THE HOME OF DICKENS

Te Aroha News, Volume XLI, Issue 6410, 3 November 1923, Page 5

THE HOME OF DICKENS

NO ONE WANTS GADSHILL. J * Nobody cared enough for Gadshill, near Rochester in England, the last home of Charles Dickens, to buy the estate when it was put up at auction. The place is said to have cost Dickens £BOOO when he had improved the property, which he had admired from . boyhood, but possessed only during the latter years of his life. Dickens gave 'readings from his works in America and England to pay for Gadshill which he improved until it so completely corresponded to his ideas of what a house should be that he dwelt in entire contentment in the little “grave red brick house.” Here some of his famous novels were written, such as “Great Expectations,” “Our Mutual Friend,” and “The Mystery of Edwin Drood.” Nothing has been said as to the character of the few bidders for the house or what v their intentions were. There has, y however, been no intimation of any purpose to preserve it as a museum or as a public memorial to its author. It has been well said that Dickens, less than any other great English writer, requires a single shrine to keep his memory fresh in the minds of his countrymen. In 1904 the house in Mile End terrace, Portsea, in f which the novelist was born, was converted into a Dickens museum. One . ■ of the efforts of the Dickens Fellowship was to secure the house in Doughty street as a monument to the author. None of these serves, however, as such a vital and varied reminder of his glorious part in English literary history as does his continuing influence in the daily life of his country. What Dickensians regard as the original of the Old Curiosity Shop passes out of existence and a narrative of the fact travels over the Eng-lish-speaking world. His marriagelicense is put up at an auction of famous bo.oks and documents, and an- • other mention of him flashes over the cables to the countries that love his work. A stuffed raven, once his pro- \ perty, and kept by the novelist in'his studio while he wrote “Barnaby Rudge,” comes to the auctioneers stand, and the world hears much of the bird and it historic importance. Day and Martin pass out of existence and the most salient fact about their famous shoe polish seems to have been that Sam Weller used it at the Whitehart Inn $ Some historic building in England is destroyed and the nations learn of the part it played in this or that romance by England’s great author. New books about the scenes of his novels are printed every year.„ So he has a monument more enduring than Gadshill or the house in Doughty street or the Portsea Museum. The constant interest of a world out of which he passed more than half a century ago is the sort of , memorial to which few men can lay claim. His characters can be mentioned with as much certainty of recognition as if they were contemporaneous figures in life to-day. Even if nobody cared enough about Gadshill to pay its price, Dickens never needed it as a reminder of his work.