At some point, like people in the past making towards Italy from northern Europe by land, you have to face the enormous challenge of crossing the Alps. The same applies metaphorically to anyone who wants to write or study the literature of Kent. At some point, one has to deal with the immensity of Charles Dickens, and his life, and the imaginative reconstruction and contribution, to this particular place that his work made, and continues to make. It would be no exaggeration to say that there is Kent as a physical place, and then there is Dickens’s Kent. The two are intimately related. But they are also radically different. Working out precisely how to relate the two to each other is not an easy task.
A vast amount has been written about Charles Dickens (1812-1870) and his life, his life in Kent, and the ways in which his work can be described, at least in parts, as autobiographical. That he felt he was describing a real world and that his words were meant to have impact n that is clear from the broadly social and political agenda that he often had – addressing inequality, injustice and other public issues. In a short space, it would be impossible, and impudent, to try to do justice to such a great figure. All I will address here is some of the most important of the specific places that Dickens lived in in Kent, the recreation of parts of Kent in his works, and then the impact that these works later had on making the place different. After all, for somewhere like Rochester for instance it is interesting, and hard, to imagine them now without his impact. This doesn’t mean this place would be physically greatly different now if Dickens had never existed or written. The Cathedral, castle, and High Street all have very separate existences, regardless of his life. But surely the atmosphere and our inner reception and experience of these sort of places would be different if we never had his work and its relation to this place. And this is about more than the use that the Dickens connection has for tourism today, or the annual Dickens Festival.
The many biographies of the writer’s life attest to the fact that his own experiences were both well documented (he wrote large numbers of letters, and was active as a journalist, and someone commemorated by others even during his life – there is no ghostly lack of any sort of public persona here as in the case of Shakespeare), and regarded as important in some way to understanding his work. Maybe it is possible to practice the Eliotesque approach of disregarding any personal biographical details of a writer’s life when looking at their work. But that must surely make them somehow different in the case of an author like Dickens. He certainly injected a lot of his own experiences and attitudes towards life gained from his history into his work. In some way, and to some degree, that must matter. If it doesn’t, that needs a pretty clear rationale as to why to exclude it.
While not born in Kent (his birthplace was at Landport, Southsea, due to his father’s work as a navy-pay officer), according to his first biographer (and someone who knew him well) John Forster, he moved to Chatham around the age of four on the transfer of his father’s working duties to the dockyard there. `The house where he lived in Chatham, which had a plain-looking whitewashed plaster-front and a small garden before and behind, was in St Mary’s-place, otherwise called the Brook.’ (John Forster, `The Life of Charles Dickens’, Cecil Palmer, London, 1928, 2). This place still exists and is now 2 Ordinance Terrace. At the age of eleven, he moved from there to London. Forster tells a story of his time in Chatham that he relayed to his biographer years later, about how Gadshill-place on the road from London to Rochester had always held a prominent place for him because `upon first seeing it as he came from Chatham with his father, and looking up at it with much admiration, he had been promised that he might himself live in it or in some such house when he came to be a man, if he would only work hard enough.’ (Forster, 2). This place famously did become his home, from 1856 till his death.
The neatness of Dickens’ ending being also in his beginning is almost akin to some of the denouements of his story plots. His life in London as an adolescent left a more searing experience, particularly through his father’s experience of debt, and his time in a blacking factory. The success of his writing career from early in his twenties never seems to have eradicated this early humiliation, and framed London as a place of great energy but underlying suffering and darkness. In the years before his move back to Kent from his numerous London locations (one, in Doughty Street, which remains a museum to him to this day) he maintained links to Kent through honeymooning after his marriage in 1836 to Catherine Hogarth in Chalk, on the Thames Estuary, but more importantly in Broadstairs. He first went there, at least according to Forster, in 1837 when it was `a small place, unknown as a holiday resort.’ On this first visit he stayed at 12, now 31, the High Street. Writing later to Forster about that visit, Dickens cheerfully refers to the `Albion Hotel where had that merry night two years ago.’ His own letters often refer to the stays in Broadstairs over the years – from 1839, almost annually to 1844 during which time he wrote `Barnaby Rudge’ at No 40 Albion Street (later made into part of the Albion Hotel). He purchased Fort House in 1850 `a name,’ Forster’s editor J T Ley sharply comments, `which some later owner altered to Bleak House, thus giving rise to the utterly erroneous impression that it was the original of Mr Jarndyce’s home’. The house in Nuckall’s Place (now 2 Victoria Parade, and location of the Dickens House Museum) along the sea front was more authentically, according to the same authority `beyond doubt the original of Betsey Trotwood’s house in Dover’ (Forster, 101).
Dickens’ life in Broadstairs, and then later in Gadshill, shows that physically he was certainly in the county a lot of the time, and wrote a great many of his books here. That their plots and characters had such vividness that one can argue today about whether or not fictional events ever “happened’ in real places arouses interesting questions. Broadstairs, at least in his letters, is a place almost of refuge and peace where he could write and get away from the distractions of London. He went there to not do things, rather than be too active – and it is not clear just how engaged he was in the local communities around him. Despite this, the commemoration of his connection to Broadstairs today is strong – and well marked in tourism brochures, marketing and facilities. Gadshill, which is many ways is the far more important location for his life , for symbolic reasons (see above) but also because it was his principle residence for the last 14 years of his life, where he lived with his new partner Ellen Tiernen after estrangement from Catherine, is a different matter. A girl’s school since 1924, it is occasionally open for public viewing during the summer each year. Its use for the last hundred years mean the house’s function has meant preserving any of the arrangements of the author’s time to a large extent is impractical. Despite this, his study Is still in place, and a reproduction of the desk at which he often wrote – the one that was famously to figure in `Dickens Dream’ the painting to commemorate the writer and his many creations by Robert William Buss from the year of his death, and itself modelled on another image, `The Empty Chair’ of the same year by Samuel Fuldes. The real desk was purchased by the Dickens Museum in London in 2015. Even so, Gadshill is a strangely muted way to commemorate the final home of one of the world’s greatest ever writers.
