‌Twelve

Larger Than Life

‘Barkis is willin’.’

Charles Dickens, David Copperfield

Charles Dickens,
Gad’s Hill to Westminster Abbey, 14 June 1870

And here, once more, comes Dickens. The Inimitable. Lying on his back, on a sofa, in the dining room of his home, Gad’s Hill, in Higham, near Rochester, Kent. The house on the hill. He had walked past it with his father, when he was a very small child. His father had said that if he worked really hard he might one day come to own it. A ridiculous dream. He has lived here for thirteen years. His immense success. Riding the train between Higham and London. One time, walking through the night, thirty miles from Tavistock Square to Gad’s Hill. And now … it is 9 June 1870 and his doctor, Frank Beard, is here, and his sister-in-law, Georgina, and two of his daughters, Katey and Mamie, and his beloved, hopeless, first-born son, Charley. And Nelly, too. She has been sent for, from her home in Peckham. All here, watching him die. He is, or he was, fifty-eight years old.

Were they also here, at the end? Scrooge and Micawber, Quilp and Miss Havisham, Sikes, Bumble and Pip? There is a famous picture of Dickens by Robert Buss called Dickens’s Dream, which hangs at his old home in Doughty Street, and in it Dickens is drowsing in a chair, pushed back from his desk (although his eyes are half-open), and dozens of his characters are gathering around him, in miniature, some of them pressing in, a tiny Little Nell on his knee, begging his attention, but also in bed, dying, and there’s David Copperfield, and Krook and Poor Jo, and Marley’s Ghost, and all the Nicklebys (Mrs Nickleby, Kate and Ralph) and the boys of Dotheboys Hall, and the Dombeys and Jenny Wren and the Dedlocks and Skimpole and Betsey Trotwood and Uriah Heep, of course, and Mr Pickwick, and Oliver, Fagin and the Artful Dodger and – there are so many of them, mostly minding their own business, some of them fading away, but others crowding around their creator, with his wild hair and beard, and immaculate white collar, and his pen drooping in his hand. He looks lined, thoughtful, unusually quiet, worn, perhaps sad. He looks like he would be happy for it all to end.

Dickens’s readers loved a good death scene and he always gave them what they wanted. ‘Dead, your Majesty. Dead, my lords and gentlemen. Dead, right reverends and wrong reverends of every order. Dead, men and women, born with heavenly compassion in your hearts …’ ‘It is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done; it is a far, far better rest that I go to than I have ever known.’ ‘No sleep so beautiful and calm, so free from trace of pain, so fair to look upon.’

No one quite agrees on his last words, but they are unlikely to have been the ones reported in The Times just after his death: ‘Be natural my children. For the writer that is natural has fulfilled all the rules of art.’ Surely he couldn’t have composed these perfectly formed words, not as the stroke claimed him. He wouldn’t even have agreed. What seems to have happened is that he wandered into dinner after a day’s writing, rambled (at times incoherently) to his sister-in-law, Georgina, stood up, swaying, and she said to him: ‘Come and lie down,’ and he replied, ‘Yes, on the ground,’ and he did – just set himself down on the floor and someone fetched a sofa and put him on it and he lay there, mumbling, until he ran out of breath twenty-four hours later. ‘And, it being low water, he went out with the tide.’

The house in Gad’s Hill is still here, although at the moment it is a small private school and is only occasionally open to visitors. It is set back from the road, approached by a curve of carriage sweep, and the sight of it – so like its photos, in which Dickens poses with family or friends on its front steps – makes me quite breathless. Well, it’s either that, or the brisk twenty-minute walk from Higham station. How Dickens would have scoffed. The house stands on the main Rochester to Gravesend road and in his last book, The Mystery of Edwin Drood, Dickens wrote that the days of the coach and the high road were now almost over, replaced by the all-conquering railways. And here we are. There are so many lorries and cars and builders’ vans screeching past that it takes me five minutes to find a way to sprint across to the school.

