Our English Watering-Place Page #2

"Our English Watering-Place" is a travelogue by Charles Dickens that paints a vivid picture of the seaside town of Brighton in the mid-19th century. Through a blend of personal observation, humor, and social commentary, Dickens explores the town's vibrant atmosphere, its residents, and the diverse array of visitors it attracts. The narrative captures the essence of seaside life, highlighting themes of leisure, class, and the interplay of urban and natural landscapes. Dickens's keen eye for detail and his ability to evoke strong imagery make this work a delightful reflection on the charm and complexities of this popular English destination.

• Short story

								

another hero.  She adds, ‘How like B. L.  Can this be mere coincidence?
J. M.’

You would hardly guess which is the main street of our watering-place,
but you may know it by its being always stopped up with donkey-chaises.
Whenever you come here, and see harnessed donkeys eating clover out of
barrows drawn completely across a narrow thoroughfare, you may be quite
sure you are in our High Street.  Our Police you may know by his uniform,
likewise by his never on any account interfering with anybody—especially
the tramps and vagabonds.  In our fancy shops we have a capital
collection of damaged goods, among which the flies of countless summers
‘have been roaming.’  We are great in obsolete seals, and in faded
pin-cushions, and in rickety camp-stools, and in exploded cutlery, and in
miniature vessels, and in stunted little telescopes, and in objects made
of shells that pretend not to be shells.  Diminutive spades, barrows, and
baskets, are our principal articles of commerce; but even they don’t look
quite new somehow.  They always seem to have been offered and refused
somewhere else, before they came down to our watering-place.

Yet, it must not be supposed that our watering-place is an empty place,
deserted by all visitors except a few staunch persons of approved
fidelity.  On the contrary, the chances are that if you came down here in
August or September, you wouldn’t find a house to lay your head in.  As
to finding either house or lodging of which you could reduce the terms,
you could scarcely engage in a more hopeless pursuit.  For all this, you
are to observe that every season is the worst season ever known, and that
the householding population of our watering-place are ruined regularly
every autumn.  They are like the farmers, in regard that it is surprising
how much ruin they will bear.  We have an excellent hotel—capital baths,
warm, cold, and shower—first-rate bathing-machines—and as good butchers,
bakers, and grocers, as heart could desire.  They all do business, it is
to be presumed, from motives of philanthropy—but it is quite certain that
they are all being ruined.  Their interest in strangers, and their
politeness under ruin, bespeak their amiable nature.  You would say so,
if you only saw the baker helping a new comer to find suitable
apartments.

So far from being at a discount as to company, we are in fact what would
be popularly called rather a nobby place.  Some tip-top ‘Nobbs’ come down
occasionally—even Dukes and Duchesses.  We have known such carriages to
blaze among the donkey-chaises, as made beholders wink.  Attendant on
these equipages come resplendent creatures in plush and powder, who are
sure to be stricken disgusted with the indifferent accommodation of our
watering-place, and who, of an evening (particularly when it rains), may
be seen very much out of drawing, in rooms far too small for their fine
figures, looking discontentedly out of little back windows into
bye-streets.  The lords and ladies get on well enough and quite
good-humouredly: but if you want to see the gorgeous phenomena who wait
upon them at a perfect non-plus, you should come and look at the
resplendent creatures with little back parlours for servants’ halls, and
turn-up bedsteads to sleep in, at our watering-place.  You have no idea
how they take it to heart.

We have a pier—a queer old wooden pier, fortunately without the slightest
pretensions to architecture, and very picturesque in consequence.  Boats
are hauled up upon it, ropes are coiled all over it; lobster-pots, nets,
masts, oars, spars, sails, ballast, and rickety capstans, make a perfect
labyrinth of it.  For ever hovering about this pier, with their hands in
their pockets, or leaning over the rough bulwark it opposes to the sea,
gazing through telescopes which they carry about in the same profound
receptacles, are the Boatmen of our watering-place.  Looking at them, you
would say that surely these must be the laziest boatmen in the world.
They lounge about, in obstinate and inflexible pantaloons that are
apparently made of wood, the whole season through.  Whether talking
together about the shipping in the Channel, or gruffly unbending over
mugs of beer at the public-house, you would consider them the slowest of
men.  The chances are a thousand to one that you might stay here for ten
seasons, and never see a boatman in a hurry.  A certain expression about
his loose hands, when they are not in his pockets, as if he were carrying
a considerable lump of iron in each, without any inconvenience, suggests
strength, but he never seems to use it.  He has the appearance of
perpetually strolling—running is too inappropriate a word to be thought
of—to seed.  The only subject on which he seems to feel any approach to
enthusiasm, is pitch.  He pitches everything he can lay hold of,—the
pier, the palings, his boat, his house,—when there is nothing else left
he turns to and even pitches his hat, or his rough-weather clothing.  Do
not judge him by deceitful appearances.  These are among the bravest and
most skilful mariners that exist.  Let a gale arise and swell into a
storm, let a sea run that might appal the stoutest heart that ever beat,
let the Light-boat on these dangerous sands throw up a rocket in the
night, or let them hear through the angry roar the signal-guns of a ship
in distress, and these men spring up into activity so dauntless, so
valiant, and heroic, that the world cannot surpass it.  Cavillers may
object that they chiefly live upon the salvage of valuable cargoes.  So
they do, and God knows it is no great living that they get out of the
deadly risks they run.  But put that hope of gain aside.  Let these rough
fellows be asked, in any storm, who volunteers for the life-boat to save
some perishing souls, as poor and empty-handed as themselves, whose lives
the perfection of human reason does not rate at the value of a farthing
each; and that boat will be manned, as surely and as cheerfully, as if a
thousand pounds were told down on the weather-beaten pier.  For this, and
for the recollection of their comrades whom we have known, whom the
raging sea has engulfed before their children’s eyes in such brave
efforts, whom the secret sand has buried, we hold the boatmen of our
watering-place in our love and honour, and are tender of the fame they
well deserve.

So many children are brought down to our watering-place that, when they
are not out of doors, as they usually are in fine weather, it is
wonderful where they are put: the whole village seeming much too small to
hold them under cover.  In the afternoons, you see no end of salt and
sandy little boots drying on upper window-sills.  At bathing-time in the
morning, the little bay re-echoes with every shrill variety of shriek and
splash—after which, if the weather be at all fresh, the sands teem with
small blue mottled legs.  The sands are the children’s great resort.
They cluster there, like ants: so busy burying their particular friends,
and making castles with infinite labour which the next tide overthrows,
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