Among other associations of the future novelist with this locality may be mentioned his attendance (in company with Dr. Dawson) at the Sunday morning services in Somers Chapel (now called St. Mary’s Parish Church), in Seymour Street (then partly fields), Somers Town,[21] concerning which act of piety Dr. Dawson regrets to observe that his lively and irreverent young friend “did not attend in the slightest degree to the service, but incited me to laughter by declaring his dinner was ready, and the potatoes would be spoiled, and, in fact, behaved in such a manner that it was lucky for us we were not ejected from the chapel.” He remained at Wellington House Academy about two years (1824-1826), without achieving any particular distinction as a pupil. Thus ended his school training, elementary at the best, and it has been truly observed that a classical education might have “done for” him—that “Boz,” like Burns, might have acquired all necessary erudition in a Board school. “Pray, Mr. Dickens, where was your son educated?” conjured a friend of John Dickens, who significantly and pertinently replied, “Why, indeed, sir—ha! ha!—he may be said to have educated himself!” a response which the novelist used good-humouredly and whimsically to imitate in Forster’s hearing.

On relinquishing his studies at the age of fourteen, Charles Dickens for a brief period was installed as clerk in the service of Mr. Molloy, a solicitor in New Square, Lincoln’s Inn. His father, however, presently transferred him to the offices of Messrs. Ellis and Blackmore, attorneys, at No. 1, Raymond Buildings, Gray’s Inn (second floor), the clerks’ office looking out upon the roadway; here he performed similar duties from May, 1827, to November, 1828, at a weekly salary of 13s. 6d., rising to 15s. Although he did not relish the law, and failed to appreciate the particular kind of responsibility devolving upon him as a humble apprentice to that profession, the few months thus employed by him were productive of fruitful results, for they afforded him opportunities of studying the idiosyncrasies of lawyers, their clerks and clients, which can only be obtained by intimate association. In the words of David Copperfield, he said: “I looked at nothing that I know of, but I saw everything,” with the result that he culled from his mental storehouse those vivid pictures of legal life and character as portrayed in “The Pickwick Papers,” “Sketches by Boz,” and later works. The Dickens family at this time had left the unattractive environment of Johnson Street and made their home at the Polygon, Somers Town, a much more respectable and refined quarter, where Harold Skimpole (in “Bleak House”) afterwards settled, and “where there were at that time a number of poor Spanish refugees walking about in cloaks, smoking little paper cigars.” The Polygon was so called from the arrangement of the houses in the form of a circle; it stood within Clarendon Square, and, on completion, became the aristocratic part of Somers Town; many successful artists and engravers selecting it as a place of residence.[22] The name of Dickens, however, does not appear in the contemporary rate-book, but we find recorded there the significant fact that No. 17 was then “let to lodgers”—a very unusual entry—and this, added to the fact that the rents were comparatively high, justifies the assumption that the Dickens family were lodgers only at the house bearing that number. At this time John Dickens, with commendable energy and perseverance, had acquired the difficult art of shorthand writing, with a view to obtaining a livelihood as a Parliamentary reporter. He apparently changed his address with some frequency, in 1832-1833 living for a time at Highgate, whither Charles accompanied him, and lodging during brief intervals in the western part of London. Certain letters written by the son to an intimate friend indicate such addresses as North End (? Fulham) and Fitzroy Street.

The father, on securing an appointment as a reporter for the Morning Herald, established himself and his family (including Charles), at No. 18, Bentinck Street, Manchester Square. The rate-book, however, does not give his name as the tenant of this or any other house in the street, so we must assume that the family were again merely lodgers. This house and its neighbours were recently demolished, being replaced by a row of mansions, and, oddly enough, the name of the occupier of No. 19 in 1895 bore the novelist’s patronymic.

On leaving Ellis and Blackmore’s office in November, 1828, Charles Dickens abandoned the pursuit of the law for ever.