I creep furtively around the boundary hedges (probably, on reflection, not the best way to behave around a school), wondering whether to stride up to the front door and tell them – what? That I love Great Expectations? ‘Please let me in.’ Dickens would have, I suppose, but the place looks peaceful and also forbidding. Hardly changed. Apparently Katey’s art is still there, on the banisters. A teacher ambles past, notebooks and files under her arm. Hans Christian Andersen, the Swedish fairy tale writer, a lugubrious man with very little English, came to stay at Gad’s Hill for two weeks and ended up staying for five, driving Dickens to distraction. Wilkie was there, too, and Andersen thought it was funny to decorate his wide-brimmed hat with daisy chains, secretly, and watch him wander off into the village, not that Wilkie would have cared. There are no daisies today on the well-trimmed lawns. It is a cold day in early January.

Perhaps it is right that Gad’s Hill is now a school. I remember reading Nicholas Nickleby aged ten, all of us helped through it by the headmaster’s wife over the course of one term. We thrilled to the jolting power of the descriptions, and the agony when Nicholas had to leave his family, and we sniggered at the strange, powdered, foreign milliner (‘demmit’), but most of all I remember the terrifying headmaster, Wackford Squeers, and his awful wife, and young Wackford his son, and their beating of Smike and the other desperate boys (all of this resonating painfully in my own life) and then that moment of pure joy, that surging rush, when Nicholas seizes the cane at last and thrashes them all, rescuing Smike, the boys cheering, and fleeing for London, the nightmarish Wackford Squeers and his brutish son bellowing in pain and thwarted rage. That was Dickens. He was on our side. No wonder crowds of thousands turned out to pay their respects at Westminster Abbey, as soon as they heard, even if he had been very clear that he didn’t want any pomp or fuss and he wanted to be buried as close to Gad’s Hill as was possible. Rochester Cathedral was as far as he was prepared to be taken.

But Dickens was no longer in charge of his own life (Queen Victoria intervened, even though he couldn’t have cared less about meeting her thirteen years earlier) and on 14 June 1870 his body in its oak coffin was taken through Higham village by carriage, accompanied by his family. And so off we go.

The tiny village of Higham slumbered in deep country in Dickens’s day. Now, a much larger village, it lies in a battered strip of green belt, on the uneasy eastern fringes of London. Thirty miles to Tavistock Square. The Thames Estuary close by, just to the north. The walk from Gad’s Hill to the station is downhill, past streets of bungalows, a block of housing (‘Dickens Court’), high winter hedges punctured with narrow unfriendly driveways (‘Private’, ‘Neighbourhood Watch’, ‘Beware. Dangerous Dogs’), a Shetland pony in a field, ignoring a huddle of sheep, the Gardeners Arms pub (perhaps old enough to have seen Dickens’s body carried by), the chip shop and the mini market (‘Get Your Dream Ticket Today’), oast houses on the horizon, and pylons, orchards, more pylons, cows, 4 x 4s racing up the lane … the mashed edgelands of merry England. A woman in a van nearly reverses over me and gives a cheery thumbs-up.

My train is heading to Luton. Dickens was taken in his special train straight to Charing Cross, and then three horse-drawn carriages proceeded to the abbey, but I have to change at London Bridge. There is no one else on the platform, not even in the train when we lurch into life. Dickens left in sunshine. There are fields with cows, hedges and banks of brambles, tall bare poplars by the line, a farm, patches of scrub, the low dip of the Kentish hills, bound with pylons, a sewage depot and warehouses, a gasworks with the cylinders down low, a vast graveyard for rusting trains, marshland over towards the estuary (steady, Pip), the first uncertain graffiti, green ivy, terraces of housing, some of it, just maybe, already here when Dickens rolled past, and cars parked by the thousands, alone in the streets or herded together in their tarmac parks.

There are some dramatic chalk cliffs at Gravesend. An old quarry perhaps. Carved and left to rot. A lake. We pass through cuttings, thick with more dark ivy, under a damp sky. Car parks and Northfleet station, pylons everywhere, dead brown flowers hanging from the buddleia, wind turbines and warehouses – so many warehouses – and all the while the same grey spiked fence running at our side. Industry, now. Tall chimneys – dormant – huge cranes, the Thames basin coming into view (the sweet, oily Thames; Dickens’s Thames), tower blocks in the distance, the train inching into Swanscombe – grey platform, grey railings, a grey shelter from the grey rain – but Dickens’s train doesn’t stop. Our doors squeal and beep. Into a tunnel, to the sound of another automated announcement: ‘The next station will be Greenhithe, for Bluewater Shopping Centre.’

