And yet for all this, there are circumstances to be noticed of the deepest possible interest connected with Chatham, and spots therein to be visited, which every pilgrim to "Dickens-Land" must recognize. At Chatham,—"my boyhood's home," as he affectionately calls it,—many of the earlier years of Charles Dickens (probably from his fourth to his eleventh) were passed; here it was "that the most durable of his earlier impressions were received; and the associations around him when he died were those which at the outset of his life had affected him most strongly."

Admirers of the great novelist are much indebted to Mr. Robert Langton, F. R. Hist. Soc., for his Childhood and Youth of Charles Dickens, a book quite indispensable to a tramp in this neighbourhood, the charming illustrations by the late Mr. William Hull, the author, and others rendering the identification of places perfectly easy. Dickens says, "If anybody knows to a nicety where Rochester ends and Chatham begins, it is more than I do." "It's of no consequence," as Mr. Toots would say, for the High Street is one continuous thoroughfare, but as a matter of fact, a narrow street called Boundary Lane on the north side of High Street separates the two places.

A few words of recapitulation as to early family history[19] may be useful here. John Dickens, who is represented as "a fine portly man," was a Navy pay-clerk, and Elizabeth his wife (nÉe Barrow), who is described as "a dear good mother and a fine woman," the parents of the future genius, resided in the beginning of this century at 387, Mile End Terrace, Commercial Road, Landport, Portsea,[20] "and is so far in Portsea as being in the island of that name." Here Charles Dickens was born, at twelve o'clock at night, on Friday, 7th February, 1812. He was the second child and eldest son of a rather numerous family consisting of eight sons and daughters, and was baptized at St. Mary's, Kingston (the parish church of Portsea), under the names of Charles John Huffham; the last of these is no doubt a misspelling, as the name of his grandfather, from whom he took it, was Huffam, but Dickens himself scarcely ever used it. In the old family Bible now in possession of Mr. Charles Dickens it is Huffam in his father's own handwriting. The Dickens family left Mile End Terrace on 24th June, 1812, and went to live in Hawke Street, Portsea, from whence, in consequence of a change in official duties of the elder Dickens, they removed to Chatham in 1816 or 1817, and resided there for six or seven years, until they went to live in London.

Bearing these circumstances in mind, it is very natural that we should determine on an early pilgrimage to Chatham, and Sunday morning sees us at the old church—St. Mary's—where Dickens himself must often have been taken as a child, and where he saw the marriage of his aunt Fanny with James Lamert, a Staff Doctor in the Army,—the Doctor Slammer of Pickwick,—of whom Mr. Langton says:—"The regimental surgeon's kindly manner, and his short odd way of expressing himself, still survive in the recollections of a few old people." Dr. Lamert's son James, by a former wife, was a great crony of young Charles Dickens, taking him to the Rochester theatre, and getting up private theatricals in which they both acted.

Surely there is a faint description of those times in the second chapter of David Copperfield:—

The church, now undergoing reconstruction, is not a very presentable structure, and has little of interest to recommend it, except a brass to a famous navigator named Stephen Borough, the discoverer of the northern passage to Russia (1584), and a monument to Sir John Cox, who was killed in an action with the Dutch (1672). The name of Weller occurs on a gravestone near the church door.

We cross the High Street, proceed along Railway Street, formerly Rome Lane, pass the Chatham Railway Station (near which is a statue of Lieutenant Waghorn, R.N., "pioneer and founder of the Overland Route," born at Chatham, 1800, and died 1850),[21] and find ourselves at Ordnance Terrace, a conspicuous row of two-storied houses, prominently situated on the higher ground facing us, beyond the Station. In one of these houses (No. 11—formerly No. 2) the Dickens family resided from 1817 to 1821. The present occupier is a Mr. Roberts, who kindly allows us to inspect the interior. It has the dining-room on the left-hand side of the entrance and the drawing-room on the first floor, and is altogether a pleasantly-situated, comfortable, and respectable dwelling. No. 11, "the second house in the terrace," is overgrown with a Virginia creeper, which, from its possible association with Dickens's earliest years, may have induced him to plant the now magnificent one which exists at Gad's Hill. "Here it was," says Forster, "that his first desire for knowledge, and his greatest passion for reading, were awakened by his mother, who taught him the first rudiments, not only of English, but also, a little later, of Latin. She taught him regularly every day for a long time, and taught him, he was convinced, thoroughly well." Mr. Langton also says that "It was during his residence here that some of the happiest hours of the childhood of little Charles were passed, as his father was in a fairly good position in the Navy Pay Office, and they were a most genial, lovable family." Here it was that the theatrical entertainments and the genial parties took place, when, in addition to his brothers and sisters and his cousin, James Lamert, there were also present his friends and neighbours, George Stroughill, and Master and Miss Tribe.

