[NỘI DUNG]:

First Description of Gadshill Place—Negociations for Purchase—Becomes

his Home in 1859—Gadshill a Century Ago—Antecedents of

Dickens's House—Exterior and Porch—Gradual Additions—Later

Changes—Swiss Châlet presented by Mr. Fechter—Dickens's

Writing-table—Making Gadshill his Home—Planting Trees—New

Conservatory—Course of Daily Life—Dickens's Dogs—A Dog with

a Taste—Favourite Walks—Cooling Churchyard.

"I was better pleased with Gadshill Place last

Saturday," he wrote to me from Paris on the 13th of

February 1856, "on going down there, even than I

had prepared myself to be. The country, against

every disadvantage of season, is beautiful; and the

house is so old fashioned, cheerful, and comfortable,

that it is really pleasant to look at. The good old

Rector now there, has lived in it six and twenty years,

so I have not the heart to turn him out. He is to

remain till Lady-Day next year, when I shall go in,

please God; make my alterations; furnish the house;

and keep it for myself that summer." Returning to

England through the Kentish country with Mr. Wilkie

Collins in July, other advantages occurred to him. "A

railroad opened from Rochester to Maidstone, which

connects Gadshill at once with the whole sea coast, is

certainly an addition to the place, and an enhancement[203]

of its value. Bye and bye we shall have the

London, Chatham and Dover, too; and that will bring

it within an hour of Canterbury and an hour and a[204]

half of Dover. I am glad to hear of your having been

in the neighbourhood. There is no healthier (marshes

avoided), and none in my eyes more beautiful. One

of these days I shall show you some places up the

Medway with which you will be charmed."

THE PORCH AT GADSHILL.

The association with his youthful fancy that first

made the place attractive to him has been told; and

it was with wonder he had heard one day, from his

friend and fellow worker at Household Words, Mr. W.

H. Wills, that not only was the house for sale to which

he had so often looked wistfully, but that the lady

chiefly interested as its owner had been long known

and much esteemed by himself. Such curious chances

led Dickens to his saying about the smallness of the

world; but the close relation often found thus existing

between things and persons far apart, suggests not so

much the smallness of the world as the possible importance

of the least things done in it, and is better

explained by the grander teaching of Carlyle, that

causes and effects, connecting every man and thing

with every other, extend through all space and time.

It was at the close of 1855 the negociation for its

purchase began. "They wouldn't," he wrote (25th of

November), "take £1700 for the Gadshill property, but

'finally' wanted £1800. I have finally offered £1750.

It will require an expenditure of about £300 more

before yielding £100 a year." The usual discovery

of course awaited him that this first estimate would

have to be increased threefold. "The changes absolutely

necessary" (9th of February 1856) "will take

a thousand pounds; which sum I am always resolving

to squeeze out of this, grind out of that, and wring[205]

out of the other; this, that, and the other generally

all three declining to come up to the scratch for the

purpose." "This day,"[219] he wrote on the 14th of

March, "I have paid the purchase money for Gadshill

Place. After drawing the cheque (£1790) I turned

round to give it to Wills, and said, 'Now isn't it an

extraordinary thing—look at the Day—Friday! I have

been nearly drawing it half a dozen times when the

lawyers have not been ready, and here it comes round

upon a Friday as a matter of course.'" He had no

thought at this time of reserving the place wholly for

himself, or of making it his own residence except at

intervals of summer. He looked upon it as an investment

only. "You will hardly know Gadshill again,"

he wrote in January 1858, "I am improving it so much—yet

I have no interest in the place." But continued

ownership brought increased liking; he took more and

more interest in his own improvements, which were

just the kind of occasional occupation and resource

his life most wanted in its next seven or eight years;

and any farther idea of letting it he soon abandoned

altogether. It only once passed out of his possession

thus, for four months in 1859; in the following year,

on the sale of Tavistock House, he transferred to it his

books and pictures and choicer furniture; and thenceforward,

varied only by houses taken from time to time

for the London season, he made it his permanent

family abode. Now and then, even during those years,[206]

he would talk of selling it; and on his last return from

America, when he had sent the last of his sons out into

the world, he really might have sold it if he could

then have found a house in London suitable to him,

and such as he could purchase. But in this he failed;

secretly to his own satisfaction, as I believe; and thereupon,

in that last autumn of his life, he projected and

carried out his most costly addition to Gadshill.

