From a Miniature by Miss Margaret Gillies exhibited in the Royal Academy, 1844. Engraved on wood by R. Taylor for “The Magazine of Art”
(Reproduced from The Magazine of Art, by kind permission of Messrs. Cassell & Co., Ltd.)
Although the leading incidents in the life of Charles Dickens are generally familiar, thanks to the various biographies of him published from time to time, a few facts, briefly stated, will not, I hope, be devoid of interest. The novelist first saw the light at No. 387, Commercial Road, Mile End, Landport, in the Island of Portsea. Like David Copperfield, he was born on a Friday, the natal day being February 7th, 1812. The baptismal register of Portsea Parish Church (St. Mary’s, Kingston), where he was christened, records that three names were bestowed upon him, Charles John Huffam, the second being that of his father, and the third the cognomen of his godfather, Christopher Huffam, a “Rigger to his Majesty’s Navy,” who lived at Limehouse Hole, on the north bank of the Thames. The birthplace in Landport—still existing is an unpretentious tenement of two storeys, surmounted by a dormer window, and fronted by a small railed-in garden. John Dickens, the father of Charles, had filled a clerical
From a photo by Fradelle & Young
CHARLES DICKENS AT WORK
position in the Navy Pay Office, Somerset House, whence he was transferred to a similar post at Portsea. About four years after the birth of Charles (the second child), the Dickens family removed to Chatham, residing there until the boy was eleven years old. It was at Chatham where he first went to school, and where he, being endowed with exceptional powers of observation, imbibed his earliest impressions of humanity, to be subsequently made available as material for his inimitable sketches.
London, however, was again to be the home of John Dickens—the mighty metropolis which, with its phantasmagoria of life in its every aspect, its human comedies and tragedies, ever attracted the great writer, whose magic pen revelled in the delineation of them. It was in 1823 that the Dickens family took up their residence in Bayham Street, Camden Town—then the poorest part of the London suburbs. There had come a crisis in the affairs of the elder Dickens which necessitated the strictest economy, and the house in Bayham Street (which may still be seen at No. 141) was nothing but “a mean tenement, with a wretched little back garden abutting on a squalid court.” This was the beginning of a sad and bitter experience in the life of Charles Dickens. Here he seemed to fall into a solitary condition, apart from all other boys of his own age, and, recalling the circumstances in after years, he observed to Forster: “As I thought, in the little back-garret in Bayham Street, of all I had lost in losing Chatham, what would I have given, if I had had anything to give, to have been sent back to any other school, to have been taught something anywhere?” Not only did the exceptionally intelligent lad miss the pleasures of association with his schoolfellows and playmates at Chatham, but he no longer had recourse to the famous books whose acquaintance he had made there.—“Don Quixote,” “Robinson Crusoe,” “The Arabian Nights,” et hoc genus omne—which, as admirers of his works will remember, he was so fond of quoting. The account given by Forster of the Bayham Street days is painful reading, and we are told that, thus living under circumstances of a hopeless and struggling poverty, the extreme sensitiveness of the boy caused him to experience acute mental suffering.