The second of eight children of John and Elizabeth Barrow Dickens, Charles John Huffam Dickens was born on 7 February 1812 in Portsmouth, Hampshire, where his father, a clerk in the navy pay office, was employed in the dockyard. The family moved to London when Dickens was two; two years later they moved to Chatham, Kent. For the rest of his life Dickens would recall his seven years in Chatham as an idyllic time when his imagination was nurtured by acting in children's plays and by the stories of his childhood: fairy tales; horror stories told by his nurse; collections such as The Arabian Nights' Entertainments; and picaresque novels, with their rambling plots and short, interpolated tales. His father was recalled to London in the winter of 1822-1823. Dickens's hopes of "growing up to be a learned and distinguished man," as he described his early dreams in an autobiographical fragment many years later, were crushed when his father, faced with financial ruin, postponed Dickens's education, putting him to work pasting labels on bottles of shoe polish in a blacking warehouse. Dickens would later see this episode as a turning point in his life, a crisis that could have led him to become "a little robber or a little vagabond." That such a downfall did not occur Dickens attributed to the power of his early reading that, as his character David Copperfield would explain, "kept alive my fancy, and my hope of something beyond that place and time." "Fancy" for Dickens represented all that was most valuable in human thought--the creative, imaginative aspect of the child's mind, which too often became dulled or even destroyed by the pragmatic idea of education that would be exemplified by the teacher Mr.
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