Already of course more money had been spent upon it

than his first intention in buying it would have justified.

He had so enlarged the accommodation, improved the

grounds and offices, and added to the land, that, taking

also into account this final outlay, the reserved price

placed upon the whole after his death more than quadrupled

what he had given in 1856 for the house, shrubbery,

and twenty years' lease of a meadow field. It

was then purchased, and is now inhabited, by his

eldest son.

Its position has been described, and one of the last-century-histories

of Rochester quaintly mentions the

principal interest of the locality. "Near the twenty-seventh

stone from London is Gadshill, supposed to

have been the scene of the robbery mentioned by

Shakespeare in his play of Henry IV; there being reason

to think also that it was Sir John Falstaff, of truly

comic memory, who under the name of Oldcastle inhabited

Cooling Castle of which the ruins are in the

neighbourhood. A small distance to the left appears

on an eminence the Hermitage the seat of the late Sir

Francis Head, Bart;[220] and close to the road, on a small[207]

ascent, is a neat building lately erected by Mr. Day.

In descending Strood-hill is a fine prospect of Strood,

Rochester, and Chatham, which three towns form a

continued street extending above two miles in length."

It had been supposed[221] that "the neat building lately

erected by Mr. Day" was that which the great novelist

made famous; but Gadshill Place had no existence until

eight years after the date of the history. The good

rector who so long lived in it told me, in 1859, that it

had been built eighty years before by a then well-known

character in those parts, one Stevens, father-in-law of

Henslow the Cambridge professor of botany. Stevens,

who could only with much difficulty manage to write

his name, had begun life as ostler at an inn; had become

husband to the landlord's widow; then a brewer;

and finally, as he subscribed himself on one occasion,

"mare" of Rochester. Afterwards the house was inhabited

by Mr. Lynn (from some of the members of

whose family Dickens made his purchase); and, before

the Rev. Mr. Hindle became its tenant, it was inhabited

by a Macaroni parson named Townshend, whose

horses the Prince Regent bought, throwing into the

bargain a box of much desired cigars. Altogether the

place had notable associations even apart from those

which have connected it with the masterpieces of English

humour. "This House, Gadshill Place, stands[208]

on the summit of Shakespeare's Gadshill, ever memorable

for its association with Sir John Falstaff in his

noble fancy. But, my lads, my lads, to-morrow morning,

by four o'clock, early at Gadshill! there are pilgrims

going to Canterbury with rich offerings, and traders riding

to London with fat purses: I have vizards for you

all; you have horses for yourselves." Illuminated by

Mr. Owen Jones, and placed in a frame on the first-floor

landing, these words were the greeting of the new

tenant to his visitors. It was his first act of ownership.

All his improvements, it should perhaps be remarked,

were not exclusively matters of choice; and to illustrate

by his letters what befell at the beginning of his changes,

will show what attended them to the close. His earliest

difficulty was very grave. There was only one spring

of water for gentlefolk and villagers, and from some of

the houses or cottages it was two miles away. "We are

still" (6th of July) "boring for water here, at the rate

of two pounds per day for wages. The men seem to

like it very much, and to be perfectly comfortable."

Another of his earliest experiences (5th of September)

was thus expressed: "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 lean 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." Towards the close of the same month (24th

of September) he wrote: "Here are six men perpetually[209]

going up and down the well (I know that somebody

will be killed), in the course of fitting a pump;

which is quite a railway terminus—it is so iron, and

so big. The process is much more like putting Oxford-street

endwise, and laying gas along it, than anything else.

By the time it is finished, the cost of this water will be

something absolutely frightful. But of course it proportionately

increases the value of the property, and

that's my only comfort. . . . The horse has gone lame

from a sprain, the big dog has run a tenpenny nail into

one of his hind feet, the bolts have all flown out of the

basket-carriage, and the gardener says all the fruit trees

want replacing with new ones." Another note came

in three days. "I have discovered that the seven miles

between Maidstone and Rochester is one of the most

beautiful walks in England. Five men have been looking

attentively at the pump for a week, and (I should

hope) may begin to fit it in the course of October." . . .

