Sketches, Dispatches, Hull Tales and Ballads - University of Hull

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Oliver Twist. Despite its grandeur, the Thames at nearly midnight,
looks as muddy and marshy as the Kent landscape, with its riverside
buildings , the old ‘smoke-stained storehouses on either side,’ rising
‘heavy and dull from the dense mass of roofs and gables,’ the ‘forest
of shipping below bridge’ almost invisible in the darkness (Ch. 46).
London Bridge makes another fleeting appearance in Great
Expectations, as Magwitch is rowed down river, past the kind of
waterfront scenery which clearly fascinated Dickens in novel after
novel. However urgent the pressures of plot, he always takes time to
note the maritime clutter of dockyards, which Pip recalls as ‘rusty
chain-cables, frayed hempen hawsers and bobbing buoys,’ down to
the level of miscellaneous surface rubbish as their boat momentarily
collides with ‘floating broken baskets, scattering floating chips of
wood and shaving, cleaving floating scum of coal’ (Ch.54). There
was clearly little about rivers, or dockyards, which Dickens failed to
observe throughout his life. David Copperfield, on his way to stay
for the first time in Mr Peggotty’s wonderful upturned boat-house
in Yarmouth, notices every scrap of nautical debris which builds his
excitement as they near the beach: the ‘lanes bestrewn with bits of
chips and little hillocks of sand,’ ‘the gas-works, rope-walks, boatbuilders’
yards, shipwrights’ yards, ship-breakers’ yards, caulkers’
yards, riggers’ lofts, smiths’ forges, and a great litter of such places’
(Ch. 3). In rhythmic, lilting lists like this Dickens is half way towards
a poem, sharing his hero’s excitement about everything to do with
the sea and rivers. The strange sound of the technical terms –
‘caulkers’, and ‘rope-walks’ – fascinates him, removed as it is from
the language of everyday life, and redolent of places where men do
real work in tough physical conditions. His late series of essays, e
Uncommercial Traveller (1860-9), takes this further in a chapter on
the bustling life of ‘Down by the Docks’: in this case, the Rochester
waterfront, where he lists in dizzying detail the food, drink, oysters,
fishy, scaly-looking vegetables, public-houses, coffee-shops, drunken
seamen with tattooed arms, sausages and saveloys, hornpipes,
parrots, waxworks, and poetic placards rhyming: ‘Come, cheer up