Dickens ragged steps and amateur twaddle
Another article from Professor Carolyn Oulton on the curious history of Folkestone’s Library and one of the more famous contributors to the collection of writers locked away inside Grace Hill!
It was meant to be so exciting having the most famous writer in England staying in Folkestone for the summer.
But as one resident admitted, just at first it was all a bit disappointing.
Photographs of Dickens show an erect figure in evening dress, all blazing eyes and ‘dandified get-up’. And now here he was with a ‘free sailorish look of almost careless attire, and flowing beard blowing in the wind out of doors’. In the weeks that followed enthusiasm grew as ‘the well-known figure became more and more common in our streets.’
Dickens later wrote an affectionate article ‘Out of Town’ for his journal Household Words. He did include the warning:
Let nobody with corns come to Pavilionstone, for there are breakneck flights of ragged steps, connecting the principal streets by back-ways, which will cripple that visitor in half an hour.
The description of those steps alone would have told anyone ‘in the know’ that Pavilionstone was actually Folkestone. Dickens renamed it in honour of Mr Breach, the landlord of the Great Pavilionstone Hotel who had looked after him when he fell ill. So delighted was Breach that he ordered 500 copies of the relevant number of Household Words – Dickens made him a present of the lot.
Years later the local journal Holbein’s was running competitions for the ‘best description in verse of any character in any novel by Dickens’ and generally making the most of this special relationship (as titles go ‘When Charles Dickens lived in Folkestone’ seems a bit of a stretch).
All of which made it particularly mortifying that Charles Dickens Jnr should come to give a reading in the town and find himself confronted with ‘An audience not worthy of the stupidest amateur twaddle which the Town Hall has fathered.’
By the time the Free Library was opened Dickens had been dead for many years.
But he would have been the first to support its aims. He would certainly have been pleased to see that the 1881 catalogue included most of his books, but if he had come back in 1902 one new title might have surprised him.
In this year the chain that owned the Pavilion Hotel reprinted ‘Out of Town’ with a beautiful cover showing ships at sea, with an introduction by the writer Percy Fitzgerald. But just to make sure visitors knew where to find the best hotel in town, they had helpfully changed the title to ‘Pavilionstone.’