The profession of journalism offering him superior attractions, he was tempted to become a newspaper reporter. With that object in view, he gave himself up to the study of stenography, devoting much of his time at the British Museum acquiring a knowledge of the subject, and practising in the Law Courts of Doctors’ Commons with extraordinary assiduity until he arrived at something like proficiency. The impediments that beset him are duly set forth in the pages of “David Copperfield,” the incidents there narrated being based upon the author’s heart-breaking experience in endeavouring to master the mysteries of shorthand. Like David, he passed a period of probation, lasting nearly two years, reporting for the Proctors at Doctors’ Commons, St. Paul’s Churchyard. The scene of his labours is thus described in “Sketches by Boz”: “Crossing a quiet and shady courtyard paved with stone, and frowned upon by old red-brick houses, on the doors of which were painted the names of sundry learned civilians, we paused before a small, green-baized, brass-headed nailed door, which, yielding to our gentle push, at once admitted us into an old quaint-looking apartment, with sunken windows and black carved wainscotting, at the upper end of which, seated on a raised platform of semicircular shape, were about a dozen solemn-looking gentlemen in crimson gowns and wigs.” The courts were destroyed in 1867, and in their place a Royal Court of Probate was established at Westminster Hall.

According to the autographs on certain British Museum readers’ slips, Charles Dickens was residing, in 1831, at No. 10, Norfolk Street, Fitzroy Square, the same street (now Cleveland Street, east side of Middlesex Hospital) in which his father was domiciled for a while in 1814.

About the year 1833 Charles rented bachelor apartments in Cecil Street (Strand), as evidenced by a letter of that period to an intimate friend, where he says: “The people at Cecil Street put too much water in the hashes, lost the nutmeg-grater, attended on me most miserably ... and so I gave them warning, and have not yet fixed on a local habitation.”

We learn from Charles Dickens the younger that his father, before occupying chambers in Furnival’s Inn, had apartments in Buckingham Street, and it is, therefore, not unlikely that he went thither from Cecil Street; the same authority adds that “if he lived in David Copperfield’s rooms—as I have no doubt he did—he must have kept house on the top floor of No. 15 on the east side—the house which displays a tablet commemorating its one-time tenancy by Peter the Great, Czar of all the Russias.”[23] David, in describing his chambers, observes that “they were on the top of the house ... and consisted of a little half-blind entry where you could see hardly anything, a little stone-blind pantry where you could see nothing at all, a sitting-room, and a bedroom. The furniture was rather faded, but quite good enough for me; and, sure enough, the river was outside the windows.” Here, or at Cecil Street, Dickens doubtless met that martyr to “the spazzums,” the immortal Mrs. Crupp, and the “young gal” whom she hired for festive occasions, such as David’s dinner-party.

In 1832, after gaining experience at Doctors’ Commons, an opening was found for a reporter on the staff of the True Sun, a London morning paper, then just launched; and here it may be observed that newspaper reporting in those days, before railways and electric telegraphs, was not unattended by great difficulties and even danger, for Dickens himself relates how he had frequently to travel by post-chaise to remote parts of the country to record important speeches, and how, on the return journey, he transcribed his notes on the palm of his hand by the light of a dark lantern while galloping at fifteen miles an hour at the dead of night through a wild district, sometimes finding himself belated in miry country roads during the small hours in a wheelless carriage, with exhausted horses and drunken post-boys, and then succeeding in reaching the office in time for publication. While thus representing the True Sun he joined the reporting staff of the Mirror of Parliament (then a comparatively new paper, conducted by his uncle, John Henry Barrow, barrister-at-law), and in 1834 associated himself with the Morning Chronicle,[24] one of the leading London journals, and a formidable rival of the Times.

As a Parliamentary reporter he won great and enviable distinction, it being an undoubted fact that of the eighty or ninety so employed with him in the “gallery” of the House of Commons, he retained the premier position by reason of his marvellous dexterity, accuracy, and capacity for work. It was, of course, in the old House, not the present palatial edifice, that Charles Dickens followed this avocation, where the accommodation provided for the newspaper representatives proved most unsatisfactory, the “gallery” in the House of Lords being no better than a “preposterous pen” (as Dickens described it), in which the reporters were “huddled together like so many sheep,” while the reporters in the Commons carried on their duties in the Strangers’ Gallery until a separate gallery was provided for their use in the temporary House constructed in 1834. The “gentlemen of the press” are now treated with much greater consideration; instead of the dark lobby, or “pen,” there are large writing-rooms, separate apartments for smoking, reading, dining, and dressing, as well as a stationer’s shop, a post-office, and a refreshment-bar.

