“Good Heaven!” said Scrooge, clasping his hands together, as he looked about him. “I was bred in this place. I was a boy here!” . . .
“You recollect the way?” inquired the Spirit.
“Remember it!” cried Scrooge with fervor; “I could walk it blindfold.”
The first ghost compelled a revisiting of his childhood and of his schooling. Now Dickens thought back on his own schoolboy teacher whom he had just seen while visiting Fanny in Manchester. As Dickens paced the streets of London, he traveled back in reverie to his childhood with his beloved teacher, William Giles, in the years before the Dickenses moved from Chatham to London.
“I was taken to Chatham when I was very young, and lived and was educated there till I was twelve or thirteen, I suppose,” Dickens wrote to Mr. Wilkie Collins on June 6, 1865.
Giles’ father, Rev. William Giles, was the minster at the Baptist Chapel nearest the school.
“It [the school] was very gravely and decorously ordered, and on a sound system; with an appeal on everything, to the honor and good faith of the boys, and an avowed intention to rely on their possession of those qualities, unless they proved themselves unworthy of it, which worked wonders,” wrote Charles Dickens in David Copperfield.
The school consisted of several of Giles’ younger siblings including John and Samuel, some children of the soldiers of the local garrison, and a few children of the neighbors. From all accounts Giles seems to have been taken with Dickens during Charles’ stay there.
According to biographer Robert Langton, Giles gave him “every encouragement in his power, even to making a companion of him of an evening, he was soon rewarded by the marked improvement that followed. Charles made rapid progress, and there is no doubt whatever that his wonderful knowledge and felicitous use of the English language in after life was, in great measure, due to the careful training of Mr. Giles, who was widely known as a cultivated reader and elocutionist.”
All these boys were in great spirits, and shouted to each other, until the broad fields were so full of merry music, that the crisp air laughed to hear it!
“These are but shadows of the things that have been,” said the Ghost. “They have no consciousness of us.”
The jocund travellers came on; and as they came, Scrooge knew and named them every one. Why was he rejoiced beyond all bounds to see them! Why did his cold eye glisten, and his heart leap up as they went past!
Mrs. Godfrey, an older sister of one of Charles’ schoolmates and a sister of Mr. Giles, remembered many years later, “Charles was quite at home at all sorts of parties, junkettings, and birthday celebrations, and that he took great delight in Fifth of November festivities around the bonfire.”
Students at Mr. Giles’ school were required to wear white beaver hats during their time there, and Dickens wore one until he left Chatham. Mary Weller, another student of the day, remembered that “they were not always learning, they had the merriest games that they ever played. They rowed up the river in the summer, and skated upon the ice in the winter. They had holidays too, and Twelfth cakes, and parties, when they danced till midnight. As to friends, they had such dear friends, and so many of them, that I want time to reckon them up. They were all young, like the handsome boy.”
He wrote a story called “Misnar, The Sultan of India!” and was well-liked for storytelling and entertaining his classmates. Charles was also a voracious reader, and ate up volumes by Defoe, Goldsmith, and Fielding.
“The school room setting adds, moreover, a layer of irony, conscious or unconscious, because it was a school that the boy in the blacking factory had so yearned to be sent,” wrote biographer Michael Slater. “To complicate matters still further, the young Scrooge’s desolate and decaying schoolhouse, ‘a mansion of dull red brick, with a little weather-cock-surmounted cupola, on the roof,’ recalls Gad’s Hill Place as seen from the outside. The forsaken-child image of the young Dickens sits, deprived of hope but comforted by imaginative literature, in the ruins of his own dream home.”
From their home at St. Mary’s Place, Fanny and Charles could see out over the church and its steeple, as well as the graveyard nearby. Dickens recalled this time in Chatham in a small story, “A Child’s Dream of a Star,” which many scholars feel reflects the closeness of the two in childhood. He wrote:
“There was one clear shining star that used to come out in the sky before the rest, near the church spire, above the graves. It was larger and more beautiful, they thought, than all others, and every night they watched for it, standing hand in hand at the window. Whoever saw it first, cried out, ‘I see the star!’ And often they cried out both together, knowing so well when it would rise, and where. So they grew to be such friends with it, that before lying down in their beds, they always looked out once again, to bid it good night; and when they were turning around to sleep, they used to say, ‘God bless the star!’ ”
Dickens biographer Peter Ackroyd pointed out: “Those who seek reasons for the ubiquity of that name [Fanny] in his fiction might start their search here. . . . On that criterion alone his response to the name is, to say the least, somewhat ambiguous; there is Fanny Dombey, the doomed mother of little Paul who dies in childbirth, but then of course there is also Fanny Squeers, the grotesque and ugly daughter of the famous Yorkshire schoolmaster. And then—in between, as it were—there is Fanny Dorrit, the imperious and petulant elder sister of Little Dorrit. There are also eight other characters who bear the same name. Now there is no doubt that Dickens did use Christian names which for some reason were emblematic for him—that is why the names of his father and sister crop up so often—and there is no doubt, too, that this was on occasions a deliberate device. But the range of Fannies in his fiction is so great that it suggests at the very least a most complicated relationship with his sibling. But we know also that, for Dickens himself, the relationship between brother and sister became the paradigm for human relationships in general; that loving sexless union of siblings is commemorated again and again in his novels.”
He was not reading now, but walking up and down despairingly. Scrooge looked at the Ghost, and with a mournful shaking of his head, glanced anxiously towards the door.
It opened; and a little girl, much younger than the boy, came darting in, and putting her arms about his neck, and often kissing him, addressed him as her “Dear, dear brother.”
“I have come to bring you home, dear brother!” said the child, clapping her tiny hands, and bending down to laugh. “To bring you home, home, home!”
When the Dickens family was reposted to London, Charles stayed behind with Mr. Giles a little while longer. He probably left Chatham around Christmas time 1822 or the early part of 1823.
“Home, little Fan?” returned the boy.
“Yes!” said the child, brimful of glee. “Home, for good and all. Home, for ever and ever. Father is so much kinder than he used to be, that home’s like Heaven! He spoke so gently to me one dear night when I was going to bed, that I was not afraid to ask him once more if you might come home; and he said Yes, you should; and sent me in a coach to bring you. And you’re to be a man!” said the child, opening her eyes, “and are never to come back here. . . .”
The night before he left the school, Mr. Giles “came fitting among the packing cases, to give me Goldsmith’s Bee as a keepsake. Which I kept for his sake, and its own, a long while afterwards.”
On leaving Chatham, Dickens later recounted, “ . . . in the days when there were no railroads in the land, I left it in a stage coach. Through all of the years that have since passed have I ever lost the smell of the damp straw in which I was packed—like game—and forwarded. . . . There was no other inside passenger, and I consumed my sandwiches in solitude and dreariness, and it rained hard all the way. . . .”
For Dickens these memories were not easy ones to choke down, knowing that his departure from Giles’ school would be more bittersweet than he could suppose at the time. The Dickenses had moved to Camden Town.
