HARD EXPERIENCES IN BOYHOOD.
1822-1824.
Mr. Dilke's Half-crown--Story of Boyhood
told--D. C. and C. D.--Enterprise of the
Cousins Lamert--First Employment in
Life--Blacking-Warehouse--A Poor Little
Drudge--Bob Fagin and Poll Green--"Facilis
Descensus"--Crushed Hopes--The Home in Gower
Street--Regaling Alamode--Home broken up--At
Mrs. Roylance's in Camden-town--Sundays in
Prison--Pudding-Shops and Coffee-Shops--What
was and might have been--Thomas and Harry--A
Lodging in Lant Street--Meals in the
Marshalsea--C. D. and the
Marchioness--Originals of Garland
Family--Adventure with Bob
Fagin--Saturday-Night Shows--Appraised
officially--Publican and Wife at Cannon
Row--Marshalsea Incident in
_Copperfield_--Incident as it
occurred--Materials for _Pickwick_--Sister
Fanny's Musical Prize--From Hungerford Stairs
to Chandos Street--Father's Quarrel with James
Lamert--Quits the Warehouse--Bitter
Associations of Servitude--What became of the
Blacking-Business.
THE incidents to be told now would probably never have been known to me,
or indeed any of the occurrences of his childhood and youth, but for the
accident of a question which I put to him one day in the March or April
of 1847.
I asked if he remembered ever having seen in his boyhood our friend the
elder Mr. Dilke, his father's acquaintance and contemporary, who had
been a clerk in the same office in Somerset House to which Mr. John
Dickens belonged. Yes, he said, he recollected seeing him at a house in
Gerrard Street, where his uncle Barrow lodged during an illness, and Mr.
Dilke had visited him. Never at any other time. Upon which I told him
that some one else had been intended in the mention made to me, for that
the reference implied not merely his being met accidentally, but his
having had some juvenile employment in a warehouse near the Strand; at
which place Mr. Dilke, being with the elder Dickens one day, had noticed
him, and received, in return for the gift of a half-crown, a very low
bow. He was silent for several minutes; I felt that I had
unintentionally touched a painful place in his memory; and to Mr. Dilke
I never spoke of the subject again. It was not, however, then, but some
weeks later, that Dickens made further allusion to my thus having struck
unconsciously upon a time of which he never could lose the remembrance
while he remembered anything, and the recollection of which, at
intervals, haunted him and made him miserable, even to that hour.
Very shortly afterwards I learnt in all their detail the incidents that
had been so painful to him, and what then was said to me or written
respecting them revealed the story of his boyhood. The idea of _David
Copperfield_, which was to take all the world into his confidence, had
not at this time occurred to him; but what it had so startled me to
know, his readers were afterwards told with only such change or addition
as for the time might sufficiently disguise himself under cover of his
hero. For the poor little lad, with good ability and a most sensitive
nature, turned at the age of ten into a "laboring hind" in the service
of "Murdstone and Grinby," and conscious already of what made it seem
very strange to him that he could so easily have been thrown away at
such an age, was indeed himself. His was the secret agony of soul at
finding himself "companion to Mick Walker and Mealy Potatoes," and his
the tears that mingled with the water in which he and they rinsed and
washed out bottles. It had all been written, as fact, before he thought
of any other use for it; and it was not until several months later, when
the fancy of _David Copperfield_, itself suggested by what he had so
written of his early troubles, began to take shape in his mind, that he
abandoned his first intention of writing his own life. Those warehouse
experiences fell then so aptly into the subject he had chosen, that he
could not resist the temptation of immediately using them; and the
manuscript recording them, which was but the first portion of what he
had designed to write, was embodied in the substance of the eleventh and
earlier chapters of his novel. What already had been sent to me,
however, and proof-sheets of the novel interlined at the time, enable me
now to separate the fact from the fiction, and to supply to the story of
the author's childhood those passages, omitted from the book, which,
apart from their illustration of the growth of his character, present to
us a picture of tragical suffering, and of tender as well as humorous
fancy, unsurpassed in even the wonders of his published writings.
