u^ 1% s** J^^ \? ^^^ .(/ 'vW.^ '^ PR QJorneU ImuBtHttg ffiibrarg Jftljara, Sfem f arh FROM THE BENNO LOEWY LIBRARY COLLECTED BY BENNO LOEWY 1854-1919 BEQUEATHED TO CORNELL UNIVERSITY rens.— The Childhood and Youth of Charles Dickens, by Kobert Langton, i '¥.R.Hist.Soe. With more than 80 fine high-class engravings on wood, from original (4ra-wings by William Hull, Edward Hull and the author. A new edition of a much- i iJsteemed work which has been outof print for many years, cr.8vo, cloth — Hutchinson ^ APRS 1950'^ V SEP 2 9 ^960^'^ SfPTZTtwr Cornell University Library PR 4582.L28 1912 The childhood and youth of Charles Dicke 3 1924 013 474 485 Cornell University Library The original of tliis bool< is in tine Cornell University Library. There are no known copyright restrictions in the United States on the use of the text. http://www.archive.org/details/cu31924013474485 * Our childhood, a time to be remembered like a happy dream through all our after li^e."— Nicholas Nickleby, chap, xxviii. THE CHILDHOOD AND YOUTH OF \a/2A^fiJ\ey€e-^J> li: U /■, i^ A^J-^'^7^ MARY (MAMIE) DICKENS AND GEORGINA HOGARTH [The Editors of the Letters of Charles Dickens] THIS BOOK IS INSCRIBED WITH THE UNAFFECTED ADMIRATION AND REGARDS OF THE WRITER CHARLES DICKENS, IN 1842, AGED 30. (From a. drawing by D. Maclise, R.A.) CONTENTS CHAPTER PAGE I. INTRODUCTORY ..... I II. THE MARRIAGE OF JOHN DICKENS . 9 III. THE BIRTH OF CHARLES DICKENS . I3 IV. ORDNANCE TERRACE, CHATHAM . . 21 V. THE MITRE ■ • • ■ • 33 VI. THE HOUSE ON THE BROOK . . 42 VII. Giles's school ..... 54 VIII. leaves CHATHAM FOR LONDON . . 64 IX. BEGINS LIFE ON HIS OWN ACCOUNT, AND DON'T LIKE IT . . . -72 X. SCHOOL AGAIN 81 XI. IN THE LAW ..... 93 XII. REPORTING AND WRITING FOR MAGAZINES 100 XIII. gad's HILL ..... 112 XIV. RETROSPECTIVE NOTES AND ELUCIDATIONS I35 INDEX 255 LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS PAGE i HALF TITLE, SIGNATURE OF CHARLES DICKENS CHARLES DICKENS {Photogravure) . . Frontispiece CHARLES DICKENS, FROM MACLISE'S DRAWING AT SOUTH KENSINGTON . . . . . vi ROBERT LANGTON ...... Xvi PREFACE INITIAL LETTER, THE ARMS OF GRAVESEND Xxiii gad's HILL PLACE ..... XXviii INITIAL LETTER, ROCHESTER CATHEDRAL HIGH STREET, ROCHESTER ..... 5 TAILPIECE, " NOBODY " . . . . .8 INITIAL LETTER, CROWN AND ANCHOR SIGNATURES, JOHN DICKENS AND ELIZABETH BARROW II INITIAL LETTER, ST. MARY'S, PORTSEA OLD FONT, ST. MARY'S, PORTSEA BIRTHPLACE OF CHARLES DICKENS ARMS OF PORTSMOUTH . ORDNANCE TERRACE, CHATHAM INITIAL LETTER, ARMS OF KENT ix 13 IS 19 20 21 List of Illustrations THE MITRE INN, CHATHAM THE HOUSE ON THE BROOK, CHATHAM THEATRE ROYAL, ROCHESTER INITIAL LETTER, MITRE PAY-OFFICE YACHT VIEW OF ROCHESTER FROM CHATHAM INITIAL LETTER, TOWER AND SPIRE OF CATHEDRAL (1825) . ROCHESTER ST. MARY'S CHURCH, CHATHAM THE NAVY-PAY OFFICE, CHATHAM DOCKYARD . CONVICT HULK, FORMERLY AT CHATHAM DOCKYARD INITIAL LETTER, GILES'S SCHOOL, CHATHAM INITIAL LETTER, "GOING," MR. SAPSEA's FATHER INITIAL LETTER, IDEAL PORTRAIT OF CHARLES DICKENS AS A BOY ..... CAT AND BOOT, WARREN's ADVERTISEMENT 30 STRAND, ditto COCK AND BOOT, ditto INITIAL LETTER, MONUMENT TO RICHARD WATTS, ROCHESTER CATHEDRAL . WELLINGTON HOUSE ACADEMY PLAN OF SCHOOLROOM, DITTO ELEVATION OF SCHOOLROOM, DITTO List of Illustrations XI PAGE INITIAL LETTER, PORCH OF RESTORATION HOUSE, ROCHESTER ..... INITIAL LETTER, COBHAM HALL MS. OF CHARLES DICKENS, AT THE AGE OF 21 SIGNATURE OF JOHN DICKENS (1842) INITIAL LETTER, GAD'S HILL PLACE MILESTONE NEAR GAD'S HILL THE FALSTAFF INN, GAD's HILL CHARLES LARKINS' MONUMENT, GAD's HILL THE CEDARS, GAD's HILL THE DOOR OF LIBRARY, GAD'S HILL PLACE FACSIMILE OF LETTER TO MR. W. B. RYE THE SWISS CHALET, FORMERLY AT GAD's HILL PLACE INITIAL LETTER, SEAL AND ARMS OF ROCHESTER EASTGATE, ROCHESTER ..... STAIRCASE AT THE BULL, ROCHESTER ORCHESTRA IN BALL-ROOM AT THE BULL HOTEL ROCHESTER CASTLE FROM OLD BRIDGE . ROCHESTER BRIDGE AND CASTLE FROM FRINDSBURY THE LEATHER BOTTLE, COBHAM, KENT . LEATHER BOTTLE FORMERLY USED AS THE SIGN DITTO (INTERIOR) Xll List of Illustrations COBHAM CHURCH, KENT ..... SOWSTER, BEADLE OF MUDFOG (AFTER CRUIKSHANK) MILE-END COTTAGE, NEAR EXETER SIGNATURE OF CHARLES DICKENS . SIGNATURE OF MARK LEMON . WATTS' CHARITY, ROCHESTER ROCHESTER CASTLE ROCHESTER CATHEDRAL AND CASTLE MINOR CANON ROW, ROCHESTER SIGNATURE OF RICHARD WATTS priors' GATE, ROCHESTER gatehouse and cathedral precincts, (unfinished) rochester old bridge cooling church by MOONLIGHT . RESTORATION HOUSE " SATIS " H0USE THE GUILDHALL .... GATEHOUSE OF CATHEDRAL CLOSE . "jasper's GATEHOUSE" THE CRYPT, ROCHESTER CATHEDRAL RESTORATION HOUSE, ROCHESTER . ROCHESTER PAGE 163 169 171 189 189 190 197 197 200 215 219 231 233 233 23s 237 242 245 247 List of Illustrations xiu EASTGATE HOUSE ..... WEST DOOR, ROCHESTER CATHEDRAL MEMORIAL BRASS IN ROCHESTER CATHEDRAL GRAVE OF CHARLES DICKENS (TAILPIECE) STROOD HILL, ROCHESTER IN THE DISTANCE PAOS 249 254 2SS Photo by Arthur Reston, Strelford. ROBERT LANGTON. ROBERT LANGTON WHAT Stratford-on-Avon is to Shakespeare, Rochester is to Charles Dickens. Dickens' associations with Rochester are very close ; much of his childhood was spent there, and it was at Gad's Hill Place, near Rochester, that he passed most of his last years, and it was there he died. Rochester is the Mecca, therefore, that has drawn Dickens' worshippers in the past, and which will doubtless attract many enthusiasts during this centennial year of Dickens' birth. As the present work (which has been out of print for some years) deals to a great extent with Rochester in relation to Dickens, it is believed that this re-issue will be acceptable to the ever-increasing band of admirers of the great novelist. Although the author could not claim a personal acquaintance with Charles Dickens, he had at least seen him in the flesh, and retained a vivid recollection of his personality ; by no means a neghgible qualification in a biographer. Robert Langton's life was uneventful, and the few facts of his career are soon told. He was born at b xvii xviii Robert Langton Gravesend in 1825, a direct descendant of Dr. Johnson's friend, Bennet Langton, whose descent from the famous Archbishop's family is rather more than conjectural. He went to a school at Rochester, and his early associations with the scene of so much of Dickens' work undoubtedly fostered his study of Dickens lore ; a subject that subsequently became of absorbing interest to him. Upon leaving school he worked for two years in the office of the Town Clerk of Gravesend. That term was sufficient, however, to demonstrate to himself and all others concerned that " the trickery of the Law " (to quote his own phrase) was not to his liking. His personal predilections were then considered, to the extent of his being articled to an engraver in London, where, with a good teacher and innate ability, he soon proved himself an adept in wood engraving, and in his twenty-fourth year he set up for himself in Man- chester as an engraver. For many years Langton contributed to most of the illustrated works of importance produced in Manchester and the North of England.' He was much interested in archae- ology ; his special studies being ancient sepulture, 1 Of these there may be cited Heginbotham's History of Stockport, Abram's History of Blackburn, Ormerod's Cheshire, Watkin's Roman Cheshire and Roman Lancashire, Baker's Memorials of Manchester Streets, Proctor's Barber's Shop, and Croston's History of Samlesbury Hall. Robert Lang;ton xix funeral customs, church bells, and Norman architecture. As a member of the Manchester Literary Club and the Lancashire and Cheshire Antiquarian Society, Langton took an active part in the pro- ceedings of these institutions, and at the former he came to be recognised as a serious student of — and subsequently an authority upon — Charles Dickens. His paper suggesting the identity of the Cheeryble Brothers, in Nicholas Nickleby, with the Grant Brothers of Manchester first brought him notice in this connection, and was followed by the pamphlet to which he refers in his Preface, entitled " Charles Dickens and Rochester," which subsequently developed into the present work. As originally produced The Childhood and Youth of Charles Dickens was not only written by Langton, but he drew many, and engraved all, of the illustrations, and acted as his own publisher. It was only when this one-man edition (issued in 1883) was exhausted that it was republished in London in 1 891. Meticulous care in verifying facts, the absence of loose or careless statements, and much patient labour all assisted in making his book a valuable contribution to Dickens literature, and he was especially proud that Sir Leslie Stephen quoted from it in his article on Dickens in the Dictionary of National Biography. Langton was the author of other papers on literary and antiquarian subjects, but none of them was of XX Robert Langton any lasting public interest. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society in 1882. Family ties, failing health, and the supersession of wood-block engraving by process reproduction, all confirmed his decision to retire to Bexley in Kent, where he spent his last days, and where he died in September 1900. PREFACE TO ENLARGED AND REVISED EDITION T N 1883 a small edition of this boo_k (for sub- scribers only) was issued privately. Since that time many new and interesting facts have come to my knowledge, all of' them tending to confirm the opinion then expressed, as to the close connection between the works of Charles Dickens and his own Life, and tending especially to show how his earlier experiences and surround- ings were coloured and reflected in his books. Of the new matter (dispersed through the book) much is taken into the text, the remainder is in footnotes. A few additional engravings have also been added. It is a saddening thought, that of the friends who helped me with the first edition, and whose xxi xxii Preface to Enlarged and Revised Edition names appear in the original Preface, far more than half have been removed by Death, in the few years that have since elapsed. Of these two or three only are mentioned in footnotes. R. L. December 3rd, i8go. " God help all who turn to the Jerusalem of their younger days, and have an altar-fire upon the cold hearth of their fathers." — American Notes, Chap. VI. " I have always observed within my experience, that the men who have left home young have, many long years afterwards, had the tenderest love for it, and for all associ- ated with it. That's a- pleasant thing to think of, as one of the wise and benevolent adjustments in these lives of ours." — Letter to Hon. Mrs. Watson, October 7th, 1856. PREFACE TO SUBSCRIBERS' EDITION i> ^^^ J^^^/^\ A FEW words of ex- --^HHHK Cwr^^^^^ planation may be necessary in intro- ducing the follow- ing pages to my readers. About Midsummer, 1879, in consequence of a conversation with my friend, Mr. J. C. Lockhart, the Treasurer of the Manchester Literary Club, I promised to do what I could to produce and read during the next Session xxiv Preface to Subscribers* Edition of the Club, an essay on Charles Dickens and his connection with Rochester. Following up this idea, in the August following I went to Rochester in company with the late Mr. William Hull, in order to make sketches to illustrate the paper. That paper was duly read and printed in the Club volmne for 1880, and was afterwards enlarged, reprinted, and published by Messrs. Chapman and Hall. Since that time I have had so many valuable and voluntary communications, containing hints and new facts on this most interesting subject, that I determined to widen the scope of the work, and instead of bringing out a third edition of my pamphlet,' to try how far I could give a sketch of the life of Charles Dickens from childhood up to youth and early manhood. The work has grown upon me, and I have in the present volimie not only utilised all the illustrations to the smaller book, but have in addition engraved from original and other drawings more than sixty new subjects. The biographical portion of this volume is on the lines of the early part of Mr. Forster's Life of Charles Dickens, and could not well have been otherwise, for without Mr. Forster's book I should have been working in the dark ; could not, indeed, in this connection, have worked at all ! ' Up to this time (1889) five editions of this little work, Charles Dickens and Rochester, have been published. Preface to Subscribers* Edition xxv It will, however, at once be apparent that many of my facts are totally at variance with Mr. Forster's text, and consequently at variance, too, with the numerous writers who have followed in his steps. It will also be seen that there is much that is quite new, and especially so during the early years at Chatham. My thanks are due for valuable assistance to the following ladies and gentlemen, viz., Mrs. Andrews (Bexley Heath), Mrs. Austin (sister of Charles Dickens), Mr. Stephen T. Aveling, Mr. John Barks- by, Mr. Jno. W. Bowden, Major and Mrs. Budden, Mr. Charles Bullard, Mr. L. Biden, F.R.H.S., Mr. John Brooker, Dr. Henry Danson, Mr. C. R. Foord, J. P., Mrs. Gibson, Mr. Jno. Gill (Royal Academy of Music), Mrs. Godfrey (Prince's Park, Liverpool), Mr. R. G. C. Hamilton, Mr. Vincent Hills, J.P., Mr. R. G. Hobbes, Miss Hogarth, Mr. Franklin Homan, Mr. John Jackson, Captain Henry James, R.N., Mr. S. Dyer Knott, Mr. A. Murphy, General Chas. Pasley, Mr. Pearce, Miss Grace Pearce, Mr. George Robinson, Mr. C. W. Sutton, Mr. S. Steele, J. P., Rev. H. B. Stevens, M.A., Mr. Chas. Roach Smith, F.S.A., Mr. Sketchly, Mr. Aid. John Tribe, Mr. Owen P. Thomas, Rev. Jno. Taylor, M.A., Mr., Humphrey Wickham, Mr. Wiggins, and in an especial manner to Mr. Willaim Brenchley Rye, who has given me much valuable information which I could not otherwise have obtained. Last, but not least, I wish to thank Mr. W. T. xxvi Preface to Subscribers* Edition Wildish, of The Rochester and Chatham Journal, who, with a rare generosity, threw open the columns of his newspaper to assist me in my inquiries. My thanks to him must include several unknown correspondents of his and mine. In conclusion, I may truly say that, from early associations of my own, and still more from a genuine admiration of the writings of Charles Dickens, this work has been to me a labour of love, for I recognise in Dickens a writer who, in his far-seeing humanity, has (more than any one in modern times, perhaps more than any one since Shakespeare) consecrated the English tongue to some of the highest purposes of which speech is capable. Robert Langton. CHAPTER I INTRODUCTORY " Every little incident, and even slight words and looks of those old days, — came fresh and thick before him many and many a time, and, rustUng above the dusty growth of years, came back green boughs of yesterday." Nicholas Nicklehy, Part II., chap, xxxiii. HE above paragraph is suggestive enough ; it was written in 1838, when the author was twenty-six years of age, and will serve for a theme for this and all the following chapters of this book. It is, be- sides, perhaps one of the earhest ex- amples of the blank verse to be found occasionally in the earUer writings of Charles Dickens. 2 Childhood and Youth of Charles Dickens It would be an easy matter to show that, in the past, nearly all our really great writers of fiction have left us, in their imaginative flights, more or less perfect sketches of their Autobiography ; and it is sometimes difficult (as indeed it should be) to determine where fiction terminates and fact begins. This is perhaps more especially true of Charles Dickens than of any other writer. I shall endeavour to show in the following brief narrative of his early years, how his own " childish imaginings " and experiences were, from the very first opening of his brilliant literary career, repro- duced in his works. This was apparent to many (though not to a full extent) long before Mr. Forster, in his first voliune of the life of his friend, astonished the reading world with his revelations in Chapter II., a chapter which has been somewhat heartlessly described by a contemporaneous writer as " The Blacking Bottle period." Since these revelations were made it has become not only possible, but comparatively easy to trace the author's life in his books. Within recent years, accordingly, we have had several attempts, both in England and America, to show how many of Dickens' characters, and incidents in his tales, are recollections of his own early experiences. These attempts, too, are (as indeed are most of the later criticisms of his works) all on one side — all friendly to the author. Introductory 3 In some of these essays, it is true, fiction is intro- duced, and in others the facts are funnier than the fiction ; as for instance where Portsea is said to be in Kent, and where we are told that Mr. Pickwick was imprisoned in Fleet Street ! Others have apparently " wandered and lost their way " in a fruitless attempt to identify places that are past finding out, places, indeed, which are intentionally and effectually beyond identification.' So also, with many of the characters of Dickens. Not only have the works themselves a strong ele- ment of immortality about them, but this quality would seem to have descended upon some of the characters in his writings ; for if one could only believe all one is told, three separate and individual examples of " Bob Cratchit " were not long ago still in the flesh, all warranted to be indisputably the real Bob ! There were also still living two Sam Wellers, one of them described to me as "an aged man now " ; and one each of Uriah Heep, Captain Cuttle, and Barnaby Rudge. The latter was further reported to have been seen rushing through the streets of Rochester, his dilapidated dress by no means improved by the flight of time. ^ Throughout the whole of the writings of Charles Dickens nothing is more noteworthy than the way in which many of the scenes of tales and incidents are only half revealed, or, as will be seen further on, purposely obscured or con- fused with other places. 