A TRAMP IN DICKENS-LAND.*
ENTHUSIASTIC C011eCtOFS will soon be able to show, not a single shelf, but a small bookcase exclusively devoted to the housing of Dickens literature. If what everybody says must be true, we may take it for granted that Dickens's own books have fewer readers now than they had, say, a quarter of a century ago; but if this be so, it is certainly a curious fact that books about Dickens are at present written, and therefore presumably read, in greater numbers than ever. This is specially true of contributions to what may be called Dickens topography. It is natural enough that it should be so, for in his imaginative treatment of localities as, to a less degree, in his imaginative treatment of men and women, observation and memory were always in partnership with pure invention, and generally they had the larger share in the production of the result. No English novelist has left us so many place-descrip- tions which can be positively, or with more or less reasonable- ness of conjecture, identified with actual localities ; and it would be strange if the Dickens enthusiast did not feel the fascination of making. or mentally following, a pilgrimage in the footsteps of the great master of romantic realism.
.4 Week's Tramp in Dickens-Land is the record of one of these pilgrimages made by Mr. Hughes and his artist-friend Mr. Kitton, and it is one of the most interesting and enter- taining specimens of the class of literature to which it belongs. Of course the special kind of enthusiasm which inspires the book is an emotion that strongly tempts a writer to sins of triviality, far-fetchedness, and irrelevance, and Mr. Hughes has not always been successful in resisting these temptations ; indeed, without any lack of charity, it may be conjectured that he has succumbed without a struggle. Of simple trivialities, the London chapter provides the largest number of specimens. It was surely unnecessary for Mr. Hughes to quote from David Copperfield the familiar description of the two pudding-shops in the Strand, simply to serve as an illustration of the statement that they have " long been removed;" and there is something almost fatuous in the remark that David's reference to " my set of chambers" in Buckingham Street "seems to point to the possibility of Dickens having resided there," especially as the conjecture is immediately followed by the candid but flat admission that "there is no evidence to prove it." Then Mr. Hughes tells us that somebody " thinks " that Miss La Creevy lived at 111 Strand, and, again, that somebody else has " supposed " that the "Magpie and Stump," where Mr. Pickwick heard the old man's story of the Queer Client, is identical with " The Old George the Fourth" in Clare Market. There are perhaps a score or two of these barren trifles of hypothesis, which increase the bulk of Mr. Hughes's record without in the least increasing its real value or interest ; but the most flagrant example of padding is to be found in the first of the really interesting chapters devoted to the Kentish city which so often provided Dickens with a background. When Mr. Micawber had an opportunity of entering the Medway coal- trade, he thought it necessary to ran down and have a look at the Medway; and, with similar inconsequence, when Mr. Hughes set himself to write about Dickens's Rochester, he felt it incumbent upon him to take us back to the Rochester of the Middle Ages ; —to tell us that so far back as A.D. 600 it boasted a wall ; that in the seventh century it was plundered by the Mercians, and in the ninth invaded by the Danes ; that twice it suffered from great conflagrations ; that four times it has been honoured by Royal visits ; and so on, through all the items of arid fact which are—as it is right and fitting they should be—the mono- poly of the guide-book compilers.
Excursions of this kind are serious lapses from literary virtue ; but, as a rule, Mr. Hughes makes a speedy recovery, and the excision of some thirty or forty of his 426 pages would purge the volume of all really irritating irrelevances. The chapter which immediately follows the introduction is perhaps the least valuable, because Dickens's London has been too energetically explored to leave many discoveries to be made by a new-comer into the field; but in and around Rochester and the other Kentish towns where the greater part of the week of pilgrimage. was spent, every day was a day of bonne.. fortunes. The quiet old city has, of course, personal as well as literary Dickensian associations, for when, in 1856,
• A Week's Tramp in Dickens-Land. Together with Personal Reminiscences of the "Inimitable Boa" therein collected. By William B. Hughes, F.Z.S. With Illustrations by F. G. Kitton, and other Artists. London: Chapman and Hall.