The person indirectly responsible for the scenes to be described was the
young relative James Lamert, the cousin by his aunt's marriage of whom I
have made frequent mention, who got up the plays at Chatham, and after
passing at Sandhurst had been living with the family in Bayham Street in
the hope of obtaining a commission in the army. This did not come until
long afterwards, when, in consideration of his father's services, he
received it, and relinquished it then in favor of a younger brother; but
he had meanwhile, before the family removed from Camden-town, ceased to
live with them. The husband of a sister of his (of the same name as
himself, being indeed his cousin, George Lamert), a man of some
property, had recently embarked in an odd sort of commercial
speculation, and had taken him into his office and his house, to assist
in it. I give now the fragment of the autobiography of Dickens:
"This speculation was a rivalry of 'Warren's Blacking, 30, Strand,'--at
that time very famous. One Jonathan Warren (the famous one was Robert),
living at 30, Hungerford Stairs, or Market, Strand (for I forget which
it was called then), claimed to have been the original inventor or
proprietor of the blacking-recipe, and to have been deposed and ill used
by his renowned relation. At last he put himself in the way of selling
his recipe, and his name, and his 30, Hungerford Stairs, Strand (30,
Strand, very large, and the intermediate direction very small), for an
annuity; and he set forth by his agents that a little capital would make
a great business of it. The man of some property was found in George
Lamert, the cousin and brother-in-law of James. He bought this right and
title, and went into the blacking-business and the blacking-premises.
"--In an evil hour for me, as I often bitterly thought. Its chief
manager, James Lamert, the relative who had lived with us in Bayham
Street, seeing how I was employed from day to day, and knowing what our
domestic circumstances then were, proposed that I should go into the
blacking-warehouse, to be as useful as I could, at a salary, I think, of
six shillings a week. I am not clear whether it was six or seven. I am
inclined to believe, from my uncertainty on this head, that it was six
at first, and seven afterwards. At any rate, the offer was accepted very
willingly by my father and mother, and on a Monday morning I went down
to the blacking-warehouse to begin my business life.
"It is wonderful to me how I could have been so easily cast away at such
an age. It is wonderful to me that, even after my descent into the poor
little drudge I had been since we came to London, no one had compassion
enough on me--a child of singular abilities, quick, eager, delicate, and
soon hurt, bodily or mentally--to suggest that something might have been
spared, as certainly it might have been, to place me at any common
school. Our friends, I take it, were tired out. No one made any sign. My
father and mother were quite satisfied. They could hardly have been more
so if I had been twenty years of age, distinguished at a grammar-school,
and going to Cambridge.
"The blacking-warehouse was the last house on the left-hand side of the
way, at old Hungerford Stairs. It was a crazy, tumble-down old house,
abutting of course on the river, and literally overrun with rats. Its
wainscoted rooms, and its rotten floors and staircase, and the old gray
rats swarming down in the cellars, and the sound of their squeaking and
scuffling coming up the stairs at all times, and the dirt and decay of
the place, rise up visibly before me, as if I were there again. The
counting-house was on the first floor, looking over the coal-barges and
the river. There was a recess in it, in which I was to sit and work. My
work was to cover the pots of paste-blacking; first with a piece of
oil-paper, and then with a piece of blue paper; to tie them round with a
string; and then to clip the paper close and neat, all round, until it
looked as smart as a pot of ointment from an apothecary's shop. When a
certain number of grosses of pots had attained this pitch of perfection,
I was to paste on each a printed label, and then go on again with more
pots. Two or three other boys were kept at similar duty down-stairs on
similar wages. One of them came up, in a ragged apron and a paper cap,
on the first Monday morning, to show me the trick of using the string
and tying the knot. His name was Bob Fagin; and I took the liberty of
using his name, long afterwards, in _Oliver Twist_.
