Life of Charles Dickens | Page 6

warehouse episode in his career.
At first, when he began his daily toil at the blacking business, some

poor dregs of family life were left to the child. His father was at the
Marshalsea. But his mother and brothers and sisters were, to use his
own words, "still encamped, with a young servant girl from Chatham
workhouse, in the two parlours in the emptied house in Gower Street
North." And there he lived with them, in much "hugger-mugger,"
merely taking his humble midday meal in nomadic fashion, on his own
account. Soon, however, his position became even more forlorn. The
paternal creditors proved insatiable. The gipsy home in Gower Street
had to be broken up. Mrs. Dickens and the children went to live at the
Marshalsea. Little Charles was placed under the roof--it cannot be
called under the care--of a "reduced old lady," dwelling in Camden
Town, who must have been a clever and prophetic old lady if she
anticipated that her diminutive lodger would one day give her a kind of
indirect unenviable immortality by making her figure, under the name
of "Mrs. Pipchin," in "Dombey and Son." Here the boy seems to have
been left almost entirely to his own devices. He spent his Sundays in
the prison, and, to the best of his recollection, his lodgings at "Mrs.
Pipchin's" were paid for. Otherwise, he "found himself," in childish
fashion, out of the six or seven weekly shillings, breakfasting on two
pennyworth of bread and milk, and supping on a penny loaf and a bit of
cheese, and dining hither and thither, as his boy's appetite
dictated--now, sensibly enough, on _à la mode_ beef or a saveloy; then,
less sensibly, on pudding; and anon not dining at all, the wherewithal
having been expended on some morning treat of cheap stale pastry. But
are not all these things, the lad's shifts and expedients, his sorrows and
despair, his visits to the public-house, where the kindly publican's wife
stoops down to kiss the pathetic little face--are they not all written in
"David Copperfield"? And if so be that I have a reader unacquainted
with that peerless book, can I do better than recommend him, or her, to
study therein the story of Dickens' life at this particular time?
At last the child's solitude and sorrows seem to have grown unbearable.
His fortitude broke down. One Sunday night he appealed to his father,
with many tears, on the subject, not of his employment, which he
seems to have accepted at the time manfully, but of his forlornness and
isolation. The father's kind, thoughtless heart was touched. A back attic
was found for Charles near the Marshalsea, at Lant Street, in the

Borough--where Bob Sawyer, it will be remembered, afterwards
invited Mr. Pickwick to that disastrous party. The boy moved into his
new quarters with the same feeling of elation as if he had been entering
a palace.
The change naturally brought him more fully into the prison circle. He
used to breakfast there every morning, before going to the warehouse,
and would spend the larger portion of his spare time among the inmates.
Nor do Mr. Dickens and his family, and Charles, who is to us the
family's most important member, appear to have been relatively at all
uncomfortable while under the shadow of the Marshalsea. There is in
"David Copperfield" a passage of inimitable humour, where Mr.
Micawber, enlarging on the pleasures of imprisonment for debt,
apostrophizes the King's Bench Prison as being the place "where, for
the first time in many revolving years, the overwhelming pressure of
pecuniary liabilities was not proclaimed from day to day, by
importunate voices declining to vacate the passage; where there was no
knocker on the door for any creditor to appeal to; where personal
service of process was not required, and detainers were lodged merely
at the gate." There is a similar passage in "Little Dorrit," where the
tipsy medical practitioner of the Marshalsea comforts Mr. Dorrit in his
affliction by saying: "We are quiet here; we don't get badgered here;
there's no knocker here, sir, to be hammered at by creditors, and bring a
man's heart into his mouth. Nobody comes here to ask if a man's at
home, and to say he'll stand on the door-mat till he is. Nobody writes
threatening letters about money to this place. It's freedom, sir, it's
freedom!" One smiles as one reads; and it adds a pathos, I think, to the
smile, to find that these are records of actual experience. The
Marshalsea prison was to Mr. Dickens a haven of peace, and to his
household a place of plenty. Not only could he pursue his career there
untroubled by fears of arrest, but he exercised among the other
"gentlemen gaol-birds" a supremacy, a kind of kingship,