Dickens’s final appearance at the House of Commons as a reporter was at the close of the session of 1836, when, like David Copperfield, he “noted down the music of the Parliamentary bagpipes for the last time.” For he had already tasted the delights of authorship, having written some original papers for the Evening Chronicle and other periodicals, and henceforth he determined to adopt literature as a profession. His first paper appeared (entitled “A Dinner at Poplar Walk”)[25] anonymously in the Monthly Magazine nearly three years prior to his retirement from the Press Gallery—that is, in December, 1833—and he has himself described how, “with fear and trembling,” he stealthily dropped the manuscript into “a dark letter-box, in a dark office, up a dark court in Fleet Street,” and how suffused with tears of joy and pride were the eyes of the young author when he beheld his little effusion “in all the glory of print” that “they could not bear the street and were not fit to be seen there.” The “dark court” referred to was Johnson’s Court, Fleet Street, the location of the office of the old (and long since defunct) Monthly Magazine; the court still exists, but the office was demolished quite recently for the extension of the premises of Mr. Henry Sells, who, happily, has preserved, as a memorial of the novelist, the door to which the veritable “dark letter-box” was attached. The story of Dickens’s early essays has often been related, and needs no repetition here. Suffice it to say that upon the success or failure of that maiden effort a very great deal depended, as he intended to be guided by the dictum of the publisher and of the public, and there is every probability that, had this initial sketch been unfavourably received, the young writer would have directed his attention to the stage, which for him always possessed a magnetic attraction; thus, instead of becoming a famous author, he would have blossomed into a popular actor, thereby missing his true vocation.

CHAPTER III.
THE LONDON AND SUBURBAN HOMES.

Dickens’s earlier sketches (which bore no signature until August, 1834, when he adopted the pseudonym of “Boz”) were penned when living with his father in Bentinck Street. At first they yielded no honorarium; but as soon as he received a modest fee for them in addition to his salary as a reporter, he exhibited a sense of independence in resolving to take the apartments in Buckingham Street, whence he presently removed to more commodious chambers in Furnival’s Inn, Holborn. He was then twenty-two years of age, and still on the staff of the Morning Chronicle, and from Christmas, 1834, he rented a “three-pair back” at No. 13, Furnival’s Inn. One of his earliest (undated) letters bears the address of Furnival’s Inn, in which he informs his future brother-in-law, Henry Austin, that he is about to start on a journey, alone and in a gig, to Essex and Suffolk—evidently on journalistic business for the Morning Chronicle—and expresses a belief that he would be spilt before paying a turnpike, or run over a child before reaching Chelmsford; his journey covered the same ground as that performed by Mr. Pickwick in his drive by coach to Ipswich. Twelve months later he transferred his impedimenta from No. 13 to more cheerful rooms at No. 15, renting a “three-pair floor south.” Several of the later “Sketches by Boz” were doubtless written at No. 13, which stood squeezed into a corner of the square on the right as entered from Holborn, the young author’s modest quarters being almost at the top of a steep and dark staircase.

His rooms at No. 15 were a decided improvement on these, and he probably had them in his mind when referring to Furnival’s Inn in “Martin Chuzzlewit” and to John Westlock’s apartments there, “two stories up”: “There are snug chambers in those Inns where the bachelors live, and, for the dissolute fellows they pretend to be, it is quite surprising how well they get on.... His rooms were the perfection of neatness and convenience.... There is little enough to see in Furnival’s Inn. It is a shady, quiet place, echoing to the footsteps of the stragglers who have business there, and rather monotonous and gloomy on Sunday evenings.” It does not require much stretch of imagination to believe that the description of Traddles’ chambers in Gray’s Inn (vide “David Copperfield,” chap. lix.) was drawn from these very apartments, or to realize the probability that the reference to Traddles and his lovely girl guests is a reminiscence of Dickens’s own.

This humble abode ever remained in his memory as a hallowed spot, cherished by the fact that here he received the commission to write “Pickwick” and penned the opening chapters, by which immortal achievement he suddenly leaped into fame; but also by another interesting and very personal recollection, namely, that it was the scene of his early domestic life. For, be it remembered, the publication of the first number of “Pickwick” (April, 1836) synchronized with his marriage, the lady of his choice being Catherine Thomson Hogarth, eldest daughter of George Hogarth, one of his colleagues on the staff of the Morning Chronicle, the ceremony being performed at the Church of St. Luke, Chelsea, of which parish the Rev. Charles Kingsley (father of the author of “Westward Ho!”) then officiated as rector.

