Full particulars are duly recorded in “The Pickwick Papers,” chapter 11. We may also remember the celebrated controversy in scientific and erudite circles, to which this remarkable stone gave rise; Mr. Pickwick being “elected an honorary member of seventeen native and foreign societies for the discovery.”
The journey being resumed from Sole Street, we travel viâ Strood, ten miles, to the important station of
CHATHAM.
Mr. Pickwick’s description (taken from his note-book sixty years since) is a fairly correct view of the general appearance of Chatham at present:—
“The principal productions of these towns appear to be soldiers, sailors, Jews, chalk, shrimps, officers, and dockyardmen. The commodities chiefly exposed for sale in the public streets are marine stores, hard-bake, apples, flat-fish, and oysters. The streets present a lively and animated appearance, occasioned chiefly by the conviviality of the military.”
In this city five years of Dickens’s boyhood were passed. Mr. Dickens, senior, was appointed in 1816 to a clerkship at the Naval Pay Office, in connection with the Royal Dockyard, and the Dickens family here resided till little Charles was nine years of age.
On arrival at the Chatham Station, we may enter the town on the right from the railway exit (north side of the line), shortly passing under an archway into Railway Street—formerly Rome Lane—in which was once situated the elementary school where the boy first attended, with his sister Fanny. Revisiting Chatham in after years, Dickens found that it had been pulled down
“Ages before, but out of the distance of the ages, arose, nevertheless, a not dim impression that it had been over a dyer’s shop; that he went up steps to it; that he had frequently grazed his knees in doing so; and that in trying to scrape the mud off a very unsteady little shoe, he generally got his leg over the scraper.”
At the upper end of Railway Street we proceed (right) by the High Street, and at a short distance (left) by Fair Row to the Brook. Turning to the left, we shall find, standing immediately beyond the corner, on the west side, the old Residence of the Dickens Family, No. 18, next door to Providence Chapel. The house is a modest-looking dwelling of three storeys, with white-washed plaster front as in former days, six steps leading up to the front door, and a small garden before and behind. The chapel previously referred to has been, in more recent years, used for meetings of the Salvation Army, since becoming a clothing factory. During the residence of the family at Chatham, the minister of this place of worship was a Mr. William Giles, who was also the schoolmaster of Clover Lane Academy. For the last two years of Charles’s Chatham experience he was placed under the educational supervision of this young Baptist minister, whose influence seems to have been favourable to the development of his pupil’s youthful talents.
Regaining the High Street by Fair Row, and turning to the left for a short distance onwards, we reach, on the right hand of the street, past the Mitre Hotel, Clover Street, on the south side of which (at the corner of Richard Street) the Academy, with its playground behind, may still be seen. Forster says:—