"Our relative had kindly arranged to teach me something in the
dinner-hour; from twelve to one, I think it was; every day. But an
arrangement so incompatible with counting-house business soon died away,
from no fault of his or mine; and, for the same reason, my small
work-table, and my grosses of pots, my papers, string, scissors,
paste-pot, and labels, by little and little, vanished out of the recess
in the counting-house, and kept company with the other small
work-tables, grosses of pots, papers, string, scissors, and paste-pots,
down-stairs. It was not long before Bob Fagin and I, and another boy
whose name was Paul Green, but who was currently believed to have been
christened Poll (a belief which I transferred, long afterwards again,
to Mr. Sweedlepipe, in _Martin Chuzzlewit_), worked generally, side by
side. Bob Fagin was an orphan, and lived with his brother-in-law, a
waterman. Poll Green's father had the additional distinction of being a
fireman, and was employed at Drury Lane theatre; where another relation
of Poll's, I think his little sister, did imps in the pantomimes.
"No words can express the secret agony of my soul as I sunk into this
companionship; compared these every-day associates with those of my
happier childhood; and felt my early hopes of growing up to be a learned
and distinguished man, crushed in my breast. The deep remembrance of the
sense I had of being utterly neglected and hopeless; of the shame I felt
in my position; of the misery it was to my young heart to believe that,
day by day, what I had learned, and thought, and delighted in, and
raised my fancy and my emulation up by, was passing away from me, never
to be brought back any more; cannot be written. My whole nature was so
penetrated with the grief and humiliation of such considerations, that
even now, famous and caressed and happy, I often forget in my dreams
that I have a dear wife and children; even that I am a man; and wander
desolately back to that time of my life.
"My mother and my brothers and sisters (excepting Fanny in the Royal
Academy of Music) were still encamped, with a young servant-girl from
Chatham workhouse, in the two parlors in the emptied house in Gower
Street north. It was a long way to go and return within the dinner-hour,
and usually I either carried my dinner with me, or went and bought it at
some neighboring shop. In the latter case, it was commonly a saveloy
and a penny loaf; sometimes, a fourpenny plate of beef from a cook's
shop; sometimes, a plate of bread and cheese, and a glass of beer, from
a miserable old public-house over the way: the Swan, if I remember
right, or the Swan and something else that I have forgotten. Once, I
remember tucking my own bread (which I had brought from home in the
morning) under my arm, wrapped up in a piece of paper like a book, and
going into the best dining-room in Johnson's alamode beef-house in Clare
Court, Drury Lane, and magnificently ordering a small plate of alamode
beef to eat with it. What the waiter thought of such a strange little
apparition, coming in all alone, I don't know; but I can see him now,
staring at me as I ate my dinner, and bringing up the other waiter to
look. I gave him a halfpenny, and I wish, now, that he hadn't taken it."
I lose here for a little while the fragment of direct narrative, but I
perfectly recollect that he used to describe Saturday night as his great
treat. It was a grand thing to walk home with six shillings in his
pocket, and to look in at the shop-windows and think what it would buy.
Hunt's roasted corn, as a British and patriotic substitute for coffee,
was in great vogue just then; and the little fellow used to buy it, and
roast it on the Sunday. There was a cheap periodical of selected pieces
called the _Portfolio_, which he had also a great fancy for taking home
with him. The new proposed "deed," meanwhile, had failed to propitiate
his father's creditors; all hope of arrangement passed away; and the end
was that his mother and her encampment in Gower Street north broke up
and went to live in the Marshalsea. I am able at this point to resume
his own account:
"The key of the house was sent back to the landlord, who was very glad
to get it; and I (small Cain that I was, except that I had never done
harm to any one) was handed over as a lodger to a reduced old lady, long
known to our family, in Little College Street, Camden-town, who took
children in to board, and had once done so at Brighton; and who, with a
few alterations and embellishments, unconsciously began to sit for Mrs.
Pipchin in _Dombey_ when she took in me.
"She had a little brother and sister under her care then; somebody's
natural children, who were very irregularly paid for; and a widow's
little son. The two boys and I slept in the same room. My own exclusive
breakfast, of a penny cottage loaf and a penny-worth of milk, I provided
for myself. I kept another small loaf, and a quarter of a pound of
cheese, on a particular shelf of a particular cupboard; to make my
supper on when I came back at night. They made a hole in the six or
seven shillings, I know well; and I was out at the blacking-warehouse
all day, and had to support myself upon that money all the week. I
suppose my lodging was paid for, by my father. I certainly did not pay
it myself; and I certainly had no other assistance whatever (the making
of my clothes, I think, excepted), from Monday morning until Saturday
night. No advice, no counsel, no encouragement, no consolation, no
support, from any one that I can call to mind, so help me God.
