Number 2, Ordnance Terrace, Chatham
(Dullborough Town), Kent.
Dickens’ childhood home from 1817-1821.
Text and Illustrations: THE CHARLES DICKENS PAGE
“Dullborough Town”.
Charles Dickens describes a visit to his childhood home.
A Charles Dickens Article
from “All The Year Round”, June 1860.
Charles Dickens, at age forty-eight, describes a trip
to his childhood home of Chatham, Kent, which he refers to
as “Dullborough Town”, and finds it “mysteriously gone,
like my own youth”.
First published in Dickens’ Weekly Journal
It lately happened that I found myself rambling about the scenes among which my earliest days were passed; scenes from which I departed when I was a child, and which I did not revisit until I was a man.
This is no uncommon chance, but one that befalls some of us any day; perhaps it may not be quite uninteresting to compare notes with the reader respecting an experience so familiar and a journey so uncommercial.
I call my boyhood’s home (and I feel like a Tenor in an English Opera when I mention it) Dullborough. Most of us come from Dullborough who come from a Country Town.
As I left Dullborough in the days when there were no Railroads in the land, I left it in a Stage-Coach [Editor: Dickens states that the name of the Stage-Coach was “The Blue-Eyed Maid”].
Through all 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, Carriage Paid, to the Cross Keys Public House, Wood-street, Cheapside, London ?
There was no other inside passenger, and I consumed my sandwiches in solitude and dreariness, and it rained hard all the way, and I thought life sloppier than I had expected to find it [Editor: It is noteworthy to mention that Dickens used the name “Sloppy” for a character in “Our Mutual Friend”].
With this tender remembrance upon me, I was cavalierly shunted back into Dullborough the other day, by Train. My ticket had been previously collected, like my taxes, and my shining new portmanteau had had a great plaster stuck upon it, and I had been defied by Act of Parliament to offer an objection to anything that was done to it, or me, under a penalty of not less than forty shillings or more than five pounds, compoundable for a term of imprisonment.
When I had sent my disfigured property on to the hotel, I began to look about me; and the first discovery I made, was, that the Railway Station had swallowed up the playing-field.
It was gone. The two beautiful Hawthorn-Trees, the Hedge,
the Turf, and all those Buttercups and Daisies, had given
place to the stoniest of jolting roads: while, beyond the Railway Station, an ugly dark monster of a Railway Tunnel kept its jaws open, as if it had swallowed them and were ravenous for more destruction.
The Stage-Coach that had carried me away, was
melodiously called Timpson’s “Blue-Eyed Maid”
[Editor: Up until fairly recently, there was still a Timpson’s Coach Company running Motor Coaches for hire], and belonged to Timpson, at the Coach-Office “up-Street”; the Locomotive Engine, that had brought me back to Dullborough, was called, severely, “No. 97”, and belonged to S.E.R.
[Editor: South-Eastern Railway], and was spitting ashes
and hot water over the blighted ground.
The remainder of this fascinating Article and its glimpse into the past, and Dickens’s thoughts on the same, can be found at
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