He was but two years old when his father left Portsea for London, and but four when a second migration took the family to Chatham.  Here we catch our first glimpse of him, in his own word-painting, as a “very queer small boy,” a small boy who was sickly and delicate, and could take but little part in the rougher sports of his school companions, but read much, as sickly boys will—­read the novels of the older novelists in a “blessed little room,” a kind of palace of enchantment, where “‘Roderick Random,’ ‘Peregrine Pickle,’ ‘Humphrey Clinker,’ ’Tom Jones,’ ‘The Vicar of Wakefield,’ ’Don Quixote, ‘Gil Blas,’ and ‘Robinson Crusoe,’ came out, a glorious host, to keep him company.”  And the queer small boy had read Shakespeare’s “Henry IV.,” too, and knew all about Falstaff’s robbery of the travellers at Gad’s Hill, on the rising ground between Rochester and Gravesend, and all about mad Prince Henry’s pranks; and, what was more, he had determined that when he came to be a man, and had made his way in the world, he should own the house called Gad’s Hill Place, with the old associations of its site, and its pleasant outlook over Rochester and over the low-lying levels by the Thames.  Was that a child’s dream?  The man’s tenacity and steadfast strength of purpose turned it into fact.  The house became the home of his later life.  It was there that he died.

But death was a long way forward in those old Chatham days; nor, as the time slipped by, and his father’s pecuniary embarrassments began to thicken, and make the forward ways of life more dark and difficult, could the purchase of Gad’s Hill Place have seemed much less remote.  There is one of Dickens’ works which was his own special favourite, the most cherished, as he tells us, among the offspring of his brain.  That work is “David Copperfield.”  Nor can there be much difficulty in discovering why it occupied such an exceptional position in “his heart of hearts;” for in its pages he had enshrined the deepest memories of his own childhood and youth.  Like David Copperfield, he had known what it was to be a poor, neglected lad, set to rough, uncongenial work, with no more than a mechanic’s surroundings and outlook, and having to fend for himself in the miry ways of the great city.  Like David Copperfield, he had formed a very early acquaintance with debts and duns, and been initiated into the mysteries and sad expedients of shabby poverty.  Like David Copperfield, he had been made free of the interior of a debtor’s prison.  Poor lad, he was not much more than ten or eleven years old when he left Chatham, with all the charms that were ever after to live so brightly in his recollection,—­the gay military pageantry, the swarming dockyard, the shifting sailor life, the delightful walks in the surrounding country, the enchanted room, tenanted by the first fairy day-dreams of his genius, the day-school, where the master had already formed a good opinion of his parts, giving him Goldsmith’s “Bee”