"Sundays, Fanny and I passed in the prison. I was at the academy in
Tenterden Street, Hanover Square, at nine o'clock in the morning, to
fetch her; and we walked back there together, at night.
"I was so young and childish, and so little qualified--how could I be
otherwise?--to undertake the whole charge of my own existence, that, in
going to Hungerford Stairs of a morning, I could not resist the stale
pastry put out at half-price on trays at the confectioners' doors in
Tottenham Court Road; and I often spent in that the money I should have
kept for my dinner. Then I went without my dinner, or bought a roll, or
a slice of pudding. There were two pudding-shops between which I was
divided, according to my finances. One was in a court close to St.
Martin's Church (at the back of the church) which is now removed
altogether. The pudding at that shop was made with currants, and was
rather a special pudding, but was dear: two penn'orth not being larger
than a penn'orth of more ordinary pudding. A good shop for the latter
was in the Strand, somewhere near where the Lowther Arcade is now. It
was a stout, hale pudding, heavy and flabby; with great raisins in it,
stuck in whole, at great distances apart. It came up hot, at about noon
every day; and many and many a day did I dine off it.
"We had half an hour, I think, for tea. When I had money enough, I used
to go to a coffee-shop, and have half a pint of coffee, and a slice of
bread-and-butter. When I had no money, I took a turn in Covent Garden
market, and stared at the pineapples. The coffee-shops to which I most
resorted were, one in Maiden Lane; one in a court (non-existent now)
close to Hungerford market; and one in St. Martin's Lane, of which I
only recollect that it stood near the church, and that in the door
there was an oval glass plate, with COFFEE-ROOM painted on it, addressed
towards the street. If I ever find myself in a very different kind of
coffee-room now, but where there is such an inscription on glass, and
read it backward on the wrong side MOOR-EEFFOC (as I often used to do
then, in a dismal reverie,) a shock goes through my blood.
"I know I do not exaggerate, unconsciously and unintentionally, the
scantiness of my resources and the difficulties of my life. I know that
if a shilling or so were given me by any one, I spent it in a dinner or
a tea. I know that I worked, from morning to night, with common men and
boys, a shabby child. I know that I tried, but ineffectually, not to
anticipate my money, and to make it last the week through; by putting it
away in a drawer I had in the counting-house, wrapped into six little
parcels, each parcel containing the same amount and labeled with a
different day. I know that I have lounged about the streets,
insufficiently and unsatisfactorily fed. I know that, but for the mercy
of God, I might easily have been, for any care that was taken of me, a
little robber or a little vagabond.
"But I held some station at the blacking-warehouse too. Besides that my
relative at the counting-house did what a man so occupied, and dealing
with a thing so anomalous, could, to treat me as one upon a different
footing from the rest, I never said, to man or boy, how it was that I
came to be there, or gave the least indication of being sorry that I was
there. That I suffered in secret, and that I suffered exquisitely, no
one ever knew but I. How much I suffered, it is, as I have said already,
utterly beyond my power to tell. No man's imagination can overstep the
reality. But I kept my own counsel, and I did my work. I knew from the
first that, if I could not do my work as well as any of the rest, I
could not hold myself above slight and contempt. I soon became at least
as expeditious and as skillful with my hands as either of the other
boys. Though perfectly familiar with them, my conduct and manners were
different enough from theirs to place a space between us. They, and the
men, always spoke of me as 'the young gentleman.' A certain man (a
soldier once) named Thomas, who was the foreman, and another named
Harry, who was the carman and wore a red jacket, used to call me
'Charles' sometimes, in speaking to me; but I think it was mostly when
we were very confidential, and when I had made some efforts to entertain
them over our work with the results of some of the old readings, which
were fast perishing out of my mind. Poll Green uprose once, and rebelled
against the 'young gentleman' usage; but Bob Fagin settled him speedily.
