er to the city. But during the process something akin to a
holocaust has taken place, to consider only the landmarks and shrines
which have disappeared,--the last as these lines are being written, being
Clifford's Inn,--while Mr. Tulkinghorn's house in Lincoln's Inn Fields,
redolent of Dickens and Forster, his biographer, is doomed, as also the
_Good Words_ offices in Wellington Street, where Dickens spent so much of
his time in the later years of his life. The famous "Gaiety" is about to
be pulled down, and the "old Globe" has already gone from this street of
taverns, as well as of letters, or, as one picturesque writer has called
it, "the nursing mother of English literature."

THE LONDON DICKENS KNEW

The father of Charles Dickens was for a time previous to the birth of the
novelist a clerk in the Navy Pay Office, then in Somerset House, which
stands hard by the present Waterloo Bridge, in the very heart of London,
where Charles Dickens grew to manhood in later years.

From this snug berth Dickens, senior, was transferred to Portsmouth,
where, at No. 387 Commercial Road, in Portsea, on the 7th February, 1812,
Charles Dickens was born.

Four years later the family removed to Chatham, near Rochester, and here
the boy Charles received his first schooling.

From Chatham the family again removed, this time to London, where the son,
now having arrived at the age of eleven, became a part and parcel of that
life which he afterward depicted so naturally and successfully in the
novels.

Here he met with the early struggles with grim poverty and
privation,--brought about by the vicissitudes which befell the
family,--which proved so good a school for his future career as a
historian of the people. His was the one voice which spoke with
authoritativeness, and aroused that interest in the nether world which up
to that time had slumbered.

The miseries of his early struggles with bread-winning in Warren's
Blacking Factory,--in association with one Fagin, who afterward took on
immortalization at the novelist's hands,--for a weekly wage of but six
shillings per week, is an old and realistic fact which all biographers and
most makers of guide-books have worn nearly threadbare.

That the family were sore put in order to keep their home together, first
in Camden Town and later in Gower Street, North, is only too apparent. The
culmination came when the elder Dickens was thrown into Marshalsea Prison
for debt, and the fam