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Charles Dickens was born at No. 387, Commercial Road, Landport, Portsea, on Friday, February 7th, 1812. He was the second son of John Dickens, a clerk in the Navy Pay office, who married Miss Elizabeth Barrow, and had a family of eight children, two of whom died in childhood. Of his very earliest days Charles Dickens retained many distinct and durable impressions. He even recollected the small front garden of the house at Portsea, from which he was taken away at the age of two years, and where he played with his elder sister whilst watched by a nurse through the kitchen window on a level with the gravel walk. Referring to these early memories, he described “how he thought the Rochester High Street must be at least as wide as Regent Street, which he afterwards discovered to be little better than a lane, how the public clock in it, supposed to be the finest clock in the world, turned out to be as moon-faced and weak a clock as a man’s eyes ever saw; and how, in its town hall, which had appeared to him once so glorious a structure that he had set it up in his mind as the model on which the genie of the lamp built the palace for Aladdin, he had painfully to recognise a mere mean little heap of bricks, like a chapel gone demented.” In “The Seven Poor Travellers” Dickens gave another picture of the same spot. “The silent High Street of Rochester is full of gables, with old beams and timbers carved into strange faces. It is oddly garnished with a queer old clock that projects over the pavement out of a grave red brick building as if Time carried on business there and hung out his sign.”
No. 15, Furnival’s Inn, Holborn
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In 1836 Charles Dickens lived at 15, Furnival’s Inn, and it was here that he “thought of Mr. Pickwick, and wrote the first number,” which was published March 31st, 1837. Two days later the author married Miss Catherine Hogarth, and after spending their honeymoon in the village of Chalk, near Gad’s Hill, the young couple continued to reside for some time in apartments on the top floor of this house.
“The Leather Bottle,” Cobham
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“The Leather Bottle,” immortalised in “The Pickwick Papers,” is situated at Cobham, opposite the church. “‘And really,’ added Mr. Pickwick, after half an hour’s walking had brought them to the village, ‘really, for a misanthrope’s choice, this is one of the prettiest and most desirable places of residence I ever met with.’
“In this opinion also both Mr. Winkle and Mr. Snodgrass expressed their concurrence; and, having been directed to the ‘Leather Bottle,’ a clean and commodious village ale-house, the three travellers entered, and at once inquired for a gentleman of the name of Tupman.”
The Old Curiosity Shop