spite, too, of his long residence in London,
and of his peculiarly intimate knowledge of the byways and nooks and
corners of London, ample proof has by this time been given. To this,
however, may be added Forster's significant statement that, "Excepting
always the haunts and associations of his childhood, Dickens had no
particular sentiment of locality, and any special regard for houses he
had lived in was not a thing noticeable in him". This was not
surprising. The conditions of life in a modern capital under most
circumstances, but especially for anyone who has made many removes, tend
to produce the impression that a man's rooftree only represents the
transient shelter of a caravanserai, rather than an abiding habitation
on which memory has stamped indelible traces. Nor can even the most
extended associations of maturity take the place of the imperishable
links forged in the most susceptible years of fresh and sensitive
childhood. For Dickens this vital distinction was emphasized both by
natural idiosyncrasy and by the pressure of events which shaped his
destiny.

"If it should appear," he says, speaking of himself under the mask
of David Copperfield, "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."

The change from Chatham and Rochester to London was indissolubly
connected in his mind with a change in the family fortunes that deprived
him of the ordinary advantages and pleasures open to any average boy of
even the lower middle classes. It ushered in a period of misery and
degradation that he could never recall without acute suffering. The few
years of happiness which he enjoyed before he was carried away to London
in the stage coach "Commodore", at the age of nine, were divided from a
strenuous and successful manhood by so dark a gulf as to concentrate all
the powers of recollection upon them with a desperate kind of intensity.
It was the realization of a childish ambition conceived in that halcyon
era which drew him to Gadshill, and he returned again and again to the
contemplation of his earliest dreams and imaginings. He wrote from
Gadshill of his old nurse--the original, it can hardly be doubted, of
Peggotty:--

"I feel much as I used to do when I was a small child, a few miles
off [i.e. at Ordnance Terrace, Chatham], and