DICKENS AND CANTERBURY
by Frank Fricker (Canterbury Branch)
First a word about Dickens in Canterbury -
as he quite often was - and then about
Canterbury in Dickens, inevitably focusing
on one famous novel, his favourite, David
Copperfield.
Winter 2005 no. 55
We know, largely from his letters, that Dickens
came many times to and through the city. At
various periods in his life he lived within fairly
easy travelling distance; during childhood years at
Chatham: in his last years at Gad's Hill Place, his
home near Rochester, where he died.
Throughout his life between there were frequent
trips from London to east Kent, continental travels
bringing him trough the city, and whole series of
holidays at his English watering place, Broadstairs,
for him within walking distance.
How he came varied, both with his own means
and status and with the remarkable contemporary
development of public transport. As a young man,
living and working in London, he could and did
come easily by coach, and continued to do so later -
for speed. He certainly came, as many did, on the
paddle-steamers which, from 1814 ran from the
City of London via Heme Bay to the poplar East
Kent resorts. There is an amusing fictional account
of such an outing in 'The Tuggses at Ramsgate'
one of the very early Sketches by Boz.
Although rail travel to Canterbury was available,
via Ashford, from 1846, Dickens would still come
by boat. Writing to his friend, the founding editor
of Punch, mark Lemon, in August 1847 he reports,
'Wilson [William Wilson, the theatrical
hairdresser] came down to Heme Bay in the same
boat with me last Sunday, on his way to the
pigmented of the Canterbury amateurs' - evidently
forerunners of the Old Staggers, who date their
existence under that name, from 1851.
A little later, we find him in Canterbury again,
where he mentions buying a copy of Sheepshank's
Bottle Sheepshanks, one of Dickens's best-known
illustrators, and old friend, had recently converted
from dedicated drinking to strident teetotalism.
With eight large plates, The Bottle showed the ruin
of a family, from first domestic drinking to
madness and death. Again, in 1849, while
holidaying at Broadstairs, Dickens writes to
another illustrator, John Leech, 'Being
unexpectedly moved down by a fit of laziness, I
went over to Canterbury yesterday - alone -
refreshed myself with a day's rain there. I returned
at night, not wholly free from Snases
Bloomfieldian'a reference to the famous sneezes
of the bishop of London, C.J. Bloomfield.
As late as the 1850's, rail travel for the better off -
as Dickens was fast becoming - usually meant
travelling with one's own carriage, fastened to a
flat truck, so that the journey could be made part
on, part off rails. However, in 'Travelling Abroad', a
piece published in April 1860, he comes through
by road in what he calls his 'travelling chariot'
from Gad's Hill, en route for the continent:
'Over the road where the old Romans used to
march, over the road where the old Canterbury
pilgrims used to go, over the road where the
travelling trains of the old imperious priests and
princes used to jingle on horseback between the
continent and this island through the mud and
water, over the road where Shakespeare hummed
to himself. "Blow, blow, thou winter wind," as he
sat in the saddle at the gate of the inn yard
noticing the carriers; all among the cherry
orchards, corn-fields, and hop-gardens; so went I,
by Canterbury to Dover.' (Travelling Abroad', The
Uncommercial Traveller).
For us, his most important visit to Canterbury must
be that in 1861 when, on 4th November, he gave
one of his celebrated readings at Sidney Cooper's
new Theatre Royal. The previous year, Cooper had
converted buildings in Guildhall Street, coming to
the rescue of the Old Stagers, they having just iost
the use of the Orange Street theatre. Debenhams
now occupy the site o Cooper's theatre and have a
plaque commemorating the city's first film show
there: why not one for the Dickens reading?
On that occasion he probably stayed at the
Fountain Inn in St Margaret's Street, opposite the
present arcade, and probably where we are to
imagine Mr Dick staying on his visits to David
Copperfield at school in Canterbury.
Dickens's Canterbury reading came early in his
second series, which ran from late October 1861 to
the end of January '62. their usual form was a two-
hour reading with a ten-minute interval. I looked
through the Kentish Gazette for the period of his
visit but disappointingly found no mention of it.
He will certainly have read from David Copperfield.
As That series went on, though, he reduced the
Copperfield reading and added a Bob sawyer
section from Pickwick.
The Dutch Dickensian Volume XXV
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