There are many settings for Dickens large body of works. Kentish locations figure most centrally in `The Pickwick Papers’ (1837), `David Copperfield’(1850), `Great Expectations’ (1861) and the unfinished `The Mystery of Edwin Drood’ (1871). In the `Pickwick Papers’, a novel full of restless, youthful vitality which involves a number of different excursions, adventures and journeys, locations from Cobham, to Rochester, to Canterbury figure. The most famous exclamation, by Alfred Jingle near the start of the novel to the wonders of Kent is reproduced so often to not need any repetition here. The fact that Jingle figures as the villain and a fraud as the rest of the novel unfolds is often forgotten because of the ways in which his distinctive manner of speech is relayed. `David Copperfield’ is a deeper work, one that trawls over much of the writer’s previous experiences, and wanders from locations in Dover, to journeys by the abandoned main character from Canterbury towards the coast and his aunt’s house, to locations in London, and then back in Kent. `Edmund Drood’ is set in Rochester and figures detailed descriptions of the cathedral environs and town which are commemorated by various plaques and inscriptions there to this day.
It is `Great Expectations’ however, with its descriptions in the opening of the brooding atmosphere of the Kent estuary by the Thames, and in particular the marsh area around the isolated village of Cooling that must stand as perhaps one of the greatest literary testaments ever written to the county, and actually written close to the scenes which are being recreated. St James’s Church in Cooling to this day has the lozenge shaped small tombs which Pip sees during his fateful first encounter with the feeling criminal Magwitch at the start of the novel. That Dickens chose such a marginal and marginalised place to set this great and intense work is telling – as is the return to this place so often even as the novel goes on to describe Pip’s progress to London, and the status of a gentleman. The most fascinating of all the locations in the novel however is the extraordinary self-contained world of Mrs Haversham – Satis House. The first visits of young Pip there to meet someone who he, erroneously, comes to think of as his benefactor, and the cold, imperious Esther, describe a world suffocating emotional repressiveness and darkness. The house, as it figures in the novels, is evidently large, and has sizeable grounds around it:
`Within a quarter of an hour we came to Mrs Haversham’s house, which was of old brick, and dismal, and had a great many iron bars to it. Some of the windows had been walled up; of those that remained, all the lower were rustily barred. There was a courtyard in front, and that was barred; so we had to wait, after ringing the bell, until someone should come to open it.’ (Great Expectations, Collins Edition, London 1961, 58)
The `dismal’ house is a good opportunity to reflect on the third aspect of Dickens and Kent – his continuing influence through his work and the way it frames the world of the built and natural landscape in the county. For in many ways, Satis House occurs almost like a character of its own in the novel – something with its own personality, and `voice’, important enough for its ruination to figure right at the end of the book, as Pip finally meets Esther after her own widowing and a kind of suggestive rapprochement between the two is made. Forster in describing some of Dickens favourite, and famously long and taxing, walks from Gadshill refers to `The Vines (where some old buildings, from one of which called Restoration-house he took Satis House for `Great Expectations’ has a curious attraction for him).’ (Forster, 658-9).
Why was this attraction `curious’? The house, to this day called Restoration House, does have a remarkable history, part of it through hosting Charles the Second on his return to Britain in May 1660. Originating from a structure from the latter part of the 16th century, at the time Dickens was living in Gadshill it was owned by Richard Berridge till 1865, and then from then by the Reverend G Chambers. There are no records of the writer ever going into the house, and his descriptions of the interior of Satis House are more striking for their imaginative quality than according to anything one could remotely find today. But that Dickens for some reason was attracted by this place is testified to by the haunting story of him standing in the Vines small public garden just opposite the building, only three days before his death, the last public sighting ever of him, gazing across towards the house.
Restoration House has had a mixed modern history. Owned by the television star of Emu fame, Rod Hull, ironically its restoration effectively bankrupted him by 1994. But the new owners, Robert Tucker and Jonathan Wilmot have since then brought the building and its gardens splendidly back to life – and though it is principally their home, through the summer they allow access to visitors, who can look at the remarkable layout both inside and outside. For all the efforts to authenticity, however, it is hard to be authentic to events that never happened. Dickens never had a benefactor when he was young let alone someone like Haversham, his story was never like that of Pip, and the imperatives of his imagination followed a much more complex logic. As Restoration House haunted him to some extent, so too it has to haunt anyone who thinks about this strange, complex building today, and how it relates to a writer’s imagination. Dickens as a brand of course is easy to find in shops, tourism locations, and even historical sites. But Dickens as a novelist – one of the very greatest in English or any other language for that matter – is not so easy to pin down. `Great Expectations’ remains to this day an unsettling, almost spectral work, and one no easier to define the impact of however intimate one is with the landscape in which it was set, and which, in some ways must have inspired it.