St. Mary's became Dickens' parish church when he moved into Gads' Hill Place, on the Gravesend-Rochester road, in 1859. He then lived in Higham until he died in 1870 and would have known the building well. In 1860, his daughter Katey was married there. It was in this year that he began one of his most well known novels, Great Expectations, which is partly set in a landscape that seems to be based on that of North Kent. Its famous beginning, above, feature an isolated marshland church, and the deserted gun placement where the convict Magwitch hides from the law corresponds perfectly with the nearby Shornemead Fort.