The honeymoon over, Dickens and his bride returned to London, and made their home at No. 15, Furnival’s Inn, where their eldest child, Charles, was born. Here his favourite sister-in-law, Mary Hogarth, sometimes stayed with the youthful couple, her amiable and delightful disposition proving a very joy in the little household; her premature death in 1837, in Doughty Street, at the age of seventeen, so unnerved her admiring brother-in-law that the course of “Pickwick” and “Oliver Twist” (produced almost simultaneously) was temporarily interrupted, and writing presently to Mrs. Hogarth from his next abode, he said: “I wish you could know how I weary now for the three rooms in Furnival’s Inn, and how I miss that pleasant smile and those sweet words which, bestowed upon our evening’s work, on our merry banterings round the fire, were more precious to me than the applause of a whole world would be.” Here, too (as already mentioned), lived John Westlock when visited by Tom Pinch, and it was the scene, also, of certain incidents in “The Mystery of Edwin Drood.” Does not Mr. Grewgious (whose chambers were “over the way” at Staple Inn) tell us that “Furnival’s is fireproof and specially watched and lighted,” and did he not escort Rosa Bud to her rooms there, at Wood’s Hotel in the Square, afterwards confiding her to the care of the “Unlimited head chambermaid”?[26]

It was once an Inn of Chancery attached to Lincoln’s Inn, deriving its name from Sir William Furnivall, who owned much property hereabouts. About 1818 it became a series of chambers wholly unconnected with any Inn of Court, and in that year was entirely rebuilt by Peto. On the right-hand side of the Square, as immediately entered from Holborn, the house (No. 15) containing the bright little rooms once tenanted by Dickens was easily identified in later years by the medallion above the ground-floor windows which notified the fact; this house and its neighbour were more ornate than the rest, by reason of the series of Ionic pilasters between the windows. The whole of Furnival’s Inn was swept away in 1898, and the site covered by an extension of the premises of the Prudential Insurance Company; thus, alas! disappears an extremely interesting Dickens landmark, so intimately associated with the novelist and his writings.

Dickens must have relinquished his tenancy of the chambers in Furnival’s Inn before the actual term had expired, the assumption being that he had taken them on a short lease, as, according to the official record, he continued to pay rent until February 1839. Two years previously, finding this accommodation inadequate, and realizing that his literary labours had already begun to yield a good income, he determined to take a house, No. 48, Doughty Street, Mecklenburgh Square—a locality not otherwise unknown to literary fame; for Shirley Brooks (a former editor of Punch) was born in this street, while both Sydney Smith and Edmund Yates lived there, the latter at No. 43,[27] opposite Tegg, the publisher of the “Peter Parley” series of juvenile books.

Yates, in his “Recollections and Experiences,” recalls the Doughty Street of his day (and of Dickens’s) as “a broad, airy, wholesome street; none of your common thoroughfares, to be rattled through by vulgar cabs and earth-shaking Pickford vans, but a self-included property, with a gate at each end, and a lodge with a porter in a gold-laced hat and the Doughty arms[28] on the buttons of his mulberry-coloured coat, to prevent anyone, except with a mission to one of the houses, from intruding on the exclusive territory.” The lodges and gates have been removed since this was written, and the porter in official garb disappeared with that exclusiveness and quietude which doubtless attracted Dickens to the spot more than sixty years ago.

No. 48, Doughty Street (where his daughters Mary and Kate were born) is situated on the east side of the street, and contains twelve rooms—a single-fronted, three-storied house, with a railed-in area in front and a small garden at the rear. A tiny little room on the ground-floor, facing the garden, is believed to have been the novelist’s study, in which he wrote the latter portion of “Pickwick,” and practically the whole of “Oliver Twist” and “Nicholas Nickleby.” The summer months he customarily spent away from home, taking his work with him, and thus a few chapters of these books were penned at Broadstairs, at Twickenham Park, and at Elm Cottage (now called Elm Lodge), Petersham, a pretty little rural retreat rented by him in the summer of 1839, a locality to which he then referred as “those remote and distant parts, with the chain of mountains formed by Richmond Hill presenting an almost insurmountable barrier between me and the busy world.”

