AN all-girls school may have inspired one of the world’s best known authors when he put pen to paper for Bleak House.
Staff and pupils at Hemel Hempstead’s Abbot’s Hill School in Bunkers Lane have been investigating the theory that Charles Dickens was a visitor to the grand house that is now a school.
Like the pieces of a jigsaw this case has been picked up and put down many times before with evidence first being presented to The Dickens Society back in 1989.
But now the theory has been supported by a Dickens scholar, Dr John Drew from the University of Buckingham.
And Hemel Hempstead historian Peter Ward has had the belief for many years that Abbot’s Hill may be the inspiration for Bleak House.
The main reason for this is the property’s three distinctive gables, pictured above left with students Imogen Shaw and Hannah Foxton, both aged 16. And the location of the house means these can be seen from the railway line that Dickens was known to have travelled up and down on.
Brickmakers’ houses and fields are referred to in the novel and both Bennetts End and Leverstock Green had brick fields. The novel talks about someone ‘tramping up’ from Hertfordshire to London with clay on his boots.
Abbot’s House was owned by Hemel Hempstead’s famous paper maker John Dickinson and the hill it sits on used to be called Bleak Hill before it was renamed Abbot’s Hill by Mr Dickinson.
And it looks like Mr Dickinson and Mr Dickens moved in the same circles. Dickens tried to set his son Charlie up in the paper-making business. Headmistress Kerstin Lewis said: “There is no way anybody could have had anything to do with the paper-making business in that period without having dealings with John Dickinson.”
And pictures of when Mr Dickinson lived in the house match descriptions in Bleak House, including oriental references - John Dickinson had connections with India. The lion brand on the paper that came out of the Dickinson mills came from Calcutta and an Indian princess stayed at the house during Queen Victoria’s Jubilee.
Other evidence that the two men may have been known to each other includes a document found in Abbot’s House from Queen Victoria to Henry Fielding Dickens – one of Dickens’ sons – when he was appointed to the Queen’s counsel.
Pupils Imogen and Hannah presented the evidence to Dr Drew for a BBC School Report – the initiative gives youngsters the chance to broadcast a new report. During the report Dr Drew said: “It is beginning to point in the direction of Abbot’s Hill School being the original of Bleak House in Dickens’s novel. It is not conclusive but it looks that way.”
Speaking to the Gazette Mrs Lewis said: “We are not trying to take away from anyone else because we think Dickens took inspiration from a lot of other places but we don’t want to be left out.”
“We would love for someone to do some independent research.”
>To listen to the school report visit the website at www.abbotshill.herts.sch.uk
