CHAPTER VII

HOME LIFE IN EUROPE

(1868-1872)

MR. AND MRS. NORTON had been but a short time on English soil when they went by invitation to stay with Dickens at Gad's Hill-"the identical spot," as Dickens, in a letter to Lady John Russell, says about the house," where Falstaff ran away." A letter written by Norton to his mother, from Gad's Hill, was devoted largely to his own search for a house, suited to the needs of his family and not too far from London; but it contains also passages of a wider interest.

To Mrs. Andrews Norton

GAD'S HILL PLACE HIGHAM BY ROCHESTER, KENT Sunday, August 9, 1868.

MY DEAREST MOTHER, - I wish you were here with us, to share in the pleasures of our visit to this delightful home, and I wish I had leisure to write to you at real length of my various interesting experiences during the days since I left you....

I spent Thursday evening as I have told you with Ruskin, and came back on Friday evening to Denmark Hill1 where I spent the night. I was delighted to find Ruskin looking well — quite unchanged since we saw

1 Ruskin's house, on the outskirts of London, where he lived till March, 1872, three months after his mother's death.

him, except perhaps for some lines of age, and in a perfectly sane and sweet condition of mind. No expressions could have been more full of affection than those he lavished upon me, and I had really a very happy time with him. He says he is much better this summer than for a long time before- and he is cheerful and hard at work. The house is wonderfully full of most wonderful and beautiful things. It is a treasure house of Turners. But all this must be left for talk when we meet.

After rather too fatiguing a morning in London, Sue and I met Dickens at the train at a little after two o'clock. He was most cordial and pleasant. We reached Gad's Hill about four and were received here by the family with delightful hospitality. The family now consists of Miss Dickens, Mr. and Mrs. Charles Collins and two little children,1 (a girl a little older than Eliot, and a dear quaint little boy not quite so old as Sally,) Dickens's two youngest boys, (one of whom is going to Cambridge two months hence, and the other is going to Australia next month to join an elder brother who has been there for three or four years,) and Miss Hogarth, - this is the family, and staying here apparently on a very long visit is Mr. Henry Chorley. The whole family, together and individually, are peculiarly attractive and pleasant, and the life of the house seems to be entirely sweet and affectionate and simple. There is something very sad, indeed, in seeing poor Mr. Collins. He has been ill for a long time, and now seems to have but a few months to live. He is

1 The children of Dickens's son Charles.

- made up

very gentle and patient and takes a pleasant part in all that goes on. Both Miss Dickens and Mrs. Collins are particularly refined and interesting women. There was a dinner party in the evening, of officers from the garrison at Chatham, and after the company had gone and the family had gone to bed Dickens and I had a long talk. This morning he proposed a walk, but I did not feel strong enough for it, and you see how I have spent a good portion of the forenoon. To-morrow we go - Dickens, Miss Dickens, Susan and I, to Canterbury, - so that Sue will not get back to you till Tuesday night. I wish I were to see you then; but I must keep away till I get a house.1

...

After the visit to Dickens, a few days spent with the Gaskells in Manchester, and a brief stay at Oxford, the Nortons established themselves at Keston Rectory near Bromley-in Kent-and not far from the Darwins at Down. The acquaintance and friendly intercourse with the Darwin family at this time grew to a closer intimacy when, in 1877, Charles Darwin's eldest son, William, married Sara Sedgwick, Mrs. Charles Norton's younger sister. Frederic Harrison, living in these years with his father at Eden Park, where Gibbon once stayed, was also a neighbour of the Nortons; they met at Eden Park, and the mutual regard which then drew the English Comtist and the liberal American together was of a sort to last through life.2

1 Later, in Italy, Mrs. Norton wrote a fuller account of this visit to Gad's Hill, with many details throwing light upon the personality of Dickens. See Scribner's Magazine, April, 1913.

See Among my Books, by Frederic Harrison (1912) containing a paper

At Keston the Nortons spent several months of great content, but for a somewhat severe illness which for several weeks in the autumn confined Norton to his room. In a letter to Miss Gaskell (August 14, 1868) he describes the place:

"After much search I have found this house, in the midst of truly delightful and most English scenery. We are literally close to a little old country church, within a stone's throw of a great finely wooded park (lately Lord Cranworth's) and within a quarter of a mile of a very wide upland common covered with heath and furze, and with a beautiful view over the pleasant country of Surrey and far away up to London. The house is a nice, quiet, ugly old-fashioned brick rectory, with superb trees close by it, and standing on a pretty little terrace above a garden."

Writing to Lowell, two weeks later, Norton says more of "the pleasant country of Surrey," in words reminding one of the "deeper familiarity" which the young Americans of Kipling's delightful story, “An Habitation Enforced," found in just such surroundings.

To J. R. Lowell

KESTON RECTORY, BROMLEY, KENT, August 30, 1868.

Would you were here this Sunday evening! Would you had been here all day to walk with us among the oaks of Holwood Park, or over the lovely fields and

on "Charles Eliot Norton." This tribute by a friend gives a vivid impression of Norton and his wife in 1868.

through the still lovelier lanes of this most rurally picturesque and characteristic of English neighbourhoods. Just think how much of England we have here, first the county itself, Chaucer's county; then the great place close by us, Pitt's home where he had gone bird's-nesting in his youth, and to which he came in his later life from choice, then a great Roman camp, and in the fields next to ours the remains of some Roman villas; then a great wide upland common with windmills on it, and covered with heather and gorse; then such lanes as are hardly to be matched in England; and meadows and fields and hills and dales the sweetness and tenderness of whose curves and slopes, the delicacy of whose lines, the exquisite variety of whose soft sweeps is something quite unknown to our own dear country where Nature seems to have been in a hurry to finish her work, and left much in block instead of completing it with the final touches of artistic feeling and lingering affection; then picturesque farm houses and farm yards such as we used to see in picture books, and great ricks of straw, and flocks of sheep, and coveys of partridges, and rabbits in all the banks, and sparrows and finches and starlings in all the hedges, and everywhere that old world look and those old world things which in spite of their novelty and strangeness have for me, — and for you too, — a deeper familiarity than the very things that have lain before our eyes since we were born. . . .

In Norton's journal there is an account of his first meeting at this time with G. H. Lewes.