1822.

'with the shock heads were Captain Porter's natural LONDON : 'children, and that the dirty lady was not married to

Gower.

Captain P. My timid, wondering station on his threshold, street was not occupied more than a couple of minutes, I dare

north.

say; but I came down again to the room below with all A child

this as surely in my knowledge, as the knife and fork were in my band.'

observer.

How there was something agreeable and gipsy-like in the dinner after all, and how he took back the Captain's knife and fork early in the afternoon, and how he went home to comfort his mother with an account of his visit, David Copperfield has also accurately told. Then, at home, came many miserable daily struggles that seemed to last an immense time, yet did not perhaps cover many weeks. Almost everything by degrees was sold or pawned, little Charles being the principal agent in those sorrowful transactions. Such of the books as had been brought from Chatham, Peregrine Pickle, Roderick Random, Tom Jones, Humphrey Clinker, and all the rest, went first. They were carried off from the little chiffonier, which his father called the library, to a bookseller in the Hampsteadroad, the same that David Copperfield describes as in the City-road; and the account of the sales, as they actually Disposes of occurred and were told to me long before David was born, was reproduced word for word in his imaginary narrative. 'The keeper of this bookstall, who lived in a little house 'behind it, used to get tipsy every night, and to be 'violently scolded by his wife every morning.

More than

' once, when I went there early, I had audience of him in 'a turn-up bedstead, with a cut in his forehead or a black

old friends.

1822.

Gowerstreet north.

LONDON: 'eye, bearing witness to his excesses over night (I am 'afraid he was quarrelsome in his drink); and he, with a 'shaking hand, endeavouring to find the needful shillings ' in one or other of the pockets of his clothes, which lay 'upon the floor, while his wife, with a baby in her arms 'and her shoes down at heel, never left off rating him. 'Sometimes he had lost his money, and then he would

D. C.

(for C. D.)

loq.

At the

pawnbroker's.

ask me to call again; but his wife had always got some '(had taken his, I dare say, while he was drunk), and secretly completed the bargain on the stairs, as we went 'down together.'

The same pawnbroker's shop, too, which was so well known to David, became not less familiar to Charles; and a good deal of notice was here taken of him by the pawnbroker, or by his principal clerk who officiated behind the counter, and who, while making out the duplicate, liked of all things to hear the lad conjugate a Latin verb, and translate or decline his musa and dominus. Every thing to this accompaniment went gradually; until at last, even of the furniture of Gower-street number four, 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.

All which is but the prelude to what remains to be described.

CHAPTER II.

HARD EXPERIENCES IN BOYHOOD.

1822-1824.

1822.

Gower

THE incidents to be told now would probably never LONDON: have been known to me, or indeed any of the occurrences of his childhood and youth, but for the accident of a street question which I put to him one day in the March or April of 1847.

north.

I asked if he remembered ever having seen in his boyhood our friend the elder Mr. Dilke, his father's acquaintance and contemporary, who had been a clerk in the same office in Somerset-house to which Mr. John Dickens belonged. Yes, he said, he recollected seeing him at a house in Gerrard-street, where his uncle Barrow lodged during an illness, and Mr. Dilke had visited him. Never at any other time. Upon which I told him that some one else had been intended in the mention made to me, for that the reference implied not merely his being met accidentally, but his having had some juvenile employment in a warehouse near the Strand; at which place Mr. Dilke, being with the elder Dickens one day, had noticed Mr. Dilke' him, and received, in return for the gift of a half-crown, a very low bow. He was silent for several minutes; I felt

half-crown.

1822.

Gower

street north.

LONDON: that I had unintentionally touched a painful place in his memory; and to Mr. Dilke I never spoke of the subject again. It was not however then, but some weeks later, that Dickens made further allusion to my thus having struck unconsciously upon a time of which he never could lose the remembrance while he remembered anything, and the recollection of which, at intervals, haunted him and made him miserable, even to that hour.

Tells the

story of his boyhood.

D. C.

and

C. D.

Very shortly afterwards, I learnt in all their detail the incidents that had been so painful to him, and what then was said to me or written respecting them revealed the story of his boyhood. The idea of David Copperfield, which was to take all the world into his confidence, had not at this time occurred to him; but what it had so startled me to know, his readers were afterwards told with only such change or addition as for the time might sufficiently disguise himself under cover of his hero. For, the poor little lad, with good ability and a most sensitive nature, turned at the age of ten into a 'labouring hind' in the service of 'Murdstone and Grinby,' and conscious already of what made it seem very strange to him that he could so easily have been thrown away at such an age, was indeed himself. His was the secret agony of soul at finding himself 'companion to Mick Walker and Mealy 'Potatoes,' and his the tears that mingled with the water in which he and they rinsed and washed out bottles. It had all been written, as fact, before he thought of any other use for it; and it was not until several months later, when the fancy of David Copperfield, itself suggested by what he had so written of his early troubles,

1822.

Gower

street

north.

began to take shape in his mind, that he abandoned his LONDON : first intention of writing his own life. Those warehouse experiences fell then so aptly into the subject he had chosen, that he could not resist the temptation of immediately using them; and the manuscript recording them, which was but the first portion of what he had designed to write, was embodied in the substance of the eleventh and earlier chapters of his novel. What already had been sent. to me, however, and proof-sheets of the novel interlined at the time, enable me now to separate the fact from the fiction; and to supply to the story of the author's childhood those passages, omitted from the book, which, apart from their illustration of the growth of his character, present to us a picture of tragical suffering, and of tender as well as humorous fancy, unsurpassed in even the wonders of his published writings.

The person indirectly responsible for the scenes to be James and George described was the young relative James Lamert, the Lamert. cousin by his aunt's marriage of whom I have made frequent mention, who got up the plays at Chatham, and after passing at Sandhurst had been living with the family in Bayham-street in the hope of obtaining a commission in the army. This did not come until long afterwards, when, in consideration of his father's services, he received it, and relinquished it then in favour of a younger brother; but he had meanwhile, before the family removed from Camden-town, ceased to live with them. The husband of a sister of his (of the same name as himself, being indeed his cousin, George Lamert), a man of some property, had recently embarked in an odd sort of com