Part 8

It was here, then, that Dickens lived from 1856 to his death, on June 9, 1870, and thus Gad's Hill is, for many, doubly a place of pilgrimage. And, truly, the whole course of the Dover Road is rich in memories of him and of the characters he drew with such a flow of sentimentality; and sentiment is more to the Englishman than is generally supposed. Hence that amazing popularity which is only just now being critically inquired into, weighed and appraised. Dickens was a man of commanding genius. His observation was acute, and he reproduced with so photographic a fidelity the life and times of his early years that the "manners and customs of the English," during the first third of the nineteenth century, find no such luminous exponent as he. When, if indeed ever, the _Pickwick Papers_ cease to amuse, they will still afford by far the most valuable evidence that could possibly exist as to the ways and thoughts, the social life and the conditions of travel, that immediately preceded the railway era. Superficial critics may hold that the most humorous book of the century is but a succession of scenes, with little real sequence and no plot; they may also say that Mr. Pickwick, Messrs. Tupman, Snodgrass, Winkle, and the rest of that glorious company, were "idiots," but for genuine fun and frolic that book is still pre-eminent, and none of the "new humorists," with their theories and criticisms of the "old humour," have approached within a continent or so of it. Not that Dickens' methods were irreproachable. It was his pleasure in all his books to give his characters allusive names by which you were supposed to recognise their attributes at once. It is thus upon the stage, in pantomime or farce, that the clown's painted grin and the low-comedian's ill-fitting clothes, red hair, and redder nose, proclaim their qualities before a word is spoken, and when Dickens calls a pompous fraud "Pecksniff," a vulgar Cockney clerk "Guppy," or a shifty, irresponsible, resourceful person "Swiveller," we know at once, before we read any further, pretty much what their characters will be like. This, of course, is not art; it is an entirely indefeasible attempt to claim your sympathies or excite your aversions at the outset, independently of the greater or less success with which the author portrays their habits afterwards. We must, however, do Dickens the justice both to allow that he needed no such adventitious aids to the understanding of his characters, and to recognise that this kind of nomenclature was not peculiarly his own, but very largely the literary fashion of his time.

The pranks of Falstaff and Prince Hal, whose doings were to be "argument for a week, laughter for a month, and a good jest for ever," are commemorated, in a fashion, by a large roadside inn, the "Falstaff," standing nearly opposite Gad's Hill Place, the successor, built in the time of Queen Anne, of a lonely beerhouse, the resort of characters more than questionable; more than kin to highwaymen, and much less than kind to unprotected wayfarers.

[Illustration: THE "FALSTAFF," GAD'S HILL.]

From here the road goes steeply all the way to Strood, over Coach and Horses' Hill, and through a deep cutting made by the Highway Board about 1830, in order to ease the heavy pull up from Rochester; a cutting known at that time as "Davies' Straits," from the name of the chairman of the Board, the Rev. George Davies. The view here, over house-tops toward the Medway, framed in on either side by this hollow road, is particularly fine, and I think I cannot come through Strood into Rochester without quoting a certain lieutenant who, with a captain and an "ancient" (by which last we understand "ensign" to be meant), travelled in these parts in 1635. "I am to passe," says he, "to Rochester, and in the midway I fear'd no robbing, although I passed that woody, and high old robbing Hill (Gadds Hill), on which I alighted, and tooke a sweet and delightfull prospect of that faire streame, with her pleasant meads she glides through." The lieutenant's description is delightful, and if he drew the sword to such good purpose as he wielded the pen, why, I think he must have been a warrior of no little distinction. He says nothing of Strood; and, indeed, I think Strood has through the centuries been entreated in quite a shabby and inadequate manner. The reason of this, of course, is that Strood is over the water and suburban to Rochester; a kind of poor relation so to speak, and treated accordingly.

But the place is old and historic, and celebrated not only for the great fight which the barons made in the thirteenth century against the king, when they fought their way across the bridge, and, taking possession of Rochester, sacked town, castle, and cathedral, but also for that exploit of the townsfolk who cut off the tail of one of Becket's sumpter-mules, whereupon that wrathful prelate cursed them, and caused them and their descendants to go with tails for ever. Thus the story which accounts for the county nickname of "Kentish long-tails," but I do not perceive that the Strood folks are so unusually decorated. Perhaps they are at pains to hide their shame.

XIX

[Sidenote: STROOD]

Strood, too, deserves some notice. The place-name has been thought to derive from _strata_, "the street," standing as it does on that ancient way, the Roman Watling Street. But, in the recent advance in the study of place-names, it is held to be from the Anglo-Saxon "strode": a marshy region.