4 Childhood and Youth of Charles Dickens How far the fact that these and similar stories are believed by numbers of people all over England, should entitle them to some respect, I will not determine ; but I can answer for it that, save for the absolute impossibiUty of the existence of a dual " Sam " and a triple " Bob," other stories quite as remarkable and improbable have come to my knowledge, which stories have the additional attraction of being strictly true. A single instance will suffice here. It is over seventy years since Mr. John Dickens (to be presently more particularly mentioned) left Mile-end Cottage, Alphington, near Exeter, and it is very nearly sixty years since he departed this life. Yet, within recent years, a letter was sent to him from America, to his old address. It was of course returned through the Dead Letter Office, and was most probably, says my informant (Mr. Rye), " a request from a Yankee collector for his autograph ! " It will be seen in the following chapters that much of my information is derived directly from aged persons of both sexes, who speak from their own personal recollections of Dickens when a boy. It is now forty years since his death, and in that time many others of these old friends have departed to " the land where all things are for- gotten," and of those that remain " how few," as Scott sings — " How few, all weak and withered of their force. Wait, on. the verge of dark eternity." Introductory 7 It is greatly to be regretted that Mr. Forster did not, forty years ago, when writing the first volume of the life of his friend, go thoroughly into these remembrances of a noble boyhood, so much easier to be got at then than now. In the prosecution of my search for the new facts in the early Ufe of Dickens now given to the world, I was at one time somewhat staggered by the question — " Do you suppose the family of an illustrious man like Charles Dickens will thank you for raking up all these details of his boy- hood ? " This query, coupled with the sentiments of Dic- kens himself, expressed in a letter to Mr. Wilham Sandys, dated June 13th, 1847, required careful consideration. He says (writing of Shakespeare), "It is a great comfort, to my thinking, that so little is known concerning the poet. It is a fine mystery, and I tremble every day lest something should come out. If he had had a Boswell, society wouldn't have respected his grave, but would calmly have had his skull in the phrenological shop windows." On mature reflection, however, it appeared to me that, as I had found absolutely nothing in the early childhood or surroundings of this great man that any one need be ashamed of, or that could give pain to relatives or friends, and that as the task would be certain to be attempted hereafter, when, for obvious reasons, much of this new matter would 8 Childhood and Youth of Charles Dickens have been irrevocably lost, I could no longer hesitate. I therefore send out this little book as another small contribution to the long list of works on Charles Dickens already before the public, a list that is growing longer every year, and in doing so earnestly hope that the narrative of these early days may interest many and offend nobody. FROM HOGARTH'S PEREGRINATIONS AT ROCHESTER AND ELSEWHERE. CHAPTER II THE MARRIAGE OF JOHN DICKENS " And it is pleasant to write down that they reared a family ; because any propagation of goodness and benevo- lence is no small addition to the aristocracy of nature, and no small subject of rejoicing for mankind at large." — Old Curiosity Shop, chap. last. " The chimes of the Church of St. Mary in the Strand." — Uncommercial Traveller. OME genealogists tell us, and with perfect accuracy, that every man now living, whether Prince or Pea- sant, is sprung (only twenty genera- tions back) from more than One Million Fathers and Mothers ! The chief conclusion to be drawn from this very levelling fact (the truth of which may readily be proved by any one) is, that the whole world is kin, in a much more literal sense than is commonly supposed. But not to go twenty generations back, nor five, how many comfortable, middle-class people can tell even the surnames of their four Great Grand- fathers ? 9 lo Childhood and Youth of Charles Dickens With a ready appreciation of tliis Vanity of Vanities, Dickens tells us, in the opening chapter of Martin Chuzzlewit, that " it may be laid down as a general principle that the more extended the ancestry, the greater the amount of violence and vagabondism." Again, " The Chuzzlewits were connected by a bend sinister, or kind of Heraldic over the left, with some unknown noble and illustrious house" [chap i.]. And looking at the matter from another side, in Nicholas Nickleby [chap. vi.J, he says, " a man who was born three or four hundred years ago cannot reasonably be expected to have had so many relations before him, as a man who is born now." Of the ancestry of Charles Dickens I can learn nothing. The only mention of a third generation in Mr. Forster's book is that in vol. i., page 42, where the little boy is said to have been possessed of " a fat old silver watch," which had been given him by his grandmother ; but whether paternal or maternal grandmother cannot perhaps now be cer- tainly known. The probability is, however, that she was the Mrs. Dickens mentioned in the Life of Lord Houghton, as housekeeper at Crewe Hall, and the possible original of Mrs. Rouncewell in Bleak House. John Dickens, the father of Charles Dickens, was descended on both sides from well-to-do middle class parents, and that is all that is known, or cern be said with certainty, of his pedigree. The Marriage of John Dickens 1 1 He was born in 1786, probably in London, and is first traceable in the books of the Navy-Pay Office, at Somerset House, under date of 5th April, 1805, as seventh assistant clerk, with a salary of £80 per annum. He was then nineteen years of age ; and four years afterwards, at the age of twenty-three, we can follow him across the street, to the beauti- ful church of St. Mary-le-Strand, where he was married to Elizabeth Barrow. The entry in the chiirch register, and a facsimile of the signatures of the principal contracting parties, is given below. [The Year 1809.] Page S- No. 17. John Dickins of this Parish Bachelor and Elizabeth Barrow of this Parish, spinster a minor, were married in this church by licence by consent of her Father this Thirteenth day of June in the Year One Thousand Eight Hundred and Nine. By me, J. J. Ellis, Curate. This marriage was solemnised between us ( Cheirles Barrow In the presence of | ^^ g^^^^ S^^j^ g^^^ And no doubt, though it be not Avritten down, in the presence of some of the junior clerks of the 12 Childhood and Youth of Charles Dickens Navy-Pay, the more so as one of them, Mr. Thomas Barrow, was, by this ceremony, to become the brother-in-law of the bridegroom, Mr. John Dickens. In the above entry, it is noticeable, first, that the curate has mis-spelt the name Dickens, for he has put a second i in the place of e ; and secondly, John was evidently a little nervous, for he has commenced to write his name in the wrong place, the " Jo " remaining to this day to testify to the fact. Immediately after their marriage (Mr. John Dickens having been " detached," as the phrase was in his department at that time, to attend the paying off of ships at Portsmouth) the young couple went to reside at Portsea, as is proved by Mr. Pearce's rent-book, the first quarter's rent (£8 15s.) having been paid September 29th, 1809. Here Fanny Dickens (Frances Elizabeth) was born, and the writer lately found the entry of her baptism in the register of St. Mary's, Portsea, under date Novem- ber 23rd, 1810. Here they lived three years at the house shown in the engraving. It was in this house that our great humorist, Charles John Huffam Dickens (Charles after his maternal grand- father and John after his father), first saw the light. Another son, Alfred, who died in his infancy, was also born at Portsea. CHAPTER III THE BIRTH OF CHARLES DICKENS " 'That boy, sir,' said the Major, ' will live in history. That boy, sir, is not a common production.' " Dombey and Son, chap. x. WAS born (as I have been informed and believe) on a Friday, at twelve o'clock at night." Thus David Cop- perfield, and this is literally accurate of Charles Dickens, who was born at Portsea on Friday, the 7th February, 1812 (Leap Year), at a few minutes before mid- night. When less than a month old, he was bap- tized at St. Mary's, Kingston, the parish church of Portsea.' ' The parish authorities at St. Mary's did not know they had the register of his baptism, till after his death, when the executors wrote for it. 13 14 Childhood and Youth of Charles Dickens The entry thus : — in the register is briefly 1812 March 4th BAPTISMS. ■ Charles John HuflRtiam S of John and Elizabeth Dickens. On the first page of Mr. Forster's Life of Charles Dickens, we find the entry of baptism as given OLD FONT, ST. MARY's, PORTSEA. above, with the remark, " though on the very rare occasions when he subscribed that name, he wrote Huff am." On this it is necessary to add that Huffam is undoubtedly the right spelling, and that the spell- ing in the register is an error. Besides bearing the THE HOUSE AT PORTSEA IN WHICH CHARLES DICKENS WAS BORN. IS The Birth of Charles Dickens 17 name of his maternal grandfather, and father, as above-mentioned, the boy was named Huffam after his Godfather, Christopher Huffam,' described in the London Post Office Directory as " Rigger to His Majesty's Navy, Limehouse Hole." The birthplace is No. 387, Commercial Road, Mile-end, Landport, formerly known as Mile-end Terrace, and is so far in Portsea, as being in the island of that name. It is now occupied by Miss Grace Pearce, the daughter of the owner who was the landlord of Mr. John Dickens when Charles was born there.' Of the infancy of Charles Dickens at Portsea little can now be known ; it is, however, certain that in June quarter 1812 Mr. John Dickens left Mile-end Terrace and went to reside in Hawke Street, Port- sea, the second house, in fact, past the boundary of Portsea. Captain Henry James, R.N., writes me (June 1885) : " The chief recollection I have of the family of Mr. Dickens was in 1812. They had left the house in which the great man was born, and I once saw the babe in long petticoats in their lodgings in Portsea." It is said that, in after years, Charles Dickens could remember places and things at Portsmouth 1 The name of Christopher occurs in three of Dickens' characters — Christopher Nubbles, Christopher Casby, and Christopher a waiter. 2 Since the above was written this house has been con- verted into a Dickens Museum. 1 8 Childhood and Youth of Charles Dickens that he had not seen since he was an infant of little more than two years old ; - and there is no doubt whatever, that many of the earliest reminis- cences of David Copperiield were also tender childish memories of his own infancy at this place. For his sister Fanny mentioned above, it may be appropriately said here that Dickens evinced through life the tenderest attachment, and there are many unmistakable allusions to her in his works. In The Haunted Man, written in 1848, shortly after his sister's death, this passage occurs : " My sister, doubly dear, doubly devoted — lived on to see me famous, — and then died — died gentle as ever, happy, and with no concern but for her brother." Her name (Fanny) occurs as the names of characters in his books, and shorter tales, no less than eleven times ! In the Experiences of a Barrister's Life, by Serjeant Ballantine, vol. i., p. 138, the writer de- scribes Fanny Dickens as " a young lady of great talents and accomplishments, who unfortimately died when still quite young." Again, in vol. ii., p. 137 (written January loth, 1838), he says : " Evening party at Levien's. Met Boz — looks quite a boy. His sister was there ; she sang beautiftdly, is pretty, and I should think clever." Fanny Dickens, afterwards Mrs. Burnett, died of consumption at the early age of thirty-eight. ARMS OF PORTSMOUTH. 19 CHAPTER IV ORDNANCE TERRACE, CHATHAM " My Boyhood's Home." — DuUborough Town. " Second house in the Terrace." — Ibid. T is believed that Mr. John Dickens removed to Chatham in 1816, and Mr. Forster's ac- count leans to this view, but if this be correct, it cannot now be settled where he lived for the first few months after his arrival at Chatham. An exhaustive search in the Rate-books proves conclusively, however, that in 1817 (probably from Midsummer) Mr. Dickens was living at the house at first No. 2, but since altered to No. Ii, Ordnance Terrace, Chatham. A view of the terrace is given on the opposite page, and the house is indicated by figures that will pass alike for 11 or 2, marked on the front. Here he resided till Lady-Day, 1821, and in this house Wdre b'orn Harriet Ellen, in the autumn of 21 22 Childhood and Youth of Charles Dickens 1819, and Frederick William in 1820. Both of these infants died in their childhood. In 1883 there were probably ten or twelve persons then living at Chatham or Rochester, who could remember his occupying this house, as also the house to be presently named, on the Brook. It was during his residence here that some of the happiest years of the childhood of little Charles were passed, as his father was at this time in a fairly good position in the Navy-Pay Office, and was (without extras) from June 1815 to 1819 in receipt of £200 per annum, and in 1820 his salary was aug- mented to £350 per annum, at which latter sum it remained till he left the service, March 9th, 1825. Mr. William Thomas Wright, for many years head of the Navy-Pay Office at Chatham Dockyard, remembered John Dickens at this time very well, and described him to my informant, Mr. W. B. Rye, formerly of the British Museum, late of Exeter, as "a fellow of infinite humour, chatty, lively, and agreeable ; and believed him capable to have imparted to his son Charles materials for some of the characteristic local sketches of men and maimers, so graphically hit off in the early chapters of Pick- wick." He is described by another gentleman still Uving as being a thorough good fellow, and, speaking of the family residing at Ordnance Terrace (at this time consisting of Mr. and Mrs. Dickens, Fanny, Charles, Letitia, and their maternal Aunt Mrs. Ordnance Terrace, Chatham 23 Allen) he says, " they were a most genia,l, loveable family," and no doubt " with something more than a ghost of gentility hovering in their company." ' Ordnance Terrace is known to have furnished the locality and characters for some of the early Sketches by Boz. The Old Lady was a Mrs. Newnham who lived at No. 5, which was then the last house in the Terrace, and was, by all accounts, very kind to the Dickens children, the youngest girl Letitia Mary, a very pretty child, being her especial favourite. The Half-Pay Captain was also a near neighbour of the Dickens family, and was quite unconsciously sitting for his portrait to one (a very little one) who was afterwards to immortalise him in his earlier writings. The next-door neighbours at No. i, the corner house, were the Stroughills, and George Stroughill the son, somewhat older than Charles Dickens, was his greatest friend during these happy years. Some characteristics of George, a frank, open, and somewhat daring boy, are reproduced as Steerforth in David Copperfield. His sister Lucy, the Golden Lucy of The Wreck of the Golden Mary, from her beautiful golden locks, was the especial favourite and little sweetheart of Charles at this time. A quotation from Sketches of Young Couples. — The old Couple will fitly introduce here " an aged woman who once lived servant " — with the Dickens family, — " she nursed the children on her lap, and tended 1 Our French watering place. 24 Childhood and Youth of Charles Dickens those who are no more — Death has not left her alone, and this with a roof above her head, and a warm hearth to sit by, makes her cheerful and contented, — she was as smart a young girl then as you'd wish to see." This old lady, who lived on in the neighbourhood, was in the service of the Dickens family both in Ordnance Terrace and in the house on the Brook. Her vivid recollections of these far-off, happy days were " like the ghost of a departed time." ' Her very suggestive maiden name was Mary Weller ! She was the wife of Mr. Thomeis Gibson (formerly a shipwright in the Dockyard), to whom she was married some sixty years. This aged couple could both of them remember little Lucy,' the blue-eyed, golden-haired fairy, of whom little Charles (himself at this early age very fair) was the constant companion. In Birthday Celebrations we come on a reminiscence of these early days which is unmistakable in this connection. " I can very well remember being taken out to visit some peach-faced creature in a blue sash, and shoes to correspond, whose life I supposed to con- sist entirely of birthdays. Upon seed-cake, sweet wine, and shining presents, that glorified young ■■ OuY Mutual Friend, vol. i., p. 311. » The name Lucy occurs in five of the works of Dickens, as the Christian names of characters, and Lucie Manette* in A Tale xjj Two */^ FACSIMILE OF LETTER FROM CHARLES DICKENS TO MR. W. B. RYE. 130 Gad's Hill 131 Between 2,000 and 3,000 people attended these sports, and there was not a single case of miscon- duct or damage to property. Writing to Mr. For- ster next day, Dickens says, " The road between this and Chatham was like a fair all day, and surely it is a fine thing to get such perfect behaviour out of a reckless seaport town." There is, it may be noted, a passage in The Holly Tree, where Dickens — perhaps unconsciously — in the person of " Boots " thus describes his own well-known partialityf or allwholesomeopen-air games and sports, thus—" and he ran, and he cricketed, and he danced, and he acted, and he done it all equally beautiful." A facsimile letter from Charles Dickens to Mr. W. B. Rye, thanking him for a copy of his little book, Visits to Rochester, and dated Gad's Hill Place, November 3rd, 1865, may not be out of place here. (See opposite.) On the 9th August, 1870 (just two months after the death of Charles Dickens), the writer was in the upper room of the chalet at Gad's Hill Place ; and but for the screaming of the swifts as they now and again swept past in their mysterious flight, the silence of the place was absolutely unbroken. The quill pens used in writing the last pages of Edwin Drood, and stained with the author's favourite blue ink, were still lying on the table, and one could not but feel " the appalling vacancy in the room he had occupied so recently, where his chair and table seemed to wait for him." ^ 1 David Copperfield, chap, xxxviii. SWISS CHALET, FORMERLY AT GAD S HILL PLACE, " My room is up among the brandies of the trees ; and the birds and the butter- flies fly in and out, and the green branches shoot in at the open windows, and the lights and shadows of the clouds come and go with the rest of the company,"— Letier to American Friend. 