The ancient and picturesque city of Rochester, so beloved by Dickens and so replete with memories of the “Master,” deserves a chapter to itself. With the exception of London, no town figures so frequently or so prominently in his books as Rochester, from “The Pickwick Papers” to the unfinished romance of “The Mystery of Edwin Drood,” where it is thinly disguised as “Cloisterham.” Dickens’s acquaintance with Rochester began in the days of his boyhood, when he lived with his father at Chatham, and, as a natural result of his unusual powers of observation, he even then stored up his youthful impressions of the quaint old houses, the Cathedral, and its neighbour, the rugged ruins of the Norman Castle overlooking the Medway. How those juvenile impressions received something of a shock in after-years we are informed by Forster, for childhood exaggerates what it sees, and Rochester High Street he remembered as a thoroughfare at least as wide as Regent Street, whereas it proved to his maturer judgment to be “little better than a lane,” while the public clock in it, once supposed by him to be the finest clock in the world, proved eventually to be “as moon-faced and weak a clock as a man’s eyes ever saw.” Even the grave-looking Town Hall, “which had appeared to him once so glorious a structure” that he associated it in his mind with Aladdin’s palace, he reluctantly realized as being, in reality, nothing more than “a mere mean little heap of bricks, like a chapel gone demented.” “Ah! who was I,” he observes on reflection, “that I should quarrel with the town for being changed to me, when I myself had come back, so changed, to it? All my early readings and early imaginations dated from this place, and I took them away so full of innocent construction and guileless belief, and I brought them back so worn and torn, so much the wiser and so much the worse!”