father" would not give him
time; John Dickens was consigned to the Marshalsea; Mrs Dickens started
an "Educational Establishment" as a forlorn hope in Upper Gower Street;
and Charles, who had helped his mother with the children, blacked the
boots, carried things to the pawnshop and done other menial work, was
now sent out to earn his own living as a young hand in a blacking
warehouse, at Old Hungerford Stairs, on a salary of six shillings a
week. He tied, trimmed and labelled blacking pots for over a year,
dining off a saveloy and a slice of pudding, consorting with two very
rough boys, Bob Fagin and Pol Green, and sleeping in an attic in Little
College Street, Camden Town, in the house of Mrs Roylance (Pipchin),
while on Sunday he spent the day with his parents in their comfortable
prison, where they had the services of a "marchioness" imported from the
Chatham workhouse.

Already consumed by ambition, proud, sensitive and on his dignity to an
extent not uncommon among boys of talent, he felt his position keenly,
and in later years worked himself up into a passion of self-pity in
connexion with the "degradation" and "humiliation" of this episode. The
two years of childish hardship which ate like iron into his soul were
obviously of supreme importance in the growth of the novelist.
Recollections of the streets and the prison and its purlieus supplied
him with a store of literary material upon which he drew through all the
years of his best activity. And the bitterness of such an experience was
not prolonged sufficiently to become sour. From 1824 to 1826, having
been rescued by a family quarrel and by a windfall in the shape of a
legacy to his father, from the warehouse, he spent two years at an
academy known as Wellington House, at the corner of Granby Street and
the Hampstead Road (the lighter traits of which are reproduced in Salem
House), and was there known as a merry and rather mischievous boy.
Fortunately he learned nothing there to compromise the results of
previous instruction. His father had now emerged from the Marshalsea and
was seeking employment as a parliamentary reporter. A Gray's Inn
solicitor with whom he had had dealings was attracted by the bright,
clever look of Charles, and took him into his office as a boy at a
salary of thirteen and sixpence (rising to fifteen shillings) a week. He
remained in Mr Blackmore's office from May 1827 to November 1828, but he
had lost none of his eager thirst for disti