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him out to see a royal carriage passing through town. Years later he told the son of a friend, as they walked together up a street in Chatham where there was a low wall with an iron railing on the top, ‘I remember my poor mother, God forgive her, put me up on the ledge of that wall, so that I might wave my hat and cheer George IV – the Prince Regent – who was driving by.’ The ‘poor mother, God forgive her’ was from the adult Dickens, who had a low opinion of George IV, but as a boy small enough to be lifted up on to the wall he would without doubt have taken innocent pleasure in waving his hat at the Prince, richly dressed and bloated, as he went past in his magnificent carriage.
    Looking back on those years, he remembered himself as a delicate and sometimes lonely child, unable to join in the games of the local boys, neighbours and sons of naval officers, who spent the summer playing cricket and Prisoner’s Base. He had begun to suffer from spasms in his side, so painful they kept him from running about, and he would lie in the grass to see the other boys playing their games, or sit near them with a book in his hand, his left wrist clasped in his right hand, swaying slightly as he read. 18 So he grew used to watching, and being set apart from those he watched. At night he was in thrall to his nurse’s bedtime stories of a Captain Murderer who cooked and ate his brides in pies, and a shipwright Chips haunted by rats: they terrified and delighted him in equal measure. On other nights his aunt Fanny ‘hummed the evening hymn to me, and I cried on my pillow’. 19
    The pains in his side came and went, and he was not always passive. His singing of comic songs was encouraged by his family, who hoisted him up on to chairs and tables to perform. His father made a friend of the landlord of the Mitre Tavern in Chatham High Street, John Tribe, and Fanny and Charles were both taken there to show off their singing skills in comic solos and duets. 20 Once you have enjoyed performance and applause, you want to try again, and Dickens’s lifelong passion for both began here. He was the junior partner for the moment, since Fanny’s musical skills were so advanced, and she was two years ahead of him in everything. Both were sent to a dame school above a shop to be put through the standard lessons, where the discipline consisted of a rap or a blow and not much was learnt.
    They were also taken to the theatre, the Rochester Theatre Royal built by the great Mrs Baker, once a puppeteer and married to a clown, who became a formidable businesswoman and ran the Kent circuit with a mixture of Shakespeare, pantomime and variety. Mrs Baker died in 1816, but the theatre continued with the mixture as before and there the children enjoyed
Richard III
and
Macbeth
– alarming yet also instructive in the way of the theatre, as it let them see that the witches and King Duncan all reappeared as other characters. And twice, in 1819 and 1820, when he was seven and eight, there were expeditions to London during the pantomime season, to see the great Grimaldi clowning his way through song and dance and comic impersonations. 21 More theatre enthusiasts were introduced into the family circle by aunt Fanny, who was courted by a Dr Lamert working at the Ordnance Hospital, with a teenage son, James, both lovers of the drama. As well as taking the children to the theatre in town, the doctor and his son got up their own productions and put them on in an empty room in the hospital. It was easy to see that it could be even more fun building sets and putting on greasepaint and costumes than watching other people doing it. Soon Charles was writing his own tragedy,
Misnar, the Sultan of India
. The manuscript did not survive, but he remembered his pride in writing it. ‘I was a great writer at eight years old or so,’ he joked later, and ‘an actor and a speaker from a baby.’ 22
    Another treat for Fanny and Charles was to be taken by their father aboard