At Elm Cottage he frequently enjoyed the society of his friends—Maclise, Landseer, Ainsworth, Talfourd, and the rest—many of whom joined in athletic competitions organized by their energetic host in the extensive grounds, among other frivolities being a balloon club for children, of which Forster was elected president on condition that he supplied all the balloons. Elm Cottage (Lodge) is now a school, screened from the public road by a high wooden fence and a barrier of elm-trees; it is a heavy-looking structure, roofed with red tiles, and at the rear is Sudbrook Lane. The novelist’s first country home, however, was at No. 4, Ailsa Park Villas, Twickenham, still standing in the Isleworth Road,[29] near St. Margaret’s railway-station, described in a recent issue of the Richmond and Twickenham Times as “a building on regular lines, shut in from the world by a plenitude of trees, silent and quiet, an ideal cottage for a mind seeking rest and repose;” not a picturesque edifice by any means, but having a quaint entablature with a circular window in the centre thereof, the house having since undergone little or no change, except, perhaps, in the enlargement of the balcony over the main entrance. There are several references in Dickens’s early letters to this region of the Thames Valley (to the Star and Garter, at Richmond, Eel Pie Island, etc.), and much local colouring is employed in certain of his novels—“Nicholas Nickleby,” “Little Dorrit,” and especially in “Oliver Twist.”[29] It is interesting to know that the Old Coach and Horses at Isleworth, where Sikes and Oliver halted during the burglary expedition to Chertsey, remains almost intact to this day, opposite Syon Lane, and contiguous to Syon House, the residence of that popular writer of fiction, Mr. George Manville Fenn.[29]

It was during the Doughty Street days that Dickens, in order to relieve the mental tension, indulged in many enjoyable jaunts into the country with Forster, these acting as a stimulant to fresh exertion. He either rode on horseback or walked to such outlying districts as Hampstead, Barnet, or Richmond, his favourite haunt in the northern suburb being Jack Straw’s Castle on the Heath, famous also for its associations with Thackeray, Du Maurier, and Lord Leighton, and commemorated a generation before by Washington Irving in his “Tales of a Traveller.” Here the Dickens traditions are still cherished, a small upper apartment in front being pointed out as the bedroom which he occasionally occupied. “I knows a good ’ous there,” he said to Forster when imploring his companionship on a bout to Hampstead, “where we can have a red-hot chop for dinner and a glass of wine”; and the notification resulted in many happy meetings there in the coming years.[30] A writer in the Daily Graphic (July 18, 1903) avers that Hampstead possesses other Dickensian associations—that the novelist had lodgings at Wylde’s Farm, and, it is said, wrote some chapters of “Bleak House” in the picturesque cottage, which, with the farmhouse and land, it is proposed to acquire for the use and enjoyment of the public. Wylde’s Farm is situated on the north-west boundary of Hampstead Heath, close to North End, Hampstead; it formerly consisted of two farms, one known as Collins’s and the other as Tooley’s, and it was at Collins’s that John Linnell, the artist, lived for some years, and there welcomed, as visitors, William Blake, Mulready, Flaxman, George Morland, and others distinguished in Art and Literature.

The associations of the novelist with No. 48, Doughty Street are perpetuated not only in the name “Dickens House” recently bestowed upon it, but by the tablet affixed thereon by the London County Council in December last—truly, a long-delayed tribute, and especially deserving in this case owing to the fact that it is the only London home of Charles Dickens which survives intact structurally. It was here that in September, 1838, Forster lunched with him, and then to sit, read, or work, “or do something” (as the author expressed it in his note of invitation), “while I write the last chapter of ‘Oliver,’ which will be arter a lamb chop.” “How well I remember that evening!” observes his friend, “and our talk of what should be the fate of Charley Bates, on behalf of whom (as, indeed, for the Dodger, too) Talfourd[31] had pleaded as earnestly in mitigation of judgment as ever at the bar for any client he had most respected.”

