In an evil hour for me, as I often bitterly thought . . . James Lamert,
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
afterward. 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.
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,
downstairs. 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 afterward 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.
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 labelled 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.