“Although I believe we were often an hour or more in the shop before our several tastes were satisfied, he never showed the least impatience, was always interested, and as desirous as we, that we should choose exactly what we liked best. . . .”
“My father insisted that my sister Katie and I should teach the polka step to Mr Leech and himself, . . . often he would practise gravely in a corner, without either partner or music.” He once got out of bed having waked with the fear he had forgotten it, and rehearsed to his own whistling by the light of a rushlight.
Miss Dickens continues:—“There never existed, I think, in all the world, a more thoroughly tidy or methodical creature than was my father. He was tidy in every way—in his mind, in his handsome and graceful person, in his work, in keeping his writing, table drawers, in his large correspondence—in fact in his whole life.
“And then his punctuality! It was almost frightful to an unpunctual mind. This again was another phase of his extreme tidiness; it was also the outcome of his excessive thoughtfulness and consideration for others.”
Naturally enough Miss Dickens makes no reference to the unhappy separation of Dickens and his wife,
which took place in 1858. In the article on Dickens in the Dictionary of National Biography, Carlyle is quoted as saying:—“No crime and no misdemeanour specifiable on either side; unhappy together, these two, good many years past, and they at length end it.”
The father of Charles Dickens was not a successful personage. He was in the Navy Pay Office; he was generally in financial trouble, and is indeed supposed to be the original of Micawber. Like that personage he was imprisoned for debt, and thus Charles Dickens learned early in life the misery as well as the comedy of a debtor’s prison, an experience of which he made brilliant use in Little Dorrit and elsewhere.
Forster points out that David Copperfield, who was in many ways drawn from his creator, had as a man a strong memory of his childhood; the most durable of his early impressions were received at Chatham, and, as Forster remarks, “the associations that were around him when he died were those which at the outset of his life had affected him most strongly.”
In an essay on travelling, Dickens [201] describes his meeting a “very queer small boy” whom he takes in his carriage, and as they pass Gads-hill Place (where Dickens afterwards lived and died) the boy begs him to stop that they may look at the house. On being asked whether he admired the house:—“Bless you, sir,” said the very queer small boy, “when I was not more than half as old as nine, it used to be a treat for me to be brought to look at it—And . . . my father, seeing me so fond of it, has often said to me, If you were to be very persevering
and were to work hard, you might some day come to live in it. Though that’s impossible.” Dickens was actually a queer small boy—very small, very sickly, who was unable to join in the active games of his schoolfellows. In 1855 we again meet with the house that was to be his home for the remainder of his life. He wrote to Wills (Letters, i. 393):—“I saw, at Gads Hill . . . a little freehold to be sold. The spot and the very house are literally ‘a dream of my childhood,’ and I should like to look at it before I go to Paris.”