Dickens' health begins to fail; he is much shaken by an accident in June, 1865; but bates no jot of his high courage, and works on at his readings; sails for America on a reading tour in November, 1867; is wretchedly ill, and yet continues to read day after day; comes back to England, and reads on; health failing more and more; reading has to be abandoned for a time; begins to write his last and unfinished book, "Edwin Drood"; except health all seems well with him; on June 8, 1870, he works at his book nearly all day; at dinner time is struck down; dies on the following day, June the 9th; is buried in Westminster Abbey among his peers; nor will his fame suffer eclipse 149 INDEX 163 LIFE OF CHARLES DICKENS. CHAPTER I. Education is a kind of lottery in which there are good and evil chances, and some men draw blanks and other men draw prizes. And in saying this I do not use the word education in any restricted sense, as applying exclusively to the course of study in school or college; nor certainly, when I speak of prizes, am I thinking of scholarships, exhibitions, fellowships. By education I mean the whole set of circumstances which go to mould a man's character during the apprentice years of his life; and I call that a prize when those circumstances have been such as to develop the man's powers to the utmost, and to fit him to do best that of which he is best capable. Looked at in this way, Charles Dickens' education, however untoward and unpromising it may often have seemed while in the process, must really be pronounced a prize of value quite inestimable. 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.