Writing to his friend Macready, the actor, in November, 1839, Dickens said: “You must come and see my new house when we have it to rights.” He had just completed the last number of “Nicholas Nickleby,” when he decided to leave Doughty Street for a more commodious residence in a more exclusive neighbourhood, namely, No. 1, Devonshire Terrace, York Gate—“a house of great promise (and great premium), undeniable situation, and excessive splendour,” to quote his own concise description; it had a large garden, and was shut out from the New Road (now the Marylebone Road) by a high brick wall facing the York Gate into Regent’s Park. In “The Uncommercial Traveller,” Dickens refers to “having taken the lease of a house in a certain distinguished Metropolitan parish—a house which then appeared to me to be a frightfully first-class Family Mansion, involving awful responsibilities.”[32]

A contemporary drawing of the house by Daniel Maclise, R.A., represents it as detached and standing in its own grounds, with a wrought-iron entrance-gate surmounted by a lamp-bracket; the building consisted of a basement, two stories, and an attic. There are only three houses in the Terrace, and immediately beyond is the burial-ground of St. Marylebone Church.[33] No. 1, Devonshire Terrace is now semi-detached, having a line of taller residential structures on the southern side, while a portion of the high brick wall on the Terrace side has been replaced by an iron railing. The house itself has been structurally changed since Dickens’s days, and has undergone enlargement, a new story being inserted between the ground-floor and the upper story, thus considerably altering its original proportions without actually removing its principal features. Mr. Hughes, who in 1888 examined the house prior to these “improvements,” states that it then contained thirteen rooms. “The polished mahogany doors in the hall, and the chaste Italian marble mantelpieces in the principal rooms, are said to have been put up by the novelist. On the ground-floor the smaller room to the eastward of the house, with windows facing north and looking into the pleasant garden, where the plane-trees and turf are beautifully green, is pointed out as having been his study.”[34] Concerning Dickens’s studies, his eldest daughter tells us that they “were always cheery, pleasant rooms, and always, like himself, the personification of neatness and tidiness. On the shelf of his writing-table were many dainty and useful ornaments—gifts from his friends or members of his family—and always a vase of bright and fresh flowers.” Referring to the sanctum at Devonshire Terrace, Miss Dickens observes that it (the first she could remember) was “a pretty room, with steps leading directly into the garden from it, and with an extra baize door to keep out all sounds and noise.” The garden here constituted a great attraction to Dickens, for it enabled him, with his children and friends, to indulge in such simple games as battledore and shuttlecock and bowls, which not only delighted him, but conveniently afforded means of obtaining necessary exercise and recreation at intervals during his literary labours.

In a stable on the south side of the garden were kept the two ravens that inspired the conception of Grip in “Barnaby Rudge,” of which famous bird they were the “great originals.” Longfellow, after visiting the novelist here in 1841, said in a letter to a friend: “I write this from Dickens’s study, the focus from which so many luminous things have radiated. The raven croaks in the garden, and the ceaseless roar of London fills my ears.” The first raven died in 1841 from the effects (it was believed) of a meal of white paint; he was quickly succeeded by an older and a larger raven (“comparatively of weak intellect”), whose decease in 1845 was similarly premature, probably owing to “the same illicit taste for putty and paint which had been fatal to his predecessor.” “Voracity killed him,” said Dickens, “as it did Scott’s; he died unexpectedly by the kitchen fire. He kept his eye to the last upon the meat as it roasted, and suddenly turned over on his back with a sepulchral cry of ‘Cuckoo.’” The novelist occupied No. 1, Devonshire Terrace (the scene of many of his literary triumphs) for a period of about twelve years—the happiest period of his life—and there wrote some of the best of his stories, including “The Old Curiosity Shop,” “Barnaby Rudge,” “Martin Chuzzlewit,” “Dombey and Son,” and “David Copperfield,” the latter the most delightful of all his books, and his own favourite. Here also he composed those ever-popular Yule-tide annuals, “A Christmas Carol,” “The Cricket on the Hearth,” and “The Haunted Man.”

