Charles John Huffham Dickens, the master story-teller, was born in
Landport, England, February 7, 1812. His father was a clerk in one of
the offices of the Navy, and he was one of eight children.

When he was four years old, his father moved to the town of Chatham,
near the old city of Rochester. Round about are chalk hills, green
lanes, forests and marshes, and amid such scenes the little Charles's
genius first began to show itself.

He did not like the rougher sports of his school-fellows and preferred
to amuse himself in his own way, or to wander about with his older
sister, Fanny, whom he especially loved. They loved to watch the stars
together, and there was one particular star which they used to pretend
was their own. People called him a "very queer small boy" because he was
always thinking or reading instead of playing. The children of the
neighborhood would gather around him to listen while he told them
stories or sang comic songs to them, and when he was only eight years
old he taught them to act in plays which he invented. He was fond of
reading books of travel, and most of all he loved _The Arabian Nights_
and _Robinson Crusoe_.

He had a great affection for Chatham and Rochester, and after he began
to write stories that were printed, he often used to put these places
into them. It was at Chatham that poor little David in the story, _David
Copperfield_, lay down to sleep when he was running away from London to
find his aunt, Miss Betsy Trotwood. It was to Rochester that Mr.
Pickwick in _Pickwick Papers_, rode with Jingle. Rochester was really
the "Cloisterham" where the wicked choir master, John Jasper, killed his
nephew, in _The Mystery of Edwin Drood_. And it was in those very
marshes near by, that Magwitch, the escaped convict in _Great
Expectations_, so frightened little Pip. It is easy to see that the
young Charles Dickens noted carefully and remembered everything he saw,
and this habit was of great use to him all his life.

These happy years were not to last long. When he was nine years old, his
father became poor and the family was obliged to move to London, where
it lived in a shabby house in a poor suburb. Before another year had
passed, his father was put into prison for debt--the same prison in
which Little Dorrit, in the story of that name, grew up. A very bitter
period followed for the solitary ten-year-old boy--a time in which, he
long afterward wrote, "but for the mercy of God, he might