“It seems that they rented a house next door to the Sheerness Theatre, and one mid-nineteenth-century chronicler said of John Dickens that “of an evening he used to sit in this room, and could hear what was passing on the stage, and join in the chorus of ‘God Save the King’ and ‘Britannia Rules the Waves'”. Songs and theatres are to feature large in Dicken’s childhood, and here is perhaps the first intimation of that long-forgotten world – in the vision of John Dickens singing patriotic songs in his sitting room, listening eagerly to the sounds coming from a small wooden theatre.”