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Dover Express 11 September 1908
Dickens and Dover
The associations of Dickens in Dover are the subject of an interesting article which appeared in the Journal "The Dickensian" published by the Dickens Fellowship and written by editor, Mr B.W. Matz. "Not only did Dickens bring in Dover in two of his novels, David Copperfield and a Tale of Two Cities, but he also describes its peculiarities as they struck him, in the 'Uncommercial Traveller'." "Considering how often Dickens must have been through Dover, on the occasion of his sea trips, says Mr Matz, and the frequent mention in his books of the road to the sea port, which ran past his house at Gad's Hill, one may be a little surprised he did not devote a special article to it as he did in the case of Broadstairs, Folkestone, and Boulogne. The town is of course mentioned by name, nearly, many times in his writings, but there are few detailed descriptions.
"Dickens stayed there on at least two occasions. He hired No.10 Camden Crescent for three months in the summer of 1852 whilst he was busy on "Bleak House", and in a letter from that address to Miss Mary Boyle he said 'My dear Mary, you do scant justice to Dover. It is not quite a place to my taste, being too bandy (I mean musical, no reference to its legs)" and infintely too gentile. But the sea is very fine and the walks very remarkable. There are two ways of going to Folkestone, both lovely and striking in the highest degree. There are Heights and Downs, and country roads and I don't know what, everywhere.
The other occasion was in1861 when he stayed at the Lord Warden Hotel and in a letter to Wilkie Collins he speaks again of the fine walks to Folkestone. "Of course I am dull and penitent here, but it is very beautiful. I can work well and I walked by the cliffs to Folkestone and back today.
This year he gave one of his public readings in Dover which was so crowded many people had to be turned away. Mr John Agate and his family were among the unfortunate and he wrote an angry letter to Dickens to which he received a very kind letter of explanation back. Writing in one of his letters of the success of his readings here, he says, "At Dover they wouldn't go, but sat applauding like mad .... the audience with the greatest sense of humour certainly is Dover. The people in the stalls set the example at laughing in the most curiously unreserved way; and they laughed with such really cordial enjoyment when Squeers read the boys' letters, that the contagion extended to me.
In the same letter he describes a storm which took place in the early part of November, "It was most magnificent at Dover. All the great side of the Lord Warden next to the sea had to be emptied, the break of the waves was so prodious and the noise so utterly confounding. The sea came in like a great sky of immense clouds, forever breaking suddenly into furious rain; all kinds of wreck washed in."
But perhaps the chief interest Dover has, for the Dickens enthusiast is, in the fact, that here lived Betsy Trotwood; that most charming of the novelist's women characters- poor little David's aunt, and that Dover was the objective of her nephew's weary tramp from London, but let me at once say that her 'very neat little cottage with cheerful bow windows; in front of it a small square gravelled court or garden full of flowers, carefully tended and smelling deliciously' has never yet been identified. Dickens locates it up in the Heights, facing the sea.
Mr Ashby Sterry, in his 'Cucumber Chronicles' is satisfied about a certain house he discovered on the Heights, but Mr C.K. Worsfold in a letter to the author of 'A week's tramp in Dickensland' had his doubts about the identification. But as a matter of fact the lady upon whom Dickens moulded David's Aunt was Miss Mary Strong, who lived in a cottage similar to that he describes as Bessie Trotwood's house, on the front at Broadstairs. She had the 'whims about donkeys', and it is on the authority of Charles Dickens the younger, who knew the lady personally, and, in the Pall Mall magazine, gave some account of his acquaintance with her, that the fact is stated. What the novelist did in this case is what he frequently did in others - described a house or character he saw in one place and located it in another.
The character of Betsy Trotwood lived on the Heights of Dover and when poor care-worn David Copperfield came at last to the great aim of his journey and set foot in the town of Dover, he was relieved but helpless and dispirited.
"I enquired about my aunt among the boatmen first and received various answers. One said she lived in the South Foreland light and singed her whiskers by doing so; another that she was made fast to the great buoy outside the harbour and could only be visited at half tide; the fourth that she was seen to mount a broom in the next high wind and make direct for Calais" Fly-drivers and shop-keepers were equally disrespectful. One morning he was sitting on the steps of a shop at a street corner of the Market Place when he at last got information from a fly-driver who also gave him a penny which poor David invested in a loaf from the shop. This shop was some years ago identified as that of Igglesden the baker's, later Igglesden & Graves.
