Mr Dickens Visits Stoke Newington

Sunday in London – gloomy, close and stale. The very bells sounded heavy, and tolled mournfully in the foetid air. Last night I had been hurtled back into the bosom of our greatest of cities by the snorting dragon known to men as the Euston express.

Birmingham, infernal shrine to the furnace-lit, sootstreaked god Mammon, had concluded a triumphant tour introducing Little Dorrit to an expectant world. But, oh! how my eyes had welled with tears as I beheld my audience – that spellbound throng of gasping wretches, some still coal-blackened from the foundries, of rheumatick clerks with chalky faces, of battered soldiers back from the Crimea where not a few had left a limb behind – all laughing till they nearly tumbled down with mirth to hear me read of the Circumlocution Office. And yet they never saw my rage that these good people, so courageous in adversity, should be betrayed by the stupidities of those in office, by oily nibsquirts decorated with gorgeous baubles, whose only care is for advancement and in whose thin veins runs barely an ounce of sour and curdled blood without a trace of human kindness.

In Devonshire Terrace the house was empty save for Mr Flintwinch, the tyrant of the regions below stairs, who had prevailed upon himself to light a fire in the drawing room, and Mrs Pudding the housekeeper, who had placed before me a paragon among steak and oyster pies. But after weeks of adulation the icy hand of loneliness fell the harder upon my shoulder; my spirit felt like ash after all else is burned away.

So it was with gratitude that I recalled a promised visit to my friend Mark Lemon, the editor of Punch magazine, an excellent fellow notwithstanding that he had represented the accursed Kate in our separation. And thus it was that I found myself clattering past Islington, across the little bridge of the New River and through the market gardens of Hackney to the pretty village of Stoke Newington, borne along in a cabriolet with a driver who told me that ‘e’d ‘ad that Thackeray in his carriage once and ‘ad found ‘im a right gracious gennulman’. I knew then I must tip the impudent fellow half a crown if word of Mr Dickens’ parsimony was not to spread.

The clip-clop of the horse’s hooves, and the echo of the train’s febrile drumming, inspired a nonsense verse (such as I would be ashamed to pen as a Christmas squib) that buzzed around my head like an insistent bee at a summer picnic.

‘Oh my Lemon, round and fat,
No surprise your rooms seemed pokey.
How I wonder what you’re at
Now you’ve found a home in Stokey.’

The house was a handsome new red-brick abode, no less than five windows wide. It enjoyed a splendid prospect of the gardens, laid out in pious adherence to the late Mr Repton’s gospel of the Picturesque, of Clissold House, a fine, austere edifice declaring to all that here is a noble seat – though in truth it is the home of the Hoares, a family of rapacious bankers.

Lemon himself, like a great cauldron bubbling over with good humour, his vast girth shaking with glee and his many whiskery chins all a wobble, opened the door himself. Instantly my dark mood blew away before his gale of jollity. ‘My dear Lemon’, I croaked, but before I could say more I was wrapped in an embrace, my hat and coat were whisked from me, and I was half carried, half shooed into the dining room, where Mrs Lemon, plump as a ripe plum, stood before an Alp of roast potatoes and a goose as large and round as herself.

A lively crowd of rosycheeked little Lemons gambolled around her and greeted me with such joy that it would have taken an act of will to remain cast down.

‘The Caesar of Literature returns from conquering the provinces!’ cried Lemon, thrusting a hot toddy into my hands, for truly is it said that there is no Punch without Lemon, since before he was a Publisher he had been a publican (discharging both trades with an honesty rarely found in either), and he had concocted a punch so fortified with persimmon and rum that the first sip suffused my being with a warmth that started at the forehead and descended like quicksilver to the shoe leather itself.

‘Come’, said Lemon after I had greeted Mrs Lemon, kissed her three little angel girls and gravely shaken hands with young Tom, ‘meet my friend George Gilbert Scott’. Mr Scott, a pleasant fellow, was fresh from attending morning service hard by at St Mary’s. Though he made no boast of it – rather I wheedled the fact from him – it turned out that he was the architect of this newest and finest exemplar of the Gothic. Emboldened with punch, we conversed upon the importance of detail in constructing both a building and a novel, notwithstanding that certain skulking critics have dared to say I take less care to keep the rain out. Such were Scott’s intelligence and shy wit, that when he spoke with grief of his commission I had to know the reason. ‘The plan’, he said, ‘was of one whole. To remove a single piece destroys a balance reflecting the harmony of God’s creation.

Alas, the steeple that I hoped would soar above all other churches in London must wait for the good men and women of the parish to find more money. I am sorely disappointed’. And with this he blew his nose into a great red sail of a handkerchief.

Now I have long since armoured my heart against the legions of tricksters, blood petitioners, lawyers, dissemblers, knaves, imposters, charlatans, quacks and general humbugs that surrounded me when first I achieved worldly success, yet there was something so affecting about poor Mr Scott’s distress that I felt an irresistible urge to comfort him.

‘Mr Scott’, said I, ‘that spire will be built. It will sing not just of the glory of God but of the genius of man. I would count it a singular honour if you would allow me to inaugurate the fund for St Mary’s spire with a donation of fifty pounds.’

[At this point the diary becomes so blotched, with tears perhaps, that it is no longer legible. Though neither man lived to see the spire completed, it is one of the most beautiful and the tallest – at 220 feet – in London].