-care-of boy" and the strong, self-reliant man whose fame had filled two continents, Gads.h.i.+ll Place was an immediate link. Everyone knows the story which d.i.c.kens tells of a vision of his former self meeting him on the road to Canterbury.

"So smooth was the old high road, and so fresh were the horses, and so fast went I, that it was midway between Gravesend and Rochester, and the widening river was bearing the s.h.i.+ps, white-sailed or black-smoked, out to sea, when I noticed by the wayside a very queer small boy.

"'Halloa!' said I to the very queer small boy, 'where do you live?'

"'At Chatham,' says he.

"'What do you do there?' say I.

"'I go to school,' says he.

"I took him up in a moment, and we went on. Presently, the very queer small boy says, 'This is Gads.h.i.+ll we are coming to, where Falstaff went out to rob those travellers and ran away.'

"'You know something about Falstaff, eh?' said I.

"'All about him,' said the very queer small boy. 'I am old (I am nine), and I read all sorts of books. But do let us stop at the top of the hill, and look at the house there, if you please!'

"'You admire that house?' said I.

[Ill.u.s.tration: GADs.h.i.+LL PLACE FROM THE GARDENS]

"'Bless you, sir,' said the very queer small boy, 'when I was not more than half as old as nine, it used to be a treat for me to be brought to look at it. And now I am nine I come by myself to look at it. And ever since I can recollect, my father, seeing me so fond of it, has often said to me, If you were to be very persevering, and were to work hard, you might some day come to live in it.

Though that's impossible!' said the very queer small boy, drawing a low breath, and now staring at the house out of window with all his might.

"I was rather amazed to be told this by the very queer small boy; for that house happens to be _my_ house, and I have reason to believe that what he said was true."

As the queer small boy in the _Uncommercial Traveller_ said, Gads.h.i.+ll Place is at the very top of Falstaff's hill. It stands on the south side of the Dover road;--on the north side, but a little lower down, is "a delightfully oldfas.h.i.+oned inn of the old coaching days", the "Sir John Falstaff";--surrounded by a high wall and screened by a row of limes.

The front view, with its wooden and pillared porch, its bays, its dormer windows let into the roof, and its surmounting bell turret and vane, bears much the same appearance as it did to the queer small boy. But amongst the many additions and alterations which d.i.c.kens was constantly making, the drawing-room had been enlarged from a smaller existing one, and the conservatory into which it opens was, as he laughingly told his younger daughter, "positively the last improvement at Gads.h.i.+ll"--a jest to prove sadly prophetic, for it was uttered on the Sunday before his death. The little library, too, on the opposite side of the porch from the drawing-room and conservatory, was a converted bedroom. Its aspect is familiar to most d.i.c.kens-lovers from Sir Luke Fildes's famous picture of "The Empty Chair". In summer, however, d.i.c.kens used to do his work not in the library but in a Swiss chalet, presented to him by Fechter, the great actor, which stood in a shrubbery lying on the other side of the highroad, and entered by a subway that d.i.c.kens had excavated for the purpose. The chalet now must be sought in the terrace garden of Cobham Hall. When d.i.c.kens sat at his desk in a room of the chalet, "up among the branches of the trees", the five mirrors which he had put in reflected "the leaves quivering at the windows, and the great fields of waving corn, and the sail-dotted river". The birds and b.u.t.terflies flew in and out, the green branches shot in at the open windows, and the lights and shadows of the clouds and the scent of flowers and of everything growing for miles had the same free access. No imaginative artist, whether in words or colour, could have desired a more inspiring environment. The back of the house, looking southward, descends by one flight of steps upon a lawn, where one of the bal.u.s.trades of the old Rochester Bridge had, when this was demolished, been fitted up as a sundial. The lawn, in turn, communicates with flower and vegetable gardens by another flight of steps. Beyond is "the much-coveted meadow"

