When, in late 1864, Charles Dickens was halfway through the writing of his last completed novel Our Mutual Friend, the romantic actor Charles Fechter gave a striking demonstration of his gratitude for all the help and advice Dickens, a great admirer of his, had given him during his management of London’s Lyceum Theatre. He made Dickens a present of a two-story wooden Swiss chalet which arrived at Dickens’s Kentish country home, Gad’s Hill near Rochester, in ninety-four pieces.
Dickens was delighted with the gift and took great pleasure in arranging for the chalet to be assembled on a leafy piece of land he owned on the opposite side of the Dover Road from Gad’s Hill itself. Later he had a tunnel dug beneath the road so that he could reach the chalet more conveniently. "In the summer (supposing it not to be blown away in the spring) the upper room will make a charming study," he wrote to his friend Forster and so it proved.
The chalet became his favorite place for writing during the spring and summer. He had five wall mirrors fitted in the upper room and wrote rapturously to his American publisher James Field that "they reflect and refract, in all kinds of ways, the leaves that are quivering at the windows, and the great fields of waving corn, and the sail-dotted river … the birds and butterflies fly in and out, and the green branches shoot in at the open windows." He wrote at a plain deal table (now to be seen in the Charles Dickens Museum, London) and this retreat became his favorite workplace. He had "never worked better anywhere," he wrote to Fechter in July 1865, adding, "It is a most delightful summer atelier." It was here on the afternoon of June 8, 1870 that he wrote his last pages of fiction, chapter 23 of the unfinished Mystery of Edwin Drood. These pages contain a most beautiful description of a summer dawn in the Kentish countryside directly inspired by his situation in the chalet.
Some time after Dickens’s death the chalet passed into the ownership of Rochester City Council, now the Medway Council, and was re-erected in the grounds of the Eastgate Museum (Dickens’s model for Westgate House in Pickwick Papers and the Nuns’ House in Edwin Drood). It has been twice restored but has now fallen again into disrepair and the interior is no longer safe to enter. The Rochester and Chatham Dickens Fellowship in association with Medway Council has launched an appeal for the £100,000 that will be needed to restore the chalet and relocate it to a nearby site. The intention is that it should become a focus for cultural events, including ones involving a writer in residence so that the chalet’s upper room may once more become a setting for acts of literary creation, honoring the memory of England’s greatest novelist. This is a fine and highly appropriate aspiration and it is greatly to be hoped that the appeal will be a most triumphant success.
—Michael Slater, author of Charles Dickens: A Life Defined by Writing