Mr. Langton further states that "Ordnance Terrace is known to have formed the locality and characters for some of the earlier Sketches by Boz." "The Old Lady" was a Miss Newnham, who lived at No. 5, and who was, by all accounts, very kind to the Dickens children. The "Half-pay Captain" was also a near neighbour, and he is supposed to have supplied one of the earliest characters to Dickens as a mere child. Some of the neighbours at the corner house next door (formerly No. 1) were named Stroughill,—pronounced Stro'hill (there was, it will be remembered, a Struggles at the famous cricket-match at All-Muggleton)—and the son, George, is said to have had some of the characteristics of Steerforth in David Copperfield. He had a sister named Lucy, probably the "Golden Lucy," from her beautiful locks, and who, according to Mr. Langton, "was the special favourite and little sweetheart of Charles Dickens." She was possibly the prototype of her namesake, in the beautiful story of the Wreck of the Golden Mary.

About the year 1821 pecuniary embarrassments beset and tormented the Dickens family, which were afterwards to be "ascribed in fiction" in the histories of the Micawbers and the Dorrits, and the family removed to the House on the Brook. In order to follow their steps in perfect sequence, we have to return by the way we came from the church, cross the High Street, and proceed along Military Road, so as to visit the obscure dwelling, No. 18, St. Mary's Place, situated in the valley through which a brook, now covered over, flows from the higher lands adjacent, into the Medway.

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:—

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:—

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.—

The worthy alderman is also stated to have had in his possession a card of invitation to spend the evening at Ordnance Terrace, addressed from Master and Miss Dickens to Master and Miss Tribe, which was dated about this time.

In consequence of the elder Dickens being recalled from Chatham to Somerset House, to comply with official requirements, the family removed to London in 1823,[22] "and took up its abode in a house in Bayham Street, Camden Town." Dickens thus describes his journey to London in "Dullborough Town," one of the sketches in The Uncommercial Traveller:—

Mr. W. T. Wildish, the proprietor of the Rochester and Chatham Journal, kindly favours us with some interesting information which has recently appeared in his journal, relating to Charles Dickens's nurse—the Mary Weller of his boyhood (and perhaps the Peggotty as well), but known to later generations as Mrs. Mary Gibson of Front Row, Ordnance Place, Chatham, who died in the spring of the year 1888, at the advanced age of eighty-four. Very touchingly, but unknowingly, did Dickens write from Gad's Hill, 24th September, 1857, being unaware that she was still living:—

"I feel much as I used to do when I was a small child, a few miles off, and somebody—who, I wonder, and which way did she go when she died?—hummed the evening hymn, and I cried on the pillow—either with the remorseful consciousness of having kicked somebody else, or because still somebody else had hurt my feelings in the course of the day."

Mrs. Gibson, when Mary Weller (what a host of pleasant recollections does the married name of the "pretty housemaid" bring up of the Pickwickian days!), lived with the family of Mr. John Dickens, at No. 11, Ordnance Terrace, Chatham, and afterwards when they moved to the House on the Brook. Her recollections were most vivid and interesting. According to the testimony of her son, communicated to Mr. Wildish, Mrs. Gibson "used to be very fond of talking of the time she passed with the Dickens family, and one of her highest satisfactions in her later years was to hear Charles Dickens's works read by her son Robert; and while listening to the descriptions of characters read to her, his mother would detect likenesses unsuspected by other persons whom Dickens must have known when a boy; and she also agreed in thinking, with Dickens's biographer, that in Mr. Micawber's troubles were related some of the experiences of the elder Dickens, who is believed for a time to have occupied a debtor's prison. She, however, would never bring herself to believe that her hero was himself ever reduced to such great hardships as the blacking-bottle period in David Copperfield would suggest if taken literally. She used to speak of the future author as always fond of reading, and said he was wont to retire to the top room of the House on the Brook, and spend what should have been his play-hours in poring over his books, or in acting to the furniture of the room the creatures that he had read about."

Mr. Langton, who had a personal interview with Mrs. Gibson herself, has recorded the fact that she well remembered singing the Evening Hymn to the children of John Dickens, and seemed very much surprised at being asked such a question. She lived with the family when Dickens's little sister, Harriet Ellen, died—a circumstance that no doubt in after years inspired the Child's Dream of a Star already referred to. When the family removed to London, Mary Weller was pressed to accompany them, but was not in a position to accept the offer, in consequence of her promise to marry Mr. Thomas Gibson, a shipwright of the Chatham Dockyard, with whom she lived happily until his death, in 1886, at the age of eighty-two.

Mrs. Gibson modestly declined, on her son Robert's suggestion, to seek an introduction to Charles Dickens, when he read some of his works at the old Mechanics' Institute at Chatham, fearing that he had forgotten her. It is certain, however, that, from the reproduction of her name as the pretty housemaid at Mr. Nupkins's at Ipswich, and from the extract from the letter above referred to, she had a kindly place in his recollections.

