pest memories of
his own childhood and youth. Like David Copperfield, he had known what
it was to be a poor, neglected lad, set to rough, uncongenial work,
with no more than a mechanic's surroundings and outlook, and having to
fend for himself in the miry ways of the great city. Like David
Copperfield, he had formed a very early acquaintance with debts and
duns, and been initiated into the mysteries and sad expedients of
shabby poverty. Like David Copperfield, he had been made free of the
interior of a debtor's prison. Poor lad, he was not much more than ten
or eleven years old when he left Chatham, with all the charms that
were ever after to live so brightly in his recollection,--the gay
military pageantry, the swarming dockyard, the shifting sailor life,
the delightful walks in the surrounding country, the enchanted room,
tenanted by the first fairy day-dreams of his genius, the day-school,
where the master had already formed a good opinion of his parts,
giving him Goldsmith's "Bee" as a keepsake. This pleasant land he left
for a dingy house in a dingy London suburb, with squalor for
companionship, no teaching but the teaching of the streets, and all
around and above him the depressing hideous atmosphere of debt. With
what inimitable humour and pathos has he told the story of these
darkest days! Substitute John Dickens for Mr. Micawber, and Mrs.
Dickens for Mrs. Micawber, and make David Copperfield a son of Mr.
Micawber, a kind of elder Wilkins, and let little Charles Dickens be
that son--and then you will have a record, true in every essential
respect, of the child's life at this period. "Poor Mrs. Micawber! she
said she had tried to exert herself; and so, I have no doubt, she had.
The centre of the street door was perfectly covered with a great
brass-plate, on which was engraved 'Mrs. Micawber's Boarding
Establishment for Young Ladies;' but I never found that any young lady
had ever been to school there; or that any young lady ever came, or
proposed to come; or that the least preparation was ever made to
receive any young lady. The only visitors I ever saw or heard of were
creditors. _They_ used to come at all hours, and some of them were
quite ferocious." Even such a plate, bearing the inscription, _Mrs.
Dickens's Establishment_, ornamented the door of a house in Gower
Street North, where the family had hoped, by some desperate effort, to
retrieve its ruined fortunes. Even so did the pupils refuse the
educational a