And thus we come to dear, delightful Broadstairs, which, like every Thanet coast-town or village, is set down in a gap, or “gate,” of the cliffs, by which, as by a staircase, you land and ascend from the sea. Here the gap is a bay, rather larger than most, hence the adjective, “Broad.” It was anciently “Broadstowe,” but why never “Bradgate” or “Broadgate” I cannot imagine. At any rate, it matters little. The point is that here is Broadstairs, very much the same place as that Dickens knew and loved. Let an anathema be here pronounced against that man who shall ever contemplate remodelling this cheery little holiday-place--the delight of children, I was about to say--really the delight of all who know it! And I think that anathema should be made retrospective and launched against whoever they were who built the great ugly barrack hotel on the south cliff. The striking alteration that has been effected in the remodelling of the so-called “Bleak House” may, however, be welcomed, in spite of the change thus made in the appearance it wore in the time of Dickens. “Fort House,” which is its proper name, was really so ugly that everyone who is not a Dickens fanatic must rejoice at the blest change.
Dickens first made the acquaintance of Broadstairs in 1837, and he did not finally desert it as a holiday resort until 1859. Enthusiasts for whom no detail of Dickens’s life is too small or insignificant have discovered that his first lodgings were in High Street, at the house now numbered “31.” It has been entirely rebuilt, but their enthusiasm is of a dreadnought quality superior to such accidents, and they flock to see the place because the conclusion of “Pickwick” was written there: in the house that no longer exists. One would think some peculiar virtue lingered in the air. Lawn House, and Number 40, Albion Street, now incorporated with the “Albion Hotel,” were favoured by him before he took Fort House, in 1850. There he wrote a portion of “David Copperfield,” but positively not a line of “Bleak House”; and that name, given later and still surviving, is a quite unwarranted title, unless indeed it may be taken as descriptive of its undoubtedly bleak and exposed situation.
Dickens, in 1843, described Broadstairs as “a little fishing place; intensely quiet”; but presently the growing popularity of it began to qualify his pleasure. In 1847 he wrote: “Vagrant music is getting to that height here, and is so impossible to be escaped from, that I fear Broadstairs and I must part company in time to come. Unless it pours of rain, I cannot write half an hour without the most excruciating organs, fiddles, bells, or glee-singers. There is a violin of the most torturing kind under the window now (time, ten in the morning) and an Italian box of music on the steps, both in full blast.” And so after 1859 place knew Dickens no more.