"C. W. DILKE."
The boy was his grandfather's to educate, and there has not often been such an education. A man ripe in years, still vigorous—for Mr. Dilke was only fifty-three when his elder grandson was born—yet retired from the business of life, and full of leisure, full of charm, full of experience, full of knowledge, devoted his remaining years to the education of his grandson. It may be held that he created a forcing-house of feeling, no less than of knowledge, under which the boy's nature was prematurely drawn up; but there can be no doubt as to the efficacy of the method. It was not coddling—Mr. Dilke was too shrewd for that—and if at a certain stage it seemed as though excessive stimulus had been given, maturity went far to contradict that impression.
'After my mother's death I began classics and mathematics with Mr. Bickmore, at that time a Chelsea curate and afterwards Vicar of Kenilworth. At the same time I took charge of teaching letters to my brother. I had few child friends, and used to see more of grown-up people, such as Chorley, [Footnote: Musical critic for the Athenaeum.] Thackeray, and Dickens, of whom the latter was known to us as "young Charles Dickens," owing to my great-grandfather having known "Micawber."'
Old Mr. Dilke's father had been employed in the Admiralty along with the father of Dickens. As for Thackeray, it was probably about this time that he came on the boy stretched out upon grass in the garden of Gore House, resting on elbows, deep in a book, and looked over his shoulder. "Is it any good?" he asked. "Rather!" said the boy. "Lend it me," said Thackeray. The book was The Three Musketeers, and we all know The Roundabout Papers which came out of that loan.
Charles Dilke had his free run of novels as a boy, and not of novels only.
In 1854, when he was only eleven:
'I began my regular theatre-going, which became a passion with me for many years, and burnt itself out, I may add, like most passions, for I almost entirely ceased to go near a theatre when I went to Cambridge at nineteen. Charles Kean, and Madame Vestris, and Charles Mathews, were my delight, with Wright and Paul Bedford at the Adelphi, Webster and Buckstone at the Haymarket, and Mrs. Keeley. Phelps came later, but Charles Kean's Shakespearian revivals at the Princess's from the first had no more regular attendant. My earliest theatrical recollection is Rachel.
'I was a nervous, and, therefore, in some things a backward child, because my nervousness led to my being forbidden for some years to read and work, as I was given to read and work too much, and during this long period of forced leisure I was set to music and drawing, with the result that I took none of the ordinary boy's interest in politics, and never formed an opinion upon a political question until the breaking-out of the American Civil War when I was eighteen. I then sided strongly with the Union, as I showed at the Cambridge Union when I reached the University. Even in this question, however, I only followed my grandfather's lead, although, for the first time, in this case intelligently. So far indeed as character can be moulded in childhood, mine was fashioned by my grandfather Dilke.'
It was not only character that Mr. Dilke formed. He made the boy the constant companion of his own intellectual pursuits, imbued him deeply with his own tastes, his own store of knowledge. In the summer of 1854 he had taken his pupil to 'Windsor, Canterbury, Rochester, Bury St. Edmunds, St. Albans, and many other interesting towns.' That autumn the pair went to France together—apparently the beginning of Charles Dilke's close acquaintance with that country, which was extended in the following year, 1855, when Wentworth Dilke was named one of the English Commissioners for the French International Exhibition, and took his family to live in Paris from April to August.
'We were all with him at Paris for some time, and I acquired a considerable knowledge of the antiquities of the town, before the changes associated with the name of Haussmann, by rambling about it with my grandfather, who, however, soon got sick of Paris and went home to his books, while we remained there for four months. I was at the party given at the Quai d'Orsay by Walewski, the son of Napoleon; at that given at the "Legion of Honour" by Flahaut, the father of Morny; at the Ball at the Hôtel de Ville to the Emperor and Empress and Queen Victoria; at the review; and at the Queen's entry and departure. The entry was the finest display of troops which I ever witnessed, as the National Guard of the City and its outskirts turned out in great form, and raised the numbers to 120,000, while the costumes both of the Guard and of the National Guard were very showy. There paraded also two hundred veterans of the wars of the First Empire in all the uniforms of the period. I heard Lablache in his last great part, and in this year I think I also saw Rachel for the last time; but I had seen her in England, I believe, in 1853. I certainly had seen her in a part in which many years later I remember Sarah Bernhardt, and can recall Rachel well enough to be able to institute a comparison entirely to Rachel's advantage.
'After our visit to Paris in 1855 my brother and I had taken to speaking and to writing to one another in French, and this practice we kept up until his death, even when he was Member of Parliament for Newcastle-on-Tyne, and I a member of the Government.'