[Sidenote: WATLING STREET]

The original meaning of "Watling Street" is never likely to be determined to the satisfaction of all antiquaries, and its age is equally a contested point. But that a street or a trackway of some kind, of an identical route with the present highway, ran between London and Dover long before Caesar landed can scarce be matter for doubt. That the Britons were barbaric and unused to commerce or intercourse with the Continent can scarcely be supposed, for Britain was the Sacred Island of the Druidical religion, and to it came the youth of Gaul for instruction at the hands of those high priests whose Holy of Holies lay, across the land, in remote Anglesey. Those priests were the instructors, both in religion and secular knowledge, of the Gaulish youth; and, outside the civilisations of Greece and Rome, Britain was even then the best place to acquire a "liberal education." Up the rugged trackway of the Sarn Gwyddelin == the Foreigners' Road, from Dover to London, and diagonally across the island, came these youths; and down it, to voyage across the Channel, and to take part with their Gaulish friends in any fighting that might be going, went those tall British warriors whose strength and fierceness surprised Caesar in his Gallic War.

Imports and exports, too, passed along this rough way; skins and gold, British hunting-dogs and slaves were shipped to Gaul and Rome by merchants who, to keep the trade unspoiled, magnified the dangers of the sea-crossing and the fierceness of the people. Pottery, glass-beads, and cutlery they imported in return; and this primitive "road" must have presented a busy scene long before it could have deserved the actual name.

When Caesar, eager for spoil and conquest, marched across country from Deal, and first saw the Sarn Gwyddelin from the summit of Barham Downs, it could have been but a track, never _built_, but gradually brought into existence by the tramping of students and fighting-men, and widened by the commerce of those exclusive merchants. Thus it remained for _at least_ ninety-eight years longer; rough, full of holes, mires, and swamps, and crossed by many streams. Caesar came and went; and not until Aulus Plautius and Claudius had overrun Britain, and probably not before many successive Roman governors had served here, and reduced this province of Britannia Prima to the condition of a settled and prosperous colony, was the Foreigners' Road made a _via strata_, a paved Roman Military Way.

Its date might be anything from the landing of Aulus Plautius, in A.D. 45, to the time of Hadrian, the greatest of all road-builders, A.D. 120. Then it became a true "street," made in the thorough manner described by Vitruvius, and paved throughout with stone blocks; the "_strata_" from which the word "street" is derived.

Engineered with all that road-making science which, not less than their victories, has rendered the Romans famous for all time, the Watling Street, as the Romans left it, stretched from sea to sea. Starting from their three great harbour fortresses on the Kentish coast--from _Rutupiae_, _Portus dubris_, and _Lemanis_, Englished now as Richborough, Dover, and Lympne--it converged in three branches upon their first inland camp and city of _Durovernum_, where Canterbury now stands. Proceeding thenceforward on the lines of the present Dover Road, the Roman road came to their next station of _Durolevum_, whose site no antiquary has fixed convincingly, but which might have been at either Sittingbourne, Ospringe, Davington, or Key Street. Thence it reached _Durobrivae_, which was certainly on the site of Rochester. Crossing the Medway by a _trajectus_, or perhaps even by a bridge of either stone or wood, the road passed through Strood, and branched off through Cobham, coming again to the modern highway at Dartford Brent. Perhaps it even had two branches here, one touching the river at _Vagniacae_, probably both Northfleet and Southfleet; and the other keeping, as we have seen, inland until a junction was effected near Dartford. But with its proximity to London, the story and the geography of Watling Street grow not a little confused. Where, for instance, the succeeding station of _Noviomagus_ was situated no one can say with certainty. It might have been at Keston; it probably was at Crayford; or there _might_ have been two branches again, as some antiquaries suggest. Through London, the Watling Street went across England, past St. Albans and Wroxeter, and finally to _Segontium_, or the hither side of the Menai Straits, throwing off a branch to _Deva_, Chester.

This and other great roads grew gradually to perfection throughout the country for four hundred years. Towns and military stations dotted them at intervals, and in between the abodes of men the way was lined, after the custom of the Roman people, with tombs and cemeteries. This explains the many "finds" of sepulchral urns and various relics beside the road.

[Sidenote: THE OLD ROADS]

When the Saxons came, they could not pronounce the name by which the half-Roman people called this road, and so "Gwyddelin" became "watling" on their tongues, while "strata" was corrupted to "street." No new roads were made now, and, indeed, not until the Turnpike Acts of George the Third's time and the era of MacAdam was the art of road-making practised again in England. For ages the "roads" of this country were a byword and a reproach to us. By the middle of the twelfth century the Roman roads that had been made and kept in repair for hundreds of years fell into ruin, and the detritus and miscellaneous accumulations of twenty-five generations now cover the greater portion of them. At a depth varying from five to fourteen, and even eighteen, feet, excavators have come upon the hard surface of the original Roman road, and mosaic pavements of villas found at that extreme depth attest how the surface of a country may be altered only by the gradual deposit of vegetable matter. The thickest deposits are found in low-lying situations, where the flow of streams or rain-water has brought liquid earth to settle upon the deserted sites of an ancient civilisation. This has occurred notably at such places as Dartford, Rochester, and Canterbury, all situated in deep valleys, where springs and storms have united to bring mud, sand, and gravel down from the hillsides, and thus to equalise in some measure the ancient irregularities of the scenery. While the hollows have thus been rendered less profound, the hill-tops and table-lands have remained very much as they were, and it is in these elevated situations that the line of Watling Street can most readily be traced, or _could_ have been had not the stone pavings that composed the road been long ages ago abstracted.