"My rescue from this kind of existence I considered quite hopeless, and
abandoned as such, altogether; though I am solemnly convinced that I
never, for one hour, was reconciled to it, or was otherwise than
miserably unhappy. I felt keenly, however, the being so cut off from my
parents, my brothers and sisters, and, when my day's work was done,
going home to such a miserable blank; and _that_, I thought, might be
corrected. One Sunday night I remonstrated with my father on this head,
so pathetically, and with so many tears, that his kind nature gave way.
He began to think that it was not quite right. I do believe he had
never thought so before, or thought about it. It was the first
remonstrance I had ever made about my lot, and perhaps it opened up a
little more than I intended. A back-attic was found for me at the house
of an insolvent-court agent, who lived in Lant Street in the borough,
where Bob Sawyer lodged many years afterwards. A bed and bedding were
sent over for me, and made up on the floor. The little window had a
pleasant prospect of a timber-yard; and when I took possession of my new
abode I thought it was a Paradise."
There is here another blank, which it is, however, not difficult to
supply from letters and recollections of my own. What was to him of
course the great pleasure of his paradise of a lodging was its bringing
him again, though after a fashion sorry enough, within the circle of
home. From this time he used to breakfast "at home,"--in other words, in
the Marshalsea; going to it as early as the gates were open, and for the
most part much earlier. They had no want of bodily comforts there. His
father's income, still going on, was amply sufficient for that; and in
every respect indeed but elbow-room, I have heard him say, the family
lived more comfortably in prison than they had done for a long time out
of it. They were waited on still by the maid-of-all-work from Bayham
Street, the orphan girl of the Chatham workhouse, from whose sharp
little worldly and also kindly ways he took his first impression of the
Marchioness in the _Old Curiosity Shop_. She also had a lodging in the
neighborhood, that she might be early on the scene of her duties; and
when Charles met her, as he would do occasionally, in his lounging-place
by London Bridge, he would occupy the time before the gates opened by
telling her quite astonishing fictions about the wharves and the tower.
"But I hope I believed them myself," he would say. Besides breakfast, he
had supper also in the prison, and got to his lodging generally at nine
o'clock. The gates closed always at ten.
I must not omit what he told me of the landlord of this little lodging.
He was a fat, good-natured, kind old gentleman. He was lame, and had a
quiet old wife; and he had a very innocent grown-up son, who was lame
too. They were all very kind to the boy. He was taken with one of his
old attacks of spasm one night, and the whole three of them were about
his bed until morning. They were all dead when he told me this; but in
another form they still live very pleasantly as the Garland family in
the _Old Curiosity Shop_.
He had a similar illness one day in the warehouse, which I can describe
in his own words: "Bob Fagin was very good to me on the occasion of a
bad attack of my old disorder. I suffered such excruciating pain that
time, that they made a temporary bed of straw in my old recess in the
counting-house, and I rolled about on the floor, and Bob filled empty
blacking-bottles with hot water, and applied relays of them to my side,
half the day. I got better, and quite easy towards evening; but Bob (who
was much bigger and older than I) did not like the idea of my going home
alone, and took me under his protection. I was too proud to let him know
about the prison, and, after making several efforts to get rid of him,
to all of which Bob Fagin in his goodness was deaf, shook hands with him
on the steps of a house near Southwark Bridge on the Surrey side,
making believe that I lived there. As a finishing piece of reality in
case of his looking back, I knocked at the door, I recollect, and asked,
when the woman opened it, if that was Mr. Robert Fagin's house."
The Saturday nights continued, as before, to be precious to him. "My
usual way home was over Blackfriars Bridge, and down that turning in the
Blackfriars Road which has Rowland Hill's chapel on one side, and the
likeness of a golden dog licking a golden pot over a shop-door on the
other. There are a good many little low-browed old shops in that street,
of a wretched kind; and some are unchanged now. I looked into one a few
weeks ago, where I used to buy boot-laces on Saturday nights, and saw
the corner where I once sat down on a stool to have a pair of ready-made
half-boots fitted on. I have been seduced more than once, in that street
on a Saturday night, by a show-van at a corner; and have gone in, with a
very motley assemblage, to see the Fat-pig, the Wild-indian, and the
Little-lady. There were two or three hat-manufactories there then (I
think they are there still); and among the things which, encountered
anywhere or under any circumstances, will instantly recall that time, is
the smell of hat-making."
