Bob Sawyer, it will be remembered,
afterwards invited Mr. Pickwick to that disastrous party. The boy
moved into his new quarters with the same feeling of elation as if he
had been entering a palace.

The change naturally brought him more fully into the prison circle. He
used to breakfast there every morning, before going to the warehouse,
and would spend the larger portion of his spare time among the
inmates. Nor do Mr. Dickens and his family, and Charles, who is to us
the family's most important member, appear to have been relatively at
all uncomfortable while under the shadow of the Marshalsea. There is
in "David Copperfield" a passage of inimitable humour, where Mr.
Micawber, enlarging on the pleasures of imprisonment for debt,
apostrophizes the King's Bench Prison as being the place "where, for
the first time in many revolving years, the overwhelming pressure of
pecuniary liabilities was not proclaimed from day to day, by
importunate voices declining to vacate the passage; where there was no
knocker on the door for any creditor to appeal to; where personal
service of process was not required, and detainers were lodged merely
at the gate." There is a similar passage in "Little Dorrit," where the
tipsy medical practitioner of the Marshalsea comforts Mr. Dorrit in
his affliction by saying: "We are quiet here; we don't get badgered
here; there's no knocker here, sir, to be hammered at by creditors,
and bring a man's heart into his mouth. Nobody comes here to ask if a
man's at home, and to say he'll stand on the door-mat till he is.
Nobody writes threatening letters about money to this place. It's
freedom, sir, it's freedom!" One smiles as one reads; and it adds a
pathos, I think, to the smile, to find that these are records of
actual experience. The Marshalsea prison was to Mr. Dickens a haven of
peace, and to his household a place of plenty. Not only could he
pursue his career there untroubled by fears of arrest, but he
exercised among the other "gentlemen gaol-birds" a supremacy, a kind
of kingship, such as that to which Charles Lamb referred. They
recognized in him the superior spirit, ready of pen, and affluent of
speech, and with a certain grandeur in his conviviality. He it was
who drew up their memorial to George of England on an occasion no less
important than the royal birthday, when they, the monarch's
"unfortunate subjects,"--so they were described in the
memorial--besought the king's "gracious majesty," of