On July 2nd 1844 the Dickens family arrived off the steam packet from Dover. The family stayed at l'hôtel des Bains in Boulogne, n°69 rue de l'écu (now rue Victor Hugo), before leaving for Genoa in Italy the following day.
In early September 1852 Dickens, his wife Catherine, and Georgina Hogarth, Catherine's junior of 12 years, embarked for Boulogne-sur-Mer for two weeks during which they stayed at l'hôtel des Bains.
As he returned there, Charles Dickens must have liked the town of Boulogne, the following year he rented the property of M. Beaucourt-Mutual there: le château des moulineaux.
As Charles Dickens liked to make known the towns of his holidays he published an article on Boulogne-sur-Mer in Household Words on November 4th 1854 entitled: "Our French Watering Place". He had published another article in 1851 on Broadstairs: "Our English Watering Place".
Quotations
Ayant gagné, par de nombreuses années de loyauté, le droit d’être parfois infidèle à notre station balnéaire anglaise, nous avons flirté, depuis deux ou trois saisons, avec une station balnéaire française : autrefois seulement connue de nous comme une ville avec une très longue rue, commençant par un abattoir et finissant par un bateau à vapeur, qu’il nous semblait de notre destin d’apercevoir seulement à l’aube des matins d’hiver, quand, à l’époque qui précédait les chemins de fers continentaux, juste suffisamment éveillés pour savoir que nous étions des plus inconfortablement endormis, c’était notre destinée de toujours la traverser à grand fracas, dans le coupé de la diligence venant de Paris, en laissant derrière nous une mer douce, et avec une mer agitée devant.
"Our French Watering Place" cité dans De Boulogne à Condette. Une histoire d’amitié. Charles Dickens Ferdinand Beaucourt-Mutuel, Janine Watrin, imprimerie Mordacq, 1992, p36.
Parce que ce lieu est parfaitement accessible, il est de bon ton de dire qu’il n’a pas de caractère, qu’il est tout à fait anglais, qu’il n’y a rien de continental en lui, et ainsi de suite. C’est l’endroit le plus bizarre, le plus pittoresque, le meilleur que je connaisse; les marins et les pêcheurs forment une race tout à fait à part, et certains de leurs villages valent tout à fait les villages de pêcheurs de la Méditerranée. La Haute Ville, avec une promenade tout autour des remparts, est charmante. Les promenades dans la campagne, délicieuses. C’est le meilleur mélange de ville et de campagne (avec l’air de la mer par-dessus le marché) que j’ai jamais vu; tout est bon marché, tout est bon; et plaise à Dieu que je vienne écrire sur ces dits remparts en juillet prochain.
Lettre à John Forster, Boulogne, Octobre 1852 citée dans De Boulogne à Condette. Une histoire d’amitié. Charles Dickens Ferdinand Beaucourt-Mutuel, Janine Watrin, imprimerie Mordacq, 1992, p16.
Il y a une promenade charmante, ombragée par une voûte d’arbres, sur les vieux murs qui forment les quatre côtés de la Haute Ville, d’où vous pouvez apercevoir les rues en-dessous, et le spectacle changeant de l’autre ville et de la rivière, des collines et de la mer. Cette promenade est d’autant plus agréable et curieuse que l’on y rencontre quelques vieilles maisons solennelles qui, enracinées au bas des rues profondes, s’ouvrent à une autre existence au sommet, ayant des portes et des fenêtres, et même des jardins, sur ces mêmes remparts. (...) C’est un lieu merveilleusement peuplé d’enfants; des enfants anglais, avec des gouvernantes lisant des romans pendant qu’ils marchent le long des allées ombragées d’arbres, ou des nurses, sur les bancs, échangeant des potins; des enfants français avec leurs bonnes souriantes à la coiffe d’un blanc de neige; si ce sont des petits garçons, avec des chapeaux de paille en forme de ruches, des paniers à ouvrage et des agenouilloirs.
extrait de « Our French Watering Place », un article de Charles Dickens publié dans Household Words le 4 novembre 1854 repris dans De Boulogne à Condette (...), Janine Watrin, imprimerie Mordacq, 1992, p29.
In early September 1852 Dickens, his wife Catherine, and Georgina Hogarth, Catherine's junior of 12 years, embarked for Boulogne-sur-Mer for two weeks during which they stayed at l'hôtel des Bains...
By October 1853 the family has returned to England with the exception of Dickens himself who was in Switzerland, and two of his sons, Franck and Alfred, who became pupils at a private boarding school...
Dickens was obviously enjoying the summer in Broadstairs when he wrote this letter entreating his friend Mark Lemon and his wife to come visit the family in Broadstairs...
The family were staying in the Albion Hotel that had acquired a house that was once simply adjoined to it in which the Dickens had stayed several times before...
In this letter to his friend Macready, Dickens ‘solemnly declares’ his affection for Broadstairs and proclaims it to be ‘the finest feature in all creation’...
Although the fictitious donkey-chaser, Miss Betsey Trotwood, lived in Dover, her real-life equivalent, Miss Pearson Strong, lived in Broadstairs along Victoria Parade...
Fond of Broadstairs as he was, Dickens was however not oblivious to the dramatic weather that it could host, nor to the fact that it was chosen by many (including himself) as a place of pure air and therefore beneficial to the health...
The situation must indeed have been unbearable as it nearly drove Dickens from the town he cherished so much as he mentions in this letter to John Forster...
After a period of fatigue which he was seeking to recover from at Broadstairs, Dickens wrote to a friend that he was now ready to write the 18th number of the Pickwick Papers (which does not allude to the town)...
In 1817 the five year old Charles Dickens moved with his family from London and after a brief stay in Sheerness, settled in Chatham, where his father, a clerk in the Navy Pay Office, had been given a promotion...
It was as a writer at the height of his powers, however, that Dickens summoned up the cacophonous activity of Chatham Dockyard working at full stretch in another article he wrote for ‘All The Year Round...
Apart from all the attractions of the dockside, there were the fortifications and the garrison buildings of the Chatham Lines, intended to protect that area vital to the nation’s defence from landward attack...
The atmosphere of the scantily populated marshland with its isolated churches and remote villages was particularly suited to the mysterious events in the book...
Whenever friends, such as the American poet Longfellow, came to stay with Dickens at Gadshill, he used to take them on a whistle-stop tour of that part of Kent, cramming in visits to Chatham, Rochester, villages, churches, woods and hop-fields...
In 1859 Ferdinand Beaucourt-Mutuel, Dickens’ landlord and friend, sold his Boulogne properties and bought a house in Condette, in which Dickens stayed in 1864...
Tuggs, in ‘The Tuggses at Ramsgate’, considered Gravesend ‘too low for a family holiday’, Dickens was sufficiently impressed with Waites’s Hotel on the waterfront to hold his birthday dinners there for several years...
At the start of his writing career, Dickens contributed a number of short articles, essays and tales, light in nature, to a variety of periodicals between 1833-6, which were later collected and published as ‘Sketches by Boz’ (1836-7)...
The town, full of equally flirtatious and pretentious characters, at first seems to be the perfect back-drop for their story, as the excerpt below exemplifies...
