Attends day school in Hampstead Road, London.

After the hardship of his time at Warren’s Blacking Factory, Charles Dickens was able to resume a more normal course of childhood when he attended a day school in Hampstead Road, London, beginning in the mid-1820s. This marked a crucial turning point in his early development, for it reconnected him with formal education and nurtured the remarkable intelligence that had already begun to set him apart. Though the school was modest and lacked the prestige of elite institutions, it offered Dickens access to structured learning, discipline, and the opportunity to refine his natural abilities in reading, writing, and performance. At Hampstead Road, Dickens revealed a keen appetite for language and storytelling, as well as a vivid imagination that would soon blossom into creative expression. His school years were relatively brief and irregular, due in part to his family’s continuing financial instability, but they nevertheless provided him with essential foundations for his later self-education. He devoured books outside of the classroom, from eighteenth-century novels to popular stories, feeding an insatiable curiosity and building a literary reservoir that would sustain his career.