This is a Web page with a number of colour photos added newly to the text of "Discover Dickens's Kent" reproduced by the special permission of Mr. Terry Townsend, Terry & Carol Townsend, Laural Cottage, Morleys Road, Sevenoaks Weald, Kent TN14 6QY, England (Telephone: 01732 463500). I deeply appreciate his obliging permission.
The pictures pasted below are some of the photos I took in Kent about ten years ago. As you see, there're few pictures but in Rochester and Broadstairs. I will go and take more photos while staying to study in U.K. for a year, but it would be gratefully appreciated if you could provide me with any of the photos you have taken in Kent.
Charles Dickens (1812-1870), greatest novelist of his time and regarded by many as the finest English writer after Shakespeare, came to Kent when he was five years old.
He enjoyed the happiest years of his childhood at Chatham, his honeymoon at Chalk, the most rewarding of his holidays at Broadstairs and spent the last years of his life in the house at Gadshill that he had admired since his boyhood.
Understandably, Dickens's books and stories are rich in reference to the people and places of Kent.
Using our directions, and Dickens's own descriptions, this book will guide you to all those places in the county that are significantly connected with him and his writings.
On June 9th 1870, to the universal grief of his great reading public, Charles Dickens died at his Kentish home at Cadshill. On the previous day he had been at work in his garden chalet on the never to be revealed, Mystery of Edwin Drood. The last page that he wrote contains a description of the effect of summer sunlight and morning air on ancient Rochester Cathedral, ". . . subduing its earthy odour and preaching the Resurrection and the Life".
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