rototype of her namesake, in the beautiful story of the
_Wreck of the Golden Mary_.

[Illustration: No. 11, Ordnance Terrace, Chatham. _Where the Dickens
Family lived 1817-21._]

About the year 1821 pecuniary embarrassments beset and tormented the
Dickens family, which were afterwards to be "ascribed in fiction" in the
histories of the Micawbers and the Dorrits, and the family removed to
the House on the Brook. In order to follow their steps in perfect
sequence, we have to return by the way we came from the church, cross
the High Street, and proceed along Military Road, so as to visit the
obscure dwelling, No. 18, St. Mary's Place, situated in the valley
through which a brook, now covered over, flows from the higher lands
adjacent, into the Medway.

[Illustration: The House on the Brook, Chatham. _Where the Dickens
Family lived 1821-3._]

The House on the Brook--"plain-looking, whitewashed plaster front, and a
small garden before and behind"--next door to the former Providence
(Baptist) Chapel, now the Drill Hall of the Salvation Army, is a very
humble and unpretentious six-roomed dwelling, and of a style very
different to the one in Ordnance Terrace. Here the Dickens family lived
from 1821 to 1823. The Reverend William Giles, the Baptist Minister,
father of Mr. William Giles, the schoolmaster, formerly officiated at
the chapel. This was the Mr. Giles who, when Dickens was half-way
through _Pickwick_, sent him a silver snuff-box, with an admiring
inscription to the "Inimitable Boz." Dickens went to school at Mr.
Giles's Academy in Clover Lane (now Clover Street), Chatham, and boys of
this and neighbouring schools were thus nicknamed:--

"Baker's Bull-dogs,
"Giles's Cats,
"New Road Scrubbers,
"Troy Town Rats."

[Illustration: Giles's School, Chatham.]

It was in the House on the Brook that he acquired those "readings and
imaginings" which in "boyish recollections" he describes as having been
brought away from Chatham:--"My father had left a small collection of
books in a little room up-stairs, to which I had access (for it adjoined
my own), and which nobody else in our house ever troubled. From that
blessed little room _Roderick Random_, _Peregrine Pickle_, _Humphry
Clinker_, _Tom Jones_, _The Vicar of Wakefield_, _Don Quixote_, _Gil
Blas_, and _Robinson Crusoe_, came out, a glorious host to keep me
company. They kept alive my fancy, and my hope of something beyond that