Illustration: Tom Rourke
Charles Dickens in Nottingham
(August, 1852)
After much applause at the new Mechanics Hall, an edifice of tawdry luxury smelling of paint, I return in triumph to the George Hotel in sanguine mood, dizzy with praise. I am served a pot of limpid greens, accompanied by a steaming pile of mutton that defies mastication. As I wrestle with my dinner I am harassed by a giggling flock of literary ladies fluttering in and out of the dining room, all desiring my signature on their souvenir programmes. I escape through the hotel kitchen to find myself in a backstreet of a festering neighbourhood, populated by drunkards of the shouting kind.
Wandering the rowdy thoroughfare, I note the shabby rags of the poor. Alehouse odours add their pungency to the low grade air breathed in these parts. The din of drinkers in each establishment sounds like the choristers of hell in rehearsal, one which promises the advent of a splitting headache. Unheeded, unloved and untamed, ragged urchins search the filthy gutters. What is it, I wonder, they hope to find that makes them hunt with such diligence?
On a street of the meanest houses, none of which can boast an unbroken window, I note slovenly women perched on rickety chairs and greasy boxes outside their doors. A few men in shirtsleeves stare and spit on the pavement as I pass. Wary, and somewhat nervous, I bid them a good evening. They laugh, mocking my southern accent. A bare-footed youth follows me up the street yelling an indecipherable word, almost certainly an insult. The local patois is ugly on the ear, the citizens of this foul borough having dispensed with the Queen’s five vowels.
I take note of the wonderful variety of stinks emanating from the various doors as I return to the George, and meet a warmer welcome, the stinks accompanying me right to the entrance. Thus to a blazing fire, and an over-warm room in which I spend a miserable night tossing upon a bed of stones to dream of the blacking factory, a place I never can forget.
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