MEMORIES OF DICKENS.

Hawera Star, Volume XLV, 29 April 1925, Page 7

MEMORIES OF DICKENS.

ITtOAI DOUGHTY STREET TO CANTERBURY.

The movements to preserve as a public trust the house in Doughty

.meet, Loudon, jn which Charles Dickens lived and wrote some of his most popular novels, recalls one’s I airly recent memories of the quietlooking house at which one gazed on bleak November days (writes Ai.C.T. in the Sydney Morning Herald). Living not tar away, it came in a morning’s walk to a post office ill the neighbourhood, it is like so many other London houses of the later Georgian period, being closely wedged in between its adjacent bricks and mortar, that a stranger might pass number 48 without a second glance. In rather a stodgy street, which once had the lively memory of containing the scintillating wit of Sydney Smith, who Jived iff number 14, Dickens wrote most of Burnaby lludge and Nicholas Nickleby. Its stones talk. And there he completed the last chapters of Pickwick Papers and Oliver Twist. It was from the front door in the dulL-looking house in Doughty Street that the great novelist often slipped out near midnight to walk and walK through the harrow byways and beyond Alarylebone Hoad into densely populated areas, where he saf the life that verged on poverty or was steeped in it, yet took its ups and downs with the queer quips described in Burnaby ibiidge and Oliver Twist. To lovers of Dickens, the quaint city is full of reminiscences of David Copperffeld. Uriah Heep, washing' his hands with invisible soap in paroxysms of ’umbleness, worked in an office here as factotum to Air. AYickffeld. The traditional home of the latter, long known as “The House of Agnes,” is nov called St. Dunstan’s House. It is exactly as the nqvelist described it, “A very old house, bulging over the road; a house with its lattice windows still further bulging,*so that I fancied the whole house was leaning forward to see who was passing on the pavement below.” Many of the older houses in this most fascinating city have the' same bulge over the waistline, as it. were, with a cautions air of peering through lattice windows at doorsteps on the street level. The old Sun Inn, which has been carefully renovated without)'losing any of its antique charm, is spick and span in a dress of white paint with green trimmings. Muslin curtains, stiff with starch and immaculate in their snowy drapery, shade the little windows in the upper story. This leans out beyond the lower one, in the same typical Canterbury manner. Long boxes 'of scarlet geraniums were a blaze of colour when 1 passed it a few years ago. In the Sun Inn, Air. Alicawber, at one crisis of his career sat in dismal mood, absently looking out of its lattice windows as he waited for “something tp turn up.” A little out of the city lioimdary is the ancient cattle market. Amongst it live and dead .stock,. Miss Betty Trot wood drove the grey pony in her little basket carriage, taking no notice whatever of the hostile remarks of the hucksters. “My aunt,” said David, “drove on with perfect indifference, and, I daresay, would have taken her way with as much coolness through an enemy’s country.”

Amongst the most beautiful medieval

“/•ottage” windows in iCanterbury are those in the old Fleur de Lis Hotel. They date back to the thirteenth century. In this hotel Dickens, who frequently stayed there, looked down on the ancient courtyard, weaving—who knows?— what golden webs of fantasy. Joseph Conrad loved Canterbury better than any city in England. During the latter years ol his life it was iris home town. Today, untroubled by the sough of the sea, he sleeps in one of its ancient cemetries, far away from the storms that rage on the coast of that country, which is called “the cradie of England.''