132 Gad's Hill 133 Over the way, however, the quiet of the place was invaded to some purpose, "herds of shabby vampires, Jew and Christian, over-ran the house. The capital modern household furniture, etc., is on view." ^ In the library Mr. Luke Fildes, the illustrator of Edwin Drood, was making a sketch in oils of the interior of the room, since published and known as " The Empty Chair." In the yard were still to be seen evidences of the master's love of out-door games. A set of bowls, a set of croquet, some American carriage bells, and, reared against a large dog-kennel, was " Aunt Sally," sticks and all, in a box. In another sort of box — a loose box in the stable — was an extremely friendly grey pony. He was, I believe, the only living thing belonging to the departed writer then left on the premises. He immediately fixed my attention as embodying at once, in his own person, two of his master's well- known characters ; for was he not " Trotty Veck " by name, and " the Aged " by reason of his years ? While I patted his neck over the half-door, he was diligently searching my pockets for possible dainties in the shape of biscuits or apples, as if quite used to it ; but at the same time with an unmistakably woe-begone expression of countenance, as if, with him, too, " regrets were the natural property of grey hairs." ' 1 Dombey and Son, chap, lix. ^ Martin Chuzglewit, chap, x. 134 Childhood and Youth of Charles Dickens " Trotty Veck " was sold to a Mr. Abrahams for twenty guineas, and is probably (like the hypo- thetical " Gray " alluded to by Mr. Weller, senr.) long since " up the universal spout o' natur." ' It is infinitely more agreeable, however, to turn from the week of the sale at Gad's Hill Place, and to remember the favourite residence of Charles Dickens as it is now, for the house and grounds, beautifully kept by its present owner, bring back to our memory Bret Harte's noble lines — let its fragrant story- Blend with the breath that thrills With hop-vines, incense all the pensive glory That fills the Kentish hills. ^ Master Humphrey's Clock, page 422, Original Edition. CHAPTER XIV RETROSPECTIVE NOTES AND ELUCIDATIONS " For my own part, my occupation in my solitary pil- grimages was to recall every yard of the old road as I went along it, and to haunt the old spots, of which I never tired. I haunted them, as my memory had often done, and lingered among them as my younger thoughts had lingered when I was far away." David Copperfield, chap. xxii. 0xhr^t^r and its Historic Pictur- esque surroundings, whether humor- ously described as "Mudfog," as "Dull-borough," as " OiurTown," or as " Cloisterham," will, as years roll on, become more and more closely associated with the life and work of Charles Dickens ; and will, for all time to come, be acknowledged to have been " the birth- place of his fancy," his " boyhood's home ! " 135 136 Childhood and Youth of Charles Dickens In the reminiscences of his early life, of which his books are full, we find, accordingly, many traces of his childhood at Chatham, many also of his struggling boyhood in London, and of his years of adolescence, remembrances not a few. In these Notes and Elucidations very little criticism will be attempted, the object being, as before stated, to show how Dickens, throughout the whole course of his brilliant literary career, delighted to return to the scenes and recollections of his early boyhood. Passing on, therefore, at once to his earliest printed pieces, the Sketches by Boz, Illustrative of every-day Life and every-day People, and taking them as they appear in the collected volumes, and not in the order in which they were written, we find in the second chapter of Our Parish, The Old Lady, who was the Mrs. Newnham mentioned in chapter iv. [ante."] The row of houses there described is Ordnance Terrace, in which there are eleven houses, while in the Sketch the row is Ccdled Gordon Place, and the numbers run much higher than they do in the origi- nal. Gordon Place, it may be noted as a curious coincidence, is a short street out of Tavistock Square. The Half-Pay Captain was also a resident of Ordnance Terrace, and lived next door to the Old Lady, and his well-remembered oddity of behaviour was a constant somrce of amusement to the neigh- EASTGATE, ROCHESTER. Retrospective Notes 139 hours. " He is a charitable, open-hearted old fellow at bottom, after all ; so although he puts the Old Lady a little out occasionally, they agree very well in the main, and she laughs as much at each feat of his handiwork when it is all over, as anybody else." In chapter iii.. The Four Sisters, we are told, " The row of houses in which the Old Lady and her troublesome neighbour reside, comprises, beyond all doubt, a greater number of characters within its circumscribed limits, than all the rest of the parish put together." This Sketch was written in 1834, and from a passage in it, telling us that the four sisters " settled in our parish thirteen years ago," we are taken back to the year 1821, when Dickens was living in Ord- nance Terrace. There cannot, therefore, be a doubt that this, too, is some recollection of his boyhood. The greater part of these Sketches contain reminis- cences of more recent times, possibly in the days when he was in Mr. Blackmore's employ. Scotland Yard is situated within less than a quarter of a mile of the Blacking Works at Old Hungerford Stairs, and The Sketch is a graphic account of a curious district of London at that time (1823-4). " A few years hence and the antiquary of another generation, looking into some mouldy record of the strife and passion that agitated the world in these times, may glance his eye over the pages we have just filled ; and not all his know- I40 Childhood and Youth of Charles Dickens ledge of the history of the past, not all his black- letter lore, or his skill in book collecting, not all the dry studies of a long life, or of the dusty volumes that have cost him a fortune, may help him to the whereabout, either of Scotland Yard, or of any one of the landmarks we have mentioned in de- scribing it." Seven Dials is wonderfully described : " Where is there such another maze of streets, courts, lanes, and alleys ? Where such a pure mixture of English- men and Irishmen as in this complicated part of London ? " This is true, to some extent, to the present day, as is also the curious account of the various articles of live and dead stock to be bought and sold there. Here is a characteristic description of one of the dwellers in this strange locality : " The shabby- genteel man is an object of some mystery, but as he leads a life of seclusion, and never was known to buy anything beyond an occasional pen, except half-pints of coffee, penny loaves, and ha'porths of ink, his fellow-lodgers very naturally suppose him to be an author, and rumours are current in the Dials that he writes poems for Mr. Warren." In Doctors' Commons are many glimpses of the Lgndon of Dickens' reporting days, and here as elsewhere in his works, so vivid, so truthful, are his descriptions of places and things now no longer in existence, that already the antiquaries of our day are taking a new and lively interest m Dickens, Retrospective Notes 141 for the very love of his descriptions of these old times ! He gives here, in very few words, an account of a trial in the Arches Court, " the office of the Judge promoted by Bumple against Sludberry," which terminated in " the awftd sentence of excommuni- cation for a fortnight, and payment of the costs of suit" against Sludberry, "who was a little, red- faced, sly-looking ginger-beer seller," and who remarked " that if they'd be good enough to take off the costs, and excommunicate him for the term of his natural life instead, it would be much more convenient to him " Through all these Sketches there runs a fine original vein of humour, set off here and there by a tender pathos which all can understand. Thus it came about that these Sketches were eagerly looked for long before the name of Charles Dickens was known, and even before he wrote under the name of Boz. His first Sketch appeared in December 1833, and the first piece signed Boz was not published till August of the next year. It was the second chapter of The Boarding House. Astley's and Early Coaches are juvenile experiences of his own, and he truly sketches himself as " a small boy of a pale aspect, with light hair, — coming up to town from school, under the protection of the guard, and directed to be left at the Cross Keys till called for." 142 Childhood and Youth of Charles Dickens Very interesting reading now is a Parliamentary Sketch, and in it we are taken back to the reporting days in the House of Commons, just after the great fire there, in October 1834, about which time this Sketch was undoubtedly written. In chap, xxii., Gin-Shops, a vivid picture of one of these glittering, brilliantly lighted saloons, is followed by a sentence or two worth thinking about. " Gin-drinking is a great vice in England, but wretchedness and dirt are a greater. If Temperance Societies would suggest an antidote against hunger, filth, and foul air, or could establish dispensaries for the gratuitous distribution of bottles of Lethe- water, gin-palaces would be numbered among the things that were." In A Christmas Dinner and The New Year (1836) are some very striking reminiscences " of happy days and old times ; " in the latter Sketch we are introduced to Mr. Dobble, who was in a pubhc office : " We know the fact by the cut of his coat, the tie of his neckcloth, and the self-satisfaction of his gait — the very green blinds themselves have a Somerset House air about them." In Shabby-Genteel People are some very tender touches of description, as to what does and what does not entitle a man to be considered shabby-genteel. " We will endeavour to explain our conception of the term which forms the title of this paper. If you meet a man, lounging up Drury Lane, or leaning with his back against a post in Long Acre, Retrospective Notes 143 with his hands in the pockets of a pair of drab trousers plentifully besprinkled with grease-spots ; the trousers made very full over the boots, and ornamented with two cords down the outside of each leg — wearing, also, what has been a brown coat with bright buttons, and a hat very much pinched up at the sides, cocked over his right eye — don't pity him. He is not shabby-genteel." " We were once haunted by a shabby-genteel man ; he was bodily present to our senses all day, and he was in our mind's eye all night. He first attracted our notice by sitting opposite to us in the reading room of the British Museum ; and what made the man more remarkable was, that he always had before him a couple of shabby-genteel books." In Mr. Minns and, his Cousin, we find another Somerset House clerk, " or, as he said himself, he ' held a responsible situation under Government.' " The cousin was a Mr. Budden, which is a well- known name at Rochester. [See Gad's Hill.] Of The Tuggs's at Ramsgate, it may be noted that in Our Boys, as acted, this Sketch is laid under contribution for a j oke or two ; here is one of them in exactly the same words. Mr. Tuggs (who dealt in Dorset butter) was asked by his new acquaintance, the captain, how he would go to Pegwell ? " 'A shay ? ' suggested Mr. Joseph Tuggs. ' Chaise,' whispered Mr. Cymon. ' I should think one would be enough,' said Mr. Joseph Tuggs. ' However, two shays, if you hke.' " 144 Childhood and Youth of Charles Dickens The notes on the Sketches may terminate with The Great Winglebury Duel, which abounds with recollections of Rochester, the description of the " long, straggling, quiet High Street, the small building with the big clock," etc., is unmistakable. The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club, known all the world over by the shorter title of Pickwick, are brim-full of reminiscences of the writer's early life, from his boyish experiences at Chatham to his reporting days. This is, on the whole, the most humorous of all his works, and still holds its place as the first favourite with the great bulk of the readers of Dickens. Towards the middle of its publication it had attained a popularity that had probably never been equalled in the annals of fiction. It was about the time of the publication of the tenth part of the Pickwick Papers that the Rev. William Giles (for he had since the Chatham days been ordained as a Baptist minister) presented Charles Dickens with a silver snuffbox, in token of his admiration of the brilliant talents displayed by his old pupil. On the inside of the lid was his name, with a suit- able inscription " to the Inimitable Boz," and the Inimitable he continued to be among his more intimate friends for the rest of his life. In his Letters it wiU be seen that he was fond of playfully describing himself as " the inimitable," and it is probably a title which posterity will finally accept. STAIRCASE AT THE BULL. ORCHESTRA IK BALL-ROOM, AT THE BULL HOTEL. lO 14S Retrospective Notes 147 The origin of Pickwick is too well known to need recapitulation here, and it is only necessary to say that the scene opens in Goswell Street, London, and that Mr. Pickwick is at the outset driven to the Golden Cross Coach Office, to meet his friends, who are to take a j ourney with him into Kent, in search of adventures. In the second chapter, the four Pickwickians take their seats on the Commodore Coach for Rochester, and Mr. Jingle joins them. Asked if he has any luggage, he replies, " Who — -I ? Brown-paper par- cel here, that's all, other luggage gone by water, — packing cases, nailed up, — ^big as houses," — a clear reminiscence of the mode of carriage adopted by Mr. John Dickens when removing his heavier household goods from Chatham to London. On reaching Rochester Bridge, and sighting the Castle, Jingle indulges in broken soliloquy till the coach stops at the Bull Hotel. Here the friends put up, and engage a private sitting-room. The year 1827 (summer) is given as the date of this visit, and it may be remarked that the Bull Hotel is very little altered in appearance, inside or outside, since that time. The staircase shown in the engraving is now just as it was, with the addi- tion, however, of a few more prints on the walls, and of the handsome hall-lamp from Gad's Hill Place. The ball-room, or assembly-room, where in times past many charity and county balls have been held, is just as it was in the Pickwick days. 148 Childhood and Youth of Charles Dickens " It was a long room, with crimson-covered benches, and wax-candles in glass chandeliers. The musicians were securely confined in an elevated den." . . . Mr. Hull's sketch is a capital representation of the entrance end of this room, and shows the little orchestra as it was and is to the present day. It is rather difficult to realise, looking at this old room by the cold light of day, that " the Commis- sioner — head of the yard," and the no less important " Head of the Garrison (like two Alexander Sel- kirks, monarchs of all they surveyed) " should have met the Smithies, the Snipes, and the Tom- linsons of a bygone age, but it is quite true that (omitting the names) the wealth and fashion of the county of Kent have many a time been present at the grand balls formerly held in this hotel. But on this particular occasion (the ball attended by Mr. Tupman and Jingle) an old acquaintance was present, and here is his portrait : he " was a little fat man, with a ring of upright black hair round his head, and an extensive bald plain on the top of it — Dr. Slammer, surgeon to the 97th. The doctor took snuff with everybody, laughed, danced, made jokes, played whist, did everything, and was everywhere." The next day the unoffending Winkle accepted the challenge sent by the irate little doctor, and at sunset the combatants, with their seconds, met in the well-remembered fields at the back of Fort Pitt, the very place where the schools of Rochester ROCHESTER CASTLE FROM OLD BRIDGE. {After Dadson.) ROCHESTER BRIDGE AND CASTDE FROM FRIND'SBURy. iA/ta' DaBSON.) 149 Retrospective Notes 151 and Chatham used to meet to settle their difficulties, and to contend in the more friendly rivalry of cricket. " The whole population of Rochester and the adjoining towns rose from their beds at an early hour of the following morning, in a state of the ut- most bustle and excitement. A grand review was to take place upon the Lines. The manoeuvres of half-a-dozen regiments were to be inspected by the eagle eye of the commander-in-chief ; temporary fortifications had been erected, the citadel was to be attacked and taken, and a mine was to be sprung." (Chap, iii.) Mr. Pickwick and his friends Winkle, Tupman, and Snodgrass,' were there, of course, and experi- enced the pleasure of waiting two hours in a front place, under pressure of an unruly crowd behind them, and a military guard in front. Here the party make the acquaintance of Mr. Wardle, and are hospitably entertained, and afterwards invited to visit Manor Farm, Dingley Dell. On the morn- ing of the next day, Mr. Pickwick " leant on the balustrades of Rochester Bridge (the old Bridge) contemplating Nature, and waiting for breakfast." 1 With reference to this curious surname, it is perhaps something more than a coincidence, that there was formerly a Mr. Gabriel Snodgrass, an eminent shipbuilder at Chatham Dockyard, where he learned his business. For a full account of him, with his portrait, see The European Magazine, July 1799. He was resident at Chatham for many years, and would probably, almost certainly, be known to Charles Dickens when a boy, at least by repute. 1 52 Childhood and Youth of Charles Dickens " On the left of the spectator lay the ruined wall, broken in many places, and in some overhanging the narrow beach below in rude and heavy masses. . . . Behind it rose the ancient castle, its towers roofless, and its massive walls crumbling away, but telling us proudly of its old might and strength. . . . On either side the banks of the Medway, covered with cornfields and pastures, with here and there a windmill or a distant church, stretched away as far as the eye could see, presenting a rich and varied landscape, rendered more beautiful by the changing shadows which passed swiftly across it, as the thin and half-formed clouds skimmed away in the light of the morning sun." The view so happily described was precisely that shown in the engraving, from a drawing by the late William Dadson, and the other engraving on the same page, also after Dadson, assists the reader by showing an extended view of the valley of the Medway. On consulting the waiter at breakfast, the friends are told, " Dingley — Dell — gentlemen — fifteen miles, gentlemen — cross road — post-chaise, sir ? " Ding- ley Dell is of course wholly " in the air," but Muggleton ? — " everybody whose genius has a topo- graphical bent, knows perfectly well that Muggleton is a corporate town, with a mayor, burgesses, and freemen ; — Mr. Pickwick stood in the principal street of this illustrious town, and gazed with an air of curiosity, not unmixed with interest, on the Retrospective Notes 153 objects around him. There was an open square for the market-place ; and in the centre of it, a large inn with a sign-post in front, displaying an object very common in art, but rarely met with in Nature — to wit, a blue lion with three bow-legs in the air, balancing himself on the extreme point of the centre claw of his fourth foot." Where, then, is Muggleton ? Well — no one can say positively, but from the direction taken by the friends, as Mr. Winkle's horse went " drifting up the High Street," preceded by the chaise, I fancy they turned into the Maidstone Road out of East- gate, past Restoration House, past the Blue-Bell, and through some of the most delightful country to be met with even in Kent, to Aylesford, and so over the bridge to West Mailing or Town-Mailing. This place does not answer to much of the descrip- tion, but I think it was in the mind of Dickens when he wrote the tale, the more so as it is certainly on a cross-road from Rochester, that the distance given by the waiter is about right, and that when Wardle and Pickwick were chasing the runaway Jingle, they went by the direct road from Mailing to London, without coming back through Roches- ter, which would have been a much longer way. One of the cricketers at Dingley Dell was Mr. Struggles, which was the nickname of George Stroughill (pronounced Stro'hill), the friend of Dic- kens when a boy at Ordnance Terrace, Chatham. The morning after the chase of Jingle and Miss 1 54 Childhood and Youth of Charles Dickens Wardle, Mr. Pickwick, Mr. Wardle, and Mr. Perker enter the yard of tlie White Hart Inn in the Borough, and introduce themselves at once to Sam Weller, who in his turn a few days later on in the narrative, introduces his father, Mr. Tony Weller, of the Marquis of Granby, Dorking. A recent writer has tried to locate this hostelry in one of the pleasant Surrey towns near London ; the real origin, however, of the names of both the inn and its master must be looked for at Chatham, where, in the old Ordnance Terrace days, a Mr. Thomas ' Weller kept the Granby Head in the High Street. " On the opposite side of the road was a large signboard on a high post, representing the head and shoulders of a gentleman with an apoplectic countenance, in a red coat, with deep blue facings, and a touch of the same blue over his three-corner.ed hat, for a sky, . . . and the whole formed an ex- pressive and undoubted likeness of the Marquis of Granby of glorious memory." — Pickwick Papers, chap, xxvii. Having returned to Dingley Dell by the Muggle- ton heavy coach, Mr. Pickwick found that Mr. ^ The transition from Tommy Weller to Tony Weller is not a very violent one, and the origin of this celebrated character is obvious enough. See also Mary Weller, in chap, iv., ante — Arn't that 'ere " Boz " a tip-top feller ! Lots writes well, but he writes Weller ! Tom Hood, in review of Master Humphrey's Clock. s » n o u w" ^i H H O a u » K H < m X H 155 Retrospective Notes 157 Tupman had gone away during his absence, but was to be heard of at " the Leather Bottle, Cobham, Kent, and the three friends at once resolve to follow him there." " At Muggleton they procured a conveyance to Rochester, where they had an early dinner, and having procured the necessary informa- tion relative to the road, the three friends set for- ward again in the afternoon to walk to Cobham." " A delightful walk it was, for it was a pleasant afternoon in June, and their way lay through a deep and shady wood, cooled by the light wind which gently rustled the thick foliage, and enlivened by the songs of birds that perched upon the boughs. The ivy and the moss crept in thick clusters over the old trees, and the soft green turf overspread the ground like a silken mat." (The friends were following the track of the Roman Watling Street, which runs almost in a straight line from Rochester to London, and a very considerable portion of which is still in existence as a country road.) " They emerged upon an open park, with an ancient Hall, displaying the quaint and picturesque architecture of Elizabeth's time. Long vistas of stately oaks and elm-trees appeared on every side, large herds of deer were cropping the fresh grass, and occasionally a startled hare scoured along the ground with the speed of the shadows thrown by the light clouds which swept across a sunny land- scape like a passing breath of summer. 