A Charles Dickens of a Holiday Festival : Spirit of Christmas Past Keeps the Humbugs Away From Rochester, England

In midwinter, when you may experience a Dickensian fog over Romney Marsh, oil refineries glow eerily on the shores of the Thames estuary and wandering through the creeks and mysterious mud flats it is easy, as you come upon Cooling churchyard, to imagine the great author himself leaning on a gravestone contemplating a foreboding scene for a novel.

The area was loved by Charles Dickens, who lived here, in a rose-brick mansion called Gad’s Hill Place, in the latter years of his life, and incorporated many a setting into his novels. After venturing out from Gad’s Hill one day in search of atmosphere, Dickens described the churchyard in the opening chapter of “Great Expectations,” when young Pip startles Magwitch, an escaped convict hiding among the bedraggled gravestones.

Today, the low marsh country north of Rochester and Chatham, between the estuaries of the Medway and the Thames, has lost none of its atmosphere of brooding isolation, especially when the wind is sighing through the reeds--”cold, bleak, biting weather; foggy withal”--and the marshes are thick with snow.

The author also is closely associated with the Medway River towns and, in particular, with Rochester, 12 miles southeast of London, where he spent a happy and impressionable childhood from age 5 to about 10. The city is steeped in Dickens lore, and it is entirely appropriate that every year it plays host to the internationally famous Dickensian Christmas Festival, when thousands of people don the costume of a century ago and Rochester’s High Street glows with the spirit of Christmas past.

Dickens wrote five books for the Christmas market. The first, “A Christmas Carol,” was released Dec. 19, 1843, and was an instant success. Reviewers vied with one another in eulogy (the Sunday Times even ventured the word sublime ), and by Christmas Day the 6,000 copies of the first edition had sold out; a second edition of 2,000 was almost wholly presold by its publication Jan. 6, 1844, and the book went through seven editions by May.

For nearly 150 years, Charles Dickens’ story of a repentant miser has helped the fast-paced modern world keep the humbug out of Christmas.

The compact cathedral city of Rochester is hardly fast-paced, with its Elizabethan timber-framed inns, tea shops, crafts and antique stores, its traditional gas lamp columns, and red-brick carriage way that has replaced the tar pavement of High Street, itself recently restored to Victorian splendor.

Dickens no doubt downed a pint in the Royal Victoria and Bull Hotel on High Street while contemplating Mr. Pickwick doing the same: The venerable inn appears as The Bull in “Pickwick Papers” and as The Blue Boar in “Great Expectations.” (The “Victoria” in the hotel’s title dates back to Nov. 29, 1836, before Princess Victoria was queen, when she had to stay here because the old Medway bridge on High Street had been made unsafe by a storm.)

On the first Friday evening of every December, the Royal Victoria and Bull rings with sounds of Dickensian jollity, and scenes from the novels are brought to life as Fagin, lovelorn Miss Havisham, Old Ebenezer counting his cash, and other costumed characters--some easily recognizable, others not so familiar--greet revelers at the organizers’ Grand Mistletoe Ball, which is held at different venues and marks the beginning of the Dickensian Christmas Festival.

The festival has become one of the great expectations of the year for local residents who, taking the meaning of “A Christmas Carol” to heart, carry the season’s spirit out of their happy family circles and share it with the world as a whole. Carolers, bell ringers and festival-goers in colorful period costume parade through High Street to the Guildhall Museum to sing under the Christmas tree. (Lanterns are available from the Tourist Information Center, or you can buy your own from the Medway Lions Club stall on Blue Boar Lane.)

Energetic youngsters in costume take part in the turkey dash inspired by “A Christmas Carol” in which Scrooge promises half a crown to the first lad who runs to the butcher and returns with “the biggest turkey you can find in the window.” Mr. Pickwick and the members of his club invite festival-goers to breakfast at the Kings Head Hotel on High Street. And the city mayor leads a parade of Dickensian characters aboard carts pulled by local brewery dray horses, followed by Father Christmas on a sleigh towed, not by his reindeer, but by one of the shire horses from Chatham Historic Dockyard.

