Based on a comment from a friend of mine, "to be in Dickens country at Christmas time certainly has its appeal. God bless us, every one!" Rosemary and I decided to visit Rochester, the town very closely associated with him and in which he grew up and died.
According to the Medway tourist site, "Medway is known for its rich heritage. The Romans and Normans each left their mark and the area has a long seafaring tradition. Rochester Castle and Cathedral and the Historic Dockyard in Chatham are just some of the great landmarks.
Charles Dickens moved to the area when he was five years old and spent the happiest years of his childhood around Chatham. He returned to the area for the last 13 years of his life, living at Gad's Hill Place, near Rochester. Many of his books featured places and buildings in and around Rochester. Satis House in Great Expectations was based on the impressive red brick Restoration House in Crow Lane, Rochester and Eastgate House, also in Rochester, was referred to as Westgate House in his first novel, The Pickwick Papers and as the Nun's House in his last, The Mystery of Edwin Drood."
Rochester is also home to the second oldest Norman castle whose size humbled Dickens causing him to write, in Household Words, "I surveyed the massive ruin from the Bridge, and thought what a brief little practical joke I seemed to be, in comparison with the solidarity, stature, strength and length of life." While the photographs reproduced do show its massive size, they also illustrate the ruinous state it is in, although well maintained by English Heritage. (The photo on the left is from the tourist web site, clearly taken on a warm and sunny day; on the right is mine.) The city, the guidebook explains, was "built within the walls of a Roman town, sited where the Roman Watling Street crosses the Medway [river] on its route from London to Canterbury and Dover." The first castle was mentioned in the Domesday Book (1086) and the existing keep was added in 1127 during the reign of Henry I. "The existence of documentation to enable these earliest building phases of the castle to be positively dated is especially fortunate; the remainder of its architectural development in the medieval period is also very well recorded, as is its dramatic military history which witnessed three major sieges within two centuries of its foundation. Viewing the castle today, it takes a small act of imagination (aided by the models available in the chapel room of the keep), to think of the workshops and houses crowed next to the base of the wall in the moat, the ivy covering the tower and the waters of the Medway at the base of the walls.
During the second siege of 1215, King John devised and implemented the plan to creating a mine under the southeast angle of the keep. Forty of the fattest pigs were requested to be sent by the King's justiciar, Hubert de Burgh, so as to bring fire beneath the tower. In an age before fire powder, "the pig fat was required to fire the pit props shoring up the undermined foundations … John's mine was successful, a whole section of the great tower came down, and to this day there is at Rochester a monument to these forty pigs in the cylindrical southeast angle of the keep, rebuilt in Poitevin fashion after the war was over."
The model in the chapel illustrates "this considerable achievement of siege-craft and military engineering", illuminating the location of the mine with a reproduction of the miners and the pit props with a user switch-on light.
The cathedral dates from 604 and today still has a 12 th century Romanesque façade, the only such high Romanesque front surviving in England. The original stone steps (now covered with wooden ones) were worn away by medieval pilgrims visiting the shrine of William of Perth, a Scottish baker who was murdered nearby in the 13 th century. Although no trace of the shrine remains today, miracles were reported to take place there.
Toward the end of the 12 th century there was a great fire (1179) which destroyed much of the cathedral; lack of funds stymied attempts to rebuild it so the original Norman nave has survived. According to our guide to Dickens' footsteps, the cathedral "features in the Pickwick Papers and takes centre-stage in The Mystery of Edwin Drood, with the plot revolving around the ancient church and the people who worked there."
Finally, we visited the museums in the Guildhall, seen here. This structure was also used as a magistrate's court in Dickens time. "It was here that Pip was brought by Mr. Pumblechook in Great Expectations , to be bound over as an apprentice to Joe Gargery." In addition to a museum devoted to Charles Dickens, there is a reconstruction of a prison ship and and displays illustrating the long history of man in the area.
