But the head is an obvious portrait, and a happy one; far more like the real boy, so tradition says, than the generalized chubbiness of the commissioned picture.
In the next year (1823) they quitted the town for a suburban home.

The spot they chose was in rural Dulwich, on Herne Hill, a long offshoot of the Surrey downs; low, and yet commanding green fields and scattered houses in the foreground, with rich undulating country to the south, and looking across London toward Windsor and Harrow.

It is all built up now; but their house (later No.

28) must have been as secluded as any in a country village.

There were ample gardens front and rear, well stocked with fruit and flowers--quite an Eden for a little boy, and all the more that the fruit of it was forbidden.