Charles Dickens—A Lecture.

and with a dangerous kind of wandering intelligence that a teacher mig ht turn to good or evil , happiness or misery , as he directed it . The influence of Mr . Giles appears to have been favourable , and Dickens himself

remembered in after years , and not ungratefully , that his past schoolmaster had pronounced him to be a boy of capacity . He used to remember that it was in the playing field close to the school that he "first heard in confidence from one whose father was

greatly connected ' being under government , ' of the existence of a terrible banditti called the radicals , Avhose principles were that the Prince Regent wore stays , that nobody had a right to any salaryand that the army and navy

, ought to be put down , horrors at which he trembled in his bed , after supplicating that the radicals might be speedily taken and hanged !' When he was about nine his father was recalled from Chatham to Somerset

House . The earliest impressions received and retained by him in London were his father ' s money involvements , and how first he heard mentioned the deed representing that crisis in his father ' s affairs in fact which is described

iu / tcfa ' owto Mr . Micawber . He knew it in later days to have been a composition with creditors ; though at this earlier date he was conscious of having confounded it with parchments of a much uiore demoniacal description One

. result from the awful document soon showed itself in family retrenchment , fie family now moved to Bayham-* eet , Camden Town . The house I ' orster describes as a mean small

tenement , with a wretched little back garden , abutting on a squalid court . A washerwoman lived next door , a Bowsh'eet officer over the way . Charles ^ ckens seemed at once to Ml into a solitary condition apart from all other

Jo 3 's of Ms own age , and to sink into a fleeted state at home . "As I 'ought , " lie said on one occasion very ^ tei'ly to Forster , " in the little back garret iu Bayham-street , of all I had

lost in losing Chatham , what would I not have given , if I had had anything to give , to have been sent back to any other school , to have been tauoht something anywhere . " He was at another school already , not knowing it , Forster adds . The self-education forced upon him was leading him all unconsiously as yet what for the future that awaited him it

most behoved him to know . " How it came that being what he was , " Mr . Forster writes , "he should now have fallen into the misery and neglect of the time about to be described was a subject on which thoughts were

frequently interchanged between us . " I know my father , lie said , " to be as kindhearted and generous a man as ever lived in the world . Everything that I can remember of his conduct to his

wife or children , or friends , in sickness or affliction , is beyond all praise . By me , as a sick child , he has watched clay and night , utiweariedly and patiently , many nights and clays . He never undertook any business charge or trust

that he did not zealously , conscientiously , punctually , and honourably discharge . His industry has always been untiring . He was proud of me in his way , and had a great admiration of the comic singing . But in the ease of his

temper , and the straitness of his means , he appeared to have utterly lost at this time the idea of educating me at all , and to have utterly put from him the

notion that I had any claim upon him in that regard whatever , so I degenerated into cleaning his boots of a morning and my own , and making myself useful in the work of the little house , and looking after my younger brothers

and sisters ( we were now six in all ) , and going ou such poor errands as arose out of our poor way of living . " Matters in Bayham-street got from bad to worse , and at last it was decided that Mrs . Dickens should open a school . A house

was soon found at No . 4 , Gower-street , K A large brass plate on the door announced Mrs . Dickens' establishment . Dickens himself savs " I left at a great many other doors a great many circulars ,