The post you are reporting:
from the Dover Review March 1964, page27:
When Dickens was in Dover
"Mr Agate was furious. Clutching his tickets - bought and paid for well in advance - he had waited for hours with his family to hear the great Charles Dickens reading his own works to a Dover audience. And then - Disaster.
"All seats gone," the stewards told him, "No, Sir, we can't pack another one in - not even if you HAVE got tickets."
Mr Agate stormed home, wrote a 'blister' to Mr Dickens and delivered the note personally to the Lord Warden Hotel. What Mr Agate said is not on record. But we do know that the letter which Mr Dickens wrote to him from the hotel on November 6th, 1861, was full of apologies, recognised that Mr Agate had 'just cause for complaint,' explained that he himself was not responsible for the ticket arrangements, and assured him tyhaty if there were more readings at Dover Mr Agate would be compensated.
And that did the lucky Dovorians who managed to get in think? Dickens described their reactions in another letter written from the Lord Warden Hotel: "At Dover they wouldn't go but sat applauding like mad," he said. In fact, he found the Dovorians to be the audience with the greatest sense of humour of any to whom he had read on his Provincial tours.
It was from his rooms at the hotel, too, that he wrote this vivid description of a storm. "All the great side of the Lord Warden next to the sea had to be emptied, the break of the waves was so prodigious and the noise so utterly confounding. The sea came in like a great sky of immense clouds forever breaking suddenly into furious rain...."
"Marine Ostrich"
Dickens already knew Dover well, of course. In the summer of1851 he had taken No.10 Camden Crescent fore three months. In "A Tale of Two Cities" he remembered that "the little narrow crooked town of Dover hid irself away from the beach and ran its head into the chalk cliffs like a marine ostrich."
He also remembered in the same book that the air among the houses of Dover was "of so strong a piscatory flavour that one might have supposed that sick fish went up to be dipped in it ......"
Even less flattering, he said this about some of our smuggler forefathers: "A little fishing was done in the port and a quantity of strolling about at night, and looking seawards...." so that "..... small tradesmen, who did no business whatsoever sometimes unaccountably realised large fortunes, and it was remarkable that nobody in the neighbourhood could endure a lamplighter."
That One Plaque
In "The Uncommercial Traveller" Dickens saw the sea at Dover "tumbling in with deep sounds after dark, and the revolving French light on Cap Grisnez regularly bursting out and becoming obscured as if the head of a gigantic lightkeeper, in an anxious state of mind, were interposed every half minute to see how it was burning."
Perhaps Dover does not do Dickens justice with that one plaque - about the fictitious David Copperfield - in the Market Square. Perhaps we ought also to tell the world with two more notices - on what was the Lord Warden Hotel and somewhere in Camden Crescent that "Charles Dickens stayed here"
After all, if other towns in the neighbourhood had the same opportunity they certainly wouldn't be slow in taking advantage of it.
- Pitt Clark
