Some of Dickens’s most poignant journalistic writing evoked reminiscences of himself as a child. He was also the first great novelist who wrote extensively about childhood—creating characters like Oliver Twist, Little Nell, Tiny Tim, Paul Dombey, David Copperfield, and Philip Pirrip (known as Pip). We don’t know to what extent these writings drew upon actual events in his life, but one thing is certain: the emotional experiences described in his books stemmed from his own memories. One of the most touching pieces is the 1853 sketch “Gone Astray,” which depicted Dickens as a youngster separated from his adult companion:
When I was a very small boy indeed, both in years and stature, I got lost one day in the City of London. I was taken out by Somebody (shade of Somebody forgive me for remembering no more of thy identity!), as an immense treat, to be shown the outside of St. Giles’s church.
The sketch proceeds to recount solitary adventures on that fateful day, with an intensity of feeling, which stamps them with the authenticity of events as they really happened. The boy befriends a dog, which ungraciously snatches his saveloy (sausage); he observes the giant statues of Gog and Magog at the Guildhall, and he wanders into a theater, where he becomes alarmed at the prospect of winning a donkey, which is being raffled off. The experiences epitomize key elements of Dickens’s conception of childhood: solitary, observant, sensitive, hopeful, full of wonder—as well as terror—at the fearsome immensity and otherness of the world beyond his own little self. It is a marvelously compelling image, one of the triumphs of Dickens’s artistry, but it is not only an image: it is also a narrative stance, which allowed him to see with vivid freshness, pathos, and humor.
What personal, life-altering experiences had made it possible for young Dickens to develop such profound insight into the workings of a child’s mind?
Charles John Huffam Dickens was born on February 7, 1812, at 13 Mile End Terrace, Portsea (now 396 Commercial Road, Portsmouth, home of the Dickens Birthplace Museum), a suburb of a great naval port then servicing wars in two hemispheres, against Napoleon on the continent and against the United States in America. His mother, Elizabeth Barrow Dickens, was said to have been dancing at a ball the night before her first son and second child was born, and his father, John Dickens, held a responsible position in the naval pay office. The job took the family first to London and then to the dockyards at Chatham, at the junction of the Medway with the Thames.
It was in Chatham that young Dickens experienced the happiest days of his childhood, playing imaginative games with neighborhood friends in the field across the street from the family home in Ordnance Terrace, and falling desperately in love with a little girl named Lucy Stroughill. “Dullborough Town” [1860] is his fictionalized evocation of those joyful days:
Here, in the haymaking time, had I been delivered from the dungeons of Seringapatam, an immense pile (of haycock), by my countrymen, the victorious British (boy next door and his two cousins), and had been recognised with ecstasy by my affianced one (Miss Green), who had come all the way from England (second house in the terrace), to ransom me, and marry me.
In Chatham, Dickens had been schooled by his mother, and later under the tutelage of a schoolmaster, the Rev. William Giles, whom he remembered fondly in later years. During this time, he began (like David Copperfield inhis childhood) to read voraciously (“as if for life”), novels and essays above all, and to listen with rapt attention to the terrifying stories, such as Captain Murderer, told by his nursemaid Mary Weller. It was in those days too, that he first saw Gad’s Hill Place, on walks with his father, who told him that if he worked hard enou
