and sad expedients of
shabby poverty. Like David Copperfield, he had been made free of the
interior of a debtor's prison. Poor lad, he was not much more than ten or
eleven years old when he left Chatham, with all the charms that were
ever after to live so brightly in his recollection,--the gay military
pageantry, the swarming dockyard, the shifting sailor life, the delightful
walks in the surrounding country, the enchanted room, tenanted by the
first fairy day-dreams of his genius, the day-school, where the master
had already formed a good opinion of his parts, giving him Goldsmith's
"Bee" as a keepsake. This pleasant land he left for a dingy house in a
dingy London suburb, with squalor for companionship, no teaching but
the teaching of the streets, and all around and above him the depressing
hideous atmosphere of debt. With what inimitable humour and pathos
has he told the story of these darkest days! Substitute John Dickens for
Mr. Micawber, and Mrs. Dickens for Mrs. Micawber, and make David
Copperfield a son of Mr. Micawber, a kind of elder Wilkins, and let
little Charles Dickens be that son--and then you will have a record, true
in every essential respect, of the child's life at this period. "Poor Mrs.
Micawber! she said she had tried to exert herself; and so, I have no
doubt, she had. The centre of the street door was perfectly covered with
a great brass-plate, on which was engraved 'Mrs. Micawber's Boarding
Establishment for Young Ladies;' but I never found that any young lady
had ever been to school there; or that any young lady ever came, or
proposed to come; or that the least preparation was ever made to
receive any young lady. The only visitors I ever saw or heard of were
creditors. They used to come at all hours, and some of them were quite
ferocious." Even such a plate, bearing the inscription, _Mrs. Dickens's
Establishment_, ornamented the door of a house in Gower Street North,
where the family had hoped, by some desperate effort, to retrieve its
ruined fortunes. Even so did the pupils refuse the educational
advantages offered to them, though little Charles went from door to
door in the neighbourhood, carrying hither and thither the most alluring
circulars. Even thus was the place besieged by assiduous and angry
duns. And when, in the ordinary course of such sad stories, Mr.
Dickens is arrested for debt, and carried off to the Marshalsea prison,[2]
he moralizes over the event in precisely the same strain as Mr.
Micawber, using, indeed, the very same words, and calls on his son,
with many tears, "to take warning by the Marshalsea, and to observe
that if a man had twenty pounds a year, and spent nineteen pounds
nineteen shillings and sixpence, he would be happy; but that a shilling
spent the other way would make him wretched."
The son was taking note of other things besides these moral apothegms,
and reproduced, in after days, with a quite marvellous detail and
fidelity, all the incidents of his father's incarceration. Probably, too, he
was beginning, as children will, almost unconsciously, to form some
estimate of his father's character. And a very queer study in human
nature that must have been, giving Dickens, when once he had
mastered it, a most exceptional insight into the ways of impecuniosity.
Charles Lamb, as we all remember, divided mankind into two races, the
mighty race of the borrowers, and the mean race of the lenders; and
expatiated, with a whimsical and charming eloquence, upon the
greatness of one Bigod, who had been as a king among those who by
process of loan obtain possession of other people's money. Shift the
line of division a little, so that instead of separating borrowers and
lenders, it separates those who pay their debts from those who do not
pay them, and then Dickens the elder may succeed to something of
Bigod's kingship. He was of the great race of debtors, possessing
especially that ideal quality of mind on which Lamb laid such stress.
Imagination played the very mischief with him. He had evidently little
grasp of fact, and moved in a kind of haze, through which all clear
outlines would show blurred and unreal. Sometimes--most often,
perhaps--that haze would be irradiated with sanguine visionary hopes
and expectations. Sometimes it would be fitfully darkened with all the
horrors of despair. But whether in gloom or gleam, the realities of his
position would be lost. He never, certainly, contracted a debt which he
did not mean honourably to pay. But either he had never possessed the
faculty of forming a just estimate of future possibilities, or else,
through the indulgence of what may be called a vague habit of thought,
he had lost the power of seeing things
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