which d.i.c.kens obtained, partly by exchange, from the trustees--not of Watts's Charity, as Forster has stated, but of Sir Joseph Williamson's Free School at Rochester. It was in this field that the villagers from neighbouring Higham played cricket matches, and that, just before d.i.c.kens went to America for the last time, he held those quaint footraces for all and sundry, described in one of his letters to Forster. Though the landlord of the Falstaff, from over the way, was allowed to erect a drinking booth, and all the prizes were given in money; though, too, the road from Chatham to Gads.h.i.+ll was like a fair all day, and the crowd consisted mainly of rough labouring men, of soldiers, sailors, and navvies, there was no disorder, not a flag, rope, or stake displaced, and no drunkenness whatever. As striking a tribute, if rightly considered, as ever was exacted by a strong and winning personality! One of those oddities in which d.i.c.kens delighted was elicited by a hurdle race for strangers. The man who came in second ran 120 yards and leaped over ten hurdles with a pipe in his mouth and smoking it all the time. "If it hadn't been for your pipe," said the Master of Gads.h.i.+ll Place, clapping him on the shoulder at the winning-post, "you would have been first." "I beg your pardon, sir," he answered, "but if it hadn't been for my pipe, I should have been nowhere."

To the hospitable hearth of Gads.h.i.+ll Place were drawn, by the fame of the "Inimitable Boz", a long succession of brilliant men and women, mostly of the Anglo-Saxon race, whether English or American; and if not in the throngs for which at Abbotsford open house was kept, yet with a frequency which would have made literary work almost impossible for the host without remarkable steadiness of purpose and regularity of habits.

For Longfellow and his daughters he "turned out", that they might see all of the surrounding country which could be seen in a short stay, "a couple of postilions in the old red jackets of the old red royal Dover road, and it was like a holiday ride in England fifty years ago".

In his study in the late and early months, and his Swiss chalet through the summer, d.i.c.kens would write such novels as _Great Expectations_, and the unfinished _Mystery of Edwin Drood_, taking his local colour from spots which lay within the compa.s.s of a reasonable walk; and others, such as _A Tale of Two Cities_ and _Our Mutual Friend_, to which the circ.u.mstances of time and place furnished little or nothing except their influence on his mood. Some of the occasional papers which, in the character of "The Uncommercial Traveller", he furnished to _All the Year Round_, have as much of the _genius loci_ as any of his romances.

Even to-day the rus.h.i.+ng swarm of motor cars has not yet driven from the more secluded nooks of Kent all such idylls of open-air vagabondage as this:--

"I have my eyes upon a piece of Kentish road, bordered on either side by a wood, and having on one hand, between the road dust and the trees, a skirting patch of gra.s.s. Wild flowers grow in abundance on this spot, and it lies high and airy, with a distant river stealing steadily away to the ocean, like a man's life. To gain the milestone here, which the moss, primroses, violets, bluebells and wild roses would soon render illegible but for peering travellers pus.h.i.+ng them aside with their sticks, you must come up a steep hill, come which way you may. So, all the tramps with carts or caravans--the gipsy tramp, the show tramp, the Cheap Jack--find it impossible to resist the temptations of the place, and all turn the horse loose when they come to it, and boil the pot. Bless the place, I love the ashes of the vagabond fires that have scorched its gra.s.s!"

The Kentish road that d.i.c.kens thus describes is certainly the Dover Road at Gads.h.i.+ll, from which, of course, there is a steep declivity whether the route is westward to Gravesend or eastwards to Strood and Rochester.

In Strood itself d.i.c.kens found little to interest him, though the view of Rochester from Strood Hill is an arresting one, with the stately mediaevalism of Castle and Cathedral emerging from a kind of haze in which it is hard to distinguish what is smoke-wreath and what a ma.s.s of crowding roofs. The Medway, which divides Strood from the almost indistinguishably overlapping towns of Rochester, Chatham, and Brompton, is crossed by an iron bridge, superseding the old stone structure commemorated in _Pickwick_. Mr. Pickwick's notes on "the four towns" do not require very much modification to apply to their present state.

