Book Description

Excerpt from Life, Letters, and Speeches of Charles Dickens, Vol. 1 of 2: With Biographical Sketches of the Principal Illustrators of Dickens's Works His birth at Portsea was due to the fact that his father was a clerk in the navy-pay Office and at the time was stationed at Portsmouth, where he attended to the paying-off Of ships. TO the same fact it was owing that until eleven years Of age Charles Dickens lived in a nautical atmosphere, first for four years at Portsea, and then for seven at Chatham. The hulks and marshes and the Old Bill Barley of Great Expectations, the babby in the form of a great Sea Porkypine, his family, and his fascinating house Of the naval order Of architecture of David Copperfield, and the more directly autobiographic Sketches in The Uncommercial Traveller at once rise to the mind as carrying these early memories Of the sea; but it is to be noticed how Dickens's references to the sea are confined almost wholly to the margin Of it, for his own early experience upon the water seems to have been limited to occasional cruises on the navy-pay yacht, an Old-fashioned, high-sterned sailing yacht, a sluggish craft which sometimes bore John Dickens and his children when he sailed on the Medway to Sheerness on the business Of the Pay Office. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.