Dickens’ rochester

Charles Dickens was born in 1812 in Portsmouth, where his father was a naval clerk, but the family moved to Kent five years later when Charles’ father was transferred to Chatham dockyard on the River Medway, near Rochester.

They relocated to London when Charles was 10, but he retained his ties to the Medway area. He had first fallen in love with Gad’s Hill Place at Higham, outside Rochester, as a boy, and when it later came up for sale in 1856, he was able to buy it as his country home. He died there in 1870.

Dickens was fond of walking around Rochester, where he drew inspiration for many of his stories. Rochester is mentioned by name in The Pickwick Papers and David Copperfield, and in two short stories, The Seven Poor Travellers and The Uncommercial Traveller. In Great Expectations, it appears as ‘up town’ and ‘our town’. In The Mystery Of Edwin Drood, it is referred to as Cloisterham.

Neighbouring Chatham also features in the books of Dickens, as Mudfog in Oliver Twist and as the dockyard and garrison town in A Tale Of Two Cities.

The Seven Poor Travellers, a Christmas story written in 1854, is based on Dickens’ memories of a charitable institution on the High Street: the Six Poor Travellers’ House. He quotes the plaque above the doorway, which specifies ‘no rogues or proctors’.

Restoration House, in Crow Lane, was the inspiration for Miss Havisham’s cobwebbed home, Satis House, in Great Expectations. Pip approached the house through what is now Vines Park. The park was also the last place where Dickens was seen in public before his death. The guildhall was where Pip was bound as an apprentice. In the cathedral graveyard, there is a headstone to the Dorrett family, a name he later used in Little Dorrit.

Eastgate House doubles as a school for young ladies in both The Pickwick Papers and Edwin Drood.

Dickens’ Swiss chalet from Gad’s Hill, in which he

did much of his writing, is now in the garden at Eastgate House, and the council is hoping to raise funds for its restoration.