158 Childhood and Youth of Charles DickeilS " ' If this,' said Mr. Pickwick, looking about him, • if this were the place to which all who are troubled with our friend's complaint came, I fancy their old attachment to this world would very soon return.' " • I think so, too,' said Mr. Winkle. " ' And really,' added Mr. Pickwick, after half- an-hour's walking had brought them to the village, ' really, for a misanthrope's choice, this is one of LEATHER BOTTLE FORMERLY USED AS THE SIGN. the prettiest and most desirable places of residence I ever met with.' " Having been directed to the Leather Bottle, the friends entered, and were at once shown into the parlour, " a long, low-roofed room, furnished with a large number of high-backed, leather-cushioned chairs, of fantastic shapes, and embellished with a great variety of old portraits and roughly coloured prints of some antiquity. At the upper end of the room was a table, with a white cloth upon it, well covered with a roast fowl, bacon, ale, and et ceteras ; and at the table sat Mr. Tupman, look- M i » pa o u h" hI H H O n a » H b O 159 Retrospective Notes i6i ing as unlike a man who had taken his leave of the world as possible." As this old house was in 1883, within and without, exactly as it was fifty years before, I have given correct views of the exterior, and of the parlour. The portraits in oil (quite a number of them) were still there, and, although the house has changed hands several times since the days of Pickwick, the furniture was the same. At the time Pickwick was written, the veritable Leather Bottle shown here was to be seen attached to the sign over the door. It is still preserved in the bar. It is worth noting that this description of Cob- ham, and its Leather Bottle, was imdoubtedly written while Charles Dickens was staying at Chalk immediately after his marriage. He was at this time in lodgings, and his old landlord, Thomas White, was stUI hving in 1882. Charles Dickens stayed a day and a night at the Leather Bottle with Mr. Forster in September 1841 {vide Forster's Life). That in his early days he stayed there on other occasions is certain, and in February 1845 Charles Dickens, Mrs. Dickens, Miss Hogarth, D. Maclise, Douglas Jerrold, and John Forster, visited Cobham Chmrch and Park on a Sunday, their head-quarters being the Bull at Rochester.^ 1 The Leather Bottle was partially destroyed by fire on Good Friday, the 8th April, 1887. II 1 62 Childhood and Youth of Charles Dickens The fine old church of St. Mary Magdalen, Cob- ham, frequently alluded to by Dickens in his works, is shown here, from a careful drawing by Mr. Edward Hull. The church is immediately in front of the Leather Bottle, and on the occasion of the visit of the four friends, Mr. Pickwick and Mr. Tupman withdrew to this quiet spot, and " for half an hour their forms might have been seen pacing the churchyard to and fro." Charles Dickens was particularly fond of this delightful part of a dehghtful county, and his last walk, when his feet had well nigh " completed their journey," was on the evening of a beautiful summer day (the 7th June, 1870), when, with his sister- in-law,' he rambled through the shady lanes that surround Cobham Park. Here is a fine description of the stillness and quiet to be found in a small village in the depths of the country at night. " It was past eleven o'clock — a late hour for the little village of Cobham — when Mr. Pickwick retired to the bedroom which had been prepared for his reception. He threw open the lattice window, and setting his light upon the table, fell into a train of meditation on the hurried events of the two preceding days. " The hour and the place were both favourable to contemplation ; Mr. Pickwick was roused by the church clock striking twelve. The first stroke 1 Miss Hogarth. i63 Retrospective Notes 165 of the hour sounded solemnly in his ear ; but when the bell ceased, the stillness seemed insupportable ; — he almost felt as if he had lost a companion." On the morrow the friends walk on to Gravesend, a place frequently mentioned in the letters of Charles Dickens, and in several of his books, and where in later life he was often seen with his pony- chaise and dogs. A few days after the discovery of the celebrated stone at Cobham, Mr. Pickwick has an adventure at Bury St. Edmunds, at a red-brick house called Westgate House, and which, like the now famous East Gate House at Rochester, was a ladies' school. At the Magpie and Stump Mr. Pickwick makes the acquaintance of several lawyers' clerks, and some wonderful tales are told by old Jack B amber of the " Inns," and the chambers therein, the " Queer Client " being, it would seem, his favourite. In it, at the opening of the tale, the High Street in the Borough, with the Marshalsea Prison, are intro- duced, and at the end reference is made to " one of the most peaceful and secluded churchyards in Kent, where wild-flowers mingle with the grass, and the soft landscape around forms the fairest spot in the Garden of England." This is probably another allusion to Cobham, or it will answer equally well for the adjoining parish of Shorne, which was also a favourite locality with Dickens. In this tale, Heyling, the " queer client," finds his enemy, a decrepit old man, living at Little 1 66 Childhood and Youth of Charles Dickens College Street, in Old Pancras Road, the same street Charles Dickens had lodged in when a boy, and where the original of Mrs. Pipchin was then living. On the breaking up of the Christmas party at Dingley Dell, Mr. Bob Sawyer invites Mr. Pickwick and friends to come and see him at his lodgings in Lant Street, in the Borough, where Dickens had also lived in his boyhood, and it is noteworthy that one of Bob's friends, Mr. Jack Hopkins, a medical student from St. Bartholomew's, was the namesake of one of the prominent characters in the prison scenes at the King's Bench given in Copperfield. The visit to Bath and Bristol is probably a re- collection of the reporting days ; the Bush, at Bristol, was Dickens' Hotel at that time. {Vide Forster's Life.) In the Fleet Prison one of the interesting party on whom Mr. Pickwick was " chummed " was a butcher of whom Mr. Roker remarks, " as he gazed abstractedly out of the grated window before him, as if he were fondly recalling some peaceful scene of his early youth ; it seems but yesterday that he whopped the coal-heaver down Fox-under-the-hill by the wharf there," — the locality being that of the blacking manufactory, and the fight, probably enough, an actual occurrence. Some of the most telling fun in all Pickwick is in chap, xlv., where old Weller visits Sam in the Retrospective Notes 167 Fleet, and the most pathetic part is that leading up to the death of the poor Chancery prisoner in the preceding chapter. Oliver Twist is a standing protest against the atrocious poor-laws of a past generation. The hero of the tale, " a child of a noble nature and a warm heart," was a workhouse boy of unknown parentage and in the opening of the story we are told that " Hunger and recent ill-usage are great assistants if you want to cry ; and Oliver cried very naturally indeed." In a letter to Rev. Thomas Robinson (April 8th, 1841), bearing on poor-law mal-administration, Dickens says, " I will pursue cruelty and oppression, the enemy of all God's creatures of all codes and creeds, so long as I have the energy of thought and the power of giving it utterance." Again, in 1844, having just returned from Venice, he remarked to his friend and biographer, " Ah ! when I saw those places, how I thought that to leave one's hand upon the time, lastingly upon the time, with one tender touch for the mass of toiling people that nothing could obliterate, would be to lift oneself above the dust of all the Doges," — and, says Forster, truly enough, " in varying forms this ambition was in all his life." — Forster, vol. ii., page 122. There is in this work some evidence of the in- fluence (it may have been an unconscious influence) exerted upon him at this time by his friend William 1 68 Childhood and Youth of Charles Dickens Harrison Ainsworth ; it is less, perhaps, in the style of the writing, than in some of the more highly dramatic situations of the plot. This feeling is, I think, heightened by the fact that the illustrations to Oliver were designed and etched by George Cruikshank, who at this time was in the enjoyment of the full measure of his extraordinary powers, and was, besides, engaged during its publication in illustrating the works of Ainsworth. Though none of the incidents of the tale can be said to resemble points in the early life of the author, there is yet a sufficient general resemblance in thought and feeling between the imaginative hardly used Oliver and his originator when a boy, to make it easy of recognition to the student, or even to the ordinary careful reader of the works of Dickens. The sketch of Mr. Fang, the police magistrate, whose eccentric outbursts of temper were continu- ally bringing him into uneaviable notice, is a re- collection of the reporting days. In reading it we are reminded of a sally of Mr. Samuel Weller, where he says, " This is a very impartial country for justice. There ain't a magistrate going as don't commit himself twice as often as he commits other people." It may perhaps interest readers to note the similarity in thought and style of the following two passages, one in Oliver Twist, chap, v., where Ohver runs away from the undertaker Sowerberry, who has tried to show him that, however he disliked Retrospective Notes 169 the business at first, he would in time get used to it, the other in David Copperfield, chap. ii. " OHver wondered, in his own mind, whether it had taken a very long time to get Mr. Sowerberry used to it. But he thought it better not to ask the question." In David Copperfield (written in the first person) little David tells how there was a mural tablet in the church to the late Mr. Bodgers, where- on, among other things, it stated that " physicians were in vain," and, says David, " I wonder whether they called in Mr. Chillip, and he was in vain ; and if so, how he likes to be reminded of it once a week." These two passages are fair specimens of the quaint, precocious thoughtfulness that Dickens has thrown into the utterances of many of his youthful characters. MuDFOG Association, 1837-38. " Mudfog is a pleasant town — a remarkably pleasant town — situ- ated ill a charming hollow by the side of a river. 1 70 Childhood and Youth of Charles Dickens from which river Mudfog derives an agreeable scent of pitch, tar, coals, and rope-yarn, a roving population in oil-skin hats, a pretty steady influx of drunken bargemen, and a great many other maritime advantages." This is evidently a humorous description of Chat- ham, and it is more than probable that Rochester is included in the general satire. Of the mayor, Mr. Nicholas Tulrumble, we are told that he began life as a coal-dealer, with a capital ol two-and-ninepence. " Time, which strews a man's head with silver, sometimes fills his pockets with gold." It was so with Nicholas Tulrumble, and it is recorded that he afterwards became mayor of Mudfog, and lived at Mudfog Hall, on Mudfog Hill. It is curious to note that among the names of eminent men attending the meetings of the Mud- fog Association was a Mr. Waghorn, a well-known and respected family name at Chatham, of which the late Lieutenant Waghorn was a member. Sow- ster is also an old Chatham name. " I have pro- cured a local artist to make a faithful sketch of the tyrant Sowster (the Beadle of Mudfog). His whole air is rampant with cruelty, nor is the stomach less characteristic of his demoniac propensities." The curious Inn signs mentioned in these papers, such as the Black-Boy-and-Stomach-ache, the Boot- Jack — and Countenance, and the Original-Pig, it might be difficult to find. Retrospective Notes 171 In Nicholas Nickleby the reader may get many glimpses of the early life of Dickens himself, and although it would be difficult to say which of the actual incidents of this great work are fact, and which fiction, in the full acceptation of the word, there can be no doubt that many of the experiences of Nicholas are recollections of the early associa- tions of the author. MILE-END COTTAGE, NEAR EXETER. The tale opens with allusions to Devonshire, a county which he has mentioned in several other books. Towards the close of Nicholas Nickleby Charles Dickens went into Devonshire, and took and furnished Mile-end Cottage, Alphington, near Exeter, for his father and mother, as mentioned in a previous chapter. A very humorous account of his negotiations with the proprietor of this house is given in Mr. Forster's book, vol. i., p. 163. 172 Childhood and Youth of Charles Dickens " I took a little house for them this morning (5th March, 1839, from the New-London Inn), and if they are not pleased with it I shall be grievously disappointed. Exactly a mile beyond the city, on the Plymouth Road, there are two white cottages ; one is theirs, and the other belongs to their land^ lady. I almost forget the number of rooms, but there is an excellent parlour, with two other rooms, on the ground floor ; there is really a beautiful little room over the parlour, which I am furnishing as a drawing-room, and there is a splendid garden." The accompanying engraving of this cottage is from a sketch kindly made by Mr. W. B. Rye, expressly for this work, and with it the reader may compare a description of this same cottage, which is to be found in Nicholas Nickleby, Part 2, chap, xxiii., where it is specially mentioned by Mrs. Nickleby as " the beautiful little thatched white house one storey high, covered all over with ivy and creeping plants, with an exquisite little porch with twining honeysuckles and all sorts of things." In a letter to Mr. Mitton of about the same date, Dickens says of this white cottage, " I don't think I ever saw so cheerful or pleasant a spot." ' Of the places dear to him in his infancy, Dickens 1 At a property sale held in Exeter, March 30th, 1885, Lot I was thus described : "A house at Alphington, called Mile-end Cottage, at one time occupied by Charles Dickens, held for forty-seven years, unexpired, from the Right Hon. Earl of Devon, at ;£io a year, and in a very dilapidated condition." Sold to Mr. Smith for ;^83. Retrospective Notes 173 mentions in this book Portsmouth, where Nicholas and Smike performed at the theatre, under the management of Mr. Vincent Crummies. The de- scription of the theatre and the company is as good as anything in the tale, and " a strong smell of orange-peel and lamp-oil, with an under-current of sawdust," may almost be perceived as we read chapter xxii. There are references, too, to some old places in London, well known to him in his boyhood, and in the Preface he says, " I cannot call to mind, now, how I came to hear about Yorkshire schools when I was a not very robust child, sitting in bye-places near Rochester Castle, with a head full of Part- ridge, Strap, Tom Pipes, and Sancho Panza." In severe weather, early in 1838, Charles Dickens and Hablot Knight Browne (Phiz), names which must be henceforward inseparably connected for all time, undertook a long journey by coach into the North of Yorkshire to see for themselves something of these Yorkshire schools. One result of their joint work in pen and pencil has been the complete obliteration of these pestilent and " cruel habitations." Probably not a single example of this low type of schools remains to the present day. Master Humphrey's Clock, with its two con- tinuous tales, and introductory chapters, cannot be said to contain many recollections of the early life of the author ; but there is probably in the story of 1 74 Childhood and Youth of Charles Dickens Joe Toddyhigh and his sad experience of " benefits forgot," some hidden reminiscence of his own boyish days. Master Humphrey also, when he says in an opening chapter, " I do not know whether all children are imbued with a quick perception of childish grace and beauty and a strong love for it, but I was," does but echo the well-known senti- ments of his creator. In the Preface we are told how Master Humphrey and his friends would probably " trace some faint reflection of their past lives in the varying current of the tale." I have always thought that in the life of Little Nell, there is in some way such a re- flection of his own life. In Dick Swiveller and his friends, and in Sampson Brass, and the Notary, there is, no doubt, a vivid sketch of persons Dickens had himself encountered in the days of the law. In the Old Curiosity Shop, the characters in- troduced seem to be real living men and women, and of its heroine. Lord Jeffrey has well said, that there has been " nothing so good as Nell since Cordeha." Barnaby Rudge, being mainly a description of the riots of 1780, and therefore an historical tale, has no special allusions to the early days of the writer ; but there is in that fine thirty-third chapter commencing, " One wintry evening," etc., a most interesting recollection of his early reading of the works of Smollett. In Peregrine Pickle, chap. ii. , the landlord of a public-house where Trunnion Retrospective Notes 175 and his cronies met nightly, hears a voice in the distance haiUng : " Ho ! the house ahoy ! " on which he, " clapping a hand to each side of his head, with his thumbs fixed to his ears, rebellowed in the same tone Hilloah ! " In Barnaby Rudge Dickens makes John Willet, on hearing the cry of " Maypole, ahoy ! " " clap his two hands to his cheeks, and send forth a roar which made the glasses dance and rafters