With even such varying fortune he effected other

changes.[222] The exterior remained to the last much as

it was when he used as a boy to see it first; a plain,

old-fashioned, two-story, brick-built country house,

with a bell-turret on the roof, and over the front door

a quaint neat wooden porch with pillars and seats.

But, among his additions and alterations, was a new

drawing-room built out from the smaller existing one,[210]

both being thrown together ultimately; two good bedrooms

built on a third floor at the back; and such rearrangement

of the ground floor as, besides its handsome

drawing-room, and its dining-room which he

hung with pictures, transformed its bedroom into a

study which he lined with books and sometimes wrote

in, and changed its breakfast-parlour into a retreat

fitted up for smokers into which he put a small billiard-table.

These several rooms opened from a hall

having in it a series of Hogarth prints, until, after the

artist's death, Stanfield's noble scenes were placed

there, when the Hogarths were moved to his bedroom;

and in this hall, during his last absence in America, a

parquet floor was laid down. Nor did he omit such

changes as might increase the comfort of his servants.

He built entirely new offices and stables, and replaced

a very old coach-house by a capital servants' hall,

transforming the loft above into a commodious school-room

or study for his boys. He made at the same

time an excellent croquet-ground out of a waste piece

of orchard.

Belonging to the house, but unfortunately placed on

the other side of the high road, was a shrubbery, well

wooded though in desolate condition, in which stood

two magnificent cedars; and having obtained, in 1859,

the consent of the local authorities for the necessary

underground work, Dickens constructed a passage beneath

the road[223] from his front lawn; and in the[211]

shrubbery thus rendered accessible, and which he then

laid out very prettily, he placed afterwards a Swiss

châlet[224] presented to him by Mr. Fechter, which arrived

from Paris in ninety-four pieces fitting like the

joints of a puzzle, but which proved to be somewhat

costly in setting on its legs by means of a foundation

of brickwork. Once up, however, it was a great resource

in the summer months, and much of Dickens's

work was done there. "I have put five mirrors in the

châlet where I write,"[225] he told an American friend,[212]

"and they reflect and refract, in all kinds of ways, the

leaves that are quivering at the windows, and the great

fields of waving corn, and the sail-dotted river. My

room is up among the branches of the trees; and the

birds and the butterflies fly in and out, and the green

branches shoot in at the open windows, and the lights

and shadows of the clouds come and go with the rest

of the company. The scent of the flowers, and indeed

of everything that is growing for miles and miles, is

most delicious." He used to make great boast, too,

not only of his crowds of singing birds all day, but

of his nightingales at night.

THE CHÂLET.

One or two more extracts from letters having reference

to these changes may show something of the

interest to him with which Gadshill thus grew under

his hands. A sun-dial on his back-lawn had a bit of

historic interest about it. "One of the balustrades of[213]

the destroyed old Rochester Bridge," he wrote to his

daughter in June 1859, "has been (very nicely) presented

to me by the contractors for the works, and

has been duly stone-masoned and set up on the lawn

behind the house. I have ordered a sun-dial for the

top of it, and it will be a very good object indeed."

"When you come down here next month," he wrote

to me, "we have an idea that we shall show you rather[214]

a neat house. What terrific adventures have been in

action; how many overladen vans were knocked up

at Gravesend, and had to be dragged out of Chalk-turnpike

in the dead of the night by the whole equine

power of this establishment; shall be revealed at

another time." That was in the autumn of 1860,

when, on the sale of his London house, its contents

were transferred to his country home. "I shall have

an alteration or two to show you at Gadshill that

greatly improve the little property; and when I get

the workmen out this time, I think I'll leave off."

October 1861 had now come, when the new bedrooms

were built; but in the same month of 1863 he announced

his transformation of the old coach-house.

