BROADSTAIRS, A DICKENSIAN RETREAT
A little further round the Isle of Thanet headland lies the town of Broadstairs, with a beautiful sandy beach, dramatic coves and proud literary heritage. Charles Dickens first came to stay here in 1837, at the age of 25. He was already famous as the author of The Pickwick Papers, the first of his novels. He took lodgings in a house on the High Street and quickly fell in love with the town, which at that time was not much more than a fishing village. Dickens returned many times over the following 15 years, staying for several months on occasions, sometimes accompanied by fellow writers Wilkie Collins and Thomas Carlyle. He stayed in several lodgings, including the Royal Albion Hotel and Fort House, a former coastguard station. It is now a guesthouse, renamed Bleak House in his honour. Many of his novels were at least partly written here, including Oliver Twist, Nicholas Nickleby, The Old Curiosity Shop and Martin Chuzzlewit. At Bleak House, fans can visit the room in which he wrote the majority of David Copperfield. It includes a replica of his writing desk, from which he could stare out of the bay window and watch the sea, which he described as an “endless inspiration”. The true repository of his Broadstairs heritage is the Dickens House Museum on Victoria Parade. Formerly known as Lawn Cottage, it was owned by a characterful woman called Mary Pearson Strong, whom Dickens befriended. Miss Strong believed she held ownership rights of the lawn in front of the cottage and took umbrage at any passers-by who led
donkeys across it, which was a regular occurrence. Her somewhat frenzied attempts to stop such acts inspired the character of Betsey Trotwood in David Copperfield. In a comedic nod, Betsey often leaps up and urges her daughter to intercept the transgressors with the shout of “Janet! Donkeys!” Not wishing to cause the real Miss Strong any aggravation, Dickens set the story in Dover. In 1851, he wrote a short essay entitled Our English Watering-Place, which is a love letter to Broadstairs. He opens it thus: “In the autumn-time of the year, when the great metropolis is so much hotter, so much noisier, so much more dusty or so much more water-carted, so much more crowded, so much more disturbing and distracting in all respects, than it usually is, a quiet sea-beach becomes indeed a blessed spot.” Today, the whole house is a museum to Dickens and his stays in the town. The curator is Lee Ault, a former honorary general secretary of the International Dickens Fellowship. “It’s possible Charles came here as a young boy with his father, who worked as a navy pay officer based in Chatham, or that he came here during his honeymoon in Ramsgate in 1836,” she explains. “It would have been a tiny place, with only 300 people.” He found inspiration in the tales of smuggling, spying and codebreaking for which the coastline is famous. A network of tunnels dug by smugglers and customs officers still lies beneath the Broadstairs headlands, and many of the stories can be found at an underground museum at Bleak House. Dickens was not the only writer to gain inspiration here. Oscar Wilde was an occasional visitor. So, too, was John Buchan, who set the finale of The Thirty-Nine Steps in a place called Bradgate, a thinly-disguised Broadstairs. The titular 39 steps themselves are at North Foreland, which is home to both a distinctive white-painted lighthouse and the splendid beach at Joss Bay. But Dickens’ legacy looms largest. A dozen pubs and cafés take their name either from the author himself or his characters and titles. Lee says she understands why he was particularly attracted to Broadstairs in autumn. “Broadstairs may be larger and busier now, but autumn is still a time of calmness,” she says. “We get a lot of painters visiting because the textures of the sky and sea are so vivid. Dickens came at all times of the year, but the fact that he was moved to write Our English Watering-Place in the autumn says a lot about how much he valued the season.”
“All the sea is sparkling, heaving, swelling up with life and beauty, this bright morning” Charles Dickens, Our English Watering-Place