n infancy. The eldest, Fanny (born 1810), was followed by
Charles (entered in the baptismal register of Portsea as Charles John
Huffham, though on the very rare occasions when he subscribed that name
he wrote Huffam); by another son, named Alfred, who died in childhood;
by Letitia (born 1816); by another daughter, Harriet, who died also in
childhood; by Frederick (born 1820); by Alfred Lamert (born 1822); and
by Augustus (born 1827); of all of whom only the second daughter now
survives.

Walter Scott tells us, in his fragment of autobiography, speaking of the
strange remedies applied to his lameness, that he remembered lying on
the floor in the parlor of his grandfather's farm-house, swathed up in a
sheepskin warm from the body of the sheep, being then not three years
old. David Copperfield's memory goes beyond this. He represents himself
seeing so far back into the blank of his infancy as to discern therein
his mother and her servant, dwarfed to his sight by stooping down or
kneeling on the floor, and himself going unsteadily from the one to the
other. He admits this may be fancy, though he believes the power of
observation in numbers of very young children to be quite wonderful for
its closeness and accuracy, and thinks that the recollection of most of
us can go farther back into such times than many of us suppose. But
what he adds is certainly not fancy. "If it should appear from anything
I may set down in this narrative that I was a child of close
observation, or that as a man I have a strong memory of my childhood, I
undoubtedly lay claim to both of these characteristics." Applicable as
it might be to David Copperfield, this was simply and unaffectedly true
of Charles Dickens.

He has often told me that he remembered the small front garden to the
house at Portsea, from which he was taken away when he was two years
old, and where, watched by a nurse through a low kitchen-window almost
level with the gravel walk, he trotted about with something to eat, and
his little elder sister with him. He was carried from the garden one day
to see the soldiers exercise; and I perfectly recollect that, on our
being at Portsmouth together while he was writing _Nickleby_, he
recognized the exact shape of the military parade seen by him as a very
infant, on the same spot, a quarter of a century before.

When his father was again brought up by his duties to London from
Portsmouth, they went into lodgings in Norfolk Street, Middlesex