Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
the actual human Charles Dickens walking across this lawn. I was having trouble not pictur-
ing him in black and white.
We drove to Rochester, an ancient Roman town whose castle and cathedral had been star-
ing at each other for many centuries before Dickens was born. Dickens wanted to be buried
there but was overruled, after his death, and taken to Poets' Corner in Westminster Abbey,
where he remains pressed up against Thomas Hardy and Rudyard Kipling. (And so the great
enemy of institutions began to be institutionalized.) In Dickens's final, unfinished novel,
The
Mystery of Edwin Drood
, a character remarks that being in Rochester Cathedral was like
“looking down the throat of Old Time.”
Forall itshistory,Rochester hasbeenforyearsnowakindofproto-Dickens World.Many
of the stores on its High Street have kitschy Dickensian signs: A Taste of Two Cities Indian
restaurant, Pips grocery, Little Dorrit's Piercing Studio. Down an alley you can find Dick-
ens's actual writing hut: a two-story chalet decorated with Swiss frippery in which Dickens
wrote for the last five years of his life. It was moved, years ago, from the yard at Gad's Hill
Place and is now (according to the informational banner in front of it, which also calls it “the
most iconic building in British literature”) about to collapse. It's being held up, inside, by
steel props, and the Dickens Fellowship is hoping to raise £100,000 to fix it.
Our last stop was one of Dickens's last stops: Miss Havisham's house. My friend, who
was skeptical about literary tourism when we started our trip—authors, he insisted, are just
ordinary people—was suddenly in ecstasy. “Of course this is Miss Havisham's house!” he
shouted. “Look at that window up top—a perfect window for peeking!” The house is open to
visitors during the summer, but today it was closed. My friend was determined to see into its
walled back garden, so we walked down an alley, ascended a metal staircase on the side of a
church, climbed on top of the stairs' highest railing—and from there we could see down into
it:MissHavisham'sgarden,theEdenofthe19th-centurynovel,sourceofalldesire,conflict,
motion, disturbance, and growth. It was manicured now rather than overgrown, but it still
seemed like the right place. Looking into it felt like looking into the nerve center not only
of
Great Expectations
, or of Dickens's imagination, or of 19th-century literature—but of the
entire history of the novel. And we had it all to ourselves.
We left Rochester in an ecstasy of Dickens communion, my friend exclaiming about how,
in just a few hours, in one morning, he had come to understand Dickens on a totally new
level. This, then, seemed to be the real Dickens World, at least for us, on that day.