And here it is. ‘Greenhithe for Bluewater’ say the station signs. Shopping. All the riches of the earth. And the desolation. Supermarkets and warehouses. Gravel and sand mounded high for more building. Pylons. The last of the countryside vanished behind us. Gone. Beaten. This is bleak. I am fighting – and losing – a battle against a longing to return to another time, another place. My head is full of David Copperfield. Barkis flicking at his horse as the cart makes its way, so slowly, along the dusty empty lanes, past the dog roses and the wild marshes, the scent of honeysuckle, and Peggotty emerging from a hedge, shaking off the pollen, the butterflies rising in clouds, Peggotty drawing sandwiches and cakes from her floury apron. And here too, of course, is Enid. Always Enid. In her little village under a lovely, clear blue sky. The jolly policeman calling out good day. The angler, dozing with his cider-filled basket by the bulrush-fringed pond. The ancient oak on the green. Wading through golden meadows, with cornflowers and poppies, foxgloves and scabious, the buttercups and the daisies, tansy and clover and the warm, sunlit aroma of wild thyme. Skylarks on high, the boom of the bittern. What is this? Where does it all come from? Why would anyone pretend that this is what we still have? All those nature writers, all that filtered, blinkered, soft-focus maundering on TV. The timeless customs. The pigs and their pannage, rooting for acorns; the falcons wheeling in the sky; the eternal, unchanging, rolling of the seasons. Who are we trying to kid? Our land is tormented. Poisoned. Dying. None of this is any longer there, at least not in untroubled isolation. It probably never was. Not like that. But always there’s Enid. Inescapable. With her beady-eyed robins and jolly little car. The endless disapproval. Children sent to their rooms. The beatings. The ration books and home-made jams. The suspicious foreigners and thieving, brown, bearded outsiders. Her insane pogonophobia. Please, for the love of God, just fuck off, Enid, and leave us all alone.

I may have nodded off. I’d dropped into the Sir John Falstaff pub earlier, for a pint of Cornish pale ale. It is opposite Dickens’s old home and he used to go there sometimes to cash his cheques. He’d called in on the morning of 8 June, the penultimate day of his life, to exchange a cheque with the owner for £22. Life was going on, so far as he was concerned. The pub is reassuringly old school, by which I mean 1970s psychedelic carpets and listless curtains and not Dickensian at all: no log fires or brass bonhomie. I join three old men swapping familiar stories, and order salt and vinegar crisps (no lunch on a Monday). The beer is good. There are prints of Mr Pickwick and Charles Dickens on the walls, and foggy London streets, and in the corner the fruit machine is aglow. No doubt Dickens would have rung up the jackpot. We are all very happy, although I have a train to catch.

I come awake, emerging from a long tunnel. The train is still empty, but the bleached image of a Victorian woman, with crinoline skirts and a wide hat, and a small pale child, is fading from the seat opposite. What a terrible journey it must have been, on this train, with Dickens dead in his coffin, moving inexorably towards London. He spent his life journeying to and from the city and he made his characters do the same. There are more warehouses and housing out of the window. How big can London grow? There’s almost nothing Dickens would recognize. New houses. Marketing suites. Portakabins all along the route. Bales of rubbish for recycling. Deserted caravans (looking curiously Dickensian). There’s a school playground, where the children are running about, leaping over tyres, skipping, shoving, screaming, giggling. Up they rise. They were here when Dickens passed, his family – too few and too small – staring from the carriage windows.

And now we’re through Abbey Wood and the housing is growing taller. There are timber yards and more supermarkets. Allotments, looking loved. Solar panels, satellite dishes and flags on the roofs. Where is the squalor that Dickens wrote about? It’s not here. Not the kind he knew. At Charlton someone has scrawled ‘Call in Sick’ in huge letters just outside the station, something Dickens never did. More tunnels. More houses. There is no end or beginning to London. Just streets and bridges and level crossings, playing fields, gum trees and proliferating spasms of graffiti.

