DICK, ROBERT (1811-1866), Scottish geologist and botanist, was born at Tullibody, in Clackmannanshire, in January 1811. His father was an officer of excise. At the age of thirteen, after receiving a good elementary education at the parish school, Robert Dick was apprenticed to a baker, and served for three years. In these early days he became interested in wild flowers—he made a collection of plants and gradually acquired some knowledge of their names from an old encyclopaedia. When his time was out he left Tullibody and gained employment as a journeyman baker at Leith, Glasgow and Greenock. Meanwhile his father, who in 1826 had been removed to Thurso, as supervisor of excise, advised his son to set up a baker’s shop in that town. Thither Robert Dick went in 1830, he started in business as a baker and worked laboriously until he died on the 24th of December 1866. Throughout this period he zealously devoted himself to studying and collecting the plants, mollusca and insects of a wide area of Caithness, and his attention was directed soon after he settled in Thurso to the rocks and fossils. In 1835 he first found remains of fossil fishes; but it was not till some years later that his interest became greatly stirred. Then he obtained a copy of Hugh Miller’s Old Red Sandstone (published in 1841), and he began systematically to collect with hammer and chisel the fossils from the Caithness flags. In 1845 he found remains of Holoptychius and forwarded specimens to Hugh Miller, and he continued to send the best of his fossil fishes to that geologist, and to others after the death of Miller. In this way he largely contributed to the progress of geological knowledge, although he himself published nothing and was ever averse from publicity. His herbarium, which consisted of about 200 folios of mosses, ferns and flowering plants “almost unique in its completeness,” is now stored, with many of his fossils, in the museum at Thurso. Dick had a hard struggle for existence, especially through competition during his late years, when he was reduced almost to beggary: but of this few, if any, of his friends were aware until it was too late. A monument erected in the new cemetery at Thurso testifies to the respect which his life-work created, when the merits of this enthusiastic naturalist came to be appreciated.

See Robert Dick, Baker of Thurso, Geologist and Botanist, by Samuel Smiles (1878).

DICK, THOMAS (1774-1857), Scottish writer on astronomy, was born at Dundee on the 24th of November 1774. The appearance of a brilliant meteor inspired him, when in his ninth year, with a passion for astronomy; and at the age of sixteen he forsook the loom, and supported himself by teaching. In 1794 he entered the university of Edinburgh, and set up a school on the termination of his course; then, in 1801, took out a licence to preach, and officiated for some years as probationer in the United Presbyterian church. From about 1807 to 1817 he taught in the secession school at Methven in Perthshire, and during the ensuing decade in that of Perth, where he composed his first substantive book, The Christian Philosopher (1823, 8th ed. 1842). Its success determined his vocation as an author; he built himself, in 1827, a cottage at Broughty Ferry, near Dundee, and devoted himself wholly to literary and scientific pursuits. They proved, however, owing to his unpractical turn of mind, but slightly remunerative, and he was in 1847 relieved from actual poverty by a crown pension of £50 a year, eked out by a local subscription. He died on the 29th of July 1857. His best-known works are: Celestial Scenery (1837), The Sidereal Heavens (1840), and The Practical Astronomer (1845), in which is contained (p. 204) a remarkable forecast of the powers and uses of celestial photography. Written with competent knowledge, and in an agreeable style, they obtained deserved and widespread popularity.

See R. Chambers’s Eminent Scotsmen (ed. 1868); Monthly Notices Roy. Astr. Society, xviii. 98; Athenaeum (1857), p. 1008.

(A. M. C.)

