Dickens, Charles, 1812-1870 -- Homes and haunts -- England; England -- Description and travel
"It was gone. The two beautiful hawthorn trees, the hedge, the
turf, and all those buttercups and daisies, had given place to the
stoniest of jolting roads; while, beyond the station, an ugly dark
monster of a tunnel kept its jaws open, as if it had swallowed them
and were ravenous for more destruction. The coach that had carried
me away, was melodiously called Timpson's Blue-eyed Maid [it was
really called the 'Commodore'], and belonged to Timpson, at the
coach office up street; the locomotive engine that had brought me
back was called severely No. 97, and belonged to S.E.R., and was
spitting ashes and hot water over the blighted ground.... Here, in
the haymaking time, had I been delivered from the dungeons of
Seringapatam, an immense pile (of haycock), by my countrymen, the
victorious British (boy next door and his two cousins), and had
been recognized with ecstasy by my affianced one (Miss Green), who
had come all the way from England (second house in the terrace) to
ransom me and marry me."
In playful vein Dickens professes to record his disappointment at
failing to receive any recognition from a "native", in the person of a
phlegmatic greengrocer, when he revisits Rochester, and revives the
associations of haunts beloved in childhood.
"Nettled by his phlegmatic conduct, I informed him that I had left
the town when I was a child. He slowly returned, quite unsoftened,
and not without a sarcastic kind of complacency, Had I? Ah! and did
I find it had got on tolerably well without me? Such is the
difference (I thought when I had left him a few hundred yards
behind, and was by so much in a better temper) between going away
from a place and remaining in it. I had no right, I reflected, to
be angry with the greengrocer for his want of interest; I was
nothing to him; whereas he was the town, the cathedral, the bridge,
the river, my childhood, and a large slice of my life, to me."
That is one side of the medal, but the other is displayed in _David
Copperfield_, when little Mr. Chillip, the doctor, welcomes David back
to England:
"'We are not ignorant, sir,' said Mr. Chillip, slowly shaking his
little head again, 'down in our part of the country, of your fame.
There must be great excitement here, sir,' said Mr. Chillip,
tapping himself on the forehead with his forefinger. 'You must find
it a trying occupation, sir!'"
A feature of Dickens's literary manner, so insistent that the most
superficial reader cannot miss it, is the individual and almost human
aspect which a street or a landscape, a house or a room, takes on in his
description. A typical example may be selected in Mr. Wickfield's
house--
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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