"The princ.i.p.al productions", he wrote, "appear to be soldiers, sailors, Jews, chalk, shrimps, officers, and dockyard men. The commodities chiefly exposed for sale in the public streets are marine stores, hard-bake, apples, flat-fish, and oysters. The streets present a lively and animated appearance, occasioned chiefly by the conviviality of the military.... The consumption of tobacco in these towns must be very great, and the smell which pervades the streets must be exceedingly delicious to those who are extremely fond of smoking. A superficial traveller might object to the dirt, which is their leading characteristic, but to those who view it as an indication of traffic and commercial prosperity, it is truly gratifying."

[Ill.u.s.tration: ROCHESTER FROM STROOD]

This description is much less true of Rochester than of its three neighbours, and does no justice to the aspects which d.i.c.kens himself presented in the Market Town of _Great Expectations_, and the Cloisterham of _Edwin Drood_. Amid the rather sordid encroachments of a modern industrialism, Rochester still keeps something of the air of an old-world country town, and in the precincts of its Cathedral there still broods a cloistral peace. The dominating feature of the town, from whatever side approached, is the ma.s.sive ruin of the Norman Keep of Bishop Gundulf, the architect also of London's White Tower. Though the blue sky is its only roof, and on the rugged staircase the dark apertures in the walls, where rafters and floors were once, show like gaping sockets from which the ravens and daws have picked out the eyes, it seems to stand with all the immovable strength of some solid rock on which the waves of rebellion or invasion would have dashed and broken.

It is easy to believe the saying of Lambarde, in his _Perambulation of Kent_, that "from time to time it had a part in almost every tragedie".

But the grimness of its grey walls is relieved by a green mantle of clinging ivy, and though it can no longer be said of the Castle that it is "bathed, though in ruins, with a flush of flowers", the beautiful single pink grows wild on its ramparts.

From the Castle to the "Bull" in the High Street is a transition which seems almost an anachronism. It is but to follow in the traces of the Pickwick Club. The covered gateway, the staircase almost wide enough for a coach and four, the ballroom on the first floor landing, with card-room adjoining, and the bedroom which Mr. Winkle occupied inside Mr. Tupman's--all are there, just as when the club entertained Alfred Jingle to a dinner of soles, a broiled fowl and mushrooms, and Mr.

Tupman took him to the ball in Mr. Winkle's coat, borrowed without leave, and Dr. Slammer of the 97th sent his challenge next morning to the owner of the coat. The Guildhall, with its gilt s.h.i.+p for a vane, and its old brick front, supported by Doric stone columns, is not so memorable because Hogarth played hop-scotch in the colonnade during his _Five Days' Peregrination by Land and Water_, as for the day when Pumblechook bundled Pip off to be bound apprentice to Jo before the Justices in the Hall, "a queer place, with higher pews in it than a church ... and with some s.h.i.+ning black portraits on the walls". This was the Town Hall, too, which d.i.c.kens has told us that he had set up in his childish mind "as the model on which the genie of the lamp built the palace for Aladdin", only to return and recognize with saddened, grown-up eyes--exaggerating the depreciation a little, for the sake of the contrast--"a mere mean little heap of bricks, like a chapel gone demented". Close by the Guildhall is the Town Clock, "supposed to be the finest clock in the world", which, alas! "turned out to be as moon-faced and weak a clock as a man's eyes ever saw".

On the north side of the High Street, not many yards from the Bull, is a Tudor two-storied, stone-built house, with latticed windows and gables.

This is the Charity founded by the will of Richard Watts in 1579, to give lodging and entertainment for one night, and fourpence each, to "six poor travellers, not being rogues or proctors". It furnished the theme to the Christmas cycle of stories, _The Seven Poor Travellers_, the narrator, who treats the waifs and strays harboured one Christmas eve at the Charity to roast turkey, plum pudding, and "wa.s.sail", bringing up the number to seven, "being", as he says, "a traveller myself, though an idle one, and being withal as poor as I hope to be".