"I shall have a small new improvement to show you

at Gads, which I think you will accept as the crowning

ingenuity of the inimitable." But of course it was not

over yet. "My small work and planting," he wrote

in the spring of 1866, "really, truly, and positively

the last, are nearly at an end in these regions, and the

result will await summer inspection." No, nor even

yet. He afterwards obtained, by exchange of some

land with the trustees of Watts's Charity, the much

coveted meadow at the back of the house of which

heretofore he had the lease only; and he was then

able to plant a number of young limes and chestnuts

and other quick-growing trees. He had already planted

a row of limes in front. He had no idea, he would

say, of planting only for the benefit of posterity, but

would put into the ground what he might himself enjoy

the sight and shade of. He put them in two or three

clumps in the meadow, and in a belt all round.[215]

Still there were "more last words," for the limit

was only to be set by his last year of life. On

abandoning his notion, after the American Readings,

of exchanging Gadshill for London, a new staircase

was put up from the hall; a parquet floor laid on

the first landing; and a conservatory built, opening

into both drawing-room and dining-room, "glass and

iron," as he described it, "brilliant but expensive, with

foundations as of an ancient Roman work of horrible

solidity." This last addition had long been an object

of desire with him; though he would hardly even now

have given himself the indulgence but for the golden

shower from America. He saw it first in a completed

state on the Sunday before his death, when his younger

daughter was on a visit to him. "Well, Katey," he

said to her, "now you see positively the last improvement

at Gadshill;" and every one laughed at the joke

against himself. The success of the new conservatory

was unquestionable. It was the remark of all around

him that he was certainly, from this last of his improvements,

drawing more enjoyment than from any

of its predecessors, when the scene for ever closed.

HOUSE AND CONSERVATORY: FROM THE MEADOW.

Of the course of his daily life in the country there

is not much to be said. Perhaps there was never a man

who changed places so much and habits so little. He

was always methodical and regular; and passed his life

from day to day, divided for the most part between

working and walking, the same wherever he was. The

only exception was when special or infrequent visitors

were with him. When such friends as Longfellow and

his daughters, or Charles Eliot Norton and his wife,

came, or when Mr. Fields brought his wife and Professor[216]

Lowell's daughter, or when he received other

Americans to whom he owed special courtesy, he would

compress into infinitely few days an enormous amount

of sight seeing and country enjoyment, castles, cathedrals,

and fortified lines, lunches and picnics among

cherry orchards and hop-gardens, excursions to Canterbury

or Maidstone and their beautiful neighbourhoods,

Druid-stone and Blue Bell Hill. "All the

neighbouring country that could be shown in so short

a time," he wrote of the Longfellow visit, "they saw.

I turned out a couple of postilions in the old red jackets

of the old red royal Dover road for our ride, and it

was like a holiday ride in England fifty years ago."

For Lord Lytton he did the same, for the Emerson

Tennents, for Mr. Layard and Mr. Helps, for Lady[217]

Molesworth and the Higginses (Jacob Omnium), and

such other less frequent visitors.

Excepting on such particular occasions however, and

not always even then, his mornings were reserved

wholly to himself; and he would generally preface his

morning work (such was his love of order in everything

around him) by seeing that all was in its place in the

several rooms, visiting also the dogs, stables, and

kitchen garden, and closing, unless the weather was

very bad indeed, with a turn or two round the meadow

before settling to his desk. His dogs were a great

enjoyment to him;[226] and, with his high road traversed[218]

as frequently as any in England by tramps and wayfarers

of a singularly undesirable description, they were

also a necessity. There were always two, of the mastiff

kind, but latterly the number increased. His own

favourite was Turk, a noble animal, full of affection

and intelligence, whose death by a railway-accident,

shortly after the Staplehurst catastrophe, caused him

great grief. Turk's sole companion up to that date

was Linda, puppy of a great St. Bernard brought over

by Mr. Albert Smith, and grown into a superbly beautiful

creature. After Turk there was an interval of an

Irish dog, Sultan, given by Mr. Percy Fitzgerald; a

cross between a St. Bernard and a bloodhound, built

and coloured like a lioness and of splendid proportions,

but of such indomitably aggressive propensities, that,

after breaking his kennel-chain and nearly devouring a

luckless little sister of one of the servants, he had to

be killed. Dickens always protested that Sultan was a

Fenian, for that no dog, not a secretly sworn member

of that body, would ever have made such a point,

muzzled as he was, of rushing at and bearing down

with fury anything in scarlet with the remotest resemblance

to a British uniform. Sultan's successor was

Don, presented by Mr. Frederic Lehmann, a grand

Newfoundland brought over very young, who with

Linda became parent to a couple of Newfoundlands,

that were still gambolling about their master, huge,

though hardly out of puppydom, when they lost him.

