Then they praised him, soft and low,
Call’d him worthy to be loved,
Truest friend and noblest foe;
Yet she never spoke nor moved.
Stole a maiden from her place,
Lightly to the warrior stept,
Took a face-cloth from the face;
Yet she neither moved nor wept.
Rose a nurse of ninety years,
Set his child upon her knee—
Like summer tempest came her tears—
“Sweet my child, I live for thee.”
CHARLES DICKENS
To begin my life with the beginning of my life,” Dickens makes one of his heroes say, “I record that I was born (as I have been informed and believe) on a Friday, at twelve o’clock at night.” Dickens was born on a Friday, the date the 7th of February, 1812, the place Landport in Portsea, England. The house was a comfortable one, and during Charles’s early childhood his surroundings were prosperous; for his father, John Dickens, a clerk in the navy pay-office, was temporarily in easy circumstances. When Charles was but two, the family moved to London, taking lodgings for a time in Norfolk Street, Bloomsbury, and finally settling in Chatham. Here they lived in comfort, and here Charles gained more than the rudiments of an education, his earliest teacher being his mother, who instructed him not only in English, but in Latin also. Later he became the pupil of Mr. Giles, who seems to have taken in him an extraordinary interest.