Farther up the High Street towards Chatham, about a quarter of a mile from Rochester Bridge, are two sixteenth-century houses, with fronts of carved oak and gables, facing each other across the street. One has figured in both _Great Expectations_ and _Edwin Drood_, for it is the house of Mr. Pumblechook, the pompous and egregious corn and seedsman, and of Mr. Sapsea, the auctioneer, still more pompous and egregious. The other--Eastgate House, now converted into a museum--is the "Nun's House", where Miss Twinkleton kept school, and had Rosa Bud and Helen Landless for pupils.

From the hum and traffic of the cheerfully frequented High Street to the calm and hush of the Cathedral precincts entrance is given by Chertsey's or College Yard Gate, which abuts on the High Street about a hundred yards north of the Cathedral. It was this Gate which Sir Luke Fildes sketched, as he has recorded in an interesting letter published in _A Week's Tramp in d.i.c.kens-Land_, by W. R. Hughes, for the background of his drawing of "Durdles Cautioning Sapsea". There are, however, two other gatehouses, the "Prior's", a tower over an archway, containing a single room approached by a "postern stair", and "Deanery Gate", a quaint old house adjoining the Cathedral which has ten rooms, some of them beautifully panelled. Its drawing-room on the upper floor bears a strong resemblance to the room--as depicted by Sir Luke Fildes--in which Jasper entertained his nephew and Neville Landless, but the artist believes that he never saw the interior. It is not unlikely that d.i.c.kens took some details from each of the gatehouses to make a composite picture of "Mr. Jasper's own gatehouse", which seemed so to stem the tide of life, that while the murmur of the tide was heard beyond, not a wave would pa.s.s the archway.

Rochester Cathedral, which overshadows, though in a less insistent and tragic manner, the whole human interest of _Edwin Drood_ almost as much as Notre Dame overshadows the human interest in Victor Hugo's romance, preserves some remains of the original Saxon and Norman churches on the site of which it was erected. Its Early English and Decorated Gothic came off lightly from three restorations, but the tower is nineteenth-century vandalism. The Norman west front enshrines in the riches of its sculptured portal, with its five receding arches, figures of the Saviour and his twelve apostles, and on two shafts are carved likenesses of Henry I and his Queen. Freeman has p.r.o.nounced it to be far the finest example of Norman architecture of its kind. The Chapter House door, a magnificent example of Decorated Gothic, is adorned with effigies representing the Christian and Jewish Churches, which are surrounded by Holy Fathers and Angels who pray for the soul, emblematically represented as a small nude form above them. But it is about the stone-vaulted crypt, where even by daylight "the heavy pillars which support the roof engender ma.s.ses of black shade", with "lanes of light" between, and about the winding staircase and belfry of the great tower that the spells of the d.i.c.kens magic especially cling, and Jasper and Durdles revisit these haunts by the glimpses of the moon as persistently as Quasimodo and the sinister Priest beset with their ghostly presences the belfry of the great Paris minster.

Of the historic imagination d.i.c.kens had little or none. He could not evoke, and never had the faintest desire to evoke, a Past that was divided from the Present by an unbridgeable chasm. Thus Rochester Castle, though he seldom failed to bring his guests to view it, affected him only with a remote sense of antiquity such as he would have experienced, no more and no less, amongst the Pyramids. But he was keenly sensitive to the influences of a Past which still survived and, by the continuity of a corporate life, made an integral part in the Present. The Cathedral life, in which by virtue of their office canons and dean were living relics of antiquity, and as much the contemporaries as the successors of the ecclesiastics who lay crumbling in the crypt, stirred this sense in him as it had been stirred by the ancient Inns of London. Almost the last words that he wrote were a tribute to the beauty of the venerable fane in which, beneath the monument of the founder of that quaint Charity rendered so famous by his story of _The Seven Poor Travellers_, a simple bra.s.s records his birth, death, and burial-place, "To connect his memory with the scenes in which his earliest and his latest years were pa.s.sed, and with the a.s.sociations of Rochester Cathedral and its neighbourhood which extended over all his life".

