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twenty-five miles from London, an area where the writer had spent the happiest years of his childhood and one to which he returned constantly as an adult, roaming there rather like some restless ghost searching for his final haunting ground. The house itself—Gad’s Hill Place—had been pointed out to the seven- or eight-year-old Charles Dickens by his father on one of their countless walks; John Dickens had said something to the effect that “If you work hard enough, my boy, and apply yourself, such a mansion might one day be yours.” Then, on that boy’s forty-third birthday in February of 1855, Dickens had taken some friends to Chatham on one of his regular sentimental hauntings and discovered, to his real shock, that the unobtainable mansion of his youth was for sale.
    Dickens was the first to admit that Gad’s Hill Place was not so much a mansion as it was a moderately comfortable country house—in truth, the author’s former home Tavistock House had been more imposing—although after purchasing Gad’s Hill Place, the writer did pour a small fortune into renovating, modernising, decorating, landscaping, and expanding it. At first he had planned to use his late father’s dream of opulence as a rental property, then began to think of it as a sometime country home, but after the bitter unpleasantness of his separation from Catherine, he first leased out Tavistock House and then put that city house up for sale, making Gad’s Hill Place his primary residence. (His habit, though, was to keep several places in London for occasional—and sometimes secret—residence, including quarters above his office at our magazine
All the Year Round
.)
    Dickens had told his friend Wills upon purchasing the place—“I used to look at it as a wonderful mansion (which God knows it is not) when I was a very odd little child with the first shadows of all my books in my head.”
    As my carriage turned off the Gravesend Road and rolled up the curved drive towards the three-storey redbrick home, I thought of how those shadows had taken on substance for hundreds of thousands of readers and how Dickens, in turn, now lived within those very substantial walls that his incorrigible father, a failure in the arenas of both family and finances, had once held up to his son as the highest possible reward of domestic and professional ambition.
    A MAID-SERVANT ADMITTED me and Georgina Hogarth, Dickens’s sister-in-law and now the mistress of the home, greeted me.
    “How is the Inimitable?” I asked, using the author’s favourite sobriquet for himself.
    “Very shaken, Mr Collins, very shaken,” whispered Georgina and held one finger to her lips. Dickens’s study was off the entryway to the right. The doors were closed but I knew from my many visits and stays at Gad’s Hill that the master’s study doors were
always
closed, whether he was there working or not. “The accident upset him so much that he had to spend the first night at his apartment in London with Mr Wills sleeping outside the door,” she continued in her stage whisper. “In case Mr Wills might be needed, you know.”
    I nodded. First hired as an assistant for Dickens’s magazine
Household Words,
the eminently practical and unimaginative William Henry Wills—in so many ways the opposite of the mercurial Dickens—had become one of the famous author’s closest friends and confidants, moving aside such older friends as John Forster.
    “He’s not working today,” whispered Georgina. “I’ll see if he wants to be disturbed.” She approached the study doors with some obvious trepidation.
    “Who is it?” came a voice from within the study when Georgina knocked lightly.
    I say “a voice” because it was not Charles Dickens’s voice. The novelist’s voice, as all who knew him long remembered, was low, quick, and burdened with a slight thickness which many mistook for a lisp and which had caused the writer, in recompense, to over-enunciate his vowels and consonants so