He had given to one of them the name of Bumble,

from having observed, as he described it, "a peculiarly

pompous and overbearing manner he had of appearing

to mount guard over the yard when he was an absolute[219]

infant." Bumble was often in scrapes. Describing

to Mr. Fields a drought in the summer of 1868, when

their poor supply of ponds and surface wells had become

waterless, he wrote: "I do not let the great

dogs swim in the canal, because the people have to

drink of it. But when they get into the Medway, it is

hard to get them out again. The other day Bumble

(the son, Newfoundland dog) got into difficulties among

some floating timber, and became frightened. Don

(the father) was standing by me, shaking off the wet

and looking on carelessly, when all of a sudden he

perceived something amiss, and went in with a bound

and brought Bumble out by the ear. The scientific

way in which he towed him along was charming."

The description of his own reception, on his reappearance

after America, by Bumble and his brother, by the

big and beautiful Linda, and by his daughter Mary's

handsome little Pomeranian, may be added from his

letters to the same correspondent. "The two Newfoundland

dogs coming to meet me, with the usual

carriage and the usual driver, and beholding me coming

in my usual dress out at the usual door, it struck

me that their recollection of my having been absent

for any unusual time was at once cancelled. They

behaved (they are both young dogs) exactly in their

usual manner; coming behind the basket phaeton as

we trotted along, and lifting their heads to have their

ears pulled, a special attention which they receive from

no one else. But when I drove into the stable-yard,

Linda (the St. Bernard) was greatly excited; weeping

profusely, and throwing herself on her back that she

might caress my foot with her great fore-paws. Mary's[220]

little dog too, Mrs. Bouncer, barked in the greatest

agitation on being called down and asked by Mary,

'Who is this?' and tore round and round me like the

dog in the Faust outlines." The father and mother

and their two sons, four formidable-looking companions,

were with him generally in his later walks.

THE STUDY AT GADSHILL.

Round Cobham, skirting the park and village and

passing the Leather Bottle famous in the page of Pickwick,

was a favourite walk with Dickens. By Rochester

and the Medway, to the Chatham Lines, was

another. He would turn out of Rochester High-street

through The Vines (where some old buildings, from

one of which called Restoration-house he took Satis-house

for Great Expectations, had a curious attraction

for him), would pass round by Fort Pitt, and coming

back by Frindsbury would bring himself by some cross

fields again into the high road. Or, taking the other

side, he would walk through the marshes to Gravesend,

return by Chalk church, and stop always to have greeting

with a comical old monk who for some incomprehensible

reason sits carved in stone, cross-legged with

a jovial pot, over the porch of that sacred edifice.

To another drearier churchyard, itself forming part of the

marshes beyond the Medway, he often took friends to

show them the dozen small tombstones of various sizes

adapted to the respective ages of a dozen small children

of one family which he made part of his story of

Great Expectations, though, with the reserves always

necessary in copying nature not to overstep her modesty

by copying too closely, he makes the number that

appalled little Pip not more than half the reality.

About the whole of this Cooling churchyard, indeed,[221]

and the neighbouring castle ruins, there was a weird

strangeness that made it one of his attractive walks in

the late year or winter, when from Higham he could

get to it across country over the stubble fields; and,

for a shorter summer walk, he was not less fond of going

round the village of Shorne, and sitting on a hot afternoon

in its pretty shaded churchyard. But on the[222]

whole, though Maidstone had also much that attracted

him to its neighbourhood, the Cobham neighbourhood

was certainly that which he had greatest pleasure in;

and he would have taken oftener than he did the walk

through Cobham park and woods, which was the last

he enjoyed before life suddenly closed upon him,

but that here he did not like his dogs to follow.

Don now has his home there with Lord Darnley,

and Linda lies under one of the cedars at Gadshill.