again and again that he never forgot that time; that to the end of the chapter he remained in many things a dreary boy-drudge. The first contention is undoubtedly true. After a silence of a quarter of a century he wrote: " Until old Hunger ford Market was pulled down, until old Hungerford Stairs were destroyed and the very nature of the ground changed, I never had the courage to go back to the place where my servitude began. I never saw it. I could not endure to go near it. For many years, when I came near to Robert Warren's in the Strand, I crossed over to the opposite side of the way to avoid a certain smell of the cement they put upon the blacking corks, which reminded me of what I was once."
Robert Buchanan used to prefer to think and write of Dickens as a great, grown-up, dreamy, impulsive child, who had learnt the things which made some of his characters immortal, not by poring over books within college walls, but by brooding life in stirring streets. Others of our modern men of letters have emphasized the same view, declaring that he never escaped the fog of the dingy warehouse in which he was a drudge; that though naturally of a light and cheerful temperament, his early experiences so loaded his soul with sorrow that he could never grow any older or rightly shake off, by a spark of volatile spirits, the weight of a world full of suffering. That view I certainly do not share. His faithful historian, Forster, has left an indelible record of the almost inexhaustible fund of natural good spirits upon which he was able to draw quite to the last; of the intense delight which he evinced in contrasts or anything that savoured of game or sport. Then again, there is the positive evidence that in his own business affairs, and in his outlook on politics and social reform, he was intensely practical, shrewd, painstaking and wide awake. His capacity for romance was but in the nature of things which decrees that every man's mental disposition is a paradox. Even his undoubted humour did not preserve him from occasional excesses of sentiment. Despite his practicality, there was nothing he loved more than to play the part of a child, looking out on to life with bewildered eyes. Mark that half-poetic touch which occurs again and again in his books in characters who, like little Paul Dombey, delight in sitting by the sea of life and wondering what, after all, the incoming waves are saying, or of others who see pictures and faces in the fire or who review snatches of their childhood in the quietude and serenity of the night! It is undoubtedly true that in his romantic moments, whenever Dickens is vitalizing characteristics or selecting an abstract emotion and radiating his creation outward from that centre, there is an irresistible suggestion and a far-away echo of those troublous times of his boyhood, a faint tremulous fluttering of distant miseries.
Take one instance and see how aptly it reveals the heart of the author himself. He is describing Arthur Clennam, who, when he got back to his lodgings, " sat down before the dying fire, as he had stood at the window of his old room looking out upon the blackened forest of chimneys and turned his gaze back upon the gloomy vista by which he had come to that stage in his existence." That is a typical setting to the scene. Now see how the mood develops.
" He was a dreamer in such wise, because he was a man who had deep-rooted in his nature a belief in all the gentle and good things his life had been without. Bred in meanness and hard dealing, this had rescued him to be a man of honourable mind and open hand. Bred in coldness and severity, this had rescued him to have a warm and sympathetic heart. Bred in a creed too darkly audacious to pursue, through its process of reversing the making of man in the image of his Creator to the making of his Creator in the image of erring man, this had rescued him to judge not, and, in humility, to be merciful and have hope and charity." That was just the position. From his own experience, Dickens found what kind teachers even the bitternesses and the sorrows of life may be.
In spite of his wage of six shillings per week — nay, rather because of it — Dickens knew what it was to have an appetite unappeased. His mother and the children being in the end forced to share quarters with his father in the Marshalsea, the debtors' prison, the boy obtained still another of those invaluable glimpses into the life of the poor in the lodgings he had to seek, and in the efforts to maintain himself out of his scanty earnings. The details of his struggle, as he has set them down, make pitiful reading. A penny cottage loaf and a pennyworth of milk made up his breakfast, and bread and cheese were the only luxuries he enjoyed for his supper. And day after day, at the blacking factory, he had to economize over his midday meal, comprising two pennyworth of hot pudding, in order to " make his money last through the week." " I know," he says, " I do not exaggerate, unconsciously and unintentionally, the scantiness of my resources and the difficulties of my life. I know that if a shilling or so were given me by any one I spent it in a dinner or a tea. I know that I worked from morning to night with common men and boys, a shabby child. I know that I tried, but ineffectually, not to anticipate my money, and to make it last the week through by putting it away in a drawer I had in the counting-house, wrapped into six little parcels, each parcel containing the same amount and labelled with a different day. I know that I have lounged about the streets insufficiently and unsatisfactorily fed. I know that, but for the mercy of God, I might easily have been, for any care that was taken of me, a little robber or a little vagabond." Small wonder, is it not, that in after life he could enter into the spirit and describe in vivid, living prose, the schemings of a mother to keep her children with bread? Small wonder that, throughout the many mutations of his literary life, his zeal for the poor should have remained as constant as it was passionate! Lord Morley years ago declared that hardship in youth creates an interest in men real, and not merely literary. In no case has this been demonstrated more completely than in that of Dickens. What momentous issues hung upon so mundane an act as a change of lodgings! The boy shifted his quarters to Lant Street, so as to be near his people now living in the debtors' prison, and to the Marshalsea he used to go daily for breakfast and supper. It needs no stretch of the imagination to conceive who sat for that moving picture of the old forbidding Marshalsea in the cold grey of the early dawn, and of a small slight figure dressed in worn clothing waiting for admittance! Amy Dorrit was a child whom the boy met, and he invested her with splendid qualities and gentle attributes, but it is obvious, nevertheless, that he transferred to her story his own actual experiences of the inside and the outside of the debtors' prison. It was an imperishable memory. When, in after years, Time's relentless ravages had razed the foul institution to the ground, the vision of it in his mind was so clear that he could describe its aspect with the minutest accuracy. Writing in May, 1857, he relates how he visited the scene of the onetime prison; how he found the outer front courtyard metamorphosed into a butter shop; how he went to Marshalsea place, " the house in which I recognized not only as the great block of the former prison, but as preserving the rooms that arise in my mind's eye when I become little Dorrit's biographer. The smallest boy I ever conversed with, carrying the largest baby I ever saw, offered a supernaturally intelligent explanation of the locality in its old uses and was very nearly correct ... A little further on I found the older and smaller wall which used to enclose the pent-up in a prison, where nobody was put except for ceremony. But whoever goes into Marshalsea place . . . will find his feet on the very paving stones of the extinct Marshalsea Gaol; will see its narrow yard to the right and the left, very little altered . . . will look upon the rooms in which the debtors lived; and will stand among the crowding ghosts of many miserable years." Verily for him it was crowded with miserable associations. Modern buildings and the operation of excellent sanitary laws have made it impossible for us to visit this ghostland of buried hopes and man's despair, but it is of importance, in tracing the effects of his childhood's environment on his after social teachings, to look at the old prison as he saw it out of those wondering, dreaming, boyish eyes of his.
" It was an oblong pile of barrack buildings partitioned into squalid houses standing back to back, so that there were no back rooms environed by a narrow paved yard, hemmed in by high walls duly spiked at top. Itself a close and confined prison for debtors, it contained within a much closer and more confined gaol for smugglers; offenders against the Revenue Laws and defaulters to Excise or Customs who had incurred fines which they were unable to pay were supposed to be incarcerated behind an iron plated door closing up a second prison consisting of a strong cell or two, and a blind alley some yard and a half wide, which formed the mysterious termination of a very limited skittle ground in which the Marshalsea debtors bowled down their troubles^."
" Supposed to be incarcerated there because the time would rather outgrow the strong cells and the blind
