[This is the fifteenth of a series of articles giving a
brief description of each of the 26 ancient Anglican cathedrals coupled with a
sketch of a person, activity or
institution connected to the area]
Rochester Cathedral has
its origins in a Saxon foundation of 604, so is over 1,400 years old, and after
Canterbury is the second oldest bishopric in England. The
mainly Norman building we see today dates from 1080 and presents an agreeable
surprise in the otherwise now rather neglected Medway town of Rochester in Kent
about 30 miles South-East of London.
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| Rochester Cathedral |
Rochester was significant in Roman times as it was on the Roman
road of Watling Street, sited at the lowest crossing of the River Medway and
was thus of strategic importance. When St Augustine
came as a missionary to Canterbury he charged
his colleague Justus with the task of founding another Christian centre, which
he did at Rochester
in 604. Many years were to elapse before Christianity was established and Rochester, squeezed between Canterbury
and London, was
always an inconsiderable See.
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| West Front Doorway |
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| Chapter House Door |
The building history of the Cathedral is very complex, but basically a Norman Benedictine priory, first led by Gundulf from 1082, survived fires, sieges and assaults in King John’s and Simon de Montfort’s time in the 13th century, allowing the Lady Chapel and other parts to be built in the Decorated and Perpendicular Gothic fashion.
The Dissolution swept away the monastic buildings and
impoverished the cathedral which sank into decrepitude. The Civil War in the 17th century
brought the usual spoliations. Stuart and Hanoverian authorities contributed
repairing funds but it was never enough. It was not until the 19th
century that the cathedral was remodelled and effectively rebuilt by three
highly competent architects, LN Cottingham, Sir George Gilbert Scott and JL Pearson.
So extensive was their work that it is now difficult to separate the original
from the Victorian reconstruction.
Two doorways are treasured. The West Door, though much
damaged, with its Christ in Glory within a fine early Norman tympanum is rare in
Britain (if less so in France). The
Chapter House Door is a magnificent example of Decorated art with the two
flanking Old and New Covenants standing below figures of the four great Doctors
of the Church. The Cathedral is certainly a very worthwhile place to see even
if its medieval antecedents have largely yielded to the confident constructions
of Victorian England.
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| Rochester Cathedral Interior |
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Charles Dickens
(1812-70) was Britain’s
greatest novelist of the 19th century. His father worked as a clerk
in the naval dockyards at Portsmouth and at Chatham, near Rochester.
When young, Dickens would walk past the fine houses in Higham and particularly
admired Gads Hill Place.
He made his fortune and in 1857 bought Gads Hill Place which remained his
country retreat until his death. He wrote much of A Tale of Two Cities, Great
Expectations, Our Mutual Friend and the unfinished Mystery of Edwin Drood at
this house.
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| Charles Dickens |
Dickens had a nomadic childhood with family poverty threatening
when his spendthrift father was briefly jailed for debt. Charles famously had a
spell at a blacking factory which he resentfully detested. Largely self-taught,
he became a legal and then a parliamentary reporter before embarking on his
first novel Pickwick Papers published
in serialised form in 1836. It was an instant success and subsequently 15 novels
flowed from his fertile pen, many acknowledged as English classics. Dickens
married Catherine Hogarth in 1836 and they had 10 children. They separated in
1858 when Dickens fell in love with Ellen Ternan, an actress 27 years his
junior, who stayed with him until his death. Dickens was a great celebrity in
his lifetime giving public declamatory readings from his novels and touring Britain and the United States.
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| Sam Weller with his Father (Pickwick Papers) |
Dickens’ novels are so engrossing and his characters so
vivid that his works cry out to be illustrated, as they were on publication
with etchings by Phiz and others. In
our time, every new generation has had its own favourite movie or TV serial to
complement the books, bringing Dickens’ delightful imagination to a fresh
audience.
And what an imagination! I first became acquainted with
Dickens through the 1948 David Lean film of Oliver
Twist starring Alec Guinness as deceitful Fagin, rolling-eyed Robert Newton
as villainous Bill Sikes, a youthful Anthony Newley as The Artful Dodger and florid Francis L Sullivan as Mr
Bumble, the beadle – a great introduction.
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| Guinness as Fagin |
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| Francis L Sullivan as Mr Bumble |
Like so many others I graduated to reading life-enhancing A Christmas Carol with the unforgettable
film performance of Alastair Sim as Scrooge and later read wonderful David Copperfield, teeming with
characters like Peggotty (“Barkis is willing”), Steerforth, Betsy Trotwood and
clammy-handed, “ever-so-‘umble” Uriah Heep.
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| Alastair Sim as Scrooge |
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| Ron Moody as Uriah Heep |
As the years passed, one caught up with the other great
characters, ignorant schoolmaster Wackford Squeers (Nicholas Nickleby), tragic Little Nell (The Old Curiosity Shop),
crooked lawyer Jaggers (Great
Expectations) and grasping midwife Sarah Gamp (Martin Chuzzlewitt) with her bibulous fondness for liquor and her
notorious umbrella, and a host of others.
Dickens has his critics and it is true that among his
gallery of great characters there is an element of the caricature and the
grotesque. He was unable to delineate a convincing female character or a plausible
love interest. He had a Victorian tendency towards the maudlin and the
sentimental. But Dickens’ audience was not the port-soaked Oxbridge don nor the
precious Bloomsbury intellectual, but the common people of London and beyond. He crusaded for the alleviation of poverty and
for the rights of the ordinary man. They loved him.
Let us leave with the quintessential Dickensian comic
character, Wilkins Micawber, the genial, improvident and grandiloquent landlord of boy-lodger David Copperfield always battling with
his “difficulties” and “waiting for something to turn up”. He was most memorably
depicted by W C Fields in a famous 1935 movie. His solid financial principles
were neatly expressed:
"Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure
nineteen pounds nineteen and six, result happiness. Annual income twenty
pounds, annual expenditure twenty pounds ought and six, result misery."
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| WC Fields as Micawber and Freddie Batholemew as Copperfield |
Charles Dickens had wished to be buried modestly at
Rochester Cathedral. A grateful nation insisted that he be laid to rest at
Poets’ Corner at Westminster Abbey. Surely this honour was most decidedly
well-earned.
SMD
14.11.12
Text Copyright © Sidney Donald 2012
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