idelity constables, sheriffs' officers,
beadles, ushers, clerks, solicitors, barristers, and last, but by no
means least, a judge. Every incident of the early life of this great
author bore fruit in his writings. No portion of his struggles and
experiences seemed to have made a deeper impress on him than did those
early days, as he said himself in the character of David Copperfield:--

If it should appear from anything I may set down in this narrative
that I was a child of close observation, or that as a man I have a
strong memory of my childhood, I undoubtedly lay claim to both of
these characteristics.

His first introduction to the terrors of the law was an unspeakably sad
one--sad, indeed, to his affectionate and imaginative nature. "I know,"
he writes, "that we got on very badly with the butcher and baker, that
very often we had not too much for dinner, and that at last my father was
arrested." He never forgot--how could he, knowing what we know the lad
to have been?--often carrying messages to the dismal Marshalsea. "I
really believed," he wrote, "that they had broken my heart." His first
visit to his father he thus describes:--

My father was waiting for me in the lodge, and we went up to his room
(on the top story but one), and cried very much. And he told me, I
remember, to take warning by the Marshalsea, and to observe that if a
man had twenty pounds a year and spent nineteen pounds nineteen
shillings and sixpence, he would be happy, but that a shilling spent
the other way would make him wretched. I see the fire we sat before
now, with two bricks inside the rusted grate, one on each side, to
prevent its burning too many coals. Some other debtor shared the room
with him, who came in by-and-by; and as the dinner was a joint stock
repast I was sent up to "Captain Porter" in the room overhead, with
Mr. Dickens's compliments, and I was his son, and could he, Captain
P., lend me a knife and fork?

Captain Porter lent the knife and fork, with his compliments in
return. There was a very dirty lady in his room, and two wan girls,
his daughters, with shock heads of hair. I thought I should not have
liked to borrow Captain Porter's comb. The Captain himself was in the
last extremity of shabbiness; and if I could draw at all, I would draw
an accurate portrait of the old, old, brown great-coat he wore, with
no other coat below it. His whis