large fortunes, and it was remarkable that
nobody in the neighbourhood could endure a lamplighter."

It was to Dover that Dickens went when he was labouring with unusual
difficulty over _Bleak House_, and lamenting his inability to "grind
sparks out of this dull anvil". At Dover, on his Second Series of
Readings, he found "the audience with the greatest sense of humour", and
"they laughed with such really cordial enjoyment, when Squeers read the
boy's letters, that the contagion" was irresistible even to Dickens
himself.

Deal, as it was in 1853, is rapidly but vigorously sketched in chapter
xlv of _Bleak House_. Esther Summerson arrives from a night journey by
coach, eager and anxious to help, if possible, Richard Carstone, the
unhappy victim of the fatal chancery lawsuit:

"At last we came into the narrow streets of Deal; and very gloomy
they were, upon a raw misty morning. The long flat beach, with its
little irregular houses, wooden and brick, and its litter of
capstans, and great boats, and sheds, and bare upright poles with
tackle and blocks, and loose gravelly waste places overgrown with
grass and weeds, wore as dull an appearance as any place I ever
saw. The sea was heaving under a thick white fog; and nothing else
was moving but a few early rope-makers, who, with the yarn twisted
round their bodies, looked as if, tired of their present state of
existence, they were twisting themselves into cordage. But when we
got into a warm room in an excellent hotel, and sat down,
comfortably washed and dressed, to an early breakfast (for it was
too late to think of going to bed), Deal began to look more
cheerful.... Then the fog began to rise like a curtain; and numbers
of ships, that we had had no idea were near, appeared. I don't know
how many sail the waiter told us were then lying in the Downs. Some
of these vessels were of grand size: one was a large Indiaman, just
come home; and when the sun shone through the clouds, making
silvery pools in the dark sea, the way in which these ships
brightened, and shadowed, and changed, amid a bustle of boats
putting off from the shore to them, and from them to the shore, and
a general life and motion in themselves and everything around them,
was most beautiful."

That Dickens was essentially a "Kentish Man", in spite of the absence of
a birth qualification, in