In this essay for New Year's Day Dickens writes on a subject of profound and perennial importance to him, his belief in the absolute need for us to preserve into adulthood, for the sake of our psychic health, our childhood sense of wonder. He begins by recalling, in vivid detail, some of the literature that had most stimulated his childish imagination. He moves on to real things (objects, places, eccentric characters seen in the streets) that made an ineffaceable impression on him during his childhood years in London – stories he then heard, or read, about the Bastille come in here too – and that remain as marvellous to him now as then. Finally, he reverts to the very earliest years of his life, spent in Chatham. For an important and illuminating discussion of the whole essay, see Malcolm Andrews, Dickens and the Grown-Up Child (1994), Ch. 4.
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