His father, John Dickens, held a clerkship in the Navy Pay Office, and
was employed in the Portsmouth Dockyard when little Charles first came
into the world, at Landport, in Portsea, on February 7, 1812. Wealth
can never have been one of the familiar friends of the household, nor
plenty have always sat at its board. Charles had one elder sister, and
six other brothers and sisters were afterwards added to the family;
and with eight children, and successive removals from Portsmouth to
London, and London to Chatham, and no more than the pay of a
Government clerk[1]--pay which not long afterwards dwindled to a
pension,--even a better domestic financier than the elder Dickens
might have found some difficulty in facing his liabilities. It was
unquestionably into a tottering house that the child was born, and
among its ruins that he was nurtured.

But through all these early years I can do nothing better than take
him for my guide, and walk as it were in his companionship. Perhaps no
novelist ever had a keener feeling of the pathos of childhood than
Dickens, or understood more fully how real and overwhelming are its
sorrows. No one, too, has entered more sympathetically into its ways.
And of the child and boy that he himself had once been, he was wont to
think very tenderly and very often. Again and again in his writings he
reverts to the scenes and incidents and emotions of his earlier days.
Sometimes he goes back to his young life directly, speaking as of
himself. More often he goes back to it indirectly, placing imaginary
children and boys in the position he had once occupied. Thus it is
almost possible, by judiciously selecting from his works, and using
such keys as we possess, to construct as it were a kind of
autobiography. Nor, if we make due allowance for the great writer's
tendency to idealize the past, and intensify its humorous and pathetic
aspects, need we at all fear that the self-written story of his life