Jasper County Democrat, Volume 14, Number 63, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 11 November 1911 — DICKENS’ OWN PEN PICTURE [ARTICLE]

DICKENS’ OWN PEN PICTURE

Great English Novelist Wrote Humorously of the Details of His Daily Life. For fourteen years Dickens made Broadstairs his principal summer home in England. London alone held a superior place in his affections. He felt hi? powers at their amplest when he was at the little channel coast town. Dickens has given the best picture of himself at his summer . routine in Broadstairs: “In a bay window in a one-pair sits, from 9 o’clock to 1, a gentleman with rather long hair and no neckcloth, who writes and grins, as if he thought he were very funny Indeed. At 1 he disappears, presently emerges from a bathing machine, and may be seen, a kind of salmon colored porpoise, splashing about in the ocean. “After that he may be viewed in another bay window on the ground floor, eating a strong lunch; and after that, walking a dozen miles or so, or lying on his back in the sand reading a book. Nobody bothers him unless they know he is disposed to be talked to; and I am told he is very comfortable, indeed. He’s as brown as a berry, and they do say is a small fortune to the innkeeper who sells beer and cold punch. But this is mere rumor. “Sometimes he goes up to London, (eighty miles or so away), and then, I’m told, there Is a sound in Lincoln’s Inn Fields at night as of men laughing, together with a clinking of knives and forks and wine glasses.”