the novelist was able to realise the dream of his childhood by becoming the possessor and inhabitant of Gad's Hill Place, fourteen years of active life were still before him. So early, however, as the days of Pickwick, Rochester localities had been made to serve as backgrounds, and there is a charming simplicity of enthusiasm in Mr. Hughes's expressions of delight at the discovery that the bedrooms at the " Bnll " assigned to himself and Mr. Kitton were the very chambers (Nos. 13 and 19) allotted by Dickens to Messrs. Winkle and Tupman, when the Pickwickians paid their eventful . visit to Rochester with that very undesirable travelling companion, Mr. Alfred Jingle. Rochester reappears under various names in Seven Poor Travellers, in The Uncommercial Traveller, and in Great Expectations ; but it is as the Cloisterham of The Mystery of Edwin Drood that it possesses the greatest number of points of interest for Dickens students. The old Cathedral dominates the story ; hard by is Minor Canon Row—called in the novel Minor Canon Corner—and not far away are " The Monk's Vineyard," locally known as " The Vines," the " Nun's House," where Rosa Bud was a pupil, and the three buildings each of which seems to have contributed some detail to that " Jasper's Gatehouse " which will probably outlast them all. A record which Mr. Hughes has preserved from oblivion suggests a probability that Edwin Drood may have been a Rochester story in origin as well as in local " appointments." He was informed by Mr. Syms, manager of the local Gas Company, and an old resident in the city, that many years ago,—
" A well-to-do person, a bachelor (who lived somewhere near the site of the present Savings Bank in High Street, Rochester, Chatham end), was the guardian and trustee of a nephew (a minor) who was the inheritor of a large property. Business, pleasure, or a desire to seek health, took the nephew to the West Indies, from which he returned somewhat unexpectedly. After his return, he suddenly disappeared, and was supposed to have gone another voyage, but no one ever saw or heard of him again, and the matter was soon forgotten. When, however, certain ex- cavations were being made for some improvements or additions to the Bank, the skeleton of a young man was discovered ; and local tradition couples the circumstance with the probability of the murder of the nephew by the uncle."
Mr. Hughes has drawn from Mr. Fildes and the present Mr. Charles Dickens two rather interesting, but, as they seem to us, by no means conclusive contributions to the solution of the narrative problem which is still—in a sense not anticipated by the propounder—the " mystery " of Edwin Drood. Some time before his too early death, Mr. R. A. Proctor (whose remarkable powers of analysis and synthesis were manifested not only in his astronomical works, but in his papers on whist and on the doctrine of chances) published a little book entitled Watched by the Dead, the object of which was to show that Dickens clearly intended in Edwin Drood to utilise in a new and striking manner a narrative idea that is to be found in nearly all his novels published subsequently to Pickwick; and that in this intention is to be found a distinct suggestion of the nature of the dgnouement. This idea is that of a wrongdoer being constantly watched, and finally hunted down, by some person whom he regards with no suspicion, but probably with con- tempt ; and Mr. Proctor's theory was, that in The Mystery of Edwin Drood this watcher and avenger was the mysterious Datchery, otherwise Edwin Drood himself, who had, un- known to Jasper, survived the murderous attempt made by the latter upon his life, and set himself to the task of bringing to justice the would-be assassin. Mr. Hughes seems to have been much impressed—as, indeed, he could hardly fail to be—by the force and subtlety of Proctor's subtle and forcible reasoning ; but it has recently been rendered ineffective for him by two statements made by Mr. Fildes and Mr. Dickens. The former is, however, merely the utterance of a strong opinion based on considerations which are not really inconsistent with the Proctorian theory.
The latter is apparently more formidable, for Mr. Dickens informs Mr. Hughes that he has his father's authority for the assertion that Edwin Drood was really dead. In ordinary cases, such a statement would make an end of controversy; but in the present case there are circumstances which compel one to pause. We know from published letters that the plan of Edwin Drood was something of which Dickens was im- mensely proud—" very curious " and " very strong " are the terms he applies to it—and that he also declared it to be " incommunicable " even to Forster, the repository of so many of his secrets. When Forster, with his restless inquisitiveness, plied Dickens with questions, he was put off, or, to use a blunt word, bamboozled, by a communica- tion which, it is now clear, was purposely misleading. It is hardly likely that a confidence withheld from Forster would be extended to another, even to his own son; and we confess to thinking it more probable that Mr. Charles Dickens should also have been made the victim of an innocent mystifi- cation, than that Mr. Proctor's absolutely convincing argu- ment should be delusive and vain. The question is,—" Who is Datchery ?" If Datchery be Drood, the novel is what Dickens evidently thought it,—the supreme constructive triumph of its writer. If Datchery be not Drood, the story simply falls to pieces, and some of its most delicate workman- ship is deprived of all point and significance. If Mr. Hughes will only refresh his memory by reading The Mystery of Edwin Drood once more, we are convinced that he will accept with- out possibility of future doubt, the interpretation which he now thinks has been effectually discredited.
Mr. Hughes's attempts to identify the Muggleton and Dingley Dell of Pickwick, and several famous places in other novels, have met with as much success as he had any right to expect. Dickens did not care to make such identification too easy; indeed, in some cases he took special pains to make it difficult, as when, for example, he took a Rochester house and set it down in Bury St. Edmunds. Generally, however, it is pretty evident that Mr. Hughes is on the right track, and his book will make Dickens-Land more interesting than ever to Dickens-lovers. To say that the numerous woodcuts—over a hundred—are worthy of the text, is to award high but certainly not undeserved praise.
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