In 1817 the five year old Charles Dickens moved with his family from London and after a brief stay in Sheerness, settled in Chatham, where his father, a clerk in the Navy Pay Office, had been given a promotion. For a while, this enabled them to live in a manner consistent with his parents’ aspirations. They had a comfortable, stylish town house at no. 2 [now no. 11] Ordnance Terrace which is marked by a plaque. Four years later John Dickens’s extravagant handling of the family finances forced the family to move to a smaller, humbler dwelling in St Mary’s Place [now The Brook], since demolished. From here, young Charles attended a school in Clover Lane [now Clover Street] run by the son of the Baptist minister. Despite the eventual reduced living circumstances, these were some of the happiest years of Dickens’s life. He was young enough not to be affected by the money troubles of his parents, but old enough to begin to build up abiding memories and to turn the lively enquiring gaze on his surroundings which would store up such rich material for the future novelist’s use. The carefree days came to an abrupt end when John Dickens was posted back to London, where he would slide even further into debt, a process that ended with him briefly incarcerated in Marshalsea Prison. His eldest son followed the family later and nearly 40 years afterwards recalled being conveyed like a parcel of game on the stagecoach that took him on the five hour journey back to the capital and a life of misery for the next two years. In a piece entitled ‘Dullborough Town’(1860), written for his journal ‘All The Year Round’, Dickens describes the shock, familiar to all those who revisit childhood haunts, of finding things drastically changed and stripped of their magic. Steam trains had obliterated his playground, the stagecoach office had vanished and his childhood sweetheart had grown fat.
Quotations
… the first discovery I made, was, that the Station had swallowed up the playing-field.It was gone. The two beautiful hawthorn trees, the hedge, the turf, and all those buttercups and daisies, had given place to the stoniest of jolting roads: while, beyond the Station, an ugly dark monster of a tunnel kept its jaws open, as if it had swallowed them and were ravenous for more destruction. The coach that had carried me away, was melodiously called Timpson’s Blue-Eyed Maid, and belonged to Timpson, at the coach- office up-street; the locomotive engine that had brought me back, was called severely No. 97, and belonged to S.E.R., and was now spitting ashes and hot water over the blighted ground.
In early September 1852 Dickens, his wife Catherine, and Georgina Hogarth, Catherine's junior of 12 years, embarked for Boulogne-sur-Mer for two weeks during which they stayed at l'hôtel des Bains...
Full of first-hand knowledge of the place and its surroundings due to his long and numerous walks, Dickens had the gift of persuading his friends to visit him...
Dickens was obviously enjoying the summer in Broadstairs when he wrote this letter entreating his friend Mark Lemon and his wife to come visit the family in Broadstairs...
By the time this letter was written (1843) Dickens knew Broadstairs well and had come to establish certain routines there as this letter delightfully depicts in which Dickens christens himself Boz, his early pseudonym...
In this letter to his friend Macready, Dickens ‘solemnly declares’ his affection for Broadstairs and proclaims it to be ‘the finest feature in all creation’...
The house, now baptised ‘Dickens House’ was minutely described by Dickens in David Copperfield and as no house of such description, nor any inhabitant of such peculiar description, have ever been identified in Dover, it is safe to assume that the cottage in Broadstairs and its occupier are what originally inspired Dickens...
The following letter, addressed to Miss Marguerite Powers, is distinct from his other pieces about Broadstairs in that it presents the town as an unattractive stormy place, full of ill children and boring speakers...
The situation must indeed have been unbearable as it nearly drove Dickens from the town he cherished so much as he mentions in this letter to John Forster...
In 1817 the five year old Charles Dickens moved with his family from London and after a brief stay in Sheerness, settled in Chatham, where his father, a clerk in the Navy Pay Office, had been given a promotion...
It was as a writer at the height of his powers, however, that Dickens summoned up the cacophonous activity of Chatham Dockyard working at full stretch in another article he wrote for ‘All The Year Round...
It is to the damp mound of the Cliffe Battery, all that remained of a Tudor fortification on the river bank, that Pip makes his tremulous way to carry provisions and a file to the fugitive Magwitch...
Dickens’s remembered delight in those early walks with his father is clear in every line of the description he gives in ‘The Pickwick Papers’ (1837)of the same walk undertaken by Mr...
’ One of the most welcome of Cobham’s buildings to Dickens’s visitors in the course of their brisk sight-seeing must have been ‘The Leather Bottle’ – ‘a clean and commodious village ale-house’...
Too young to be aware of the irony of such advice coming from his notoriously disorganised parent, Dickens was impressed by his father’s words: ‘If you were to be very persevering and were to work hard, you might some day come to live in it!’ His childhood fascination with the place remained, for when the property came onto the market in 1855, Dickens was persistent in his negotiations to purchase it...
From his long walks in the area, which took him around the villages of the Hoo Peninsula to the bustling Thames waterside, Dickens must have been familiar with the chaotic, emotionally charged scenes of departure for new lives in the colonies, which were a feature of Gravesend life...