This long neglect of the roads made country journeys exceedingly difficult and dangerous. Travellers' tales in England during six or seven centuries are concerned with two great evils; highway robbery and the shocking state of the roads; and so deep and dangerous were some of the quagmires that, rather than attempt to cross them, coachmen would drive through wayside fields, and thus make a road for themselves. It was in this way that ancient highways became diverted, and the pedestrian who finds the route between two towns to be extraordinarily circuitous must often look to these circumstances for an explanation. The southern counties bore a bad reputation for impassable roads until about seventy years ago, and Kentish miles were long linked with Essex stiles and Norfolk wiles as prime causes of beguilement; while the fertility of Kentish soil is joined with the muddy character of Kentish roads in two old county proverbs. Thus, "Bad for the rider, good for the abider," expressed truths obvious enough to those who came this way a hundred years ago; and "There is good land where there is foul way" would have said much for the excellence of Kent, where all the ways were foul. But if the traveller was not a landed gentleman, except in the sense that he was generally covered with mud from head to foot, the reflection that the county through which he waded deep in slush must be singularly fertile could scarce have afforded him much consolation for lost time and spoiled clothes. Here is a tale of an unfortunate horseman bogged on these miscalled "roads" which is quite eloquent of what old-time wayfaring was like. He comes to a suspicious-looking slough and hesitates. "Is there a good bottom here, my man?" he asks of a country joskin regarding him with a wide smile. "Oo-ah! yes, there's a good bottom to un," replies the countryman, and the traveller urges on his way until, within a yard or so, his horse sinks to the girth in liquid mud. "I thought you said there was a good bottom to this road," shouts the traveller. "Yes," rejoins the rustic, "soo there ees, but you a'n't coom to un yit, master."

XX

Strood is one long street of miscellaneous houses, with fields and meadows running up to the backyards; with engine-shops, mills, wheelwrights, and a variety of other noisy trades clanging and clattering in the rear, and an old church on the hillside to the left, appropriately dedicated to that patron of thieves and sailor-men, Saint Nicholas. But whether or no "Saint Nicholas' clerks" looked in here to pray the saint to send them "rick franklins and great oneyers" across that "high old robbing hill," I should not like to say; having though, the while, a shrewd suspicion that their piety was somewhat to seek, and that the shrine of the saint profited but little, if at all, from their ill-gotten gains upon the road.

[Sidenote: "CRISPIN AND CRISPIANUS"]

Perhaps the most remarkable feature of the old houses here and at Rochester, and, indeed, along a great portion of the Dover Road, is the great use of weather-boarding, chiefly on the upper storeys. An instance of this is seen at Strood at an inn, the "Crispin and Crispianus," standing in the main street. A still more interesting point about this old house is its pictorial swinging sign, overhanging the pathway--a representation of the two shoemaker brothers, Crispin and Crispian, at work, cobbling boots. The brothers were Christian martyrs who suffered death at Soissons, A.D. 287. How they came to serve as the sign of an inn is quite unknown. It has been suggested that, as Agincourt was fought on Saint Crispin's Day, this old sign is of the warlike and patriotic order to which belong the Waterloo, Wellington, Nelson, Alma, and Trafalgar signs that are so plentiful on this road; but it is a great deal more likely that it is a relic of the days when men made pilgrimages to Becket's shrine, when innkeepers found their account to lie in calling their houses after some popular saint or another.

