Visiting Hove

 

Yesterday I gave my niece Tash a lift to her flat-share in Hove, and my eye caught the blue plaque a few doors up the street. 

John Leech was an illustrator for Punch, and also, now and then, for Charles Dickens, most famously in A Christmas Carol (1843) and its successors. 

Apparently the plaque is not quite accurate. 16 Lansdowne Place was actually a lodging house where, in February 1849, stayed Mr and Mrs Leech, Mr and Mrs Dickens, their two daughters and Dickens' sister-in-law. (Source: Judy Middleton's excellent Hove history blog, http://hovehistory.blogspot.com/2015/11/lansdowne-place-hove.html .)

Here's how Forster describes the 1849 visit:

His [Dickens'] first seaside holiday in 1849 was at Brighton, where he passed some weeks in February; and not, I am bound to add, without the usual unusual adventure to signalize his visit. He had not been a week in his lodgings, where Leech and his wife joined him, when both his landlord and the daughter of his landlord went raving mad, and the lodgers were driven away to the Bedford hotel. "If you could have heard the cursing and crying of the two; could have seen the physician and nurse quoited out into the passage by the madman at the hazard of their lives; could have seen Leech and me flying to the doctor's rescue; could have seen our wives pulling us back; could have seen the M.D. faint with fear; could have seen three other M.D.'s come to his aid; with an atmosphere of Mrs. Gamps, strait-waistcoats, struggling friends and servants, surrounding the whole; you would have said it was quite worthy of me, and quite in keeping with my usual proceedings." The letter ended with a word on what then his thoughts were full of, but for which no name had yet been found. "A sea-fog to-day, but yesterday inexpressibly delicious. My mind running, like a high sea, on names—not satisfied yet, though." When he next wrote from the seaside, in the beginning of July, he had found the name; had started his book; and was "rushing to Broadstairs" to write the fourth number of David Copperfield.

(Source: https://www.gutenberg.org/files/25851/25851-h/25851-h.htm .)

Was the story true? Doubtless it was, in outline. But Dickens was rather prone to dismissing people as "raving mad" if their behaviour inconvenienced him. When his marriage broke down a few years later, he would account for it by describing his wife's behaviour in the same way. Not, of course, an unusual thing to do.

"Mr Fezziwig's Ball", John Leech's frontispiece to A Christmas Carol. 

[Image source:  British Library (https://www.bl.uk/romantics-and-victorians/articles/the-origins-of-a-christmas-carol).]

Dickens had a high regard for "kind-hearted" Leech's gently satirical art, undiminished even by a massive blunder in one of the illustrations to The Battle of Life (which Dickens complained of to Forster, but couldn't face pointing out to Leech himself).

 Dickens saw him as having brought beauty into a line of art previously distinguished for cruel ugliness (e.g. Rowlandson, Gillray); in Leech, he wrote, caricature had become character. Perhaps he saw a kind of parallel to his own work when compared to fiercer predecessors like Smollett; no less trenchant but more broadly humane and open to sentiment. 

Looking down the street to the sea.

The view out back.

Another blue plaque further down the street. Charles Augustin Busby was the architect of this lower part of the street, and himself lived at No. 2 from 1829 until his death in 1834. Despite contributing so much to Hove's fine facades (e.g. here, Brunswick Square, Brunswick Terrace...), he died bankrupt.

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But no visit to Hove should conclude without Lee Harwood, whose memorial bench stands in Brunswick Square. Here's a poem from his final  collection The Orchid Boat (2014).

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Departures

         A hot summer night,
the sound of rain in the courtyard.
                 A satin breeze
         sways the curtains.
                    She wrote
                       ‘Gently I open
     my silk dress and float alone
       on the orchid boat. Who can
take a letter beyond the clouds?’ 
       All those years ago
                    And he wrote
‘A picture held us captive and we
        could not get outside it.’
         When the winter came
                    she wrote
   ‘I put on my new quilted robe
      sewn with gold thread.’
         Is that how you saw it? 
Passing a mirror in a dusky corridor
—that face, the tilt of those shoulders.
   Or in the bright light of morning
the details of your face in that mirror
—a picture, as though set, that maps
      the wear of years, dreams,
       that this is where we’ve come to,
    and the future best left to itself.
 The letter will reach the other side of the                                         mountains,
 clouds will roll back clear of the summits.
What was needed was done, but never done,
                         it’s never done.
           Plodding along the mountain path—
drifts of rain, streams sweeping across the path,
       cloud so low you can barely see the path
                 as you stumble on loose rock.
              How to imagine an orchid boat?
      It gets harder. But days come and go,
the sun comes out and everything seems to                                           sparkle
                 and the letter spirals away.
       The picture in the mirror seemed so real,
   though only caught that imprisoning moment.
  A golden leaf in autumn spins into a dark river
where the currents dance it underwater back                            and forth, side to side.
                          Without thinking
              I step aboard the orchid boat,
                            the feel of silk
            carrying me beyond all mirrors.

(Poem source: https://kenneturner.com/tag/romanticized/ .)