Publisher's Synopsis
Excerpt from Life of Charles Dickens
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 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 5 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.
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