A curious incident in connection with the "Crispin and Crispianus" must be noted before we pass on. It happened in 1830. One night in September of that year, a doctor who had only just then commenced practice in Strood was called in to see a man lying at the point of death in an upper room of the old inn. He hastened to the place, and found a man lying in bed who told him that, although he was known only as an ostler, he was really the Earl of Coleraine, nephew of that notorious Colonel Hanger who is chiefly known as the riotous boon-companion of the Prince Regent in the early days of Brighton and the Pavilion. Colonel Hanger was the fourth earl, and succeeded his brother in the title, which he never assumed. He died, childless, in 1824, and the earldom became extinct. As Colonel Hanger was the youngest son of his father, and as no mention has ever been made of any of his elder brothers leaving sons, the matter is not a little mysterious, especially as the colonel's right to the title, had he chosen to use it, was not disputed. However, the strange man who died on September 20, 1830, at the "Crispin and Crispianus" apparently satisfied Doctor Humphrey Wickham of the truth of his story, and that his real name was Charles Parrott Hanger, instead of "Charley Roberts," by which he had been known at Strood and the neighbourhood for twenty years. During this time he had acted as ostler at the coaching inns of Rochester and Chatham; had tramped the country, selling laces, thread, tape, and other small wares; and on Sundays shaved labourers. He had deserted his wife years before. She was long dead, and he had a son apprenticed to a firm of ironmongers at Birmingham. To this son he left all he was possessed of, making the doctor his executor. It will not be imagined that this ex-ostler, dying in a room of the "Crispin and Crispianus," where he was lodged by the landlady out of charity, had anything to bequeath; but the doctor paid over, as executor, the sum of L1000 to Charles Henry Hanger, the son of this eccentric.

XXI

[Sidenote: ROCHESTER]

And so, as Mr. Samuel Pepys might say, into Rochester.

Rochester was to Dickens variously "Mudfog," "Great Winglebury," "Dullborough," and "Cloisterham." It cannot be said that any of these names form anything like an adequate word-picture of the place. As names, they vary from good to indifferent, and very bad, but none of them shadow forth the real Rochester, which is rather a busy place than otherwise: none, for instance, are so happily descriptive as that under which a waggish fellow introduced a wealthy distiller to an assemblage of Polish notables--as "Count Caskowisky." I might pluck a feather from Dickens' wing with which to furnish forth a wounding shaft, and say of Rochester, under any of those pseudonyms, as Trabbs' boy said in another connection (and yet not deserve the title of "unlimited miscreant,") "Don't know yah!"

The somnolent place which Dickens drew--its High Street a narrow lane, its houses abodes of gloom and mystery--has not much existence in fact. It is, of course, heresy to say so (but it is none the less true), that although no other place was probably so well known to Dickens, and that from his youth upward, yet he never caught the true note of Rochester. That he loved the place seems obvious enough, but his was not the Gothic, mediaeval temperament that could really appreciate it aright. The test of this is found in the fact that although Dickens has written many glowing pages on Rochester, and apparently yielded to none in his admiration for the old city, yet its appearance is far more beautiful to the stranger learned in Dickens-lore than anything he is prepared to see.

Busy, beautiful Rochester, and none the less beautiful because busy. The traveller who first sees the old place, its castle and cathedral and the turbid Medway, from Strood, is fortunate in his approach, and will never forget the grand picture it makes. To his right stretches away for miles the broad valley of the Medway, with bold hills crowned with windmills, above, and the stream, diminishing in long perspective, below; with jutting promontories where the factory-chimneys of Borstal and Wouldham stand up, clustered like the stalks of monstrous vegetables, and the red-sailed barges that drop down with wind and tide. Before him rise the great keep, the cathedral, and the clustered red roofs of the city, with a glimpse of the High Street, the Town Hall and its great vane--a full-rigged ship--at the other end of the bridge. And all the while to his left is the shrieking and the screaming of the trains, rolling in thunder over the two railway bridges that absolutely shut out and ruin the view down the stream. The bustle, roar, and rattle of the trains, the busy, yet silent, traffic of the river, the smoke rising in wreaths from those distant chimneys of Wouldham and Borstal, all bespeak labour and commerce, and all these rumours of a busy community blend finely with the shattered majesty of that ancient Castle, the solemnity of the Cathedral, and the noisy, yet restful, cawing of the raucous rooks who circle round about those lofty battlements, their outcry mingled with the sobbing, moaning voices of the pigeons, and the shrill piping of querulous sea-birds.

The bridge over which Mr. Pickwick leaned and meditated while waiting for breakfast has gone the way of many another old building referred to in that book which will presently have a quite unique archaeological value, so changed are the varied haunts of the Pickwickians. Necessity, they say, the call of progress, demanded the removal of the fine stone bridge of eleven arches that had spanned the Medway so efficiently for five centuries, and it _was_ removed in 1856; but how cruel the necessity, and how heavy a toll we pay for our progression perhaps only those who had stood upon the ancient ways can tell. The masonry was so strong that it was found necessary to blow it up.

Meanwhile, we must clear our minds from a very reasonable prejudice, and acknowledge that, as an example of modern engineering, the new Rochester Bridge is very fine. It is of iron, broad and graceful as its iron construction will allow, and it spans the river in three great arches. It cost L160,000, exclusive of approaches, to build, and was opened in 1856. The old bridge had a protecting balustrade which more or less effectually saved the lieges from being blown by furious winds into the water. Before the balustrade there were high iron railings, which were fixed according to the French Ambassador, the Duc de Nivernais, "so that drunkards, not uncommon here, may not mix water with their wine."