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LIFE OF CHARLES DICKENS.

CHAPTER I.

Education is a kind of lottery in which there are good and evil
chances, and some men draw blanks and other men draw prizes. And in
saying this I do not use the word education in any restricted sense,
as applying exclusively to the course of study in school or college;
nor certainly, when I speak of prizes, am I thinking of scholarships,
exhibitions, fellowships. By education I mean the whole set of
circumstances which go to mould a man's character during the
apprentice years of his life; and I call that a prize when those
circumstances have been such as to develop the man's powers to the
utmost, and to fit him to do best that of which he is best capable.
Looked at in this way, Charles Dickens' education, however untoward
and unpromising it may often have seemed while in the process, must
really be pronounced a prize of value quite inestimable.

His father, John Dickens, held a clerkship in the Navy Pay Office, and
was employed in the Portsmouth Dockyard when little Charles first came
into the world, at Landport, in Portsea, on February 7, 1812. Wealth
can never have been one of the familiar friends of the household, nor
plenty have always sat at its board. Charles had one elder sister, and
six other brothers and sisters were afterwards added to the family;
and with eight children, and successive removals from Portsmouth to
London, and London to Chatham, and no more than the pay of a
Government clerk[1]--pay which not long afterwards dwindled to a
pension,--even a better domestic financier than the elder Dickens
might have found some difficulty in facing his liabilities. It was
unquestionably into a tottering house that the child was born, and
among its ruins that he was nurtured.

But through all these early years I can do nothing better than take
him for my guide, and walk as it were in his companionship. Perhaps no
novelist ever had a keener feeling of the pathos of childhood than
Dickens, or understood more fully how real and overwhelming are its
sorrows. No one, too, has entered more sympathetically into its ways.
And of the child and boy that he himself had once been, he was wont to
think very tenderly and very often. Again and again in his writings he
reverts to the scenes and incidents and emotions of his earlier days.
Sometimes he goes back to his young life directly, speaking as of
himself. More often