ring — a long, sustained, discordant bellow, that rolled onward with the wind," etc. A Ceiristmas Carol (1843) opens with a Christ- mas Eve and a wonderful description of a London fog. Scrooge having dismissed his clerk for the night, the office was closed in a twinkling, and poor Bob Cratchit having gone down a slide " at the end of a lane of boys twenty times, in honour of its being Christmas Eve, ran home to Camden Town as hard as he could pelt to play at Blind-man's- buff." On going home to his old-fashioned roomy City house, Scrooge is visited by the ghost of his de- ceased partner Marley, who introduces the spirits of Christmas past, of Christmas present, and of Christmas yet to come. The spirit of Christmas past takes Scrooge by the hand, and they pass out into the open country, and, incredible as it may seem to those who know how different in every particular Charles Dickens was, to that curious creation of his own fancy, 176 Childhood and Youth of Charles Dickens Scrooge, we yet find that in some particulars the childhood of Scrooge was the childhood of himself. " ' Good heaven ! ' said Scrooge, clasping his hands together, as he looked about him, ' I was bred in this place ; I was a boy here ! ' " ' You recollect the way ? ' inquired the Spirit. ' Remember it ! ' cried Scrooge, with fervour, ' I could walk it blindfold.' " They walked along the road, Scrooge recognis- ing every gate, and post, and tree, until a market town appeared in the distance, with its bridge, its church,^ and winding river." — " They left the high- road by a well-remembered lane, and soon ap- proached a mansion of dull red brick, with a little weather-cock surmounted cupola on the roof, and a bell hanging in it." This curious mixing up of the boyhood of Scrooge with his own, seems to have been something more than a passing fancy, for in a letter to. Mr. W. H. Wills, dated Folkestone, September i6th, 1855, he writes thus : — " My dear Wills, — Scrooge is delighted to find that Bob Cratchit is enjoying his holiday in such a delightful situation ; and he says (with that warmth of nature which has distinguished him since his conversion), ' Make the most of it. Bob ; make the most of it.' " 1 In the MS. of A Christmas Carol the word castle has been struck out here, probably that the locality, Rochester, should be less easily recognised. Retrospective Notes i77 The purposely confused, account of his old sclieol near Clover Lane, with his later school, and the red brick house with the cupola (Gad's Hill Place), is at least remarkable. The reader will find, too, that Master Scrooge had a little sister Fanny, who came to fetch him home from school. Further on in the tale the ghost of ChristtnE^s present takes Scrooge to his nephew's house, and we are told that " Scrooge's niece played well iipon the harp ; and played among other tunes, a simple little air (a mere nothing, — you might learn to whistle it in two minutes) which had been familiar to the child who fetched Scrooge from the boarding- school — when this strain of music sounded, all the things that the ghost had shown him came upon his mind, he softened more and more." In Stave Four the ghost of Christmas yet to come conducts Scrooge to the house of Bob Cratchit at Camden Town (he had been there before with the second spirit), " through several streets familiar to his feet," and he sees Bob Cratchit surrounded by his children, save one. Tiny Tim, who is lying dead upstairs. Mrs. Cratchit and the girls are busy with the mourning, and the funeral is to take place on Sunday. Poor Bob has been to see the place where his child is to be buried, and Mrs. Cratchit says, " You went to-day, then, Robert ? " " Yes, my dear," returned Bob ; "I wish you could have gone. It would have done you good tP see how green a place it is. But you'll see it often. 12 178 Childhood and Youth of Charles Dickens I promised him that I would walk there on a Sun- day. My little, little child ! " cried Bob ; " my little child ! " " He broke down all at once. He couldn't help it. If he could have helped it, he and his child would have been further apart, perhaps, than they were."" Thomas Hood, in a review of this matchless per- formance in the January number of Mood's Maga- zine for 1844, thus speaks of the Christmas Carol : — " If Christmas, with its ancient and hospitable customs, its social and charitable observances, were in danger of decay, this is the book that would give them a new lease. The very name of the author predisposes one to the kindlier feelings ; — it was a blessed inspiration that put such a book into the head of Charles Dickens, a happy inspiration of the heart, that warms every page." As there is very little that can be considered to be retrospective in the rest of the Christmas books, they may be taken seriatim here instead of in the strict order of time of publication. The Chimes, written in Italy in 1844, and read from the proofs on Monday, December 2nd, to the illustrious company, represented in Daniel Machse's celebrated sketch,' was avowedly " a great blow for the poor," but is not otherwise noticeable here. Of the eleven persons represented in the above-named sketch, not one now survives. ' Forster's Life of Charles Dickens, vol. ii. Retrospective Notes 179 The Cricket on the Hearth, 1845, and The Battle of Life, 1846, have no special interest for the purposes of this book. Written in the middle period of the working life of Dickens, tKey resemble some others of his works in this particular, that there is in them scarce a trace of the recollections of his own early life. The original editions of these Christmas Books are now very valuable, and are specially sought for by collectors, on account of their choice illustrations by Maclise, Stanfield, Leech, Doyle, Tenniel, and Stone. The Haunted Man, 1848. Besides the allusion to the death of his sister, quoted on page 18, ante, there is in this little book some recollection of the old College at Cobham. It is somewhat obscured with the encroachments " of the great city," but there can be little doubt as to the locality Charles Dickens had in his mind when he wrote the following lines : " The last glimmering of daylight died away from the ends of avenues ; and the trees, arching over- head, were sullen and black. When in parks and woods, the high wet fern and sodden moss and beds of fallen leaves and trunks of trees were lost to view, in masses of impenetrable shade. When lights in old halls and in cottage windows were a cheerful sight. When the mill stopped, the wheelwright and the blacksmith shut their workshops, the turn- pike-gate closed, the plough and harrow were left lonely in the fields, the labourer and team went 1 80 Childhood and Youth of Charles Dickens home, and the striking of the churcii clock had a deeper sound than at noon, and the churchyard wicket would be swung no more that night." He elsewhere describes the dwelling of the student as " an empty old pile of building, on a winter night, with the loud wind going by upon its journey of mystery — whence, or whither, no man knowing since the world began." . . . Martin Chuzzlewit, 1843-4, is almost universally acknowledged to be one of the best, and most deservedly popular, of all the works of Charles Dickens. It abounds in descriptive passages of the highest order, and is in the great novelist's richest vein of humour. Written to illustrate the various kinds and degrees of selfishness, it intro- duces to the reader's notice some of the most inter- esting and curious of all the characters of Dickens. The tale opens in the neighbourhood of Salisbury, and it will be noticed that Mark Tapley (a new development, and in some degree an improvement on Sam Weller) describes himself as " a Kentish man by birth." ' In chap, v., while incidentally describing some of the shop windows Tom Pinch delighted to gaze at in the old city of Salisbury, he mentions a book shop " where children's books were sold, and where poor Robinson Crusoe stood alone in his might, with dog and hatchet, goat skin cap and fowhng- 1 Tapley is one of the characters in Smollett's Sir Launce- lot Greaves, where he is described as a Brewer. Retrospective Notes * i8i pieces, calmly surveying Philip Quarll and the host of imitators round him, and calling Mr. Pinch to witness that he, of all the crowd, impressed one solitary foot-print on the shore of boyish memory, whereof the tread of generations should not stir the lightest grain of sand." Farther on in this chapter (the evening service at the Cathedral being over), " Tom took the organ himself. It was then, turning dark, and the yellow light that streamed in through the ancient windows in the choir was mingled with a murky red. As the grand tones resounded through the church, they seemed, to Tom, to find aii echo in the depth of every ancient tomb, no less than in the deep mystery of his own heart. Great thoughts and hopes came crowding on his mind as the rich music rolled upon the air, and yet among them — something more grave and solemn in their purpose, but the same — were all the images of that day, down to its very lightest recollection of childhood." Chapter vii. introduces those amusing rascals Montague Tigg and Chevy Slyme, the latter of whom is detained at the Blue Dragon for an unpaid score, — " a thing in itself essentially mean ; a low performance on a slate, or possibly chalked upon the back of a door." Young Martin afterwards encounters Tigg at a pawnbroker's in London, where in a playful fashion he assists him in pawning his watch, and farther on in the tale (chap, xxvii.), Tigg appears in "clothes 1 82 Childhood and Youth of Charles Dickens of the newest fashion and the costUest kind — precious chains and jewels sparkled on his breast; his fingers clogged with brilliant rings," — as chairman of the Anglo-Bengalee Disinterested Loan and Life Assurance Company. Tigg and his friend David, the pawnbroker's assistant of former days, had " embarked in an enterprise of some magnitude, in which they ad- dressed the public in general from the strong position of having everything to gain, and nothing at all to lose." To these impecunious scamps Jonas Chuzzlewit, a sordid, ungainly man, was introduced, and took his seat as a member of the board. There is, says Dickens, in another place, " a simplicity of cunning no less than a simplicity of innocence," and he then shows how Jonas was thrown off his guard by the magnificence of Tigg and his surroundings. " It is too common with all of us, but it is especially in the nature of a mean mind, to be overawed by fine clothes and fine furniture.^ They had a very decided effect on Jonas." In chap, XXXV. is a capital description of an old waterside inn, where Martin and Mark went on being set ashore, on their return from America ; the descriptive sketch of this inn recalls to mind more than one old tavern still to be seen at Chatham. 1 Rich clothes are oft by common sharpers worn, And diamond rings felonious hands adorn. — Martial. Retrospective Notes 183 " It had more corners in it than the brain of an obstinate man ; was full of mad closets, into which nothing could be put that was not specially in- vented and made for that purpose ; had mysterious shelvings and bulk-heads, and indications of stair- cases in the ceiling ; and was elaborately provided with a bell that rung in the room itself, about two feet from the handle, and had no connection what- ever with any other part of the establishment." Of all descriptions of the now vanished coaching- days the ride from Salisbury to London in chap, xxxvi. is surely the best. Dickens describes the coachman as doing things with his hat, " which nothing but an unlimited knowledge of horses and the wildest freedom of the road, could ever have made him perfect in. The guard, too ! Seventy breezy miles a day were written in his very whiskers. His manners were a canter ; his conversation a round trot. He was a fast coach upon a down-hill turnpike road ; he was all pace. A waggon couldn't have moved slowly, with that guard and his key- bugle on the top of it." As a slight test of the hold Martin Chuzzlewit has taken upon the public, it may be remarked that, with perhaps the single exception of Pickwick, no work of fiction (by whomsoever written) contains so many characters whose names may be said to have " passed into the language." Bailey, jun., and Poll Sweedlepipe, Pecksniff, and Pinch, and Slyme, Sairey Gamp, and her mythical 1 84 Childhood and Youth of Charles Dickens friend Mrs. Harris, Betsy Prig, Zephaniah Scadder, and Jefferson Brick, Mark Tapley, Tigg, and Tod- gers. Writing to Mr. Forster when the work was in progress (November 2nd, 1843), Dickens says, " You know, as well as I, that I think Chuzzlewit in a hundred points immeasureably the best of my stories.' ' And so, up to that time, it undoubtedly was. DoMBEY AND SoN, 1846-7-8. On the authority of Dickens himself (see Forster's Life of Charles Dickens, vol. ii., p. 327), much of the early part of this tale, so far as Paul Dombey is concerned, is in a manner autobiographical ! From internal evidence alone, we might have been almost sure of this ; for there is, in little Paul, the same kind of quick, precocious intelligence, that we now know was so remarkable in little Charles Dickens. Little Paul Dombey, however, in his early boy- hood, knew nothing of the cheerful genial surround- ings which had so much to do with the after hfe and fame of Charles Dickens ; and it is only when we come to the Pipchin days that we can see that Paul and his originator were identical. " I hope you will like Mrs. Pipchin's establish- ment," wrote Dickens to Mr. Forster. " It is from the life, and I was there, — shall I leave you my life in MS. when I die ? There are some things in it that would touch you very much." This letter was written November 4th, 1846. Retrospective Notes 185 In Walter Gay, too, there is noticeable much of the prompt impulsive action and indomitable energy of Charles Dickens at his age ; and it is difficult to believe otherwise than that the author himself knew this well, and that his own youth was before his mind's eye when he makes Walter propose to Florence on the eve of their marriage, that they should go away on the morrow, and stay in Kent until their ship was ready for them at Gravesend. Of the illustrations to Dombey and Son, it may be said that " Phiz " (Mr. Hablot K. Browne) was probably at his best during its publication, and many of these plates are amongst his finest efforts. " Browne is certainly interesting himself," says Dickens in a note to Mr. Forster, " and taking pains. I think the cover very good ; perhaps with a little too much in it, but that is an ungrateful objection." It must be owned, however, that a few of the earlier plates in Dombey and Son were not so happy, and Dickens said of one or two of them, that they were so "dreadfully bad" they made him "curl his legs up." The objection was that the artist did not keep strictly to the text, and not that the illustrations were bad as works of art. David Copperfield, 1849-50, is so obviously and transparently autobiographical, and has, moreover, been so frequently alluded to and quoted in the course of this work, that it cannot be necessary to do more than make a few brief comments on it here. 1 86 Childhood and Youth of Charles Dickens The tale opens at Blunderstone or Blundeston in Suffolk, six miles from Yarmouth, and farther on in the story, David is at school at Canterbury ; but it is certain that Dickens never was at Yarmouth till January 1849 (when he was thirty-seven years of age), and he probably never saw Canterbury in his boyhood at all. It is very likely, therefore, that but for an evident intention to obscure his own identity in this tale, Charles Dickens would have written Portsmouth instead of Yarmouth, and Rochester instead of Canterbury. So, also, with some of the leading characters and incidents of the story, such as the brutal step-father Murdstone, the eccentric but practical aunt, Betsy Trotwood, with her odd companion, Mr. Dick.' Although these and others of the characters in David Copperfield are, if possible, more real than those of any other of the books of Charles Dickens, they have, perhaps, been introduced with the in- tention of making the autobiographical character of the work less easy of recognition. In this tale, as in Dombey and Son, one of the greatest favourites of all the characters introduced is a seafaring man, or, as he styled himself, " a babby in the form of a great Sea Porkypine." Daniel Peg- gotty and Ned Cuttle are types of men still to be found in our seaport towns, and with such men, it is 1 The name of this curious character was originally written "Mr. Robert," as may be seen on Folios 8 and 9 of the MS. at South Kensington, Retrospective Notes 187 well known, Dickens was quite at home. It is perhaps worthy of notice, that Peggotty as a Christian name for a woman was once in use at Chatham, though many will think, with Miss Betsy Trotwood, that it has a somewhat heathenish sound- There is in chap. xiii. an interesting account of David's flight from London, and his passing through Rochester, and sleeping by the side of a garrison gun, in one of the batteries just above his old house on the Brook. Also a life-hke sketch of " Old Charley," a drunken madman, who formerly dealt in second-hand clothes at Chatham. Of Wilkins Micawber, " with that theer bald head of his," nothing new can be said, but that his genial loveable disposition is likely to be remembered for all time, — " in short — till something better turns up." One other pleasant reminiscence of Dickens' own early days it is difficult to pass over. Who can doubt but that the light-hearted revels in the chambers in Gray's Inn, tenanted by Tommy Traddles, is nothing more than a recollection of the Furnival's Inn days so dear to himself ? We are also told in this same chapter how Traddles (like Dickens himself, and like Walter Gay) " had taken his young wife down into Kent for a wedding trip." The great secret of the success of David Copper- field is undoubtedly this, that not only has Charles Dickens, as it were, breathed into it the breath of his own life, but, as his friend Mr. Forster has 1 88 Childhood and Youth of Charles Dickens beautifully said, " Childhood and youth live again for all of us in its marvellous boy-experiences." ' Bleak House, 1852-3. Of the twelve alterna- tive titles proposed for this book, see Forster's Life of Charles Dickens, vol. iii., page 31 ; eight of them commenced with Tom-all-alone's (see ante, page 59), as in the following examples : — Tom-all-alone's. The Solitary House that was always shut up. Tom- all-alone's. The Solitary House where the grass grew. Tom-all-alone's. The Solitary House where the wind howled. All the trial titles are akin to these, and all sug- gest desolation and ruin, till at last the short but expressive Bleak House was adopted, and Tom-all- alone's, the curious place-name from the neighbour- hood of Chatham, was only used incidentally in the tale, as the name of a dilapidated rookery in London. Trooper George, Matthew Bagnet, and the " old girl," his wife, are life-like studies, if not actual reproductions of characters Dickens had known ; so are the numerous lawyers and lawyers' clerks introduced in Bleak House. It has occurred to me that the interior view of Chesney Wold in this story, showing the long draw- ing-room, was probably taken from Tabley Hall, Cheshire. The similarity is most striking. In August 1881 I wa:s at Tabley, and in conversa- tion with thfe late Lord de Tabley I ventured to call his attention to the fact, and to ask him if it ^ Life of Charles Dickens, vol. iii., page 15. Retrospective Notes 189 was possible that Hablot K. Browne could ever have seen this fine room. He replied, "It is pos- sible enough, as Phiz and Dickens were in this neighbourhood together more than once." The reader will recollect that the owner of Chesney Wold was Sir Leicester Dedlock, and will perhaps agree with me that as Leicester is the old family name of the De Tableys, here is another very remarkable coincidence. The Seven Poor Travellers. In the visitors' book at Watts' Charity, Rochester, under date of May nth, 1854, the following names may be seen : — During this particular visit, Dickens was, no doubt, studying the administration of the charity at that time, for use in the Christmas number of Household, Words. The introduction, describing, as it does, the internal arrangements and surroundings of this probably unique Charity, is in Dickens' best manner. 