kers were large. I saw his bed
rolled up in a corner; and what plates, and dishes, and pots he had on
a shelf; and I knew (God knows how!) that the two girls with the shock
heads were Captain Porter's natural children, and that the dirty lady
was not married to Captain P. My timid, wondering station on his
threshold was not occupied more than a couple of minutes, I daresay;
but I came down to the room below with all this as surely in my
knowledge as the knife and fork were in my hand.

When the stern necessities of the situation required the detention of Mr.
Pickwick in the old Fleet Prison, we have produced a lifelike
representation of the debtors' gaol; and I believe that the reforms which
have made such an institution a thing of the past are in a great part
owing to the vivid recollection which enabled him to point to the horrors
and injustice which were practised in the sacred name of law.

At the age of fifteen we find Dickens a bright, clever-looking youth in
the office of Mr. Edward Blackmore, attorney-at-law in Gray's Inn,
earning at first 13_s_. 6_d_. a week, afterwards advanced to 15_s_.
Eighteen months' experience of this sort enabled him in the pages of
Pickwick thus to describe lawyers' clerks:--

There are several grades of lawyers' clerks. There is the articled
clerk, who has paid a premium, and is an attorney in perspective, who
runs a tailor's bill, receives invitations to parties, knows a family
in Gower Street, and another in Tavistock Square; who goes out of town
every Long Vacation to see his father, who keeps live horses
innumerable; and who is, in short, the very aristocrat of clerks.
There is the salaried clerk--out of door, or in door, as the case may
be--who devotes the major part of his thirty shillings a week to his
personal pleasure and adornment, repairs half-price to the Adelphi
Theatre at least three times a week, dissipates majestically at the
cider cellars afterwards, and is a dirty caricature of the fashion
which expired six months ago. There is the middle-aged copying clerk,
with a large family, who is always shabby, and often drunk. And there
are the office lads in their first surtouts, who feel a befitting
contempt for boys at day-schools; club as they go home at night for
saveloys and porter: and think there's nothing like "life."

I fancy Dickens never rose above the status of office boy, and probably
as