48 DOUGHTY STREET

Wanganui Chronicle, Volume LXXXII, Issue 19301, 2 May 1925, Page 11

48 DOUGHTY STREET

WHERE PICKWICK PAPERS WAS WRITTEN

To Be Preserved as Museum

Dickens’ Spirit Returns to Old House

T fPON the one hundred and'thirteenth anniversary of the birth of Charles Dickens the announcement was made that the house in which he lived when “Pickwick Papers” suddenly and permanently made him famous is to become his house again—his house and that of all the great army of Dickens devotees spread over the wide English-speaking world. It is to be a museum of Dickens relics, a gathering place of Dickensians, but chiefly it is to be a memorial in the heart of London to the man who has so thickly peopled that ancient city with Dickens characters that in most of our elder memories it is still Dickens’ town. Dickens lived in bigger and finer houses in London. But it was in March, 1837, in the midst of the amazing success of “Pickwick,” that at 25 years old he transported his family from modest lodging In Furnival’s Inn to 48 Doughty Street, the house which has just been rescued from decay and ignominy of going into retail trade as a butcher, shop. WHERE THE HOUSE STANDS. It is not a big house as it stands now and as it stood then, on the cast side of a broad thoroughfare running parallel w*ith Gray’s Inn Road. Doughty Street lies on the other side of High Holborn from Lincoln’s Inn and all the tangle of streets leading to the Strand and Fleet Street. It is reached from Holborn by way of Kingsgate Street (where Sairy Gamp dwelt) through Red Lion Square, Bedford Row, Theobald’s Road and John Street—in the very enumeration of which is the fine foggy London flavour. The house is built in the Georgian style, is three stories high, and contains twelve rooms. It was in the very smallest of these, on the ground, floor at the back, that Dickens during the two years of his occupancy used to write. Already for many years the residence so honoured has been reduced to the. shabby gentility of taking lodgers. In 1891 William R. Hughes records in “A Week’s Tramp in Dickens Land” that he found displayed in a window, first floor, front, the sign “Apartments to Let.” And he added, “They looked very uncomfortable.”

F. Hopkinson Smith, novelist, painter and lighthouse builder, likewise has left a record of his visit, which occurred some time before 1914, in an account published in his book called “In Dickens’ Loqdon.” This book is illustrated with numerous drawings by Smith, among which are sketches of the front of the house and of a big window opening on the back garden. In that day, too, the house harboured lodgers, two of them Americans. It Was administered by a “done-up-in-lavender sort of old lady, as if she had lived a good many years in one room and been folded up every night and laid away in a bureau drawer.” There were ruffles and strings to her cap, with fluted ends, and the dame’s age might have been between 70 and 80 years. By her the visitor was shown the veritable knocker of Dickens time..■.(which,,had been put on the inside of the door for safekeeping.) He likewise inspected the’'little room at the back where the great man used to write. The room measured 10 by 8 feet; it had a fireplace “no bigger than a work basket” in one corner and the grate held “two handfuls of coal.” Dickens’ writing table, the landlady said, had stood by the window.

Outside the window was a back garden very like a graveyard, says Hopkinsen Smith. He thinks it was, in fact, that identical garden which Dickens described in “Our Mutual Friend/’ when he wrote: “A mouldy little plantation. a cat preserve. Sparrows were there and cats were there, dry rot and wet rot wore there.” In the state in which Smith saw it, the place was innocent of grass and consisted of tumbled earth and a few blasted and bleached bushes.

Yet in this house, undeterred by the desolation of the garden, Dickens wrote the last numbers of “Pickwick Papers,” and after “Pickwick,” “Oliver Twist” and “Nicholas Nickleby,” not to dwell upon minor works like “The Mudfrog Papers” and the editing of the “Life of Grimaldi,” the famous clown? Here Charles Dickens saw himself transformed by what he i wrote from a comparatively unknown young writer to the best seller in England. Originating in the request of the publisher that Dickens supply text to accompany Seymour’s sporting sketches, “Pickwick Papers” promptly captured the public fancy and held it fast. The undertaking overleaped the publisher’s modest programme and ran away with the author’s plan—so far as he had any. Seymour blew his brains out after a few numbers had appeared, but that did not stem a tide of popularity the sweep of which is roughly indicated by the binder’s figures—for the first few numbers 400 each, for the fifteenth number 40,000. Presently all the reading part of England was talking “Pickwick” and waiting breathlessly for the next instalment of the adventures of that delectable gentleman and his satelites. Thomas Carlyle tells the storv of the Archdeacon of the date who went to administer consolation to a sick man in view of his approaching departure from this world. As the cleric left the room after his- solemn office he heard the just shrived sinner say, “Thank God, ‘Pickwick’ will be out in ten days, anyway.” While there was life there was hope.

