CHARLES DICKENS' PAINFUL JUVENILE EXPERIENCES.

Tuapeka Times, Volume III, Issue 215, 14 March 1872, Page 7

CHARLES DICKENS' PAINFUL JUVENILE EXPERIENCES.

From Mr. Forster's " Life of Dickens," just published, we learn that the great novelist, though one of the most successful of men, had many sore trials and it only quickens our sympathies to learn that these had to be borne in mere boyhood.

It is to be noticed that Dickens really made two starts in life. The first, and most painful one, which is now brought under public notice for the first time, in the " Autobio graphical Notes," was when he was only ten years of age. His father — a good natured, easy-going man, industrious but unbusiness-like — was in a debtor's prison, and his son had to enter the service of a blacking manufacturer, a rival of the great Warren. Here his wages were from six to seven shillings per week, and his chief employment, we are told, was "to cover the pots of paste blacking, first with oil paper, then with blue paper, to tie them round with string to clip the paper, close and neat, and to paste on a printed label." Even before this time the little fellow had cut a sorry figure. "He was," remarks Mr. Forster, " a very little and a very sickly boy. He was subject toattacksof violent spasms, which disabled him for any active exertion. He was never a good little cricket player. He was never a first rate hand at marbles, or peg-top, or prisoner's bars.

How, nevertheless, rapidly he made his way on his second start in life, first as a lawyer's clerk, then as a newspaper reporter, and lastly as a novelist, all the world knows. But to learn how bravely he struggled through the previous period, we must turn to these " Notes'," where the story is told with the simplicity and power of a master mind that, of Dickens himself.

Whilst his father and the rest of the family except a sister were domiciled in the debtors' prison, Charles boarded with a " reduced old lady," who served him has the model of Mrs Pipchin. Dickens' reference to this portion of his life is deeply pathetic: "My own exclusive breakfast of a penny cottage loaf and a pennyworth of milk I provided for myself. I kept another small loaf and a quarter of a pound of cheese on a particular shelf of a particular cupboard, to make my supper ou when I came back at night. They made a hole in the six or seven shillings, I know well ; and I was out at the blacking warehouse all day, and had to support myself on -that money all the week. 1 suppose my lodging was paid by m) father. I certainly did not pay it myself; and I certainly had no other assistance whatever (the making of my clothes, I think, excepted), from Monday morning till Saturday night. No advice, no counsel,, no encouragement, no consolation, no support from any one that I can call to mind. Sundays Fanny and I passed in the prison. I was at the academy in Tenterdon-street. Hanover Square, at nine o'clock in the morning, to fetch her ; and we walked back there together at night.

"I was so young and childish, and so little qualified — how could I be other-wise?—-to undertake the whole charge of my own existence, that, in going to Hungerford stairs of a morning, I could not resist the stale pastry put out at half-price on trays _at the confectioners' doors in Tottenham Court road ; and often spent in that the money I should have kept for my dinner. Then I went without my dinner, or bought a roll, or a piece of pudding. There were two pudding shops between which I was divided, according to my finances. One was in a court close to St. Martin's Church (at the back of the church), which is now removed altogether. The pudding at that shop was made with currants, and was rather a special pudding, but was dear, two penn'orth not being larger than a penn'orth of more ordinary pudding. A good shoj) for the latter was in the Strand, somewhere near where the Lowther Arcade is now.

It was a stout, hale pudding, heavy •and flabby, with raisins in it, stuck in whole, at great distances apart. It came up hot, at about noon every day, and many and many a day did I dine off it Webad'half an hour for tea. When I had money enough, I used to go to a coffee-shop, and have half a pint of coffee and a slice of bread and butter. " When I had no money, I took a turn into Covent Garden Market, and stared at, the pine apples. The coffee-shops to which 1 most resorted were, one in Maidenlane ; one in a court (non existent now) close to Hungerford Market ; and one in St Martins-lane, of whom I only recollect that it stood near the church, and that in the door there was an oval glass plate, with ' Coffee room ' painted on it, addressed towards the street. If I ever find myself in a very different kind of coffee-room now, but where there is such an inscription on glass, and read it backward on the wrong side ' Moor-eeffoc ' (as I often used to do then in a dismal reverie), a shock goes through my blood.

I know Ido not exaggerate, unconsciously and unintentionally, the scantiness of my resources and the difficulties of my life. I know 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 countinghouse, wrapped into six. little parcels, each parcel containing the same amount,

and labelled with a different day. I know that- 1 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 vagabond."

The memory of this time is said to have haunted him throughout life, and to have disturbed him when in the very height of his fame.