THE LATE CHARLES DICKENS, JUN.
[TO THE EDITOR OF THE "SPECTATOR."]
you permit me to supplement the obituary notices of the late Charles Dickens, jun., by a brief mention of the private school where I was his school and class fellow just fifty years ago ? The school in question was, at that date, located at No. 9 Northwick Terrace, Maida Hill, and was carried on by a very remarkable man, the late Joseph Charles King. Mr. King was a genius in the teaching line, and an ideal schoolmaster, both outwardly and inwardly. His presence was truly awe-inspiring from his massive brow and towering stature. He became positively terrible when he occasionally lost patience with his pupils. His staff consisted of his three daughters and a mild male mathematical assistant. The daughters were hardly less brilliant than their father in classical scholarship. The eldest, the late Mrs. Menzies, successfully carried on the school at Carlton Hill, St. John's Wood, for nearly forty years after her father's death. Mr. King was an artist as well as a scholar, and was the intimate associate of the elder Dickens, Thackeray, 3facready, the Landseers, Cattermole, St. John, Thomas Keightley, and other literary men of the day. Most of his friends sent their sons to his schooL Mr. Frederic Harrison and Canon Ainger were also pupils of Mr. King.
One of my earliest recollections is of seeing Charles Dickens the elder drive up to the door in a four-wheeled cab, and swing himself out on the wrong side, in doubt as to whether he had pulled up at the right house. He was dressed in a tight-fitting frock-coat, buttoned up to the throat. My class-mate, Charles Dickens the younger, was popular with us all. He took us with him, on at least one occasion, to an entertainment at his father's house in the Marylebone Road, where a scene out of " Pickwick " was acted. We were much overworked both in and out of school, but young Dickens was not absorbed by the lessons to which we were kept eight hours a day. When sitting next to him, I used to observe that he was constantly drawing over his exercise-books parties of stiff soldiers, charging an imaginary enemy.—I am, Sir, &c., W. H. HALL.
The Cottage, Six-Mile Bottom., Cambridgeshire, July 23rd.
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