Life of Charles Dickens | Page 5

as they are. Thus all his
excellencies and good gifts were neutralized at this time, so far as his
family were concerned, and went for practically nothing. He was,
according to his son's testimony, full of industry, most conscientious in
the discharge of any business, unwearying in loving patience and
solicitude when those bound to him by blood or friendship were ill or
in trouble, "as kind-hearted and generous a man as ever lived in the
world." Yet as debts accumulated, and accommodation bills shed their
baleful shadow on his life, and duns grew many and furious, he became
altogether immersed in mean money troubles, and suffered the son who
was to shed such lustre on his name to remain for a time without the
means of learning, and to sink first into a little household drudge, and
then into a mere warehouse boy.
So little Charles, aged from eleven to twelve, first blacked boots, and
minded the younger children, and ran messages, and effected the family
purchases--which can have been no pleasant task in the then state of the
family credit,--and made very close acquaintance with the inside of the
pawnbrokers' shops, and with the purchasers of second-hand books,
disposing, among other things, of the little store of books he loved so
well; and then, when his father was imprisoned, ran more messages
hither and thither, and shed many childish tears in his father's
company--the father doubtless regarding the tears as a tribute to his
eloquence, though, heaven knows, there were other things to cry over
besides his sonorous periods. After which a connection, James Lamert
by name, who had lived with the family before they moved from
Camden Town to Gower Street, and was manager of a worm-eaten,
rat-riddled blacking business, near old Hungerford Market, offered to
employ the lad, on a salary of some six shillings a week, or thereabouts.
The duties which commanded these high emoluments consisted of the
tying up and labelling of blacking pots. At first Charles, in
consideration probably of his relationship to the manager, was allowed
to do his tying, clipping, and pasting in the counting-house. But soon
this arrangement fell through, as it naturally would, and he descended
to the companionship of the other lads, similarly employed, in the

warehouse below. They were not bad boys, and one of them, who bore
the name of Bob Fagin, was very kind to the poor little better-nurtured
outcast, once, in a sudden attack of illness, applying hot
blacking-bottles to his side with much tenderness. But, of course, they
were rough and quite uncultured, and the sensitive, bookish,
imaginative child felt that there was something uncongenial and
degrading in being compelled to associate with them. Nor, though he
had already sufficient strength of character to learn to do his work well,
did he ever regard the work itself as anything but unsuitable, and
almost discreditable. Indeed it may be doubted whether the iron of that
time did not unduly rankle and fester as it entered into his soul, and
whether the scar caused by the wound was altogether quite honourable.
He seems to have felt, in connection with his early employment in a
warehouse, a sense of shame such as would be more fittingly associated
with the commission of an unworthy act. That he should not have
habitually referred to the subject in after life, may readily be
understood. But why he should have kept unbroken silence about it for
long years, even with his wife, even with so very close a friend as
Forster, is less clear. And in the terms used, when the revelation was
finally made to Forster, there has always, I confess, appeared to me to
be a tone of exaggeration. "My whole nature," he says, "was so
penetrated with grief and humiliation, ... 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." And again: "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 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." Great part, perhaps the greatest part, of Dickens' success as a
writer, came from the sympathy and power with which he showed how
the lower walks of life no less than the higher are often fringed with
beauty. I have never been able to entirely divest myself of a slight
feeling of the incongruous in reading what he wrote about the