The Granville does things on a lordly scale, and has an express of its own from London. Down below it, indeed, and in direct communication, is the railway station, on the sands, beneath the cliffs. There is a forthright, downright manner about the railway company which rather challenges admiration, even if the slowness and unpunctuality of its trains and the filthiness of its carriages evoke our disgust. The Company seems to say, “You want to go to the seaside at Ramsgate?” and then, without more ado, not only conveys you, but, in a manner of speaking, actually deposits you on the seashore, as near the sea as possible; short of being actually flung into it.
The railway comes in by a black inferno of tunnel, and smokes the cliffs to a sooty hue. And here, before you, are the famous sands of Ramsgate, playground in the summer season of uncounted thousands of holiday-folk. They have rendered this no place for a quiet holiday; and effectively disprove the ancient and much-quoted saying, wrongly attributed to Froissart, “The English take their pleasures sadly.” Can you come away from Ramsgate sands with that belief?
It is rather curious nowadays to read Dickens’s short story, “The Tuggses at Ramsgate,” to note that, in the novelist’s mind, a more or less vulgar Cockney who had suddenly found himself possessed of twenty thousand pounds, would think at once of Ramsgate as a holiday-place for himself and family. He would probably not do so now; but the general trend of popular literature in those days was in the same direction of comparatively unenterprising holidays on the nearest coast-line.
Thus, according to one of the innumerable guides to Ramsgate, published in 1864, the following concatenation of summer circumstances clearly pointed out to the Londoner the desirability of taking holiday on the Kentish coast in general, and at Ramsgate in particular; that is to say: “When the weather gets so hot that soda-water bottles are dangerous as powder-flasks, and go off like pistols; when flowers die as soon as they are plucked, and butchers’ shops smell unpleasantly; when the London restaurants ice their bitter ale, and pine-apple is at a halfpenny the slice; when your hair is always moist and your listless arms hang at your sides like bell-pulls; when old gentlemen leave off flannel and sit in draughts with their waistcoats open, whilst elderly ladies pearl-powder their faces ten times a day; when the warm fingers make marks on the new novel, and dogs have disagreeable expressions and long tongues; when the ‘catch-’em-alives’ at the grocers’ are dotted with dead flies thicker than the currants in a Christmas pudding, and when the trees in the squares seem powdered over with Scotch snuff. When all these things are seen and take place, then mamma thinks how delightful the sea-breeze must be, and suddenly discovers that the children look pale. Then she carefully points out to papa at breakfast that the baby is as white as melted butter, that little Selina has nasty black marks under her eyes; and at dinner she tenderly makes the stubborn father notice that Tom has scarcely eaten enough to fill an egg-cup, and that Johnny has emptied both water-bottles, as if sickening for a fever. If the stern husband should still resist, then one day, when he is at business, the doctor is sent for, and he, charming humbug, knows too well his duty not to prescribe ‘change of air.’ Then, as a further precaution, Selina is put to bed, Tom is forced to take bitter pills in orange marmalade, and Johnny made to drink wine-glasses of pink stuff, until at last papa gives way before the threatened doctor’s bill. Then carpets are taken up, chairs piled one on another into barricades of legs, the picture-frames are covered with gauze, the servants put upon board-wages, and at last the family, with twenty boxes, goes to the seaside.”