His father's attempts to avoid going through the court having failed,
all needful ceremonies had to be undertaken to obtain the benefit of the
insolvent debtors' act; and in one of these little Charles had his part
to play. One condition of the statute was that the wearing-apparel and
personal matters retained were not to exceed twenty pounds sterling in
value. "It was necessary, as a matter of form, that the clothes I wore
should be seen by the official appraiser. I had a half-holiday to
enable me to call upon him, at his own time, at a house somewhere beyond
the Obelisk. I recollect his coming out to look at me with his mouth
full, and a strong smell of beer upon him, and saying good-naturedly
that 'that would do,' and 'it was all right.' Certainly the hardest
creditor would not have been disposed (even if he had been legally
entitled) to avail himself of my poor white hat, little jacket, or
corduroy trowsers. But I had a fat old silver watch in my pocket, which
had been given me by my grandmother before the blacking-days, and I had
entertained my doubts as I went along whether that valuable possession
might not bring me over the twenty pounds. So I was greatly relieved,
and made him a bow of acknowledgment as I went out."
Still, the want felt most by him was the companionship of boys of his
own age. He had no such acquaintance. Sometimes he remembered to have
played on the coal-barges at dinner-time, with Poll Green and Bob Fagin;
but those were rare occasions. He generally strolled alone, about the
back streets of the Adelphi, or explored the Adelphi arches. One of his
favorite localities was a little public-house by the water-side, called
the Fox-under-the-hill, approached by an underground passage which we
once missed in looking for it together; and he had a vision which he has
mentioned in _Copperfield_ of sitting eating something on a bench
outside, one fine evening, and looking at some coal-heavers dancing
before the house. "I wonder what they thought of me," says David. He had
himself already said the same in his fragment of autobiography.
Another characteristic little incident he made afterwards one of
David's experiences, but I am able to give it here without the disguises
that adapt it to the fiction: "I was such a little fellow, with my poor
white hat, little jacket, and corduroy trowsers, that frequently, when I
went into the bar of a strange public-house for a glass of ale or porter
to wash down the saveloy and the loaf I had eaten in the street, they
didn't like to give it me. I remember, one evening (I had been somewhere
for my father, and was going back to the borough over Westminster
Bridge), that I went into a public-house in Parliament Street,--which is
still there, though altered,--at the corner of the short street leading
into Cannon Row, and said to the landlord behind the bar, 'What is your
very best--the VERY _best_--ale, a glass?' For the occasion was a
festive one, for some reason: I forget why. It may have been my
birthday, or somebody else's. 'Two-pence,' says he. 'Then,' says I,
'just draw me a glass of that, if you please, with a good head to it.'
The landlord looked at me, in return, over the bar, from head to foot,
with a strange smile on his face, and, instead of drawing the beer,
looked round the screen and said something to his wife, who came out
from behind it, with her work in her hand, and joined him in surveying
me. Here we stand, all three, before me now, in my study in Devonshire
Terrace. The landlord, in his shirt-sleeves, leaning against the bar
window-frame; his wife, looking over the little half-door; and I, in
some confusion, looking up at them from outside the partition. They
asked me a good many questions, as what my name was, how old I was,
where I lived, how I was employed, etc. etc. To all of which, that I
might commit nobody, I invented appropriate answers. They served me with
the ale, though I suspect it was not the strongest on the premises; and
the landlord's wife, opening the little half-door and bending down, gave
me a kiss that was half admiring and half compassionate, but all womanly
and good, I am sure."
A later, and not less characteristic, incident of the true story of this
time found also a place, three or four years after it was written, in
his now famous fiction. It preceded but by a short time the discharge,
from the Marshalsea, of the elder Dickens; to whom a rather considerable
legacy from a relative had accrued not long before ("some hundreds," I
understood), and had been paid into court during his imprisonment. The
scene to be described arose on the occasion of a petition drawn up by
him before he left, praying, not for the abolition of imprisonment for
debt, as David Copperfield relates, but for the less dignified but more
accessible boon of a bounty to the prisoners to drink his majesty's
health on his majesty's forthcoming birthday.