The Romans came this way after invading ancient Britain in AD 43, and established Durobrivae, now Rochester, as a staging post on Watling Street, their great highway through Britain. When the Normans invaded, they too grasped the strategic situation of Rochester and built a castle, the keep of which survives, the tallest in England. In due course they replaced the adjacent Saxon church, the second oldest diocese in Britain after Canterbury, with a building that forms the core of the modern cathedral and in which, in the south transept, there is a brass memorial to the writer who spent the impressionable years of his childhood and the later part of his life in or near this city.

Charles Dickens was 5 years old when his father, John Dickens, came from Portsmouth to the Navy Pay Office at Chatham Dockyard in 1816. They lived at No. 2 (now No. 11) Ordnance Terrace, in a row of Georgian houses built in 1794. Dickens’ happiest childhood days were spent in this house with a hayfield opposite, now occupied by Chatham Railway Station. From the window of his attic bedroom Charles could see the view of Rochester Castle and Cathedral across the river from Chatham Dockyards. The rope-makers, the anchorsmiths and blockmakers were seen by young Dickens at their work; he smelled the tar and wood shavings, and sailed down the Medway to Sheerness, passing the black hulks where convicts awaited transportation to Botany Bay, Australia. (In years past, on Nov. 23 the anchorsmiths held a pageant in honor of their patron Saint Clement and visited the inns singing “Beat it out, beat it out--Old Clem! with a clink of the stout (steins)--old Clem,” an event recalled by Dickens when he wrote “Great Expectations” in 1860.)

The people he knew and the places in which he lived powerfully affected the boy’s imagination. Dickens immortalized the Castle, the Cathedral and Eastgate House, which now houses the Charles Dickens Centre, in “Pickwick Papers.” “The Mystery of Edwin Drood” is almost entirely set in Rochester, called Cloisterham, and in it features the Cathedral, Minor Canon Row, Eastgate House--called the Nun’s House--and the black and white Tudor buildings in High Street that were also Uncle Pumblechook’s premises in “Great Expectations.” And Watt’s Charity, a magnificent oak-beamed Tudor house on High Street, appears in the Christmas story called “The Seven Poor Travellers.”

The Poor Travellers’ Procession performed by the Phoenix Players re-enacts the memorable scene from Dickens’ story as part of the annual Christmas Festival. A cast of ragged-trousered down-and-outs makes its way from the Royal Victoria and Bull Hotel to the Charity, colloquially known as “Six Poor Travellers”: The Charity was endowed under the terms of local benefactor Richard Watts’ will of 1579 as a charitable trust to provide a nightly board and lodging for six poor travelers, which it continued to do right up to World War II.

The Medway Lions and Lionesses provide roasted chestnuts, toffee apples and warm muffins for the crowds as they cheer on the needy vagrants. To quote Dickens himself, “Here’s Richness indeed!”

Scrooge’s “bah humbug!” echoes, too, through High Street: “If I could work my will, every idiot who goes about with ‘Merry Christmas’ on his lips, should be boiled with his own pudding, and buried with a stake of holly through his heart!”

Dr. Slammer (of “Pickwick Papers”) takes no notice as he prepares a goose for the oven; while Magwitch, the escaped convict from “Great Expectations,” licks his lips longingly.

Merriment indeed! But hold on to your purses, wallets and silk handkerchiefs for Fagin and Artful Dodger stalk the streets in search of easy pickings.

To be safe, hop aboard the river-bus Clyde and explore the Medway River, which dallying through orchards and hop fields to its confluence with the Thames at the sea, saunters past many haunts of Charles Dickens.

On foot, too, one may follow the journeyings of Dickens through the surrounding countryside. Young Charles and his beloved father would go for long walks. A favorite route was through Rochester past Cobham Hall to Cobham, a charming village with the church of St. Mary Magdalene, and the half-timbered Leather Bottle Inn, still open for food and drink, to which Tracy Tupman fled after being jilted by Rachel Wardle in “Pickwick Papers.”