[Ill.u.s.tration: RESTORATION HOUSE, ROCHESTER]

In the old cemetery of St. Nicholas' Church, on the north side of the Cathedral, it was d.i.c.kens's desire to be buried, and his family would have carried out his wishes had it not been that the burial-ground had been closed for years and no further interments were allowed. On the south side of the Cathedral is the delightfully oldfas.h.i.+oned terrace known as Minor Canon Row--d.i.c.kens's name for it is Minor Canon Corner--where the Reverend Septimus Crisparkle kept house with the "china shepherdess" mother. The "Monks' Vineyard" of _Edwin Drood_ exists as "The Vines". Here under a group of elms called "The Seven Sisters" Edwin Drood and Rosa sat when they decided to break their engagement, and opposite "The Seven Sisters" is the "Satis House" of _Great Expectations_, where the lonely and embittered Miss Havisham taught Estella the cruel lessons of a ruined life. It is really Restoration House--Satis House is on the site of the mansion of Master Richard Watts, to whose apologies for no better entertainment of his Sovereign, Queen Elizabeth answered "Satis"--and it takes its name from having received the restored Merry Monarch under its roof on his way to London and the throne. Pepys, who was terrified by the steepness of the castle cliff and had no time to stay to service at the Cathedral, when he had been inspecting the defences at Chatham, found something more to his mind in a stroll by Restoration House, and into the Cherry Garden, where he met a silly shopkeeper with a pretty wife, "and did kiss her".

d.i.c.kens would often follow this route of Pepys, but in the reverse direction, that is, through the Vines to Chatham and its lines of fortification, where Mr. Pickwick, Mr. Winkle, and Mr. Snodgra.s.s became so hopelessly entangled in the sham fight which they had gone over from Rochester to see. At No. 11 Ordnance Terrace the little Charles d.i.c.kens lived from 1817 to 1821, and at No. 18 St. Mary's Place from 1821 to 1823, the financial troubles, which eventually drove the family into the Marshalsea debtors' prison, and Charles himself into the sordid drudgery of the blacking-shop by Hungerford Stairs, having already enforced a migration to a cheaper and meaner house. In Clover Street (then Clover Lane) the little d.i.c.kens went to a school kept by a Mr. William Giles, who years afterwards sent to him, when he was halfway through with _Pickwick_, a silver snuff-box inscribed to the "Inimitable Boz". To the Mitre Inn, in the Chatham High Street, where Nelson had many times put up, d.i.c.kens was often brought by his father to recite or sing, standing on a table, for the amus.e.m.e.nt of parties of friends. He speaks of it in the "Holly Tree Inn" as

"The inn where friends used to put up, and where we used to go to see parents, and to have salmon and fowls, and be tipped. It had an ecclesiastical sign--the 'mitre'--and a bar that seemed to be the next best thing to a bishopric, it was so snug. I loved the landlord's youngest daughter to distraction--but let that pa.s.s. It was in this inn that I was cried over by my little rosy sister, because I had acquired a black eye in a fight."

When the little Charles d.i.c.kens was taken away to London inside the stage-coach Commodore--his kind master on the night before having come flitting in among the packing-cases to give him Goldsmith's _Bee_ as a keepsake--he was leaving behind for ever, in the playing-field near Clover Lane and the grounds of Rochester Castle and the green drives of Cobham Park, the untroubled dreams of happy childhood. And though he could not know this, yet, as he sat amongst the damp straw piled up round him in the inside of the coach, he "consumed his sandwiches in solitude and dreariness" and thought life sloppier than he had expected to find it. And in _David Copperfield_ he has thrown back into those earlier golden days the shadow of his London privations by bringing the little Copperfield, footsore and tired, toiling towards dusk into Chatham, "which, in that night's aspect is a mere dream of chalk and drawbridges and mastless s.h.i.+ps in a muddy river, roofed like Noah's arks". No doubt the terrible old Jew in the marine-stores shop, who rated and frightened David with his "Oh, my eyes and limbs, what do you want? Oh, my lungs and liver, what do you want? Oh--goroo, goroo!"--until the helpless little fellow was obliged to close with an offer of a few pence instead of half a crown for his waistcoat, is the portrait of some actual Jew dealer whom, in one of the back streets of Chatham, the keen eyes of the precocious child, seeming to look at nothing, had curiously watched hovering like a hideous spider on the pounce behind his grime-encrusted window.

