Charles Dickens: A Life by Claire Tomalin Read Free Book Online

and Charles were sent to a proper school, Mr Giles’s ‘classical, mathematical and commercial’ establishment. William Giles was the son of a local minister, had himself been to Oxford, was a good teacher and ran his school well. He recognized that he had an unusual pupil and Charles responded to his encouragement and worked hard. He also had fun. When asked to recite, he gave a piece out of
The Humourist’s Miscellany
, and the other children applauded enough for two encores. He was liked by teachers and fellow pupils, and gaining confidence in his abilities. Mr Giles served him ill in one way, by teaching him to take snuff, a kind known as ‘Irish blackguard’, and although Charles gave up the habit after a few years and did not resume it, he had got the taste for tobacco, and he became a serious smoker at the age of fifteen. 24
    Dickens looked back on the years in Chatham as the idyll of his life. He had the blessings of secure family love, ideal landscape, river and town, good teaching, and his small world was beginning to expand pleasurably around him. When he reached his tenth birthday in February 1822, he was happy at school, encouraged and favoured by his teacher and enjoying his studies. At home, his mother was about to give birth to another child, who arrived on 3 April and was given the name of the baby who had died in 1814, Alfred, and of her sister’s husband, Lamert. He thrived, and they could all look forward to summer and long days out on the river or in the open country. Then they heard that their father was being taken back to London and they would have to leave with him. The pantomime visits were all the elder children remembered of London, but their mother was a Londoner by birth and her brothers were there, so she may have been pleased to be returning to town.
    They began to prepare. The children’s nurse, Mary Weller, wanted to stay in Chatham and to marry her sweetheart, who worked in the docks, and she put in an offer for the Dickenses’ chairs, which was accepted. They would take with them only a little maid they had acquired from the Chatham Workhouse, an orphan of no known parentage and seemingly no name – or at least Dickens never gives her one. 25 Mr Giles offered to keep Charles until the end of the half and invited him to lodge with his family, and this was agreed to. He saw the house packed up and waved goodbye to his parents, sisters and brothers. The Giles family made a fuss of him, with Miss Giles admiring his long curly hair, and for a few weeks the routine of school continued to absorb him.
    The ten-year-old boy made his memories of the years in Kent into a treasure trove in his mind. For the rest of his life he enjoyed bringing them out, and taking friends to walk over the territory he had known and loved so well. In 1857 he described the seven miles between Maidstone and Rochester as ‘one of the most beautiful walks in England’. 26 Kent was always a place of delight and pleasure, a paradise of woods and orchards, sea coast, marshes and rivers. Here he chose to spend his honeymoon, here he would go roaming alone or with chosen companions, here he took his children for long summer months, and here he bought his dream house, and died in it. Here he wished to be buried. The landscape and towns of Kent gave him settings for many of his books. His first novel,
The Pickwick Papers
, is partly set in Rochester and round about, and his last, the unfinished
Mystery of
Edwin Drood
, centres on its streets and assigns real houses to its characters. David Copperfield tramps across its bridge on his way to find his aunt, who will save him from the cruelty of his stepfather, believe in him and cherish him.
Great Expectations
inhabits the streets and houses of Rochester and the Medway marshes and estuary. The pattern, structure and setting of human lives was the stuff of his novels, and he saw the structure and pattern of his own life as closely related to place. Journeys in and out of