The spiked grey fence is still tracking us, now covered in thick effusions of the wild clematis known as old man’s beard. Wilkie! He will be waiting at the abbey. The woods around Gad’s Hill are full of old man’s beard, where Dickens loved to walk, alone or with his guests. They are empty, on a Monday in January, and the only people I pass are builders working in the wide forecourts of the large detached homes. The woods are quiet, and hard to reach, what with all the signs saying ‘Private’ and ‘Keep Out’. The A2 is over the hill, a background howl and moan, people on the move. ‘Danger of Death’, I am reminded by a bright yellow sign on a telegraph pole. And down at Crabbles Bottom, a scrap of ancient woodland just next to the A2 that the local council is doing its best to nurture, someone has torn down the fencing and sprayed the ground with black bags of litter, most of them burst open, a sodden toy giraffe smeared into the mud. At the end of his working life Dickens had lost almost all humour and hope, until only the rage was left. But we don’t have to follow down that path, or remember him that way. Although sometimes it is hard.

We ride into London and its death-dealing air. In a great vista of new housing, stretching down to the Thames and away to the south, it is only the old pubs and churches, and sometimes the warehouses that survive. I wonder if Dickens is still with us, or if he too is fading from our lives. At Greenwich station there is an upsurge of energy on the platform, of the kind Dickens needed and fed upon, and a noisy group of schoolchildren swaggers onto the train. Deptford Creek slops muddily down below, hiding Fagin’s treasures. More, taller towers. The streets start to narrow and crowd. At last this is something that Dickens would recognize: tight little lanes, pubs, dark buildings, black railway arches, a firestorm of graffiti (‘ACAB’ written in letters eight feet tall), the tip of the gherkin (‘saucy!’ yells Nancy), and here we are, clanking into London Bridge, and on for Charing Cross, never mind the gap.

At last, the Thames, ‘stretching away to the great ocean, Death’. We have not left anyone behind. Not even Enid. The London Eye and a cider lodge and the train crossing the river, and to either side there are people strolling in the short January afternoon over the elegant new footbridge. The train comes to a halt by the side of the Playhouse Theatre, opened twelve years after Dickens’s death. It is what it is. And these are the times we live in.

There were perhaps fourteen people in Westminster Abbey to see Dickens’s coffin lowered into the ground, as well as a few idle (or even startled) sightseers. At least they had listened to him to that extent, and kept the moment as private as possible. Perhaps Nelly was lurking, although no one says that she was. Wilkie was there, of course, along with his droopy brother Charles, an artist, who ten years earlier had married Katey Dickens, much to her father’s irritation. She left for her honeymoon wearing funereal black, even though, so far as we know, no one had died.

There are hundreds of people in the abbey today, many of them milling and bumping around ‘Poets’ Corner’, trampling over Dickens and his peers. He really didn’t want to be here. Perhaps he’s happy to be this close to Sam Johnson, although they would surely annoy one another after a while. Or maybe not. The place has a strange atmosphere, with tour groups drifting by, pausing at Kipling ‘the writer of The Jungle Book and the poem “If” and, next to him, Charles Dickens, buried here against his wishes. You probably know him best from Oliver’. When the news of Dickens’s death reached his friend, the poet Longfellow, in Boston, he refused to believe it: Dickens ‘was so full of life’, he wrote, ‘it did not seem possible he could die’. Longfellow has a bust, erected by his ‘British friends’, but many of the other poets, writers and dramatists memorialized here are not in fact buried in the abbey. One exception is Sam Johnson – interred in ‘the cheapest manner’, as Sir John Hawkins fumed that Sam had left everything to his old servant and friend, the freed slave Francis Barber.

Wilkie lingered for a while. He probably chatted to his brother Charles, then waved him off with Katey. He may have talked to John Forster, although they were never close. Forster thought Wilkie a bad influence. He was more likely to have spent time with Frank Beard, who was his doctor as well as Dickens’s, and a good friend. Maybe his gout was troubling him. In any case, he will have stayed, I am sure, to see the ground closed over Dickens (although he did not live long enough to know the extraordinary radiance with which the brass letters shine from the worn black stone of Dickens’s grave). And then he will have left, his thoughts turning to his new mistress and the next calming draught of laudanum. Straightening his waistcoat. And limping off into the night.