LONDON: 1828-30.

on the son's education.

he was storing up for himself from the opportunities such offices opened to him. Nor would it be possible to have better illustrative comment, on all these years, than is furnished by his The father father's reply to a friend it was now hoped to interest on his behalf, which more than once I have heard him whimsically, but good-humouredly, imitate. "Pray, Mr. Dickens, where was "your son educated?" "Why, indeed, Sir-ha! "ha! he may be said to have educated himself!" Of the two kinds of education which Gibbon says that all men who rise above the common level receive; the first, that of his teachers, and the second, more personal and more important, his own; he had the advantage only of the last. It nevertheless sufficed for him.

Another employment in prospect.

Very nearly another eighteen months were now to be spent mainly in practical preparation for what he was, at this time, led finally to choose as an employment from which a fair income was certain with such talents as he possessed; his father already having taken to it, in these latter years, in aid of the family resources. In his father's house, which was at Hampstead through the first portion of the Mornington-street school time, then in the house out of Seymour-street mentioned by Dr. Danson, and afterwards, upon

1828-30.

shorthand.

museum

the elder Dickens going into the gallery, in LONDON: Bentinck-street, Manchester-square, Charles had continued to live; and, influenced doubtless by the example before him, he took sudden determination to qualify himself thoroughly for what his father was lately become, a newspaper parliamentary reporter. He set resolutely there- Studying fore to the study of short-hand; and, for the additional help of such general information about books as a fairly educated youth might be expected to have, as well as to satisfy some higher personal cravings, he became an assiduous attendant in the British-museum reading-room. He In Britishwould frequently refer to these days as decidedly reading. the usefullest to himself he had ever passed; and judging from the results they must have been so. No man who knew him in later years, and talked to him familiarly of books and things, would have suspected his education in boyhood, almost entirely self-acquired as it was, to have been so rambling or hap-hazard as I have here described it. The secret consisted in this, that, whatever for the time he had to do, he lifted himself, there and then, to the level of; and at no time disregarded the rules that guided the hero of his novel. "Whatever I have tried to do in life, I "have tried with all my heart to do well.

What

room.

D. C.

for

C. D.

LONDON: 1828-30.

Preparing for the gallery.

D. C. for

C. D.

"I have devoted myself to, I have devoted myself to "completely. Never to put one hand to anything on "which I could throw my whole self, and never "to affect depreciation of my work, whatever it "was, I find now to have been my golden rules."

Of the difficulties that beset his short-hand studies, as well as of what first turned his mind to them, he has told also something in Copperfield. He had heard that many men distinguished in various pursuits had begun life by reporting the debates in parliament, and he was not deterred by a friend's warning that the mere mechanical accomplishment for excellence in it might take a few years to master thoroughly: “a "perfect and entire command of the mystery of "short-hand writing and reading being about "equal in difficulty to the mastery of six lan"guages." Undaunted, he plunged into it, selfteaching in this as in graver things; and, having bought Mr. Gurney's half-guinea book, worked steadily his way through its distractions. "The "changes that were rung upon dots, which in "such a position meant such a thing, and in such "another position something else entirely dif "ferent; the wonderful vagaries that were played "by circles; the unaccountable consequences that "resulted from marks like flies' legs; the tremendous

1828-30.

"effects of a curve in a wrong place; not only LONDON: "troubled my waking hours, but reappeared be"fore me in my sleep. When I had groped my "way, blindly, through these difficulties, and had "mastered the alphabet, there then appeared a "procession of new horrors, called arbitrary char"acters; the most despotic characters I have ever "known; who insisted, for instance, that a thing "like the beginning of a cobweb meant expecta"tion, and that a pen-and-ink sky-rocket stood "for disadvantageous. When I had fixed these "wretches in my mind, I found that they had "driven everything else out of it; then, beginning "again, I forgot them; while I was picking them "up, I dropped the other fragments of the system; "in short, it was almost heart-breaking."

likeness

D. C. and

What it was that made it not quite heart- Further breaking to the hero of the fiction, its readers between know; and something of the same kind was now C. D. to enter into the actual experience of its writer. First let me say, however, that after subduing to his wants in marvellously quick time this unruly and unaccommodating servant of stenography, what he most desired was still not open to him. "There never was such a short-hand writer," has been often said to me by Mr. Beard, the friend he first made in that line when he entered the The Life of Charles Dickens. I. 8

1828-30.

Reporting in Doctors'commons.

LONDON: gallery, and with whom to the close of his life he maintained the friendliest intercourse. But there was no opening for him in the gallery yet. He had to pass nearly two years as a reporter for one of the offices in Doctors'-commons, practising in this and the other law courts, before he became a sharer in parliamentary toils and triumphs; and what sustained his young hero through something of the same sort of trial, was also his own A real Dora support. He, too, had his Dora, at apparently

in 1829.

The Dora of 1829 reappears in 1855.

the same hopeless elevation; striven for as the one only thing to be attained, and even more unattainable, for neither did he succeed nor happily did she die; but the one idol, like the other, supplying a motive to exertion for the time, and otherwise opening out to the idolater, both in fact and fiction, a highly unsubstantial, happy, foolish time. I used to laugh and tell him I had no belief in any but the book Dora, until the incident of a sudden reappearance of the real one in his life, nearly six years after Copperfield was written, convinced me there had been a more actual foundation for those chapters of his book than I was ready to suppose. Still I would hardly admit it; and, that the matter could possibly affect him then, persisted in a stout refusal to believe. His reply (1855) throws a little light