Dickens in Naples

vetturino

So we go, rattling down-hill, into Naples. A funeral is coming up the street, toward us. The body, on an open bier, borne on a kind of palanquin, covered with a gay cloth of crimson and gold. The mourners, in white gowns and masks. If there be death abroad, life is well represented too, for all Naples would seem to be out of doors, and tearing to and fro in carriages.
 Some of these, the common Vetturino vehicles, are drawn by three horses abreast, decked with smart trappings and great abundance of brazen ornament, and always going very fast. Not that their loads are light; for the smallest of them has at least six people inside, four in front, four or five more hanging behind, and two or three more, in a net or bag below the axle-tree, where they lie half-suffocated with mud and dust.

via chiaja today

Exhibitors of Punch, buffo singers with guitars, reciters of poetry, reciters of stories, a row of cheap exhibitions with clowns and showmen, drums, and trumpets, painted cloths representing the wonders within, and admiring crowds assembled without, assist the whirl and bustle. Ragged lazzaroni lie asleep in doorways, archways, and kennels; the gentry, gaily drest, are dashing up and down in carriages on the Chiaja, or walking in the Public Gardens; and quiet letter-writers, perched behind their little desks and inkstands under the Portico of the Great Theater of San Carlo, in the public street, are waiting for clients.



Why do the beggars rap their chins constantly, with their right hands, when you look at them? Everything is done in pantomime in Naples, and that is the conventional sign for hunger. A man who is quarreling with another, yonder, lays the palm of his right hand on the back of his left, and shakes the two thumbs—expressive of a donkey's ears—whereat his adversary is goaded to desperation. Two people bargaining for fish, the buyer empties an imaginary waistcoat pocket when he is told the price, and walks away without a word, having thoroughly conveyed to the seller that he considers it too dear. Two people in carriages, meeting, one touches his lips, twice or thrice, holding up the five fingers of his right hand, and gives a horizontal cut in the air with the palm. The other nods briskly, and goes his way. He has been invited to a friendly dinner at half-past five o'clock, and will certainly come.



All over Italy, a peculiar shake of the right hand from the wrist, with the forefinger stretched out, expresses a negative—the only negative beggars will ever understand. But, in Naples, those five fingers are a copious language. All this, and every other kind of out-door life and stir, and maccaroni-eating at sunset, and flower-selling all day long, and begging and stealing everywhere and at all hours, you see upon the bright sea-shore, where the waves of the Bay sparkle merrily....



Capri—once made odious by the deified beast Tiberius—Ischia, Procida, and the thousand distant beauties of the Bay, lie in the blue sea yonder, changing in the mist and sunshine twenty times a day; now close at hand, now far off, now unseen. The fairest country in the world, is spread about us. Whether we turn toward the Miseno shore of the splendid watery amphitheater, and go by the Grotto of Posilipo to the Grotto del Cane and away to Baiae, or take the other way, toward Vesuvius and Sorrento, it is one succession of delights. In the last-named direction, where, over doors and archways, there are countless little images of San Gennaro, with this Canute's hand stretched out, to check the fury of the burning Mountain, we are carried pleasantly, by a railroad on the beautiful Sea Beach, past the town of Torre del Greco, built upon the ashes of the former town destroyed by an eruption of Vesuvius, within a hundred years; and past the flat-roofed houses, granaries, and maccaroni manufacturies; to Castellamare, with its ruined castle, now inhabited by fishermen, standing in the sea upon a heap of rocks.

Here, the railroad terminates; but, hence we may ride on, by an unbroken succession of enchanting bays, and beautiful scenery, sloping from the highest summit of Saint Angelo, the highest neighboring mountain, down to the water's edge—among vineyards, olive-trees, gardens of oranges and lemons, orchards, heaped-up rocks, green gorges in the hills—and by the bases of snow-covered heights, and through small towns with handsome, dark-haired women at the doors—and pass delicious summer villas—to Sorrento, where the poet Tasso drew his inspiration from the beauty surrounding him. Returning, we may climb the heights above Castellamare, and looking down among the boughs and leaves, see the crisp water glistening in the sun; and clusters of white houses in distant Naples, dwindling, in the great extent of prospect, down to dice. The coming back to the city, by the beach again, at sunset; with the glowing sea on one side, and the darkening mountain (Vesuvius), with its smoke and flame, upon the other, is a sublime conclusion to the glory of the day.

porta capuna

That church by the Porta Capuna—near the old fisher-market in the dirtiest quarter of dirty Naples, where the revolt of Masaniello began—is memorable for having been the scene of one of his earliest proclamations to the people, and is particularly remarkable for nothing else, unless it be its waxen and bejeweled Saint in a glass case, with two odd hands; or the enormous number of beggars who are constantly rapping their chins there, like a battery of castanets. The cathedral with the beautiful door, and the columns of African and Egyptian granite that once ornamented the temple of[Pg 22] Apollo, contains the famous sacred blood of San Gennaro or Januarius, which is preserved in two phials in a silver tabernacle, and miraculously liquefies three times a year, to the great admiration of the people. At the same moment, the stone (distant some miles) where the Saint suffered martyrdom, becomes faintly red. It is said that the officiating priests turn faintly red also, sometimes, when these miracles occur.



The old, old men who live in hovels at the entrance of these ancient catacombs, and who, in their age and infirmity, seem waiting here, to be buried themselves, are members of a curious body, called the Royal Hospital, who are the official attendants at funerals. Two of these old specters totter away, with lighted tapers, to show the caverns of death—as unconcerned as if they were immortal. They were used as burying-places for three hundred years; and, in one part, is a large pit full of skulls and bones, said to be the sad remains of a great mortality occasioned by a plague. In the rest, there is nothing but dust. They consist, chiefly, of great wide corridors and labyrinths, hewn out of the rock. At the end of some of these long passages, are unexpected glimpses of the daylight, shining down from above. It looks as ghastly and as strange; among the torches, and the dust, and the dark vaults; as if it, too, were dead and buried.