1 90 Childhood and Youth of Charles Dickens He had been wandering about the neighbouring Cathedral, " and had seen the tomb of Richard watts' charity. Watts, with the efhgy of worthy Master Richard starting out of it like a ship's figure-head." ' ' See the engraving of this monument on page 81 {Initial letter). Retrospective Notes 1 9 1 The description oi the building and accommoda- tion for the travellers is, or was at that time, abso- lutely correct. Of the six little rooms set apart as dormitories for the travellers, the account given by the matron in the tale is also quite accurate. ' ' They sleep in two little outer galleries at the back, where their beds has always been, ever since the Charity was founded. It being so very ill-convenient to me as things is at present, the gentlemen are going to take off a bit of the back-yard, and make a slip' of a room for 'em there, to sit in before they go to bed.' " ' And then the six poor travellers,' said I, ' will be entirely out of the house ? ' " ' Entirely out of the house,' assented the presence, comfortably smoothing her hands. ' Which is considered much better for all parties, and much more conwenient.' " I had been a little startled, in the Cathedral, by the emphasis with which the effigy of Master Richard Watts was bursting out of his tomb ; but I began to think, now, that it might be expected to come across the High Street some stormy night, and make a disturbance here." An extract from the will of Richard Watts, re- taining the old spelling, may be interesting here. The will is dated August 15th, 1579, and directs that to the almshouse already standing beside the Market Cross in the City of Rochester, there be added " six sever all rooms with chimneys for the 192 Childhood and Youth of Charles Dickens comfort placing and, abiding of the poor within the said Citte, and also to be made apt and convenierit places therein for VI. good Mattresses or Flockbeds and other good and sufficient furniture to harbor or lodge in Poor Travellers or Wayfare men being no Common Rooges nor Proctors, and they the said Wayfaring men to harbor and lodge therein no longer than one night unless sickness be the further cause thereof and those poor folks there dwelling shall keep the House sweete make the Beds see to the Furniture keep the same sweete and curtuorsly intreate the said Poor Travellers and to every of the said Poor Travellers at their first coming in to have Illld. and they shall warm them at the fyre of the residence within the said house if nede bee." The plain meaning of the testator, Richard Watts, is that six poor men should be courteously received and lodged for one night, and relieve^ with four- pence in money. The equally plain meaning of Charles Dickens was that the poor were not treated as Watts directs in his will, but were in fact pushed out of the house altogether, and had a shp of a room in the back-yard, where they could sit before going to bed. This room is lighted, it may be added, by one ordinary street-lamp, ingeniously placed in the yard so that it shines alike into the room, and into the approach to the dormitories. Rogues and tramping vagabonds swarm on the Kentish roads still, though the Proctors, as known to ROCHESTER CASTLE. Showing Graveyard in the remains of Castle Moat. 13 193 Retrospective Notes 195 Watts, are extinct and forgotten ; but it has always seemed to me that the good people of Rochester, instead of abolishing this Charity altogether, as was once quietly proposed, ought rather to be proud of it, and after being quite sure they are relieving only the deserving -poor (there are plenty of them), they should, in the common-sense in- terpretation of the Founder's Will, give to each " wayfare man " not only a bare fourpence of the present currency, but the relative equivalent of fourpence in 1579.^ Ample funds exist for doing this, as Watts, for the maintenance of this house, gave "to the Mayor and citizens, all other his lands, tenements, and estates for ever." In this Christmas number for 1854, the strong love of Dickens for these old scenes of his boyhood must be apparent to all. His visit in the May of this year, when Mark Lemon was with him, must have been a great treat. Here is a brief descrip- tion of the slumberous old city, written when Dickens was in the prime of life, and in the fullest enjoyment of his extraordinary powers : — ' ' The silent High Street of Rochester is full of gables with old beams and timbers carved into strange faces. It is oddly garnished with a queer old clock that projects over the pavement out of a 1 Fourpence in the time of Elizabeth would buy a poor man quite a httle stock of provisions. What would it bTiy now ? 196 Childhood and Youth of Charles Dickens grave red-brick building, as if time carried on busi- ness there and hung out his sign. Sooth to say, he did an active stroke of work in Rochester, in the days of the Romans, and the Saxons, and the Normans ; and down to the times of King John, when the rugged castle— I will not undertake to say how many hundreds of years old then— was abandoned to the centuries of weather which had so defaced the dark apertures in its walls that the ruin looks as if the rooks and daws had picked its eyes out." The account of the treat to the poor Travellers on this occasion is of course wholly fictitious, al- though it is accepted as sober truth by many people both in Rochester and elsewhere. After the genial author's imaginary compa;ny had been feasted with " turkey and a chine," and a jug of punch had been produced, they drank to the memory of good Master Richard Watts. " It was the witching hour for story-telling. ' Our whole life, Travellers,' said I, 'is a story more or less intelhgible, generally less ; but we shall read it by a clearer light when it is ended. I, for one, am so divided this night between fact and fiction, that I scarce know which is which.' " The stories being finished, and the wassail too, the party broke up as the Cathedral bell struck Twelve. " As I passed along the High Street I heard the ROCHESTER CATHEDRAL AND CASTLE. MINOR CANON ROW, ROCHESTER. (See also Edwin Drood.) 197 Retrospective Notes 199 waits at a distance, and struck off to find them. They were playing near one of the old gates of the city, at the corner of a wonderfully quaint row of red-brick tenements, which the clarionet obligingly informed me were inhabited by the minor canons. They had odd little porches over the doors, like sounding-boards over old pulpits, and I thought I should like to see one of the minor canons come out upon his top step and favour us with a little Christmas discourse about the poor scholars of Rochester, taking for his text the words of his Master relative to the devouring of widows' houses." In the morning the party of the night before, after partaking of hot coffee and bread-and-butter, all came out into the street together, and there shook hands. " As for me, I was going to walk by Cobham Woods, as far upon my way to London as I fancied. And now the mists began to rise in the most beautiful manner, and the sun to shine ; and as I went on through the bracing air, seeing the hoar-frost sparkle ever3rwhere, I felt as if all nature shared in the joy of the great birthday. By Cob- ham Hall, I came to the village, and the churchyard where the dead had been quietly buried, " in the sure and certain hope ' which Christmas time inspired. — Thus Christmas begirt me, far and near, until I came to Blackheath, and had walked down the long vista of gnarled old trees in Greenwich Park, and was being steam-rattled through the mists, now closing in once more, towards the lights of London," 200 Childhood and Youth of Charles Dickens It may be well to close this note on the Seven Poor Travellers by giving the full inscription on the tablet to Richard Watts in the south transept of Rochester Cathedral : — Sacred to the Memory of RICHARD WATTS Esg : a principal Benefactor to this City who departed this life Sept. lo. 1579 at his Mansion house on Bully hill called SATIS (so named by Q. EI-IZABETH of glorious . memory), and lies interr'd near this place as by his Will doth plainly appear. By which Will dated Aug. 22. and proved Sep. 25- 1579- he founded an Alrhshouse for the relief of poor people and for the reception of six poor Travelers every night and for imploying the poor of this City. The Mayor and Citizens of this City in testimony of their Gratitude and his Merit have erected this Monument a.d. 1736. RICHARD WATTS Esq : then Mayor. ^^^l^Wi^ SIGNATURE OF RICHARD WATTS. On another page an engraving of a fine memorial brass to Charles Dickens is given ; it was very ap- propriately placed immediately under Watts' monu- ment. Though not strictly in chronological order, it PRIORS GATE, ROCHESTER. 201 Retrospective Notes 203 will be convenient to take the rest of the Christmas stories here. The Holly Tree, 1855. There is a curious reminiscence in the opening of this tale, of the journey by coach to the "farther borders of York- shire," in the days before Nickleby. When snowed up at The Holly Tree on a Yorkshire moor, the traveller having speedily exhausted the literature of the inn, amuses himself with recalling his experiences of inns, and a capital series of re- membrances of nurse's stories, all connected with inns, follows. " My first impressions of an Inn dated from the nursery ; consequently I went back to the nursery as a starting point, and found myself at the knee of a sallow woman with a fishy eye, an aquiline nose, and a green gown,' whose speciality was a dismal narrative of a landlord by the roadside, whose visitors unaccountably disappeared for many years, until it was discovered that the pursuit of his life had been to convert them into pies." " Then there was the roadside Inn, renowned in my time in a sixpenny book with a folding plate, representing in a central compartment of oval form the portrait of Jonathan Bradford, and in four other compartments four incidents of the tragedy with which the name is associated, — coloured with a hand at once so free and economical, that the bloom of Jonathan's complexion passed without any pause I Evidently Mrs. Pipchin. 204 Childhood and Youth of Charles Dickens into the breeches of the ostler, and, smearing itself off into the next division, became rum in a bottle." The Mitre Inn (previously mentioned) was next passed in review, and then "to be continued to- morrow," said I, "when I took my candle to go to bed." But the bed took upon itself to continue the train of thought, and here Dickens alludes to the fact, mentioned in his Life and Letters, that he had for years dreamed of a dear friend (his young sister-in- law, Mary Hogarth) " sometimes as stillliving; some- times as returning from the world of shadows to com- fort me ; always as being beautiful, placid, and happy, and never with any approach to fear or distress." ^ 1 This frequently recurring dream or vision of Mary- Hogarth (who died in 1837 "at the early age of seven- teen "), through the whole of the rest of his life, is one of the most notable incidents in the career of Dickens ; and, if other evidence were wanting, might be instanced as a proof of the deeply affectionate nature of the man. It is remarkable that the words he wrote for her epitaph, " Young, beautiful, and good," are repeated (1838) in Oliver Twist, chap, xxxiv., where, speaking of the illness of Rose Maylie, he says, " The young, the beautiful, and good ; " and again in chap, xxxix., also (1840) in The Old Curiosity Shop, at the death of little Nell, he says of her, " so young, so beautiful, so good." Finally, we have the same words in Dombey and Son (1847), chap. 1., where Walter Gay, speaking of Florence Dombey, says, " To think that she, so youflg, so good, and beautiful ! " This is surely not an involuntary reproduction of himself, but a studied, intentional, and very touching tribute to the memory of the dear young friend of his early days. Retrospective Notes 205 And so on, through a succession of inns in Switzerland, in France, in Wales, in the Highlands of Scotland, and in Cornwall, where there comes in a remembrance of a glorious excursion in which Dickens and Forster, and " Mac " and " Stanny " were in company, for the humorous account of which see Forster's Life of Charles Dickens, vol. ii., page 20. In Dickens' account of the journey he says, " they made such sketches, those two men (Stanfield and Maclise), that you would have sworn we had the Spirit of Beauty with us as well as the Spirit of Fun." The Wreck of the Golden Mary, 1856. Sixty- seven days out from Liverpool, the good ship Golden Mary, bound for California, strikes on an iceberg, and the crew and passengers having taken to the boats, the good qualities of the captain and mate at once become manifest. The story opens with a capital description of two genial seamen. Captain Ravender and John Steadi- man the mate. After a fine account of his ship. Captain Ravender describes his fellow-travellers : — " Of my passengers, I need only particularise, just at present, a bright-eyed blooming young wife who was going out to j oin her husband in California, taking with her their only child, a little girl of three years old, whom he had never seen. — As the child had a quantity of shining fair hair, clustering in curls all about her face, and as her name was Lucy, Steadiman gave her the name of the Golden 2o6 Childhood and Youth of Charles Dickens Lucy.'^ — So we had the Golden Lucy and the Golden Mary." After thirteen days' exposure and privation in an open boat the poor child dies and — " we buried the Golden Lucy in the grave of the Golden Mary." The Perils of Certain English Prisoners, 1857. The story is told by one Gill Davis, a private in the Royal Marines, and the scene opens on board of the armed sloop, Christopher Columbus, in the South American waters off the Mosquito shore. Of himself Gill Davis says : " I was a foundling child picked up somewhere or another, and I always understood my Christian name to be Gill. It is true that I was called Gills when employed at Snor- ridge Bottom, betwixt Chatham and Maidstone, to frighten birds, — but that had nothing to do with the baptism wherein I was made, etc., and wherein a number of things were promised for me by some- body, who let me alone ever afterwards as to per- forming of them, and who, I consider, must have been the beadle. Such name of Gills was entirely owing to my cheeks, or gills, which at that time of my life were of a raspy description. " In those climates you don't want to do much. I was doing nothing. I was thinking of the shepherd (my father, I wonder ?) on the hill-sides by Snorridge Bottom, with a long staff, and with a rough white coat in all weathers all the year round, who used to let me lie in a corner of his hut by night, and who ' See ante, page 24. Retrospective Notes 207 used to let me go about with him and his sheep by day when I could get nothing else to do, and wbo used to give me so little of his victuals and so much of his staff, that I ran away from him — which was what he wanted all along, I expect — to be knocked about the world in preference to Snorridge Bottom." This is not the only local allusion in the tale ; there is also mentioned a Mr. Commissioner Por- dage, an old and esteemed name at Rochester. (See also the notes on Little Dorrit.) In the portion of The Haunted House, 1859, written by Dickens, are allusions to his own habit of work, to his belief or otherwise in ghosts in general, to his bloodhound Turk, and to his friend and solicitor, the late Fred Ouvry, Esq., who, as Mr. Undery, he describes as playing " whist better than the whole Law List, from the red cover at the begin- ning to the red cover at the end." In the Ghost in Master B.'s Room are apparently some playful reminiscences of past days : " Where is my little sister ? " said the ghost, " and where is the boy I went to school with ? " " I entreated the phantom to be comforted, and above all things to take heart respecting the loss of the boy he went to school with. I represented to him that probably that boy never did, within human experience, come out well, when discovered. I urged that I myself had, in later life, turned up several boys whom I went to school with, and none of them had at all answered." 2o8 Childhood and Youth of Charles Dickens Hard Times, 1854. Published originally in Household Words. The argument of this tale, as explained by Dickens himself, is this : " My satire is against those who see figures and averages, and nothing else — the representation of the wickedest and most enormous vice of this time ; the men who, through long years to come, will do more to damage the really useful truths of political economy than I could do (if I tried) in my whole life." Coketown in this story is supposed to stand for Manchester, or some other of our Lancashire manu- facturing towns. Of Josiah Bounderby (see also page 79 ante) it may be said that though he is undoubtedly to be met with occasionally in " the dark, and true, and tender north," he is also to be heard of sometimes in other parts of the world. One of the least successful attempts in this or any of the books of Charles Dickens, is his ren- dfering of the Lancashire dialect ; the utterances put into the mouths of Stephen Blackpool, and others, in Hard Times, are very far from being correct. By far the best, most spirited, and life-hke part of this story is the description of Mr. Sleary and his circus riders, and it is interesting to note that the inscription on the sign of the Pegasus Arms, where the circus company put up, Good malt makes good beer. Walk in, you'll find it here, etc., etc.. Retrospective Notes 209 was taken from an old Inn sign, The Malt Shovel, at the foot of Chatham Hill.' Little Dorrit, 1855-6-7. The name Dorrit, with a slight alteration in the spelUng, is taken from a Rochester family, and it is an interesting fact that in the graveyard of Rochester Cathedral are still to be seen two tombstones, side by side, on which are engraved the now historic names of Fanny Dorrett and Caleb Pordage. There are in this tale other curious revelations, which could not be coincidences merely, but must have occurred to the mind of the writer as recollec- tions of his own boyhood. Such are the prison experiences of the Dorrits. Rochester is also incidentally mentioned with other places "on the Dover Road" in Book 2, chap, xviii. A Tale of Two Cities, 1859, is for the purposes of this book chiefly remarkable for a very graphic account of a journey at night on the Dover Road, in the old coaching days of 1775. At the trial of Darnay, it was shown that on the journey to Dover he had " travelled back some dozen miles or more, to a garrison and dockyard, and there collected information ; a witness was called to identify him as having been, at the precise time required, in the coffee-room of an hotel in that garrison-and-dockyard town waiting for another person." The reference is to Chatham. 