"I mention the circumstance because it illustrates, to me, my early
interest in observing people. When I went to the Marshalsea of a night,
I was always delighted to hear from my mother what she knew about the
histories of the different debtors in the prison; and when I heard of
this approaching ceremony, I was so anxious to see them all come in, one
after another (though I knew the greater part of them already, to speak
to, and they me), that I got leave of absence on purpose, and
established myself in a corner, near the petition. It was stretched
out, I recollect, on a great ironing-board, under the window, which in
another part of the room made a bedstead at night. The internal
regulations of the place, for cleanliness and order, and for the
government of a common room in the ale-house, where hot water and some
means of cooking, and a good fire, were provided for all who paid a very
small subscription, were excellently administered by a governing
committee of debtors, of which my father was chairman for the time
being. As many of the principal officers of this body as could be got
into the small room without filling it up, supported him, in front of
the petition; and my old friend Captain Porter (who had washed himself,
to do honor to so solemn an occasion) stationed himself close to it, to
read it to all who were unacquainted with its contents. The door was
then thrown open, and they began to come in, in a long file; several
waiting on the landing outside, while one entered, affixed his
signature, and went out. To everybody in succession, Captain Porter
said, 'Would you like to hear it read?' If he weakly showed the least
disposition to hear it, Captain Porter, in a loud sonorous voice, gave
him every word of it. I remember a certain luscious roll he gave to such
words as 'Majesty--gracious Majesty--your gracious Majesty's unfortunate
subjects--your Majesty's well-known munificence,'--as if the words were
something real in his mouth, and delicious to taste; my poor father
meanwhile listening with a little of an author's vanity, and
contemplating (not severely) the spikes on the opposite wall. Whatever
was comical in this scene, and whatever was pathetic, I sincerely
believe I perceived in my corner, whether I demonstrated or not, quite
as well as I should perceive it now. I made out my own little character
and story for every man who put his name to the sheet of paper. I might
be able to do that now, more truly: not more earnestly, or with a closer
interest. Their different peculiarities of dress, of face, of gait, of
manner, were written indelibly upon my memory. I would rather have seen
it than the best play ever played; and I thought about it afterwards,
over the pots of paste-blacking, often and often. When I looked, with my
mind's eye, into the Fleet prison during Mr. Pickwick's incarceration, I
wonder whether half a dozen men were wanting from the Marshalsea crowd
that came filing in again, to the sound of Captain Porter's voice!"
When the family left the Marshalsea they all went to lodge with the lady
in Little College Street, a Mrs. Roylance, who has obtained unexpected
immortality as Mrs. Pipchin; and they afterwards occupied a small house
in Somers-town. But, before this time, Charles was present with some of
them in Tenterden Street to see his sister. Fanny received one of the
prizes given to the pupils of the Royal Academy of Music. "I could not
bear to think of myself--beyond the reach of all such honorable
emulation and success. The tears ran down my face. I felt as if my heart
were rent. I prayed, when I went to bed that night, to be lifted out of
the humiliation and neglect in which I was. I never had suffered so much
before. There was no envy in this." There was little need that he should
say so. Extreme enjoyment in witnessing the exercise of her talents, the
utmost pride in every success obtained by them, he manifested always to
a degree otherwise quite unusual with him; and on the day of her
funeral, which we passed together, I had most affecting proof of his
tender and grateful memory of her in these childish days. A few more
sentences, certainly not less touching than any that have gone before,
will bring the story of them to its close. They stand here exactly as
written by him:
"I am not sure that it was before this time, or after it, that the
blacking-warehouse was removed to Chandos Street, Covent Garden. It is
no matter. Next to the shop at the corner of Bedford Street in Chandos
Street are two rather old-fashioned houses and shops adjoining one
another. They were one then, or thrown into one, for the
blacking-business; and had been a butter-shop. Opposite to them was, and
is, a public-house, where I got my ale, under these new circumstances.
