Page:Notes and Queries - Series 11 - Volume 7.djvu/519

 ns. vii. jdne 28,1913.] NOTES AND QUERIES. 511 while Great Charles Street Was quite, so to speak, off a visitor's beat, and still further away from the hotel. Dickens had no need to find out a house with three steps to it •anywhere, whether in Great Charles Street, Newhall Street, Conegreve Street, or any other "quiet substantial - looking street." But the Square, though close to the hotel, was near no canal, and Mr. Winkle's house was " at the canal "—that is, at (or near) the (headquarters) of the canal, which until a few months ago stood almost within a stone's throw of the conspicuous corner house with the seven or eight steps. The house (not " now hidden behind a large hoarding," as stated by Mb. Fry) was, when I last saw its remains two or three months ago, for the most part demolished, its ruins were exposed for all to see, though, perhaps, a third of the mangled fabric was then still holding together. It is not unfair to assume that the strange wharf offices took the fancy of Dickens, and that he was interested in the story of the canal navigation movement, much talked of in pre-railway days. He visualized the district, and mentally noted the picturesque offices and house—the latter just the sort of house suited for a fairly prosperous wharfinger's abode—and in due course introduced them both into the pages of ' Pickwick.' He made a trivial mistake about the number of the steps, a mistake concerning a casually noticed house any chance passer-by might easily make. The residence faced the end of Broad Street at the corner of Easy Row ("a quiet substantial-looking street "), and was once almost opposite the garden wall of the printer Baskerville's house—a dead wall in a quiet street; but for a slight curve in the street there could easily have been seen from its steps the bridge in Broad Street crossing the canal. In 1830 this, then newly opened, bridge was one of the Birmingham " sights " shown to visitors, among whom in that year Was a distinguished party which included the Duke of Wellington and Sir Robert Peel. These statesmen and their friends, then unpopular in the Midlands, on entering carriages to proceed from the Royal Hotel (the scene of the Pickwickians' interview with the waiter) to the Society of Arts rooms, " were assailed by considerable hissing " ; but on visiting the Broad Street bridge they entered a barge and (to quote a contemporary newspaper account) " pro- ceeded to examine the work of that stu- pendous undertaking." All this goes to emphasize the fact that the curved line of Way from the wharf offices past the comer house on the right to the commonplace bridge was considered to be worth talking about in the days of the writing of ' Pick- wick,' and so much so that the quick-witted Dickens, note-book in hand, seized the salient street features of the district as local copy, and subsequently used them, when relating Birmingham incidents, in more than one of his works. He had no need to go to Great Charles Street: he knew, without going so far afield, of a weird wharf and a notable house—excellent pro- perties for the legitimate copy of an alert author out for the purpose of the creation of imaginative and appealing fiction. Years afterwards the same canal found its Way into ' The Old Curiosity Shop,' and the " fire watcher " who befriended little Nell and her grandfather was probably met with in lower'Broad Street, near the old Eagle Foundry, between Mr. Winkle's house and the bridge visited by Wellington and Peel. In 1862 there was opened on the same bridge the Unitarian Church of the Messiah, a top-stone of which was laid by Mr. Arthur Ryland, the practical founder of the Bir- mingham and Midland Institute, and a personal friend of Charles Dickens. The unusual situation of the Church " not founded upon a rock" gave rise at the time to an epigram in Birmingham's famous satirical paper. The Town Crier (which ran from 1861 to late in 1903). as follows :— St. Peter's world-wide diocese Rests ou the power of the keys ; Our Church, a trifle heterodox Will rest upon a power of locks. It was to Ryland that Dickens wrote in 1853 offering to give a public reading of his ' Christmas Carol' on behalf of the Institute : " There would be some novelty in the thing, as I have never done it in public, though I have in private, and (if I may say so) with a great effect on the hearers." The reading (with others) took place in the Christmas week of 1853. A few days later Dickens again wrote to Ryland:— "I am quite delighted to find you are so well satisfied I think I was never better pleased in my life than I was with my Birmingham friends. He had already written to another corre- spondent :— " I never saw, uordo I suppose anybody ever did, such an interesting sight as the working people's night. There were 2,o00 of them there, and a more delicately observant audience it is impossible to imagine. They lost nothing, misinterpreted no- thing, followed everything closely, laughed and cried with most delightful earnestness, and ani- mated me to that extent that I felt as if we were all bodily going up into the clouds together."