ABSTRACT
As the son of a naval pay clerk Charles Dickens spent much of his childhood in the seaports of Portsmouth and Chatham where he would have come into contact with sailors from all over the world. To a child with an imagination as vivid as that of the young Dickens, the stories he would have heard from sailors returning from across the British Empire would have fired his imagination and, like so many of his childhood memories, stayed with him forever. The East certainly had a strong imaginative hold over him from an early age and one of his first recorded projects was the adaptation of James Ridley's Tales of the Genii, when he was just nine years old.1 However, in his adult life the empire as a whole was to exercise a curious appeal to his faculties and was to become tied to his vision of the Condition of England.