The stones in the street may be smoothed by my small feet going across
to it at dinner-time, and back again. The establishment was larger now,
and we had one or two new boys. Bob Fagin and I had attained to great
dexterity in tying up the pots. I forget how many we could do in five
minutes. We worked, for the light's sake, near the second window as you
come from Bedford Street; and we were so brisk at it that the people
used to stop and look in. Sometimes there would be quite a little crowd
there. I saw my father coming in at the door one day when we were very
busy, and I wondered how he could bear it.
"Now, I generally had my dinner in the warehouse. Sometimes I brought it
from home, so I was better off. I see myself coming across Russell
Square from Somers-town, one morning, with some cold hotch-potch in a
small basin tied up in a handkerchief. I had the same wanderings about
the streets as I used to have, and was just as solitary and
self-dependent as before; but I had not the same difficulty in merely
living. I never, however, heard a word of being taken away, or of being
otherwise than quite provided for.
"At last, one day, my father, and the relative so often mentioned,
quarreled; quarreled by letter, for I took the letter from my father to
him which caused the explosion, but quarreled very fiercely. It was
about me. It may have had some backward reference, in part, for anything
I know, to my employment at the window. All I am certain of is, that,
soon after I had given him the letter, my cousin (he was a sort of
cousin, by marriage) told me he was very much insulted about me, and
that it was impossible to keep me after that. I cried very much, partly
because it was so sudden, and partly because in his anger he was violent
about my father, though gentle to me. Thomas, the old soldier, comforted
me, and said he was sure it was for the best. With a relief so strange
that it was like oppression, I went home.
"My mother set herself to accommodate the quarrel, and did so next day.
She brought home a request for me to return next morning, and a high
character of me, which I am very sure I deserved. My father said I
should go back no more, and should go to school. I do not write
resentfully or angrily; for I know how all these things have worked
together to make me what I am; but I never afterwards forgot, I never
shall forget, I never can forget, that my mother was warm for my being
sent back.
"From that hour until this at which I write, no word of that part of my
childhood which I have now gladly brought to a close has passed my lips
to any human being. I have no idea how long it lasted; whether for a
year, or much more, or less. From that hour until this my father and my
mother have been stricken dumb upon it. I have never heard the least
allusion to it, however far off and remote, from either of them. I have
never, until I now impart it to this paper, in any burst of confidence
with any one, my own wife not excepted, raised the curtain I then
dropped, thank God.
"Until old Hungerford market was pulled down, until old Hungerford
Stairs were destroyed, and the very nature of the ground changed, I
never had the courage to go back to the place where my servitude began.
I never saw it. I could not endure to go near it. For many years, when I
came near to Robert Warren's in the Strand, I crossed over to the
opposite side of the way, to avoid a certain smell of the cement they
put upon the blacking-corks, which reminded me of what I was once. It
was a very long time before I liked to go up Chandos Street. My old way
home by the borough made me cry, after my eldest child could speak.
"In my walks at night I have walked there often, since then, and by
degrees I have come to write this. It does not seem a tithe of what I
might have written, or of what I meant to write."
The substance of some after-talk explanatory of points in the narrative,
of which a note was made at the time, may be briefly added. He could
hardly have been more than twelve years old when he left the place, and
was still unusually small for his age; much smaller, though two years
older, than his own eldest son was at the time of these confidences. His
mother had been in the blacking-warehouse many times; his father not
more than once or twice. The rivalry of Robert Warren by Jonathan's
representatives, the cousins George and James, was carried to wonderful
extremes in the way of advertisement; and they were all very proud, he
told me, of the cat scratching the boot, which was _their_ house's
device. The poets in the house's regular employ he remembered, too, and
made his first study from one of them for the poet of Mrs. Jarley's
wax-work. The whole enterprise, however, had the usual end of such
things. The younger cousin tired of the concern; and a Mr. Wood, the
proprietor who took James's share and became George's partner, sold it
ultimately to Robert Warren. It continued to be his at the time Dickens
and myself last spoke of it together, and he had made an excellent
bargain of it.