Dickens wrote affectionately about Broadstairs in ‘Our Watering Place’ (Household Words 1851). In a more intimate letter to the actor William Macready written in 1842, he called the town ‘the chosen resort and retreat of jaded intellect and exhausted nature’.
Charles Dickens lived in Kent between 1816 and 1822 and returned for holidays, before moving to Gad's Hill, near Rochester, for the last fourteen years of his life.
2 Nuckell’s Place in Broadstairs is now better known as the Dickens House Museum. Better still, as Betsey Trotwood’s cottage in David Copperfield. In the 20th century it was also the home of dramatist and Dickens festival organiser Gladys Waterer.
Dickens’s Dover Road in David Copperfield becomes a traceable corridor across Kent when early modern and nineteenth-century maps anchor the route from Canterbury to Dover. Comparing cartography with agricultural and coastal landscapes reconstructs likely travel conditions, from traffic levels and dust to shifting smells of hops, livestock, and sea air.
David Copperfield comes to understand his past by literally walking away from it. The difficult question of what home means – and where it might be – is explored through his symbolic journey from London to Dover.
David Copperfield's Canterbury setting galvanised local calls for a local branch of the Dickens Society. But Dickens's response to the city is more ambivalent than the novel suggests.
In the nineteenth century, Broadstairs maintained its reputation as a peaceful seaside town largely untouched by the commercial development of nearby Ramsgate and Margate. In the summer months, the sea bathing and slower pace of life attracted celebrity authors including Dickens and Wilkie Collins.
Elizabeth Waterman-Scrase provides an intimate view of the London to Dover road trod by Dicken's David Copperfield's in their consideration of mid-19th century road building, improvement and traversing.
This visual essay by Jacqui Stamp discusses the mythical but enduring folk tradition of the early 19th century Hooden Horse in Kent.
Dickens was involved in the Staplehurst railway disaster of 9 June 1865, when the tidal train from Folkestone was derailed by a partially repaired bridge. He carefully concealed the damaging detail that he had been travelling with Ellen Ternan and her mother.
The Goodwin Sands, about 7 miles off the coast of Broadstairs, were notoriously dangerous in stormy weather. Dickens vividly describes the impact of a storm in 1851, while he was staying in Broadstairs.
William Harrison Ainsworth emerges as a prolific nineteenth-century writer whose Gothic romance Rookwood links literary celebrity to Kent through Canterbury and the Newgate fascination with crime. The essay traces Ainsworth’s circles with figures like Dickens and shows how his portrayal of the self-styled Knight of Malta draws on the real John Nichols Thom and the Bossenden Wood uprising.