The friends which the fame of the young author attracted thither included some of the most distinguished men of the day, such as Macready, Talfourd, Proctor (“Barry Cornwall”), Clarkson Stanfield, R.A., Sir David Wilkie, R.A., Sir Edwin Landseer, R.A., Samuel Rogers, Sydney Smith, and many others of equal note, for which reason, among others, he always cherished fond recollections of this London home, and writing to Forster from Genoa in 1844, he could not refrain from expressing how strangely he felt in the midst of such unfamiliar environment. “I seem,” he said, “as if I had plucked myself out of my proper soil when I left Devonshire Terrace, and would take root no more until I return to it.... Did I tell you how many fountains we have here? No matter. If they played nectar they wouldn’t please me half so well as the West Middlesex Waterworks at Devonshire Terrace.” As in the case of 48, Doughty Street, this house bears a commemorative tablet, placed by the London County Council. It is interesting to add that within a stone’s-throw stands the old parish church of St. Marylebone, the scene of the burial of little Paul Dombey and his mother, and of Mr. Dombey’s second marriage.

At Devonshire Terrace four sons were born to him, viz., Walter Landor, Francis Jeffrey, Alfred Tennyson, Henry Fielding, and one daughter, Dora Annie, who survived only a few months.

On particular occasions, owing to a prolonged absence from England, he let this house firstly to General Sir John Wilson in 1842 (when he first visited America); secondly, to a widow lady, who agreed to occupy it during his stay in Italy in 1844; and, thirdly, in 1846, to Sir James Duke. The widow lady took possession a week or two before he started for the Continent, thus compelling him to seek temporary quarters elsewhere. He found the necessary accommodation near at hand, namely, at No. 9, Osnaburgh Terrace, New Road (now Euston Road), which he rented for the interval. Here occurred an amusing contretemps. Before entering upon this brief tenancy, he had invited a number of valued friends to a farewell dinner prior to his departure for Italy, and suddenly discovered that, owing to the small dimensions of the rooms, he would be obliged to abandon or postpone the function, the house having no convenience “for the production of any other banquet than a cold collation of plate and linen, the only comforts we have not left behind us.” Additional help being obtained, however, the dinner went off satisfactorily.

Dickens and his family left England for Italy in July, 1844, remaining abroad for a period of twelve months. In November, however, he made a quick journey to London, in order to test the effect of a reading aloud of his just completed Christmas book, “The Chimes,” before a few friends assembled for that purpose at Forster’s residence, Lincoln’s Inn Fields, which, as readers of “Bleak House” may remember, is introduced into that story as Mr. Tulkinghorn’s Chambers. The pleasurable interlude over, the novelist returned to Genoa, there remaining until June, 1845, when, homesick and eager to renew the “happy old walks and old talks” with his friends in the “dear old home,” he gladly settled down again in Devonshire Terrace. But only eleven months elapsed before he departed for Switzerland, where he rented a little villa called Rosemont at Lausanne; here he embarked upon a new story, “Dombey and Son,” and wrote “The Battle of Life.” His stay on the Continent was unexpectedly curtailed by the illness from scarlet fever of his eldest son Charles, then at King’s College school in London, whereupon, at the end of February, 1847, the novelist and his wife hastily made their way to the bedside of their sick boy, taking up their abode at the Victoria Hotel, Euston Square,[35] the Devonshire Terrace home being still occupied by Sir James Duke. The little invalid was under the care of his grandmother, Mrs. Hogarth, in Albany Street, Regent’s Park, and Dickens secured temporary quarters near at hand, in Chester Place, where he remained until June, and where a fifth son was born, christened Sydney Smith Haldemand.

Writing to Mrs. Hogarth from Chester Place (the number is not recorded), he said: “This house is very cheerful on the drawing-room floor and above, looking into the park on one side and Albany Street on the other.”