It was old a.s.sociations that led d.i.c.kens so often in his walks from Gads.h.i.+ll Place to Chatham. But the neighbourhood which gave him most pleasure, combining as it did with similar a.s.sociations an exquisite beauty, was, Forster tells us, the sylvan scenery of Cobham Park. The green woods and green shades of Cobham would recur to his memory even in far-off Lausanne, and the last walk that he ever enjoyed--on the day before his fatal seizure--was through these woods, the charm of which cannot be better defined than in his own description in _Pickwick_:

"A delightful walk it was; for it was a pleasant afternoon in June, and their way lay through a deep and shady wood, cooled by the light wind which gently rustled the thick foliage, and enlivened by the songs of the birds that perched upon the boughs. The ivy and the moss crept in thick cl.u.s.ters over the old trees, and the soft green turf overspread the ground like a silken mat. They emerged upon an open park, with an ancient hall, displaying the quaint and picturesque architecture of Elizabeth's time. Long vistas of stately oaks and elm trees appeared on every side; large herds of deer were cropping the fresh gra.s.s; and occasionally a startled hare scoured along the ground with the speed of the shadows thrown by the light clouds, which swept across a sunny landscape like a pa.s.sing breath of summer."

The mission on which Mr. Pickwick and his two disciples were engaged was, it will be remembered, to convert Mr. Tupman from his resolution to forsake the world in a fit of misanthropy, induced by the faithlessness of Rachel Wardle.

"'If this,' said Mr. Pickwick, looking about him--'If this were the place to which all who are troubled with our friend's complaint came, I fancy their old attachment to this world would very soon return.'"

Mr. Pickwick was right, for when they arrived at the village, and entered that "clean and commodious village alehouse", the "Leather Bottle", they found Mr. Tupman set down at a table "well covered with a roast fowl, bacon, ale, and et ceteras", and "looking as unlike a man who had taken leave of the world as possible".

The "ancient hall" of Cobham consists of two Tudor wings, with a central block designed by Inigo Jones. It has a splendid collection of Old Masters, and a music room which the Prince Regent p.r.o.nounced to be the finest room in England. In the terrace flower garden at the back of the Hall, it may be mentioned again here, is the Swiss chalet from Gads.h.i.+ll Place, which served d.i.c.kens for a study in the summer months. The circuit of Cobham Park is about seven miles, and it is crossed by the "Long Avenue", leading to Rochester, and the "Grand Avenue", which, sloping down from the tenantless Mausoleum, opens into Cobham village.

The inn to which Mr. Tupman retired, in disgust with life, still retains the t.i.tle of the "Leather Bottle", but has mounted for its sign a coloured portrait of Mr. Pickwick addressing the Club in characteristic att.i.tude. It was in Cobham village that Mr. Pickwick made his notable discovery of the stone with the mysterious inscription--an inscription which the envious Blotton maintained was nothing more than BIL STUMPS HIS MARK. Local tradition suggests that d.i.c.kens intended the episode for a skit upon archaeological theories about the dolmens known as Kit's Coty House, and that a Strood antiquary keenly resented the satire. However that may be, Kit's Coty House is not at Cobham, but some miles away, near Aylesford. In Cobham church there is perhaps the finest and most complete series of monumental bra.s.ses in this country, most of them commemorating the Lords of Cobham.

[Ill.u.s.tration: COBHAM PARK]

Out of the Cobham woods it is not a long walk to the little village of Shorne, where d.i.c.kens was fond of sitting on a hot summer afternoon in its pretty, shaded churchyard. This is believed to be the spot which he has described in _Pickwick_ as "one of the most peaceful and secluded churchyards in Kent, where wild flowers mingle with the gra.s.s, and the soft landscape around forms the fairest spot in the garden of England".