Charles Dickens first saw the mansion when he was 'not half as old as 9', when his father
John Dickens told Charles that if he worked hard enough, one day he would own it or just such a house. As a boy, Dickens would often walk from
Chatham to Gad's Hill Place as he wished to see it again and again as an image of his possible future. Dickens was later to write, " I used to look at it as a wonderful Mansion (which God knows it is not) when I was a very odd little child with the first faint shadows of all my books in my head - I suppose." but changed his mind and used it instead as a country retreat, moving into the house in June 1857. Dickens had bookshelves installed in his study at Gad's Hill Place, some of which contained dummy books the titles of which he invented to reflect his own prejudices and opinions, including ''Hansard's Guide to Refreshing Sleep
, History of a Short Chancery Suit
in twenty-one volumes, Socrates on Wedlock
, King Henry the Eighth's Evidences of Christianity
, and the series The Wisdom of Our Ancestors: I Ignorance, II Superstition, III The Block, IV The Stake, V The Rack, VI Dirt,
and VII Disease
. Alongside these was placed a very narrow dummy volume entitled The Virtues of Our Ancestors''. Dickens was visited at Gad's Hill Place in 1857 by
Danish author and poet
Hans Christian Andersen, who was invited for two weeks but who stayed for five. Other guests included
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow,
Charles Allston Collins,
Wilkie Collins,
Marcus Stone,
H.F. Chorley,
Percy Fitzgerald,
John Leech,
Alexander William Kinglake,
William Powell Frith and
Charles Fechter. In 1864 Fechter gave Dickens a prefabricated two-storey Swiss chalet as a Christmas present. Dickens had it assembled on land he owned on the opposite side of the Rochester High Road, known by the family as the Wilderness, which was accessible by a tunnel that he had built between the two areas some years earlier. He, Dickens worked on many of his later works in his study on the top floor of this Swiss chalet, including
A Tale of Two Cities,
Great Expectations,
Our Mutual Friend and the unfinished
The Mystery of Edwin Drood. The chalet has been preserved and was moved to Eastgate House in Rochester High Street,
Rochester, as a memorial to the writer. The house remained Dickens's country home until his death in 1870, dying as he did of a stroke on a couch in the dining room there. Much of the contents of the house were auctioned after his death. ==Later history==