Life of Charles Dickens | Page 3

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 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 deepest memories of his
own childhood and youth. Like David Copperfield, he had known what
it was to be a poor, neglected lad, set to rough, uncongenial work, with
no more than a mechanic's surroundings and outlook, and having to
fend for himself in the miry ways of the great city. Like David
Copperfield, he had formed a very early acquaintance with debts and
duns, and been initiated into the mysteries