Winter 2005 no. 55
Coming now to Becket; after his confrontation
with the four knights, the archbishop is urged by
his attendants to take sanctuary:
Hearing the distant voices of the monks singing
the service ....he said it was now his duty to
attend, and therefore, and for no other reason, he
would go.
There was a near way between his Palace and the
Cathedral, by some beautiful old cloisters which
you may yet see. (Dickens here ignores the later
rebuilding of the cloister.) He went into the
Cathedral, without any hurry, and having the
Cross carried before him as usual. When he was
safely there, his servants would have fastened the
door, but he said No! It was the house of God and
not a fortress!
[When the knights entered] ...It was so dark, in
the lofty aisles and among the stately pillars of the
church, and there were so many hiding-places in
the crypt below and in the narrow passages above,
that Thomas a Becket might even at that pass have
saved himself if he would. But he would not. And
though they all dispersed and left him there with
no other followers than EDWARD GRYME, his
faithful cross-bearer, he was as firm then, as ever
he had been in his life!
[After the murder, vividly described],...'It is an
awful thing to think of the murdered mortal who
had so showered his curses about, lying, all
disfigured, in the church, where a few lamps here
and there were but red sparks or an pall of
darkness; and to think of the guilty knights riding
away on horseback, looking over their shoulders at
the dim Cathedral, and remembering what they
had left inside.' Dickens was not too careful about
factual detail: elsewhere in the Child's History he
mentions that the Black Prince's tomb is in
Westminster Abbey, near that of Edward the
Confessor.
And so to David Copperfield. There are pitfalls
here; we need constantly to remind ourselves that,
although Charles Dickens was often in Canterbury,
his characters were not, are not. They live in
fiction, and it is time-wasting, however intriguing,
to try to identify the Wickfields' house - despite the
Dickens Inn's alternative
title (the House of
Agnes), or the before-
mentioned little inn,
though we know it is
close to the cathedral,
itself obviously fact. At
one time, it seems, there
were two houses at
opposite ends of the city
claiming to be Uriah
Heep's home, the site of
one of them now in Safeways territory. Having
sounded that, I'm sure, unnecessary warning, I'll
remind you of some of the Canterbury passages in
the novel.
First that familiar description of the Wickfield
house, which we should not simply identify as The
House of Agnes or The Dickens Inn in St Dunstan's
Street. Mr Wickfield is Betsey Trotwood's lawyer,
with whom David stays while at school in
Canterbury, and it is his angelically patient
daughter, Agnes who at last becomes his wife.
Through a low window of the house young David
also glimpses the young but already thoroughly
unprepossessing Uriah Heep.
This well-known passage is a good example of the
favourite Dickensian technique of animating and
humanising things. Here we are sharing adult
David's memory of what his young self saw and
imagined.
At length we stopped before a very old house
bulging out over the road; a house with long low
lattice- windows bulging out still farther, and
beams with carved heads on the ends bulging out
too, so that I fancied the whole house was leaning
forward, trying to see who was passing on the
narrow pavement below. It was quite spotless in its
cleanliness. The old-fashioned brass knocker on
the low arched door, ornamented with carved
garlands of fruit and flowers, twinkled like a star;
the two stone steps descending to the door were as
white as if they had been covered with fair linen;
and all the angles and corners, and carvings and
mouldings, and quaint little panes of glass, and
quainter little windows, though as old as the hills,
were as pure as any
snow that ever fell
upon the hills.1
As soon as the pony-
chaise stops he sees
the cadaverous face of
Heep at a small
window on the
ground floor - all this
strongly symbolic and,
for him, prophetic.
David is sent to school,
as a day boy - at Dr
Strong's academy,
close to the Cathedral,
as was and is King's
School. Dr Strong himself is supposedly based in
part on the King's headmaster, the Rev J. Burt,
M.A. S. Gordon Wilson is now quite an old booklet
on Canterbury and Charles Dickens, says 'the
character exactly fits'.
Here is David arriving as a new boy. 'I went,
accompanied by Mr Wickfield, to the scene of my
future studies - 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 to walk with a
Dr Strong's School?
The Dutch Dickensian Volume XXV 2
5
