Read Charles Dickens: A Life for Free Online

the steep hill rising above Chatham and Rochester, with views down to the river. No. 2 Ordnance Terrace is still there, battered by time and neglect, and you can see it was one of a group of modest terraces built near the large houses in the New Road laid out along the hilltop in the 1790s. The town was prosperous, rough and lively, crammed with working people serving the needs of the Navy, and the Army too, since Chatham was also a recruiting centre for soldiers. There were many blacksmiths and rope-makers there, and their apprentices had their own songs and celebrations when they paraded with bands, wearing masks and collecting money.
    Up the hill at Ordnance Terrace things were quieter. There was plenty of open space, with farmland at the back and the grassy expanse of a hay field in front, where the children could play safely, picnic under the hawthorn trees and make friends with their neighbours. George and Lucy, children of Mr Stroughill, the plumber next door, became their playmates, and Charles fell in love with Lucy, whom he claimed to remember afterwards as ‘peach-coloured, with a blue sash’. The grass on which they sat eating sweets together has long since gone, sliced off by a Victorian railway cutting, and large trees along its edge obscure the view, but you can still get a sense of how agreeable it must have been. Each house has a few steps up to its narrow front door, with a small fanlight above; below, a basement; one front window on the ground floor, two each on the first and second floors. Into this simple box went Mr and Mrs Dickens, her sister Mary Allen, known as ‘Aunt Fanny’, widow of a naval officer, the three children, their nurse Mary Weller and the maid Jane Bonny.
    By now the boy could just about read, although not yet the splendid and expensive volume his father brought home,
The History and Antiquities of Rochester and Its Environs
, newly published with a folding map and five plates. It was his mother who gave him daily lessons in reading over a period of time, and taught him ‘thoroughly well’, he told his friend John Forster. Forster says Dickens used almost exactly the words he gave to David Copperfield, ‘I faintly remember her teaching me the alphabet; and when I look upon the fat black letters in the primer, the puzzling novelty of their shapes and the easy good nature of O and S, always seem to present themselves before me as they used to do.’ 16 This makes Elizabeth Dickens sound like a mother who cherished her son through careful teaching which sparked his imagination, and from then on words were associated with pleasure and he was set on his path. Without her he might not have embarked on his own crash course of literary studies through the library of books left by his father in the little room next to his bedroom at the top of the stairs. They were hefty eighteenth-century travel books and novels: Defoe’s
Robinson Crusoe
, Fielding’s
Tom Jones
, Goldsmith’s
The Vicar of Wakefield
, Smollett’s
Roderick Random, Peregrine Pickle
and
Humphry Clinker
; also Mrs Inchbald’s collection of farces, some volumes of the
Tatler
and the
Spectator
, and fairy stories, the
Arabian Nights
and
The Tales of the Genii.
Catching the light of the long summer evenings as he sat alone at the top of the house, he travelled, suffered and triumphed with the heroes of the small print, his imagination free of constraint.
    According to one account, his nurse Mary Weller described him as ‘a terrible boy to read’. She also remembered him coming downstairs and asking for the kitchen to be cleared for a game. Then George from next door would bring his magic lantern and Charles and Fanny would sing, recite and perform, a favourite piece for him being Dr Watts’s ‘The Voice of the Sluggard’, with gestures and actions. She found him ‘a lively boy, of a good, genial, open disposition’, and Mrs Dickens was ‘a dear, good mother’. 17 He himself kept a vivid memory of his mother taking