Charles Dickens [antikvár]

Larly T>aysright:Charles Dickens, aged 11, workingin Warren 's blacking factoiy at Hungeiford Stairs. 'No words canexpress the secret agony of my soul Dickens relived tltese childhood experiences when writing Dávid Copperfield.right:The House in Bayham Street, Camden Town, where the Dickens family lived during a period when the author'sfatlier losthisjob and was imprisoned for debt, and theyoung Charles was sentoutto work.Shortly after Charles Dickens was born, his family moved to Kent, where his father, John Dickens, a clerk in the Navy Pay Office, had been given a good post. They settled happily into 2 Ordnance Terrace, Chatham; across the road írom the house was a big hayfield, covered in summer-time with buttercups and daisies, and in the distance was the winding River Medway, with the sailing-ships gliding up and down. The five years spent at Chatham were perhaps the happiest of Dickens' whole life. Visiting the dockyard - the Gun Wharf, the rope walk -with his father, cruising in the Admiralty yacht to Sheerness, wandering in the woods and parkland round the great house at Cob-ham, exploring the drowsy old cathedral city of Rochester, with its crumbling castle circled by cawing rooks, he spent the impressionable years from five to ten in what seemed during later life an idyllic dream.He went to school in Chatham; but formai education was never very important to him. Something that mattered to him much more was the diseovery in an attic of a heap of old novels, which he devoured passionately, living the characters for days at a time.Hard facts soon came to provide quite enough stimulation for a child's mind. John Dickens was always a free-spending man, anda bad manager, and the family's finances were in a poor state by the time that they moved to London in 1822. The modest comfort of Chatham was replaced by near-squalor in Camden Town, schooling was discontinued, and Charles became acquainted with a pawn shop, and did odd jobs about the house. Then, as the load of debt mounted, his parents found him a job with a firm manu-facturing blacking at Hungerford Stairs, near the site of the present Charing Cross Station. The work was not specially hard - he had to seal and Iabel pots of the blacking - but the conditions were sordid (he never forgót the smell of the sealing-cement and the nőise of the rats which infested the rotten warehouse), the other boys and men employed at the place were a rough, coarse lot (one of the boys was called Bob Fagin), and to the dreamy, gentle child, still dazed by the ending of his Kentish idyll, the place became a complete hell of degradation and despair.Meanwhile his father's troubles came to a climax with his imprisonment in the Marshalsea debtors' prison. The family was temporarily broken up, and Charles had to live alone in lodgings. After working during the day at Warren's blacking warehouse, he would visit his father in the prison, where the misery of the humán wreckage he saw there made an indelible impression on his mind.Although this incident loomed so large that it later seemed to Dickens to have