Poor David Copperfield, on his way to his aunt's at Dover, stopped at Chatham—"footsore and tired," he says, "and eating bread that I had bought for supper." He is afraid "because of the vicious looks of the trampers;" and even if he could have spared the few pence he possessed for a bed at the "one or two little houses" with the notice "lodgings for travellers," he would have hardly cared to go in, on account of the company he would have been thrown into. And so he says, "I sought no shelter, therefore, but the sky; and toiling into Chatham—which, in that night's aspect, is a mere dream of chalk, and draw-bridges, and mastless ships in a muddy river, roofed like Noah's arks,—crept, at last, upon a sort of grass-grown battery overhanging a lane, where a sentry was walking to and fro. Here" [he continues] "I lay down near a cannon; and, happy in the society of the sentry's footsteps, ... slept soundly until morning." Of course it is not possible for us to identify this spot. "Very stiff and sore of foot," he says, "I was in the morning, and quite dazed by the beating of drums and marching of troops, which seemed to hem me in on every side when I went down towards the long narrow street." However, he has to reserve his strength for getting to his journey's end, and to this effect he resolves upon selling his jacket.

There are plenty of marine-store dealers at Chatham, whom we notice on our tramp, but none of them would, we believe, now answer to the description of "an ugly old man, with the lower part of his face all covered with a stubbly grey beard, in a filthy flannel waistcoat, and smelling terribly of rum," such as he who assailed little David, in reply to his offer to sell the jacket, with, "Oh, what do you want? Oh, my eyes and limbs, what do you want? Oh, my lungs and liver, what do you want? Oh—goroo, goroo!" After losing his time, and being rated at and frightened by this "dreadful old man to look at," who in every way tries to avoid giving him the money asked for,—half-a-crown,—offering him in exchange such useless things to a hungry boy as "a fishing-rod, a fiddle, a cocked hat, and a flute," the poor lad is obliged to close with the offer of a few pence, "with which [he says] I soon refreshed myself completely; and, being in better spirits then, limped seven miles upon my road."

The Convict Prison at Chatham is said to have been built on a piece of ground which, in the middle of the last century, belonged to one Thomas Clark, a singular character, who lived on the spot for many years by himself in a small cottage, and who used every night, as he went home, to sing or shout, "Tom's all alone! Tom's all alone!" This, according to the opinion of some, may have given rise to the "Tom all alone's" of Bleak House, more especially considering the fact that military operations were frequently going on at Chatham, which Dickens would notice in his early days. The circumstance is thus referred to in the novel:—"Twice lately there has been a crash, and a crowd of dust, like the springing of a mine, in Tom all alone's, and each time a house has fallen."

Mr. George Robinson of Strood directs our attention to the fact that a "child's caul," such as that described in the first chapter of David Copperfield, which he was born with, and which was advertised "at the low price of fifteen guineas," would be a likely object to be sought after in a sea-faring town like Chatham, in Dickens's early days, when the schoolmaster was less abroad than he is now.

In after years, memories of Chatham Dockyard appear in many of the sketches in the Uncommercial Traveller and other stories. "One man in a Dockyard" describes it as having "a gravity upon its red brick offices and houses, a staid pretence of having nothing to do, an avoidance of display, which I never saw out of England." "Nurse's Stories" says that "nails and copper are shipwrights' sweethearts, and shipwrights will run away with them whenever they can." In Great Expectations the refrain, "Beat it out, beat it out—old Clem! with a clink for the stout—old Clem!" which Pip and his friends sang, is from a song which the blacksmiths in the dockyard used to sing in procession on St. Clement's Day.

By accident we make the acquaintance of Mr. William James Budden of Chatham, who informs us that Charles Dickens was better known there in his latter years for his efforts, by readings and otherwise, to place the Mechanics' Institute on a sound basis and free from debt.

Dickens, as the Uncommercial Traveller, thus describes the Mechanics' Institute and its early efforts to succeed:—

"As the town was placarded with references to the Dullborough Mechanics' Institution, I thought I would go and look at that establishment next. There had been no such thing in the town in my young days, and it occurred to me that its extreme prosperity might have brought adversity upon the Drama. I found the Institution with some difficulty, and should scarcely have known that I had found it if I had judged from its external appearance only; but this was attributable to its never having been finished, and having no front: consequently, it led a modest and retired existence up a stable-yard. It was (as I learnt, on enquiry) a most flourishing Institution, and of the highest benefit to the town: two triumphs which I was glad to understand were not at all impaired by the seeming drawbacks that no mechanics belonged to it, and that it was steeped in debt to the chimney-pots. It had a large room, which was approached by an infirm step-ladder: the builder having declined to construct the intended staircase, without a present payment in cash, which Dullborough (though profoundly appreciative of the Institution) seemed unaccountably bashful about subscribing."