DICKENS, CHARLES JOHN HUFFAM (1812-1870), English novelist, was born on the 7th of February 1812 at a house in the Mile End Terrace, Commercial Road, Landport (Portsea)—a house which was opened as a Dickens Museum on 22nd July 1904. His father John Dickens (d. 1851), a clerk in the navy-pay office on a salary of £80 a year, and stationed for the time being at Portsmouth, had married in 1809 Elizabeth, daughter of Thomas Barrow, and she bore him a family of eight children, Charles being the second. In the winter of 1814 the family moved from Portsea in the snow, as he remembered, to London, and lodged for a time near the Middlesex hospital. The country of the novelist’s childhood, however, was the kingdom of Kent, where the family was established in proximity to the dockyard at Chatham from 1816 to 1821. He looked upon himself in later years as a man of Kent, and his capital abode as that in Ordnance Terrace, or 18 St Mary’s Place, Chatham, amid surroundings classified in Mr Pickwick’s notes as “appearing” to be soldiers, sailors, Jews, chalk, shrimps, officers and dockyard men. He fell into a family the general tendency of which was to go down in the world, during one of its easier periods (John Dickens was now fifth clerk on £250 a year), and he always regarded himself as belonging by right to a comfortable, genteel, lower middle-class stratum of society. His mother taught him to read; to his father he appeared very early in the light of a young prodigy, and by him Charles was made to sit on a tall chair and warble popular ballads, or even to tell stories and anecdotes for the benefit of fellow-clerks in the office. John Dickens, however, had a small collection of books which were kept in a little room upstairs that led out of Charles’s own, and in this attic the boy found his true literary instructors in Roderick Random, Peregrine Pickle, Humphry Clinker, Tom Jones, The Vicar of Wakefield, Don Quixote, Gil Blas and Robinson Crusoe. The story of how he played at the characters in these books and sustained his idea of Roderick Random for a month at a stretch is picturesquely told in David Copperfield. Here as well as in his first and last books and in what many regard as his best, Great Expectations, Dickens returns with unabated fondness and mastery to the surroundings of his childhood. From seven to nine years he was at a school kept in Clover Lane, Chatham, by a Baptist minister named William Giles, who gave him Goldsmith’s Bee as a keepsake when the call to Somerset House necessitated the removal of the family from Rochester to a shabby house in Bayham Street, Camden Town. At the very moment when a consciousness of capacity was beginning to plump his youthful ambitions, the whole flattering dream vanished and left not a rack behind. Happiness and Chatham had been left behind together, and Charles was about to enter a school far sterner and also far more instructive than that in Clover Lane. The family income had been first decreased and then mortgaged; the creditors of the “prodigal father” would not give him time; John Dickens was consigned to the Marshalsea; Mrs Dickens started an “Educational Establishment” as a forlorn hope in Upper Gower Street; and Charles, who had helped his mother with the children, blacked the boots, carried things to the pawnshop and done other menial work, was now sent out to earn his own living as a young hand in a blacking warehouse, at Old Hungerford Stairs, on a salary of six shillings a week. He tied, trimmed and labelled blacking pots for over a year, dining off a saveloy and a slice of pudding, consorting with two very rough boys, Bob Fagin and Pol Green, and sleeping in an attic in Little College Street, Camden Town, in the house of Mrs Roylance (Pipchin), while on Sunday he spent the day with his parents in their comfortable prison, where they had the services of a “marchioness” imported from the Chatham workhouse.

Already consumed by ambition, proud, sensitive and on his dignity to an extent not uncommon among boys of talent, he felt his position keenly, and in later years worked himself up into a passion of self-pity in connexion with the “degradation” and “humiliation” of this episode. The two years of childish hardship which ate like iron into his soul were obviously of supreme importance in the growth of the novelist. Recollections of the streets and the prison and its purlieus supplied him with a store of literary material upon which he drew through all the years of his best activity. And the bitterness of such an experience was not prolonged sufficiently to become sour. From 1824 to 1826, having been rescued by a family quarrel and by a windfall in the shape of a legacy to his father, from the warehouse, he spent two years at an academy known as Wellington House, at the corner of Granby Street and the Hampstead Road (the lighter traits of which are reproduced in Salem House), and was there known as a merry and rather mischievous boy. Fortunately he learned nothing there to compromise the results of previous instruction. His father had now emerged from the Marshalsea and was seeking employment as a parliamentary reporter. A Gray’s Inn solicitor with whom he had had dealings was attracted by the bright, clever look of Charles, and took him into his office as a boy at a salary of thirteen and sixpence (rising to fifteen shillings) a week. He remained in Mr Blackmore’s office from May 1827 to November 1828, but he had lost none of his eager thirst for distinction, and spent all his spare time mastering Gurney’s shorthand and reading early and late at the British Museum. A more industrious apprentice in the lower grades of the literary profession has never been known, and the consciousness of opportunities used to the most splendid advantage can hardly have been absent from the man who was shortly to take his place at the head of it as if to the manner born. Lowten and Guppy, and Swiveller had been observed from this office lad’s stool; he was now greatly to widen his area of study as a reporter in Doctors’ Commons and various police courts, including Bow Street, working all day at law and much of the night at shorthand. Some one asked John Dickens, during the first eager period of curiosity as to the man behind “Pickwick,” where his son Charles was educated. “Well really,” said the prodigal father, “he may be said—haw—haw—to have educated himself.” He was one of the most rapid and accurate reporters in London when, at nineteen years of age, in 1831, he realized his immediate ambition and “entered the gallery” as parliamentary reporter to the True Sun. Later he was reporter to the Mirror of Parliament and then to the Morning Chronicle. Several of his earliest letters are concerned with his exploits as a reporter, and allude to the experiences he had, travelling fifteen miles an hour and being upset in almost every description of known vehicle in various parts of Britain between 1831 and 1836. The family was now living in Bentwick Street, Manchester Square, but John Dickens was still no infrequent inmate of the sponging-houses. With all the accessories of these places of entertainment his son had grown to be excessively familiar. Writing about 1832 to his school friend Tom Mitton, Dickens tells him that his father has been arrested at the suit of a wine firm, and begs him go over to Cursitor Street and see what can be done. On another occasion of a paternal disappearance he observes: “I own that his absence does not give me any great uneasiness, knowing how apt he is to get out of the way when anything goes wrong.” In yet another letter he asks for a loan of four shillings.