The present burial-place lies out yonder, on a hill between the city and Vesuvius. The old Campo Santo with its three hundred and sixty-five pits, is only used for those who die in hospitals, and prisons, and are unclaimed by their friends. The graceful new cemetery, at no great distance from it, tho yet unfinished, has already many graves among its shrubs and flowers, and airy colonnades. It might be reasonably objected elsewhere, that some of the tombs are meretricious and too fanciful; but the general brightness seems to justify it here; and Mount Vesuvius, separated from them by a lovely slope of ground, exalts and saddens the scene.



If it be solemn to behold from this new City of the Dead, with its dark smoke hanging in the clear sky, how much more awful and impressive is it, viewed from the ghostly ruins of Herculaneum and Pompeii!



Stand at the bottom of the great market-place of Pompeii, and look up the silent streets, through the ruined temples of Jupiter and Isis, over the broken houses with their inmost sanctuaries open to the day, away to Mount Vesuvius, bright and snowy in the peaceful distance; and lose all count of time, and heed of other things, in the strange and melancholy sensation of seeing the Destroyed and the Destroyer making this quiet picture in the sun. Then, ramble on, and see, at every turn, the little familiar tokens of human habitation and everyday pursuits, the chafing of the bucket-rope in the stone rim of the exhausted well; the track of carriage-wheels in the pavement of the street; the marks of drinking-vessels on the stone counter of the wine-shop; the amphoræ in private cellars, stored away so many hundred years ago, and undisturbed to this hour all rendering the solitude and deadly lonesomeness of the place, ten thousand times more solemn, than if the volcano, in its fury, had swept the city from the earth, and sunk it in the bottom of the sea.Today when you turn the corner from Tavistock Street into Wellington Street in Covent Garden you find the Charles Dickens Coffee House serving up steaming cappuccinos with literary history as sprinkles. This was once the busy office where Dickens published his periodical All The Year Round from 1859 until his death in 1870.

Raise your eyes to roof level and you will see the attic rooms which he kept as his hideaway. Long since converted into a smart flat with one double bedroom, these are now coming to the market priced at £475,000 through LDG (020 7580 1010). During this later period of his life, when he spent many nights here, Dickens wrote A Tale of Two Cities, Great Expectations, Our Mutual Friend, began Edwin Drood and set off on strenuous reading tours at home and abroad. This too is where Wilkie Collins must have delivered instalments for The Woman in White andThe Moonstone for inclusion in All The Year Round.

In her biography of Dickens, Claire Tomalin describes him installing gas lighting to the third floor and using the makeshift pied-à-terre to dress and dine before going to the theatre. He referred to it as a sort of summer gipsy tent.

It is particularly interesting that he created the refuge as he became disenchanted with his wife Catherine and began a separate life. He eventually made Gad's Hill in Kent his main home and occasionally rented a house in London. The rooms helped him to conceal his relationship with Nelly Ternan, allowing overnight stays within a web of complicated travel arrangements, dashing to and from France (where she was living for a while) and all over the country on reading tours. He ordered in turtle soup and salmon from Fortnum's, served up ice gin punch to his friends, boiled his kettle on a camp stove and kept his velvet smoking jacket here.

These days, though the kitchen is slick and modern, the flat still has an air of the bohemian eyrie about it, with views across the rooftops of Covent Garden. "This flat is a real piece of literary history," says Ben Everest, partner at LDG who is handling the sale. "It would make a good buy-to-let investment, having previously been let at £400 per week.

Where excited readers once clamoured outside for the next instalment of their favourite novel, now there is a blue plaque commemorating his years here. Notebook in hand, Dickens must have set off on his now famous all-night walks. "I am always wandering here and there from my rooms in Covent-garden, London – now about city streets: now about the country bye-roads – seeing many little things, and some great things, which, because they interest me, I think may interest others."

The current owner, Charlie Wood, bought the flat in 2005 and is an avid fan of Dickens. He particularly loves A Tale of Two Cities, some of which must have been written here.

"The fabric and layout of the building are, I think, little changed since his day," he says. "When you walk out of the door or look out of the window and see the roof of Covent Garden market, it is wonderful to imagine what it must have been like 160 years ago.

"You really feel like you're in the beating heart of a great creative city. I shall miss it a lot," he says.

HOMES WITH LITERARY CONNECTIONS FOR SALE

Home to Henry Williamson, author of Tarka the Otter

During the Second World War Williamson bought a farm on the north Norfolk coast and wrote The Story of a Norfolk Farm about his early struggle on the land. He lived at this tiny two-bedroom flint cottage, Meadow Lea Cottage, Church Street, Stiffkey, and wrote in the old washhouse in the garden. After eight years he left to begin his life in Devon. £495,000, Bedfords (01328 730500)

Where Dickens first thought of Little Nell

This Grade I Georgian three-bedroom town house in St James's Square, Bath, was the home of writer Walter Savage Landor, and Dickens always stayed with him when he visited the city. It was while he stayed here in 1840 that Dickens first thought of Little Nell and the first seed of The Old Curiosity Shop was sown. Hamptons International (01225 312244) is selling it at £1.15 million.

Before Winnie the Pooh

A A Milne lived at Broadgate House, Steeple Bumpstead, Essex, while he was working for Punch, before he married and Christopher Robin was born. It is close by The Splash, a ford where the Bumpstead Brook crosses the road and small children still play Poohsticks. Carter Jonas (01223 368771) is asking £1.275 million.