he goes back to it indirectly, placing imaginary
children and boys in the position he had once occupied. Thus it is
almost possible, by judiciously selecting from his works, and using
such keys as we possess, to construct as it were a kind of
autobiography. Nor, if we make due allowance for the great writer's
tendency to idealize the past, and intensify its humorous and pathetic
aspects, need we at all fear that the self-written story of his life
should convey a false impression.

He was but two years old when his father left Portsea for London, and
but four when a second migration took the family to Chatham. Here we
catch our first glimpse of him, in his own word-painting, as a "very
queer small boy," a small boy who was sickly and delicate, and could
take but little part in the rougher sports of his school companions,
but read much, as sickly boys will--read the novels of the older
novelists in a "blessed little room," a kind of palace of enchantment,
where "'Roderick Random,' 'Peregrine Pickle,' 'Humphrey Clinker,' 'Tom
Jones,' 'The Vicar of Wakefield,' 'Don Quixote, 'Gil Blas,' and
'Robinson Crusoe,' came out, a glorious host, to keep him company."
And the queer small boy had read Shakespeare's "Henry IV.," too, and
knew all about Falstaff's robbery of the travellers at Gad's Hill, on
the rising ground between Rochester and Gravesend, and all about mad
Prince Henry's pranks; and, what was more, he had determined that when
he came to be a man, and had made his way in the world, he should own
the house called Gad's Hill Place, with the old associations of its
site, and its pleasant outlook over Rochester and over the low-lying
levels by the Thames. Was that a child's dream? The man's tenacity and
steadfast strength of purpose turned it into fact. The house became
the home of his later life. It was there that he died.

But death was a long way forward in those old Chatham days; nor, as
the time slipped by, and his father's pecuniary embarrassments began
to thicken, and make the forward ways of life more dark and difficult,
could the purchase of Gad's Hill Place have seemed much less remote.
There is one of Dickens' works which was his own special favourite,
the most cherished, as he tells us, among the offspring of his brain.
That work is "David Copperfield." Nor can there be much difficulty in
discovering why it occupied such an exceptional position in "his heart
of hearts;" for in its pages he had enshrined the dee