rsonage. He was in
the Navy Pay Office; he was generally in financial trouble, and is indeed
supposed to be the original of Micawber. Like that personage he was
imprisoned for debt, and thus Charles Dickens learned early in life the
misery as well as the comedy of a debtor's prison, an experience of which
he made brilliant use in Little Dorrit and elsewhere.

Forster points out that David Copperfield, who was in many ways drawn
from his creator, had as a man a strong memory of his childhood; the most
durable of his early impressions were received at Chatham, and, as
Forster remarks, "the associations that were around him when he died were
those which at the outset of his life had affected him most strongly."

In an essay on travelling, Dickens {201} describes his meeting a "very
queer small boy" whom he takes in his carriage, and as they pass
Gads-hill Place (where Dickens afterwards lived and died) the boy begs
him to stop that they may look at the house. On being asked whether he
admired the house:--"Bless you, sir," said the very queer small boy,
"when I was not more than half as old as nine, it used to be a treat for
me to be brought to look at it--And . . . my father, seeing me so fond of
it, has often said to me, _If you were to be very persevering __and were
to work hard_, _you might some day come to live in it_. Though that's
impossible." Dickens was actually a queer small boy--very small, very
sickly, who was unable to join in the active games of his schoolfellows.
In 1855 we again meet with the house that was to be his home for the
remainder of his life. He wrote to Wills (Letters, i. 393):--"I saw, at
Gads Hill . . . a little freehold to be sold. The spot and the very
house are literally 'a dream of my childhood,' and I should like to look
at it before I go to Paris."

One of the many things in _David Copperfield_ which are autobiographical
is the account {202a} of his delight over his father's little collection
of books. "From that blessed little room, _Roderick Random_, _Peregrine
Pickle_, _Humphrey Clinker_, _Tom Jones_, _the Vicar of Wakefield_, _Don
Quixote_, _Gil Blas_, and _Robinson Crusoe_ {202b} came out, a glorious
host, to keep me company. They kept alive my fancy, and my hope of
something beyond that place and time--they, and the _Arabian Nights_, and
the _Tales of the Genii_--and did me no harm. . . . I have been Tom
Jones (a child's Tom Jones, a harmless creature) for a week together.