The Dickenses then entered the shadowy glades of Cobham Wood--”the paths were hard; the grass was crisp and frosty; the air had a fine, dry, bracing coldness”--to come out, two miles further on, by Gad’s Hill. Here the boy gazed upon the white portico of an ivy-fronted mansion overlooking the valley of the Medway--Gad’s Hill Place--where John Dickens told his son that “if you were to be very persevering and were to work hard you might someday come to live in it.” Dickens bought Gad’s Hill in 1856 and lived there for 14 years until his death, on June 9, 1870.

No trip would be complete without a visit to the Charles Dickens Centre (open daily 10 a.m.-5:30 p.m.), housed on High Street in Eastgate House, a magnificent Elizabethan structure built in 1590. In the late 18th Century it was a young ladies’ boarding school: Dickens portrayed it as such in “Pickwick Papers,” though he called it Westgate House and placed it in Bury St. Edmunds.

Standing in the garden of Eastgate House is the Swiss chalet presented to Dickens in 1864 by a French actor, Charles Fechter, and which arrived at Higham railway station packed in 58 packing cases. Dickens installed the chalet on the Gad’s Hill property and used it as a summer house and study; he was writing the last chapters of “The Mystery of Edwin Drood” in the upstairs room when he died.

With luck one might emerge from the Swiss chalet to find a soft blanket of snow on High Street, for it would not be a Dickensian Christmas without snow and ice. Festival organizers offer free skating for those in the costume of the era, on a large synthetic-ice rink installed in the parking lot of the Kings Head Hotel.

Synthetic? Well, Mother Nature can’t be counted on to come up with the goods. Last year, tourism chief Roger Evans was taking no chances after two mild and snowless winters. He hired a snow-making machine which sent soapsud-like flakes showering down on High Street. Alas, the fickle English weather once again played tricks. No sooner had the machine been turned on than nature provided its own authentic flakes to add to the make-believe version. Frosty conditions even caused standing water to freeze on top of the synthetic-ice in the rink, and the skating spectacular billed as the star attraction was temporarily put on ice because it was too cold!

Bob Cratchit going down “a (ice) slide on Cornhill, at the end of a lane of boys, twenty times, in honor of its being Christmas Eve” epitomizes for Dickens the right approach to Christmas. “There are people who will tell you that Christmas is not what it used to be,” he wrote in “Sketches by Boz.” “Dwell not upon the past. Reflect on your present blessing . . . Fill your glass again, with a merry face and a contented heart. Our life on it, but your Christmas shall be merry! “

GUIDEBOOK: The Road to Rochester

Getting there: By car: Rochester is 30 miles from Central London on the A2 and M2 via Greenwich and Dartford. By rail: There is frequent service from Charing Cross and Victoria stations in London to Chatham, Rochester and Strood; travel time is about 45 minutes. By motor-coach: The Maidstone and District Invictaway (local telephone 634-55133) operates daily motor-coach service to and from Victoria Coach Station; travel time is about 80 minutes to Rochester and 90 minutes to Chatham.

Where to eat: Mr. Tope’s Restaurant, 60 High St., 634-845270, housed in one of Rochester’s finest historic buildings, serves English and continental cuisine, traditional afternoon tea, cakes and scones. Another pleasing place to enjoy tempting afternoon tea and scones is the family-owned Castle Restaurant, 151 High St., 634-842812, which also serves traditional English fare for lunch and dinner. Also on High Street is the 400-year-old Jolly Knight & Kings Head Hotel, 634-842709, which features a traditional English carvery, and the Royal Victoria and Bull Hotel, 634-846266, which offers ploughman’s lunch, salads, Scotch eggs and pie washed down by real ales in the Great Expectations Bar, as well as wider options in a full-service restaurant.

For more information: On the Dickensian Christmas Festival, write The Tourist Information Center, Eastgate Cottage, Rochester, Kent ME1 EW; from U.S. telephones, call 011-44-634-843666.