it.

The biographical circumstances will not, of course, be forgotten. The
life of Dickens had been a curious one. Brought up in a family just poor
enough to be painfully conscious of its prosperity and its
respectability, he had been suddenly flung by a financial calamity into
a social condition far below his own. For men on that exact edge of the
educated class such a transition is really tragic. A duke may become a
navvy for a joke, but a clerk cannot become a navvy for a joke.
Dickens's parents went to a debtors' prison; Dickens himself went to a
far more unpleasant place. The debtors' prison had about it at least
that element of amiable compromise and kindly decay which belonged (and
belongs still) to all the official institutions of England. But Dickens
was doomed to see the very blackest aspect of nineteenth-century
England, something far blacker than any mere bad government. He went not
to a prison but to a factory. In the musty traditionalism of the
Marshalsea old John Dickens could easily remain optimistic. In the
ferocious efficiency of the modern factory young Charles Dickens
narrowly escaped being a pessimist. He did escape this danger; finally
he even escaped the factory itself. His next step in life was, if
possible, even more eccentric. He was sent to school; he was sent off
like an innocent little boy in Eton collars to learn the rudiments of
Latin grammar, without any reference to the fact that he had already
taken his part in the horrible competition and actuality of the age of
manufactures. It was like giving a sacked bank manager a satchel and
sending him to a dame's school. Nor was the third stage of this career
unconnected with the oddity of the others. On leaving the school he was
made a clerk in a lawyer's office, as if henceforward this child of
ridiculous changes was to settle down into a silent assistant for a
quiet solicitor. It was exactly at this moment that his fundamental
rebellion began to seethe; it seethed more against the quiet finality of
his legal occupation than it had seethed against the squalor and slavery
of his days of poverty. There must have been in his mind, I think, a dim
feeling: "Did all my dark crises mean only this; was I crucified only
that I might become a solicitor's clerk?" Whatever be the truth about
this conjecture there can be no question about the facts themselves. It
was about this time that he began to burst and bubble over, to insist
upon his own intellect,