Early in 1848 Devonshire Terrace was quitted by Sir James Duke, and Dickens returned to London from Brighton (where he had been spending two or three weeks) joyfully to enter into possession once more of his own home, taking with him for completion an important chapter of “Dombey and Son.” The lease of this house expired in 1851, the last book written there being “David Copperfield,” at the publication of which his reputation attained its highest level. He now realized that, for a family consisting of six sons and two daughters (of whom the eldest, Charles Culliford Boz, was but fourteen years of age), this residence did not offer sufficient accommodation, and therefore he decided with keen regret not to renew the lease.[36] Indeed, from the beginning of the year he had been negotiating for a more commodious domicile, Tavistock House, in Tavistock Square, then, and for some years previously, the residence of his cherished artist friend, Frank Stone, A.R.A., father of Mr. Marcus Stone, the Royal Academician. An opportunity arising for the immediate purchase of the lease of Tavistock House, Dickens felt convinced it was prudent that he should buy it, for, as he observed in a letter to Frank Stone, it seemed very unlikely that he would obtain “the same comforts for the rising generation elsewhere for the same money,” and gave him carte-blanche to make the necessary arrangements for acquiring the lease at a price not exceeding £1,500. “I don’t make any apologies,” he added, “for thrusting this honour upon you, knowing what a thorough-going old pump you are.” After securing the property, the summer months were spent by the novelist at Broadstairs, where a “dim vision” suddenly confronted him in connection with the impending change of residence. “Supposing,” he wrote considerately to Stone, “you should find, on looking forward, a probability of your being houseless at Michaelmas, what do you say to using Devonshire Terrace as a temporary encampment? It will not be in its usual order, but we would take care that there should be as much useful furniture of all sorts there as to render it unnecessary for you to move a stick. If you should think this a convenience, then I should propose to you to pile your furniture in the middle of the rooms at Tavistock House, and go out to Devonshire Terrace two or three weeks before Michaelmas, to enable my workmen to commence their operations. This might be to our mutual convenience, and therefore I suggest it. Certainly, the sooner I can begin on Tavistock House the better, and possibly your going into Devonshire Terrace might relieve you from a difficulty that would otherwise be perplexing. I make this suggestion (I need not say to you) solely on the chance of its being useful to both of us. If it were merely convenient to me, you know I shouldn’t dream of it. Such an arrangement, while it would cost you nothing, would perhaps enable you to get your new house into order comfortably, and do exactly the same thing for me.”[37] The exchange was accordingly made, so enabling Dickens to effect certain structural improvements in Tavistock House before returning from Broadstairs to take possession in November. These alterations and reparations, which were apparently on a somewhat extensive scale, were carried out under the superintendence of his brother-in-law, Henry Austin, an architect and sanitary engineer, to whom Dickens (harassed by delays in the work) wrote despairingly as follows:

“Broadstairs, “Sunday, September 7, 1851.

“My dear Henry,

“I am in that state of mind which you may (once) have seen described in the newspapers as ‘bordering on distraction,’ the house given up to me, the fine weather going on (soon to break, I dare say), the printing season oozing away, my new book (‘Bleak House’) waiting to be born, and

“No Workmen on the Premises,

along of my not hearing from you!! I have torn all my hair off, and constantly beat my unoffending family. Wild notions have occurred to me of sending in my own plumber to do the drains. Then I remember that you have probably written to propose your man, and restrain my audacious hand. Then Stone presents himself, with a most exasperatingly mysterious visage, and says that a rat has appeared in the kitchen, and it’s his opinion (Stone’s, not the rat’s) that the drains want ‘compo-ing’; for the use of which explicit language I could fell him without remorse. In my horrible desire to ‘compo’ everything, the very postman becomes my enemy, because he brings no letter from you; and, in short, I don’t see what’s to become of me unless I hear from you to-morrow, which I have not the least expectation of doing.

“Going over the house again, I have materially altered the plans, abandoned conservatory and front balcony, decided to make Stone’s painting-room the drawing-room (it is nearly 6 inches higher than the room below), to carry the entrance passage right through the house to a back door leading to the garden, and to reduce the once intended drawing-room—now schoolroom—to a manageable size, making a door of communication between the new drawing-room and the study. Curtains and carpets, on a scale of awful splendour and magnitude, are already in preparation, and still—still—

“No Workmen on the Premises.

“To pursue this theme is madness. Where are you? When are you coming home? Where is the man who is to do the work? Does he know that an army of artificers must be turned in at once, and the whole thing finished out of hand?

“O rescue me from my present condition. Come up to the scratch, I entreat and implore you!

“I send this to Lætitia (Mrs. Austin) to forward,

“Being, as you well know why,

Completely floored by N.W.,[38] I

Sleep!

I hope you may be able to read this. My state of mind does not admit of coherence.

“Ever affectionately, “Charles Dickens.

“P.S.—No Workmen on the Premises!

“Ha! ha! ha! (I am laughing demoniacally.)”[39]

Other letters followed, testifying to the highly nervous condition and impatience of the writer, who in certain of these characteristic missives, said: