Back of old Hungerford Stairs, behind what is now Charing Cross Station, you may visit the spot where the two boys—the real and the imaginary—Charles Dickens and David Copperfield spent so many hours while working for a scant pittance in that “crazy old house with a wharf of its own abutting on the water when the tide was in, and on the mud when it was out, and literally overrun with rats.” Gadshill, where Dickens lived and died, is on the very borders of historic Rochester, teeming with reminders of “Edwin Drood,” not to say of the genial Pickwick and his companions. Of Furnival’s Inn where “Pickwick” was written, and where its author spent the first months of his married life, only the site remains; but these “Rambles” will help you to find all, or nearly all, of his other homes, even to that last home of all—the grave in Westminster Abbey, in which he was laid on the 14th of June 1870. His friends’ houses too, and the scores of spots noteworthy by reason of association with him personally, you will be given an opportunity of visiting if you follow this careful _cicerone_. At No. 58 Lincoln’s Inn Fields still stands Forster’s house, where, in 1844, Dickens read “The Chimes” to Carlyle, Douglas Jerrold, Maclise, and others, and which is also utilised in “Bleak House” to supply a model for the dwelling-place of Mr. Tulkinghorn. The office of _Household Words_, founded by Dickens, is now part of the Gaiety Theatre. The old taverns about Hampstead, whither he loved to resort for a friendly flagon “and a red-hot chop,” are much as they were in the novelist’s day, save in one regrettable instance where the proprietor has preferred, in order to cater to an unappreciative class, to disfigure his inn into a mere modern public-house of the conventional type, such that Dickens, who loved the place when it was old-fashioned and comfortable, would utterly disown now. The ancient “Spaniards,” however, is much the same as it was in the days of the Gordon riots, when the then host of the quaint little tavern saved Lord Mansfield’s country house at Caen Wood by allowing the rioters to devastate his cellars, while he privily sent for the Guards. The reckless waste of liquor on that occasion is said to have suggested to Dickens the scene in “Barnaby Rudge,” where John Willet watches the sack of his beloved “Maypole” and sees his cellars drained of their best, as he lies bound and helpless in the bar. That the novelist frequently visited the “Spaniards,” the old records of the house can show; and in “Pickwick” he makes it the scene of a memorable tea-party, attended by Mrs. Bardell, just before those “sharp practitioners,” Dodson and Fogg, caused the injured lady’s arrest. The “Bull and Bush,” another old Hampstead inn much frequented of Dickens, also exists unharmed by the “renovator.” And while we are upon the subject of inns known to our author, let us not forget the “Maypole” itself, here shown to be the “King’s Head” at Chigwell.