Charles Dickens—A Lecture.

calling attention to the merits of the establishment . Yet nobody ever came to school , nor do I recollect that anybody ever proposed to come , or that the least preparation was made to receive anybody . But I know 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 . " The interval between the spoiiging-house and the prison was passed by the sorrowful lad in running

errands , and carrying messages for the prisoner , delivered with swollen eyes , and through shining tears ; and the last words said to him by his father before he was finally carried to the Marshalsea

were to the effect that the sun was set on him for ever . " I really believe at the time , " said Dickens to Forster , " that they had broken my heart . " He afterwards took ample revenge for this false alarm by making all the world laugh at

them in David Copperfield . He then describes a visit which he paid his father in the Marshalsea . " My father was waiting for me in the lodge , and we went up to his room on the top storey but oneand cried very much ; and he

, told me , I remember , to take warning by the Marshalsea , and to observe that if a man had £ 20 a year , and spent £ 19 19 s . 6 d . 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 dusted grate , one on each side , to prevent its burning too many coals . . Some other debtor shared the room with him , Avho came in by and by , and as the dinner was a joint-stock repast ,

I was sent up to Capt . Porter , in the room overhead , with Mr . Dickens' compliments , and I was his son , and could he , Capt . P ., lend me a knife and fork . Capt . Porter lent the knife and fork with his compliments in return . There

was a very dirty lady in his little room , and two wan girls , his daughters , with shock heads of hair . I thought I should not have liked to borrow Capt . Porter ' s comb . The Capt . himself was in the last extremity of shabbiness , and if I

could draw at all I could draw an accurate portrait of the old brown greatcoat he wore , with no other coat below it . His wiskers were large . I saw his bed rolled up in a corner , and what plates and dishes and pots he had on a

shelf . " At home almost everything by degrees was sold or pawned , Charles being the principal agent in these sorrowful transactions . The same , pawnbrokers' shops which were so well known , to David

Copperfield were not less familiar to Charles Dickens . At last even of the furniture of Gower-street , No . 4 , there was nothing left except a few chairs , a kitchen table and some beds . Then

they encamped as it were in the two parlours of the emptied house , and lived there night and day . Between 1822 and 1824 a speculation which was in rivalry of Warren ' s blacking was got up , and a Mr . Lamert , a

distant connection of his mother ' s , bought it . The chief manager , James Lamert , his cousin , seeing how he was employed from clay to clay , proposed that Dickens should go into the blacking warehouseat six or seven shillings

, a week . At any rate the offer was accepted very willingly by his father and mother . Dickens writes in the fragment of autobiography which he has left , " It is wonderful to me how I could have been so easily cast away at

such an age . It was wonderful to me that even after my descent into the poor little drudge I had been since we came to London , no one had compassion enough on me—a child of singular abilities , quick , eager , delicate , and soon

hurt bodily or mentally , to suggest that something might have been spared , as certainly it might have been , to place me at any common school . My work was to cover the pots of paste blacking , first with a piece of oil paper , and then

with a piece of blue paper , to tie them round with a string , and then to clip the paper close and neat all round , until it looked as smart as a pot of ointment from an apothecary ' s shop . When a certain number of grosses of pots had