of
them, his not least splendid successes were wrought, his childish
experiences had made him actually one. They were not his clients whose
cause he pleaded with such pathos and humor, and on whose side he got
the laughter and tears of all the world, but in some sort his very self.
Nor was it a small part of this manifest advantage that he should have
obtained his experience as a child and not as a man; that only the good
part, the flower and fruit of it, was plucked by him; and that nothing
of the evil part, none of the earth in which the seed was planted,
remained to soil him.

His next move in life can also be given in his own language: "There was
a school in the Hampstead Road kept by Mr. Jones, a Welshman, to which
my father dispatched me to ask for a card of terms. The boys were at
dinner, and Mr. Jones was carving for them with a pair of holland
sleeves on, when I acquitted myself of this commission. He came out, and
gave me what I wanted; and hoped I should become a pupil. I did. At
seven o'clock one morning, very soon afterwards, I went as day-scholar
to Mr. Jones's establishment, which was in Mornington Place, and had its
school-room sliced away by the Birmingham Railway, when that change came
about. The school-room, however, was not threatened by directors or
civil engineers then, and there was a board over the door, graced with
the words WELLINGTON HOUSE ACADEMY."

At Wellington House Academy he remained nearly two years, being a little
over fourteen years of age when he quitted it. In his minor writings as
well as in _Copperfield_ will be found general allusions to it, and
there is a paper among his pieces reprinted from _Household Words_ which
purports specifically to describe it. To the account therein given of
himself when he went to the school, as advanced enough, so safely had
his memory retained its poor fragments of early schooling, to be put
into _Virgil_, as getting sundry prizes, and as attaining to the eminent
position of its first boy, one of his two schoolfellows with whom I have
had communication makes objection; but both admit that the general
features of the place are reproduced with wonderful accuracy, and more
especially in those points for which the school appears to have been
much more notable than for anything connected with the scholarship of
its pupils.

In the reprinted piece Dickens describes it as remarkable for white
mice. He says that red-polls, linnets, and even canaries wer