Dickens first made the acquaintance of Broadstairs in 1837, and he did not finally desert it as a holiday resort until 1859. Enthusiasts for whom no detail of Dickens’s life is too small or insignificant have discovered that his first lodgings were in High Street, at the house now numbered “31.” It has been entirely rebuilt, but their enthusiasm is of a dreadnought quality superior to such accidents, and they flock to see the place because the conclusion of “Pickwick” was written there: in the house that no longer exists. One would think some peculiar virtue lingered in the air. Lawn House, and Number 40, Albion Street, now incorporated with the “Albion Hotel,” were favoured by him before he took Fort House, in 1850. There he wrote a portion of “David Copperfield,” but positively not a line of “Bleak House”; and that name, given later and still surviving, is a quite unwarranted title, unless indeed it may be taken as descriptive of its undoubtedly bleak and exposed situation. Dickens, in 1843, described Broadstairs as “a little fishing place; intensely quiet”; but presently the growing popularity of it began to qualify his pleasure. In 1847 he wrote: “Vagrant music is getting to that height here, and is so impossible to be escaped from, that I fear Broadstairs and I must part company in time to come. Unless it pours of rain, I cannot write half an hour without the most excruciating organs, fiddles, bells, or glee-singers. There is a violin of the most torturing kind under the window now (time, ten in the morning) and an Italian box of music on the steps, both in full blast.” And so after 1859 place knew Dickens no more. “Broadstairs,” says a booklet issued in recent years, setting forth the desirability of the building-land round about it, “has been vastly altered and improved since Dickens’s time. Mansions and villas have sprung up in all directions, public thoroughfares have improved, or been newly constructed, promenades have been formed along the sea front, commanding extensive prospects of land and marine scenery, charming gardens have been laid out.” This is a builder’s, an auctioneer’s, and land-agent’s idea of a vastly improved place; but, although Broadstairs is still delightful, I do not think any one else will be found to agree with the ideas put forward by these interested persons. Most people would prefer the comparative seclusion of forty years earlier. But you are not to suppose it to have been altered to any appreciable degree. The surroundings have been vastly changed, but the little bay with the queer old jetty is the same, although something, I know not what, has recently been done to the jetty, something in which plenteous tar is concerned. [Illustration: BROADSTAIRS: YORK GATE]