Charles Dickens prospered in that house. But he worked hard there—often well on into the night—though nocturnal labour was not a custom to which he clung. You find him writing to John Forster, later his biographer, “I’m getting on, thank Heaven, like a house afire, and think the next ‘Pickwick’ will bangall the others.” ... Dickens’ recreation at this time was long horseback rides, on which he often had Forster as his .companion. Afterward he took up long walks in-

stead. But the destination and turning point, mounted or afoot, was almost certain to be a good inn well-furnished with comforting food and drink such an inn as Mr Pickwick himself would choose. Sometimes the place of resort was Jack Straw’s Castle on Hampstead Heath. Possibly it was of this place that the novelist wrote to Forster: “I know a good ’ouse where we can hax c a red hot chop for dinner and a glass of good wine”—this as part of an invitation or challenge to a jaunt across country. PROSPERITY OVERTAKES AUTHOR. A very industrious, wholesome and hearty existence, it seems, for a rising young author. It was in the house in Doughty Street that Dickens’ first and second daughters were born, and there also, to his deep grief, died his sister-in-law, Mary Hogarth. At first the lion’s share of the profts of his great success went to the publishers—which was a subject of some heart-burning —but Dickons was not nearly as unbusinesslike as many authors, and he was presently rich enough to take his family to the country in the summers. Once they stayed at Richmond; once there was a cottage at Twickenham, where Alexander Pope used to take his Arcadian case. Then was established the custom of a feast on the anniversary of his marriage. This was celebrated always at the- famous Star and Garter at Richmond, where one may look down over the Thames and the little boats that go down toward London. Every year for twenty years the feast was held, and always when the family was in England the Star and Garter was the happy scene of it. Both family and fortune having outgrown such modest quarters, Dickens in 1839 moved to a big house, 1 Devonshire Terrace, with a wall skirting Marylcbone Lane and facing York Gate, Regent’s Park. That was a favourite residence of his. He moved from there to another large house in Tavistock Square, a house with a room big enough to serve as a theatre anti one sometimes actually devoted to that purpose, for Dickons had a strong taste for the stage and abounded in hospitality. That house afterwards became the Jews’ College. After Tavistock Square came Gadshill, where Dickens died. THACKERAY’S FUTILE VISIT. Before he went to Doughty Street, in the very beginnins of his good fortune, he lived —as has been said—in Furnival’s Inn. Thither came the author of “Vanity Fair” when he heard that the young man, whose il charming and humourous works in covers which wore coloured light, and green camo out once a month”—wanted an artist to illustrate his writings. “I remember.” says Thackeray, “walking to his chambers in Furnival’s Inn with two or three drawings in my hand, which, strange to say, he did not find.suitable. ” Thus simply is recorded the celebrated incident which did not make Thackeray the illustrator of 4 ‘Pickwick.”

For all that Dickens’ stay there was so brief, the house in Doughty Street remains the most romantically entangled with his career. In that house were developed or created a whole host of Dickens characters familiar to all the world —from Pickwick and Sam Weller to Fagin and the Crummies family of actors—immortal, types of a profession which, for all the changes in it, remains so essentially the same. It is therefore very properly this house of which the freehold is now vested in the Dickens Fellowship and the future of which is to be devoted to his memoir.

When the house is equipped for its new purpose it will not only have in it relics like the tall table which Dickens used for his readings in England and America, but a library already stocked with 1200 books of Dickensiana. 387 portraits of the author mounted and arranged chronologically and ninety framed portraits, besides a large number of magazine articles, privately printed Dickens books and miscellaneous objects relating to the man and his work. If this enumeration seems a bit dry-as-dust, remember that much of all this is Dickons’ own writing. For example, there are seventy editions of the novels and 113 editions of the Christmas books alone. And Gilbert Keith Chesterton, the pre-eminent Dickensian of our time (President, of the Dickens Fellowship, in his order before the present incumbent, M. W. Pett Rid<m). has this to say: “I believe that the books are alive; I believe that leaves still grow in them as leaves grow on trees.”

It is Chesterton who calls Dickens “the last cry of Merry England” before the smug Victorians got the Puritan lid clamped down at last upon the natural English folk. He adds that, with the Puritan lid blown off again —or sensibly dislocated—what the Victorians used to call his “caricatures” arc recognised once more for what they are—English life itself. So that while “Thackeray belongs to Victoria as much as Addison to Queen Anne—and it is not only Queen Anne who is dead’’—Dickens is seen now as belonging “to the times since his death when his own ‘Hard Times’ grew harder ” and a lot of things happened w'hich were, not dreamed of in the Victorian philosophy. In shor;, the creator of Pickwick and Sam Weller and all that motley parade of England’s own which he carved in stone and with Gothic profusion included the gargoyles—this man is so modern that he “can be criticised as the contemporary of Bernard Shaw and Anatole France ” So the author of the Human Comedy of England seems to one who know, extraordinarily well both Dickens and England. By so significant a judgment >s it proclaimed that, after enduring the sneers of his children’s contemporar ies he has in spirit recaptured the age of his grandchildren. ft is f or them and their elnldren that 48 Doughty Street is to be preserved and cherished