The House on the Brook—"plain-looking, whitewashed plaster front, and a small garden before and behind"—next door to the former Providence (Baptist) Chapel, now the Drill Hall of the Salvation Army, is a very humble and unpretentious six-roomed dwelling, and of a style very different to the one in Ordnance Terrace. Here the Dickens family lived from 1821 to 1823. The Reverend William Giles, the Baptist Minister, father of Mr. William Giles, the schoolmaster, formerly officiated at the chapel. This was the Mr. Giles who, when Dickens was half-way through Pickwick, sent him a silver snuff-box, with an admiring inscription to the "Inimitable Boz." Dickens went to school at Mr. Giles's Academy in Clover Lane (now Clover Street), Chatham, and boys of this and neighbouring schools were thus nicknamed:—
"Baker's Bull-dogs,
"Giles's Cats,
"New Road Scrubbers,
"Troy Town Rats."
It was in the House on the Brook that he acquired those "readings and imaginings" which in "boyish recollections" he describes as having been brought away from Chatham:—"My father had left a small collection of books in a little room up-stairs, to which I had access (for it adjoined my own), and which nobody else in our house ever troubled. From that blessed little room Roderick Random, Peregrine Pickle, Humphry Clinker, Tom Jones, The Vicar of Wakefield, Don Quixote, Gil Blas, and Robinson Crusoe, came out, a glorious host to keep me company. They kept alive my fancy, and my hope of something beyond that place and time,—they and the Arabian Nights, and the Tales of the Genii,—and did me no harm; for whatever harm was in some of them was not there for me. I knew nothing of it."
It is very probable that his first literary effort, The Tragedy of Misnar, the Sultan of India, "founded" (says Forster), "and very literally founded, no doubt, on the Tales of the Genii," was composed after perusal of some of the works above referred to, but it is to be feared that it was never even rehearsed. The circumstances of the family had so changed for the worse, that here were neither juvenile parties nor theatrical entertainments.
A view from one of the upper windows of the house in St. Mary's Place gives the parish church and churchyard precisely as described in that pathetic little story, A Child's Dream of a Star. Charles Dickens was the child who "strolled about a good deal, and thought of a number of things," and his little sister Fanny—or his younger sister Harriet Ellen—was doubtless "his constant companion" referred to in the story.
We leave with feelings of respect the humble but famous little tenement, its condition now sadly degraded; proceed along the High Street, and soon reach "The Mitre Inn and Clarence Hotel," a solid-looking and comfortable house of entertainment, at which Lord Nelson and King William IV., when Duke of Clarence, frequently stayed, and (what is more to our purpose) where we find associations of Charles Dickens. There are a beautiful bowling-green and grounds at the back, approached by a series of terraces well planted with flowers, and the green is surrounded by fine elms which constitute quite an oasis in the desert of the somewhat prosaic Chatham. The Mitre is thus immortalized in the "Guest's Story" of the Holly Tree Inn:—
Mitre Inn, Chatham.
"There was an Inn in the Cathedral town where I went to school, which had pleasanter recollections about it than any of these. I took it next. It was the Inn where friends used to put up, and where we used to go to see parents, and to have salmon and fowls, and be tipped. It had an ecclesiastical sign—the 'Mitre'—and a bar that seemed to be the next best thing to a Bishopric, it was so snug. I loved the landlord's youngest daughter to distraction—but let that pass. It was in this Inn that I was cried over by my rosy little sister, because I had acquired a black-eye in a fight. And though she had been, that holly-tree night, for many a long year where all tears are dried, the Mitre softened me yet."
About the year 1820 the landlord of the Mitre was Mr. John Tribe, and his family being intimate with the Dickenses, young Charles spent many pleasant evenings at the "genial parties" given at this fine old inn. Mr. Langton mentions that the late Mr. Alderman William Tribe, son of Mr. John Tribe, the former proprietor, perfectly recollected Charles Dickens and his sister Fanny coming to the Mitre, and on one occasion their being mounted on a dining-table for a stage, and singing what was then a popular duet, i. e.—