SOME time ago, I was chatting to an author who lived in the Home Counties and I happened to mention the links between Charles Dickens and the north-east of England.

She then surprised me by saying she knew of no such links so I told her about his association with Barnard Castle, Bowes, Greta Bridge, York, Malton, Whitby and Mulgrave Castle.

As I recounted his experiences in this part of the world and how they had inspired some of his greatest works, I knew she was sceptical – she had always associated Dickens with Victorian London, its back streets and dense fogs. I am sure she is not alone in this lack of wider knowledge so I thought I would give the topic a brief airing in this week’s column.

Together with Hablot K Browne, the illustrator of his books, Dickens travelled from London to Greta Bridge by coach, the journey taking two whole days. It was a severe winter and they arrived at Greta Bridge near Barnard Castle around 11pm on January 31, 1838. Earlier, at around 8pm, it had started to snow and he wrote of crossing a wild heath where there was no vestige of a track. It was a long, cold and tiring journey.

He wrote: “We reached a bare place with a house standing alone in the midst of a dreary moor which the guard informed us was Greta Bridge. It was fearfully cold and there were no outward signs of anyone being up at the house. But to our great joy we discovered a comfortable room with drawn curtains and a most blazing fire. In half an hour, they gave us a smoking supper and a bottle of mulled port.”

He was later to write that this inn, The George, was the very best in which he had stayed and he immortalised it in his Christmas Story when it became The Holly Tree. The following morning, after a hearty breakfast, the pair set off for Barnard Castle about four miles away, where they were to stay at the King’s Head in the Market Place.

Dickens was able to find inspiration in almost any situation, for close to the King’s Head at Amen Corner, just below the market cross, was Master Humphrey’s clock-making business. Dickens used this real name in his tale of Master Humphrey’s Clock.

Thomas Humphrey was born in 1787 and in 1806 had become apprenticed to Robert Thwaites, a local clockmaker. After working for another clockmaker at Chester-le-Street, Humphrey returned to establish his own business in Barnard Castle. He couldn’t have asked for better publicity than to feature in the work of this popular author.

But Dickens was clearly upon a mission because in his pocket he had a letter written by his friend Charles Smithson, who was a solicitor with offices in Chancery Lane, Malton. It was a letter of introduction in which he adopted a false name because his intention was to visit the infamous school known as Shaw’s Academy in nearby Bowes. Its headmaster, William Shaw, had been convicted of negligence against some boys in his care but most others were well-treated with some even going home for holidays.

Dickens must have read about the trial some years earlier and set off to research the story for a novel, the story-line of which had been agreed in advance with his publisher.

However, Mr Shaw had discovered Dickens’s plans and so, when the author arrived, Mr Shaw showed him in at one door, led him straight through the school, and quickly out by another exit.

Dickens was far from pleased by this brusque reception and so wrote his story about Nicholas Nickleby and the fictional Dotheboys Hall, whose headmaster was called Wackford Squeers. Readers were quick to link fact and fiction, especially as Wackford Squeers had the same initials as William Shaw, and both were blind in one eye. The resultant bad publicity caused parents to withdraw their children from Shaw’s Academy and it closed.

Dickens’s links with Malton come through his friendship with the solicitor, Charles Smithson. Dickens often visited the area, once travelling to Whitby by train, but it was Smithson’s office in Chancery Lane, Malton, which can still be seen, that provided the inspiration for A Christmas Carol. The office became the counting-house of the miser Ebeneezer Scrooge and his long-suffering clerk, Bob Cratchit.

Dickens had many other associations with Malton, including his brother Henry who was chief engineer on the York-Scarborough railway and he visited many places in the town.

They included the Talbot Hotel, and also the old theatre in Saville Street where he gave a reading. The bells of the ancient St Leonard’s Church, then Anglican but now restored to the Roman Catholics, were those mentioned in A Christmas Carol.