1 Since removed. 14 2IO Childhood and Youth of Charles Dickens There is also a fine description of the neighbour- hood of Soho Square, another of the residences of Dickens when a youth of seventeen or eighteen. The Uncommercial Traveller. In this series of papers (i860) the writer makes many allusions to memories of his early days, and well-known well- remembered places. To begin with, there is a telling description of the East End of London, familiar to Dickens from his early boyhood. In the article Wapping Workhouse, he describes his journey through the town, past the India House, with its memories of another Charles (Charles Lamb), pats his little wooden midshipman affectionately " on one leg of his knee-shorts for old acquaintance' sake," and so past Aldgate Pump, and Whitechapel Church, and finds himself " rather inappropriately for an Uncommercial Traveller — in the Commercial Road." Travelling Abroad. The whole of these Un- commercial papers appeared in All the Year Round, and were written at a period of the author's life when he had come back, as it were, to live in the old neighbourhood ; hence the frequent references to well-remembered localities in Kent. Here is a delightfully fresh description of the Dover Road: " So smooth was the old high road, and so fresh were the horses, and so fast went I, that it was midway between Gravesend and Rochester, and the widen- ing river was bearing the ships, white sailed or black-smoked, out to sea, when I noticed by the wayside a very queer small boy. Retrospective Notes 211 " ' Holloa ! ' said I, to the very queer small boy, ' where do you live ? ' " ' At Chatham,' says he. " ' What do you do there ? ' says I. " ' I go to school,' says he. " I took him up in a moment, and we went on. Presently the very queer small boy says, ' This is Gad's Hill we are coming to, where Falstaff went out to rob those travellers, and ran away.' " ' You know something about Falstaff, eh ? ' said I. " ' All about him,' said the very queer small boy, ' I am old (I am nine), and I read all sorts of books. But do let us stop at the top of the hill, and look at the house there, if you please ! ' " ' You admire that house ? ' said I. " ' Bless you, sir,' said the very queer small boy, ' when I was not more than half as old as nine, it used to be a treat for me to be brought to look at it. And ever since I can recollect, my father, seeing me so fond of it, has often said to me, " If you were to be very persevering and were to work hard, you might some day come to live in it ! " Though that's impossible ! ' said the very queer small boy, drawing a long breath, and now staring at the house out of window with all his might. " I was rather amazed to be told this by the very queer small boy ; for that house happens to be my house, and I have reason to believe that what he said was true." 2 1 2 Childhood and Youth of Charles Dickens The paper is a recollection of foreign travel, and represents the author as " looking out of the German chariot window in that delicious travellers' trance which knows no cares, no yesterdays, no to-morrows, nothing but the passing objects and the passing scents and sounds ! " The infinite pity and compassion of Charles Dickens is nowhere better shown than in The Great Tasmania's Cargo. " I travel constantly, up and down a certain line of railway that has a terminus in London. It is the railway for a large military depot,' and for other large barracks. To the best of my belief, I have never been on that railway by daylight, without seeing some hand- cuffed deserters in the train." The subject of this paper is, however, an account of the condition of some of the survivors of the campaign in India after the Indian Mutiny, and landed from the troop- ship Great Tasmania at Liverpool. The chapter on Tramps has some very shrewd and discriminating remarks as to the habits <, of these wanderers. Perhaps nowhere in England are greater numbers and greater varieties of the genus tramp to be encountered, than on the Dover Road. His description of the tramp's manner of sitting by the roadside with his legs in a dry ditch, or of sleeping in the sun lying on the broad of his back, is only equalled by his account of the grades and conditions of this far too numerous fraternity. ^ Chatham, Retrospective Notes 213 " He (the tramp) generally represents himself, in a vague way, as looking out for a job of work ; but he never did work, he never does, and he never will." Then there is the slinking tramp, the well- spoken, glib young man, the exemplary Mr. and Mrs. Anderson, who appear to have spent " the last of their little all on soap," they are so clean. " But the most vicious, by far, of all the idle tramps, is the tramp who pretends to have been a gentleman, — this pitiless rascal blights the summer road as he maunders on between the luxuriant hedges, where (to my thinking) even the wild convolvulus and rose and sweetbriar are the worse for his going by, and need time to recover from the taint of him in the air." Other sorts of tramps — the handicraft tramps who are to be found everywhere are then described. " Surely a pleasant thing if we were in that con- dition of life (knife grinding) to grind our way through Kent, Sussex, and Surrey. Clock mending, again, except for the slight inconvenience of carrying a clock under one arm, and the monotony of making the bell go, — what a pleasant privilege to give voice to the dumb cottage clock, and set it talking to the cottage family again." Dickens then fancies him- self as a travelUng clock-maker, getting a job to repair the turret stable clock at the Hall (Cobham HaU). " Our task at length accomplished, we should be taken into an enormous servants' hall, and there regaled with beef and bread and power- 2 1 4 Childhood and Youth of Charles Dickens ful ale. Then paid freely we should be at liberty to go, and should be told by a pointing helper to keep round over yinder by the blasted ash, and so straight through the woods, till we should see the town lights right afore us. So should we lie that night at the ancient sign of the Crispin and Crispanus (at Strood), and rise early next morning to be betimes on tramp again." The tramping bricklayers and their ways, the tramping soldier, " his legs well chafed by his trousers of baize," the tramping sailor and others are next taken, and the paper closes with a vivid description of a famous camping-ground near Gad's Hill, for which see the chapter on Gad's Hill. DuLLBOROUGH TowN, " my boyhood's home," is of course Rochester, and in this paper are some of the best of the many glimpses given in the writings of Dickens of his own childhood in this place. The half-humorous, half-regretful mood in which this chapter xii. is written is very noticeable, and it is more than probable that nearly all these incidents (recalled to the mind of Charles Dickens by a leisurely stroll through Chatham and Rochester in the period of middle life) are literally his own ex- periences when a boy. On leaving the Chatham station, which is here purposely confounded with the terminus of the S. E. R. at Strood, the first discovery is that " the station had swallowed up the playing-field." This playing-field was immediately in front of Ordnance GATEHOUSE AND CATHEDRAL PRECINCTS, ROCHESTER. This Drawing was left unfinished at the death of the Artist, Me. William Hull. 215 Retrospective Notes 217 Terrace, and the writer, among others, can speak to the perfect accuracy of this description, for it was at one time his playing-field, too. " It was gone. The two beautiful hawthorn trees, the hedge, the turf, and all those buttercups and daisies, had given place to the stoniest of jolting roads ; while beyond the station an ugly dark monster of a tunnel kept its jaws open, as if it had swallowed them and were ravenous for more destruction. " When I had been let out at the platform door, like a prisoner whom his turnkey grudgingly re- leased, I looked in again over the low wall, at the scene of departed glories. Here, in the hay-making time, had I been delivered from the dungeons of Seringapatam, an immense pile (of haycock), by my countrymen, the victorious British (boy next door and his two cousins), and had been recognised with ecstasy by my affianced one (Miss Green), who had come all the way from England (second house in the terrace) ' to ransom me and marry me." He then describes the scene of many a cricket-match between the rival schools of Boles's and Coles's (otherwise Baker's and Giles's), and turning away for a ramble through the town, finds that the old coach office of Timpson's is gone. " When I departed from Dullborough in the strawy arms of Timpson's Blue-eyed Maid, Timpson's was 1 No. 2, Ordnance Terrace, Chatham, which is close at hand. 2 1 8 Childhood and Youth of Charles Dickens a moderate-sized coach-office"; he then gives an exact description of what Simpson's coach-ofifice used to be in the memory of the middle-aged in- habitants of Rochester. " Of course the town had shrunk fearfully since I was a child there. I found the High Street little better than a lane. There was a public clock in it which I had supposed to be the finest clock in the world : whereas it now turned out to be as in- expressive, moon-faced, and weak a clock as ever I saw. " The Theatre ' was in existence, I found ; and I resolved to comfort my mind by going to look at it. Richard the Third, in a very uncomfortable cloak, had first appeared to me there, and had made my heart leap with terror by backing up against the stage-box in which I was posted, while struggUng for life against the virtuous Richmond. " It was within those walls that I had learnt, as from a page of Enghsh history, how that wicked king slept in war time on a sofa much too short for him, and how fearfully his conscience troubled his boots." Then follows an account of the way in which evil days had fallen upon this theatre, how part of it had been let to a dealer in wine and bottled beer, how it was as a theatre To Let, and hopelessly so, and how there had been no performance there, ex- cept of a panorama, for a long time. " No, there 1 The Theatre Royal, Star Hill, Rochester. 219 Retrospective Notes 221 was no comfort in the Theatre. It was mysteriously gone, like my own youth. Unlike my own youth, it might be coming back some day, but there was little promise of it." The Theatre, new-fronted and entirely altered, is now (1885) turned into a Con- servative Club. The uncommercial spirits do not appear to have been improved by a visit to the Mechanics' Institu- tion, nor the Corn Exchange, nor by wandering through the streets, recognising here and there a once familiar face. One such recognition it would be unpardonable to omit. " I had not gone fifty paces along the street when I was suddenly brought up by the sight of a man who got out of a little phaeton at the doctor's door, and went into the doctor's house. Immediately the air was filled with the scent of trodden grass, and the perspective of years opened, and at the end of it was a little likeness of this man keeping a wicket, and I said, ' God bless my soul ! Joe Specks.' " Through many changes and much work, I had preserved a tenderness for the memory of Joe, forasmuch as we had made the acquaintance of Roderick Random together, and had believed him to be no ruffian, but an ingenuous and engaging hero." The Uncommercial Traveller makes himself known to Joe Specks who had married Lucy Green, and when their youngest child came in after dinner, — " I saw again in that httle daughter, the little 222 Childhood and Youth of Charles Dickens face of the hayfield, unchanged, and it quite touched my fooUsh heart. We talked immensely, Specks and Mrs. Specks, and I, and we spoke of our old selves as though our old selves were dead and gone, and indeed, indeed they were — dead and gone as the playing field that had become a wilderness of rusty iron, and the property of S. E. R. " When I went to catch my train at night I was in a more charitable mood with DuUborough than I had been all day ; and yet in my heart I had loved it all day too. Ah ! who was I that I should quarrel with the town for being changed to me, when I myself had come back so changed to it ! All my early readings and early imaginations dated from this place, and I took them away so full of innocent construction and guileless belief, and I brought them back so worn and torn, so much the wiser and so much the worse ! " In Night Walks are some striking Night Thoughts,^ suggested by the localities through which he wan- dered, and short as the paper is, there are in it some of the most characteristic descriptive passages, written in Dickens' best manner. In his wanderings he haunts St. Sepulchre's, the ^ It may be objected that surely there is nothing in the writings of Charles Dickens bearing any analogy to those of Dr. Edward Young ; but indeed there is, and here is a line from Martin Chuzzlewit, chap, xlvii., that might have been taken direct from the Night Thoughts — " What words can paint tremendous truths like these ! *' Retrospective Notes 223 Old Bailey, the King's Bench Prison, the Old Kent Road, and so round by Bethlehem Hospital, to Westminster, and Old Palace Yard. Westminster Abbey suggested " a wonderful procession of its dead among the dark arches and pillars, each cen- tury more amazed by the century following it than by all the centuries going before." The chapter on Chambers opens thus : " Having occasion to transact some business with a solicitor who occupies a highly suicidal set of chambers in Gray's Inn, I afterwards took a turn in the large square of that stronghold of melancholy, reviewing with congenial surroundings my experiences of chambers." He then describes various chambers in the different Inns, and first we have a description of a set of chambers reminding us of those of Tommy Traddles in Cop-per field, for he tells us of " a young fellow who had sisters, and young country friends, and who gave them a little party — in the course of which they played at Blind-man's Buff." ' In one set of chambers a mysterious visitor walks in at night, and claims all the furniture as his, and, upon a decanter of gin being produced, with sugar and hot water to assist, " the visitor drank the whole before he had been an hour in the chambers by the chimes of the church of St. Mary in the Strand." The Nurse's Stories resemble strongly in their 1 See also page 187, for another mention of these chambers. 224 Childhood and Youth of Charles Dickens daring improbability, and quaint humour, some of the stories told by Mr. W. R. S. Ralston, and notably some of his Russian Folk Tales. Whether we are indebted to Mrs. Pipchin for some of these " hair-raising nightmares " cannot now be known. It is certain, however, that some of the uncanniest of them all had their origin, or were suggested, in the Ordnance Terrace days at Chatham, and it is equally certain that Mary WeUer was the young woman who told some of these ' Stories.' " The first diabolical character who intruded himself on my peaceful youth (as I called to mind that day at DuUborough) was a certain Captain Murderer. This wretch must have been an off- shoot of the Blue-beard family, but I had no sus- picion of the consanguinity in those times. — The young woman who brought me acquainted with Captain Murderer had a fiendish enjoyment of my terrors, and used to begin, I remember — as a sort of introductory overture- — by clawing the air with both hands, and uttering a long low hollow groan. " So acutely did I suffer from this ceremony in combination with this infernal captain, that I some- times used to plead I thought I was hardly strong enough and old enough to hear the story again just yet. But she never spared me one word of it. — This female bard — may she have been repaid my debt of obligation to her in the matter of night- mares and perspirations ! — reappears in my memory Retrospective Notes 225 as the daughter of a shipwright. Her name was Mercy, though she had none on me." There is a strong flavour of shipbuilding in the story of a shipwright whose name was Chips, who worked in the Government Yard ; " his father's name before him was Chips, and his father's name before him was Chips, and they were all Chipses." While Chips was working in the Yard on some repairs to an old Seventy-four, the Devil appeared to him, and ultimately Chips sold himself to the Evil One (" the bargain had run in the family for a long time ") for " an iron pot and a bushel of ten- penny nails, and half a ton of copper, and a rat that could speak." This rat was a thought-reading animal, and some- times not only anticipated the utterances of Chips, but came out with the following refrain in reply — A Lemon has pips, And a Yard has ships, And I'll have Chips. Those who knew Charles Dickens personally, will remember well the delight he took in such grue- some tales as these Nurse's Stories. In Birthday Celebrations, mentioned in a former chapter, are to be found unmistakable recol- lections of his own happy childhood. " My memory presents a birthday when Olympia and I were taken by an unfeeling relative — some cruel uncle, or the like — to a slow torture called an 15 22^ Childhood and Youth of Charles Dickens Orrery. The terrible instrument was set up at the local Theatre, and I had expressed a profane wish in the morning that it w£is a play ; for which a serious aunt had probed my conscience deep, and my pocket deeper, by reclaiming a bestowed half- crown." " The first magic lantern I ever saw was secretly and elaborately planned to be the great effect of a very juvenile birthday ; but it wouldn't act, and its images were dim. My experience of adult birth- day magic lanterns may possibly have been unfor- tunate, but has certainly been similar." And so, through a variety of birthdays up to manhood, the paper ending with a humorous de- scription of an imaginary celebration of Shake- speare's Birthday at Dullborough. Chatham Dockyard, i860. In this chapter we are taken to the marshy country on the banks of the estuary of the Thames, near Cooling ; a delight- fully quiet place for an idle raimble on a fine summer day, and a part of the country that Dickens first became acquainted with on his taking up his residence at Gad's Hill Place, distant six or seven miles. He was afterwards, to the close of his life, very partial to these low-lying marshes, and made use of them again in 1861, in Great Expectations. This curious corner of the county of Kent has quite recently been made accessible to all, by a new branch Une of the South-Eastern Railway, and is well worth a visit. Only by a personal visit on a Retrospective Notes 227 suitable day can the freshness and accuracy of the descriptive parts of this Chapter, and of those in Greai Expectations, be fully reaHsed and appreciated. Near an old fort in these marshes the Uncom- mercial Traveller meets a boy " with an intelligent face burnt to a dust colour by the summer sun, and with crisp hair of the same hue. He is a boy in whom I have perceived nothing incompatible with habits of studious inquiry and meditation, unless an evanescent black eye (I was delicate of inquiring how occasioned) should be so considered." With this boy " I recently consorted on a breezy day when the river leaped about us, and was full of life. — Peace and abundance were on the country side in beautiful forms and beautiful colours, and the harvest seemed even to be sailing out to grace the never-reaped sea in the yellow-laden barges that mellowed the distance. — While he (the boy) thus discoursed, he several times directed his eyes to one distant quarter of the landscape, and spoke with vague mysterious awe of ' the Yard.' Pon- dering his lessons after we had parted, I bethought me that the Yard was one of our large public Dock- yards, and that it lay hidden among the crops down in the dip beyond the windmills, as if it modestly kept itself out of view in peaceful times, and sought to trouble no man. Taken with this modesty on the part of the Yard, I resolved to improve the Yard's acquaintance." Accordingly he takes boat and crosses the Med- 228 Childhood and Youth of Charles Dickens way, and landing at the stairs, proceeds to examine and describe the gun-wharf, the building of the Achilles, with his twelve hundred clattering and banging workmen, the tributary workshops, where they make rivets, punch holes in the iron plates, and shear off superfluous portions of thick iron ; where they make oars for the ships' boats, and saw timbers for the ships. After this he comes to the sauntering part of his expedition, and consequently to the core of his uncommercial pursuits. " Everywhere, as I saunter up and down the Yard, I meet with tokens of its quiet and retiring character. The white stones of the pavement present no other trace of Achilles and his twelve hundred banging men (not one of whom strikes an attitude) than a few occasional echoes. But for a whisper in the air suggestive of sawdust and shav- ings, the oar-making and the saws of many move- ments might be miles away. Down below here is the great reservoir of water where timber is steeped in various temperatures, as a part of its seasoning process. Above it, on a tram-road supported by pillars, is a Chinese Enchanter's Car, which fishes the logs up, when sufficiently steeped, and rolls smoothly away with them to stack them. When I was a child (the Yard being then familiar to me) I used to think that I shoiild like to play at Chinese Enchanter, and to have that apparatus placed at my disposal by a beneficent country. " Sauntering among the rope-making, I am spun Retrospective Notes 229 into a state of blissful indolence, wherein my rope of life seems to be so untwisted by the pro- cess as that I can see back to very early days indeed." In Titbull's Almshouses occurs again a distinct reference to the venerable College at Cobham : "A charming rustic retreat for old men and women ; in a quaint ancient foundation in a pleasant English county, behind a picturesque church and among rich old convent gardens." With the Medicine Men of Civilisation, in which are some well-considered strictures on the follies of our modern Funeral customs, and a remi- niscence of a funeral which he attended when a very little boy, these Uncommercial Notes must terminate. The Chapters of the Uncommercial Traveller, written in the prime of the author's life, and exhibiting as they do very favourably his unrivalled descriptive powers, may yet be said to be tinctured with sad- ness ; but Charles Dickens has left it on record {Nicholas Nicklehy, chap, vi.) that, " memory, how- ever sad, is the best and purest link between this world aiid a better ! " The story of Great Expectations, 1861, ap- peared originally in All the Year Round. It may be observed that upon Charles Dickens purchasing Gad's Hill Place, and going to reside there, his old love for the neighbourhood seems at once to have revived ; not that it had ever really relaxed at any period of his life, but from that time, the 230 Childhood and Youth of Charles Dickens favourite localities of his boyhood again appear prominently in his works. In the first chapter little Pip, the hero of the tale, is introduced, and in Cooling Churchyard, shown in the engraving, a convict escaped from the hulks at Chatham suddenly pounces on him, and under threats of having " his heart and his liver," makes him promise to bring him in the morning a file, and some " wittles." A fine account follows of the morning mists on the marshes, in the depths of winter ; and the humour turns to pathos in the description which follows, where the poor starving wretch is repre- sented as almost too far gone to eat and drink the good tilings Pip has stolen for him. " He was awfully cold, to be sure. I half ex- pected to see him drop down before my face, and die of deadly cold. His eyes looked so awfully hungry, too, that when I handed him the file, and he laid it down on the grass, it occurred to me he would have tried to eat it if he had not seen my bundle. ' What's in the bottle, boy ? ' said he. ' Brandy,' said I. He was already handing mince- meat down his throat in the most curious manner — more like a man who was putting it away some- where in a violent hurry than a man who was eat- ing it — but he left off to take some of the liquor. He shivered all the while so violently that it was quite as much as he could do to keep the neck of the bottle between his teeth without biting it off. Retrospective Notes 231 ' I think you have got the ague,' said I. ' I'm much of your opinion, boy,' said he. ' It's bad about here,' I told him. ' You've been lying out on the meshes, and they're dreadful aguish. Rheu- matic too.' ' I'll eat my breakfast afore they're the death of me,' said he. ' I'll beat the shivers COOLING CHURCH BY MOONLIGHT. SO far, I'll bet you.' He was gobbling mince-meat, meat-bone, bread, cheese, and pork-pie all at once ; staring distrustfully while he did so at the mist all around us, and often stopping — even stopping his jaws — to listen." — Chap. iii. In chap. vii. Pip goes to Rochester with Mr. 232 Childhood and Youth of Charles Dickens Pumblechook on his way to Miss Havisham's. " I had heard of Miss Havisham up town — everybody, for miles round, had heard of Miss Havisham up town — as an immensely rich and grim lady who lived in a large and dismal house barricaded against robbers, and who led a life of seclusion." In the tale this is called Satis House, but Mr. Forster tells us that Restoration House is the one Dickens had in view. I give here, on another page, a view of Restoration House from the Vines, and also a view of the real Satis House as it at present exists. The latter stands on the site of the celebrated mansion, where in the time of Richard Watts Queen Elizabeth was lodged and entertained. Restoration House is a fine specimen of Eliza- bethan or Jacobean domestic architecture, and is now the property of Stephen T. Aveling, Esq. ; it seems to have had great attractions for Dickens, and will be referred to again further on. In chap. xiii. Pip is bound apprentice to his good brother-in-law, Joe Gargery, and there is a graphic sketch of the Guildhall with its " shining black portraits on the walls, which my inartistic eye re- garded as a composition of hardbake and sticking- plaster." The Blue Boar in this tale is meant for the Bull Hotel. There is an inn in the High Street with the sign of the Blue Boar, but the description in every particular points to the Bull, and the other RESTORATION HOUSE. The "Satis House" of Great EBpectations. SATIS HOUSE, ROCHESTER. Retrospective Notes 235 sign is probably only introduced to make the locality less easy of identification. THE GUILDHOUSE, ROCHESTER. The notable recollections of Dickens in this tale are the convicts and the convict-ships, " like wicked Noah's arks," the ancient city with its suburbs and 236 Childhood and Youth of Charles Dickens surroundings, and perhaps, in the childhood of Pip, some tender ghmmerings of his own early life. Of the characters in this book the most easily recognisable as studies from life, are the Old Bailey Attorney with his creaking boots, and his " halo of scented soap; " Mr. J aggers comes, in point of time, nearly at the end of a long list of lawyers, but he is surely one of the finest descriptive efforts of Charles Dickens. Old Bill Barley, of Mill Pond Bank, too, is a rare example of observation and power of expression in a very few words ; no one in the tale had seen this waterside curiosity (ex- cept his daughter Clara), but he had been h&ard vibrating in the beam, and " pegging with some dreadful instrument overhead," and he remains as one of the realities of the story. Old Bill Barley and Commodore Trunnion in Peregrine Pickle are so much alike, in speech at least, that we shall probably not err greatly in sup- posing that Dickens had the Commodore in his mind when he created the gouty old Purser in this tale. The following passage possibly records a frequent experience of Charles Dickens ; in the tale it is the experience of " Pip," after he had for a time realised his expectations : — " It was interesting to be in the quiet old town once more, and it was not disagreeable to be here and there suddenly recognised and stared after. GATEHOUSE OF CATHEDRAL CLOSE, ROCHESTER, Retrospective Notes 239 One or two of the tradespeople even darted out of their shops, and went a Httle way down the street before me, that they might turn, as if they had forgotten something, and pass me face to face — on which occasions I don't know whether they or I made the most pretence ; they of not doing it, or I of not seeing it." The story of Great Expectations hes either in Rochester and neighbourhood, or London, and hke Edwin Drood, is so full of Rochester and London that either book might, equally with his terrible story of the French Revolution, have been called A Tale of Two Cities. Our Mutual Friend, 1864, cannot be said to contain many recollections of the author's own childhood, but there are in it the sketches of waterside places at the East End of London (places which Dickens had known well as a little boy) which are as good as anything in all his writings. The ruined windmill mentioned in the story was a conspicuous object on the banks of the Thames seventy years since, and here in this mill Gaffer Hexam " dwelt deep and dark in Limehouse Hole, among the riggers, and the mast, oar, and block makers " — the very spot, in fact, where Dickens' godfather, Christopher Huffam, had formerly carried on a lucrative business (see chap. iii.). Before proceeding to the last of the books of 240 Childhood and Youth of Charles Dickens Dickens, it may be briefly noted here that there are in occasional papers in Household Words and All the Year Round, other distinct recollections of his own early days ; also in some of the Christmas numbers not previously mentioned, there are many such allusions. They can, however, only be indi- cated here, and first, in Household Words for May 1850, the Begging- LETTER Writer's horse drops dead at Chatham. This town is also selected for use in The Detective Police, July 1850, and in One Man in a Dockyard, September 1851, there is besides a description of the " Yard," a fine passage on Rochester Castle, as follows, " What a brief little practical joke I seemed to be, in comparison with its solidity, stature, strength, and length of life ! " Then there is The Christmas Tree, 1850. " Be- ing at home again, and alone, the only person in the house awake, my thoughts are drawn back, by a fascination which I do not care to resist, to my own Childhood ; " there are also Lying Awake, the beautiful allegorical tale, The Child's Story, written in 1852, with its touching, almost prophetic, allusions to events which were to happen in his own family circle, and Down with the Tide. All these shorter pieces are very thoughtfully written, and will repay a very careful reading. In Edwin Drood Charles Dickens was doing some of the best work he had ever done, but like his own life, alas ! "it was appointed that i6 " jasper's gatehouse." Showing door of " Postern Stair," on tlie plate of wliich Mr. Hull has play- fully put thejword Jasper. 242 Retrospective Notes 243 the book should shut with a spring for ever and ever." ' The surname Drood is adapted from that of a Mr. Trood, formerly landlord of the Falstaff Inn, Gad's Hill, and the scene of the tale is laid chiefly in Rochester under the thin disguise of Cloisterham. In looking through the MS. of this tale in the Forster collection at South Kensington, three things at least are noteworthy. In the first place, as originally written, the first chapter. The Dawn, opens thus : " An ancient English Cathedral Town ? How can the ancient English Cathedral town be here ? " The word Town was afterwards struck out and Tower substituted in the printed book. In the second place it is noticeable that though in this MS. interlineations and corrections abound, yet in Edwin Drood's letter to his uncle John Jasper, the text runs straight on almost without altera- tion, and indeed the entire folio of this part of chap. X. is about the clearest example in the whole MS. This is the more remarkable when we remem- ber that Dickens in one of his letters (written some years before) represents himself as getting on famously with his work, " no blotting, as when writing fiction ; but straight on, as when writing ordinary letter " (Life, vol. i., p. 20). So thor- oughly to the very last did he throw himself into his characters, and identify himself with his characters. ^ A Tale of Two Cities, Book i, chap. iii. 244 Childhood and Youth of Charles Dickens In the third place this MS. is imperfect ; one folio of the opening of the eleventh chapter is missing. It is that portion describing Staple Inn, and the mysterious inscription P. J. T. ■During the writing of Edwin Drood Charles Dickens was frequently in Rochester, and was as frequently seen by Mr. Miles the Sacristan, to be studying the Cathedral and its precincts most at- tentively. In this tale, though, alas ! only a fragment, the solution of the mystery is certainly foreshadowed. Jasper (an honoured local name, by-the-bye) murders his nephew, Edwin Drood, and it is with reason supposed that, in the end, the crime would have been found to have been committed in the Cathedral itself. In chap, xxiii., Jasper, in the incoherent ramblings produced by opium, lets fall a hint or two as to his crime and its inevitable remorse : "A hazardous and perilous journey, over abysses where a slip would be destruction. Look down, look down ! You see what lies at the bottom there?" "He is on his feet, speaking in a whisper, and as if in the dark. — No struggle, no consciousness of peril, no entreaty — and yet I never saw that before." There is in this passage some suggestion of a reason for that strange nocturnal visit to the Cathedral, when Jasper, accompanied by Durdles, climbs the heights of the great tower, and looks Retrospective Notes 245 down from Triforium and clerestory galleries, as Dickens himself had surely done. His last visit to Rochester was on Monday the 6th June, 1870, when he walked over from Gad's Hill, accompanied by his dogs. On this occasion he was seen by several persons leaning on the fence THE CRYPT, ROCHESTER CATHEDRAL. (After a drawing by " Phiz.") in front of Restoration House, and apparently ex- amining the old mansion with great care. It was remarked at the time that there would be some notice of this building in the tale then current, and nothing was more likely, for on the following day Tuesday, or possibly Wednesday, we find he had in the last chapter of the story ever to be written 246 Childhood and Youth of Charles Dickens reintroduced " the Vines," a fine open space im- mediately in front of Restoration House.' There is a passage in Great Expectations, chap, xxix., descriptive of this same house, which seems to have an additional meaning now. " I had stopped to look at the house as I passed, and its seared red-brick walls, blocked windows, and strong green ivy, clasping even the stacks of chimneys with its twigs and tendons, as if with sinewy old arms, made up a rich attractive mystery." Another easily recognisable architectural feature in this work, " The Nun's House," or Eastgate House, is a Ladies' School no longer, but externally, at least, it presents the same app earance as when Dickens was a boy here ; so croes the picturesque block of buildings immediately opposite to it, mentioned in the tale as Mr. Sapsea's premises ; so does the west front of the Cathedral itself, and indeed the entire surroundings of this quiet spot are but little changed in the last seventy or eighty years. The figure of Mr. Sapsea's father " in the act of selling " (see initial letter, page 64), which in the story is said to face the Nun's House, was reEilly to be seen some fifty to sixty years since over the door of a house in St. Margaret's Banks, Rochester. In times long since passed (practical joking being then a venial offence), several generations of young 1 " The Vines " was formerly a vineyard, and it will be noted that in the tale Dickens calls it the Monk's Vineyard. 247 Retrospective Notes 249 officers in succession attempted to remove this " wooden effigy," but he was too firmly fixed, and defied all their efforts. In this story again there is evidence of the results of the early readings at Chatham. EASTGATE HOUSE, ROCHESTER. The Princess Puffer (who dealt in opium) asks both Edwin Drood and Mr. Datchery for a specific sum of money, three-and-sixpence, and in each case succeeds in getting it. Mr. Datchery, how- ever, remarks, " Wasn't it a little cool to name your sum ? Isn't it customary to leave the amount 250 Childhood and Youth of Charles Dickens open ? Mightn't it have the appearance, to the young gentleman — only the appearance — that he was rather dictated to ? " In Mrs. Inchbald's Lovers' Vows, act iii., scene i., Baron Wildersheim is asked by a supposed beggar to give him a dollar, and the Baron replies, " This is the first time I was ever dictated to by a beggar what to give him." My illustrations to this, and some other portions of this book, are from careful drawings by the late William Hull, of Manchester and Rydal, and have been universally admired, as being faithful repre- sentations of Cloisterham and its antiquities. I shall not be likely to forget the delight of my friend, on taking him a drive from the Bull at Rochester, to Cooling, and Cliffe, and Gad's Hill, nor his having the brougham stopped that he might more closely examine the brilliant effect of some mosses, growing on the reddest of red tiles, on an old building near Chffe Street. " I must come here again, and try and fix some of this wonderful colour next summer," he quietly remarked, as we terminated our visit to Gad's Hill ; but it was not to be, for before " next summer " came round he was laid at rest in the quiet church- yard at Grasmere. Mr. Edward Hull also has, since his brother's death, made many drawings for this work, and especially the views of Cobham, the two Schools of Charles Dickens, the Cedar Trees at Gad's Hill, ROCHESTER CATHEDRAL (WEST DOOR). X -Charles Dicken; • Born AT Portsmouth seventh of February 1812 died at Gadshill place • J BY Rochester ninth of June ib70 Buried in "Westminster ABBEYoa^'sog to connect his memory with the scenes in which his earliest AND.HIS LATEST, '-^ l>: YEARS WERE PASSEDAND WITH THE ASSOCIATIONS OF ROCHESTER CATHEDRAL AND « " ,ITS NEIGHBOURHOOD WHICH EXTENDED OVER ALL HIS LIFE tS;«S)f9vSXjVi) • VnHIS TABLET WITH THE SANCTION OF THE DeAN AND CHAPTER IS PLACED BY'HIS EXECUTORS V ji-ajviU^lg^-OK^K^>I-'