nd lodged for a time near the Middlesex
hospital. The country of the novelist's childhood, however, was the
kingdom of Kent, where the family was established in proximity to the
dockyard at Chatham from 1816 to 1821. He looked upon himself in later
years as a man of Kent, and his capital abode as that in Ordnance
Terrace, or 18 St Mary's Place, Chatham, amid surroundings classified in
Mr Pickwick's notes as "appearing" to be soldiers, sailors, Jews, chalk,
shrimps, officers and dockyard men. He fell into a family the general
tendency of which was to go down in the world, during one of its easier
periods (John Dickens was now fifth clerk on L250 a year), and he always
regarded himself as belonging by right to a comfortable, genteel, lower
middle-class stratum of society. His mother taught him to read; to his
father he appeared very early in the light of a young prodigy, and by
him Charles was made to sit on a tall chair and warble popular ballads,
or even to tell stories and anecdotes for the benefit of fellow-clerks
in the office. John Dickens, however, had a small collection of books
which were kept in a little room upstairs that led out of Charles's own,
and in this attic the boy found his true literary instructors in
_Roderick Random_, _Peregrine Pickle_, _Humphry Clinker_, _Tom Jones_,
_The Vicar of Wakefield_, _Don Quixote_, _Gil Blas_ and _Robinson
Crusoe_. The story of how he played at the characters in these books and
sustained his idea of Roderick Random for a month at a stretch is
picturesquely told in _David Copperfield_. Here as well as in his first
and last books and in what many regard as his best, _Great
Expectations_, Dickens returns with unabated fondness and mastery to the
surroundings of his childhood. From seven to nine years he was at a
school kept in Clover Lane, Chatham, by a Baptist minister named William
Giles, who gave him Goldsmith's _Bee_ as a keepsake when the call to
Somerset House necessitated the removal of the family from Rochester to
a shabby house in Bayham Street, Camden Town. At the very moment when a
consciousness of capacity was beginning to plump his youthful ambitions,
the whole flattering dream vanished and left not a rack behind.
Happiness and Chatham had been left behind together, and Charles was
about to enter a school far sterner and also far more instructive than
that in Clover Lane. The family income had been first decreased and then
mortgaged; the creditors of the "prodigal