_Veranilda_, touching the 'schoolboy, obsessed by a consuming passion for
learning, at the Quaker's boarding-school at Alderley. He had come thither
from Wakefield at the age of thirteen--after the death of his father, who
was, in a double sense, the cardinal formative influence in his life. The
tones of his father's voice, his father's gestures, never departed from
him; when he read aloud, particularly if it was poetry he read, his father
returned in him. He could draw in those days with great skill and
vigour--it will seem significant to many that he was particularly
fascinated by Hogarth's work, and that he copied and imitated it; and his
father's well-stocked library, and his father's encouragement, had
quickened his imagination and given it its enduring bias for literary
activity.' Like Defoe, Smollett, Sterne, Borrow, Dickens, Eliot, 'G.C.' is,
half involuntarily, almost unconsciously autobiographic.]

'Not without awe did I see the picture of the room which was now
tenantless: I remember too, a curiosity which led me to look closely
at the writing-table and the objects upon it, at the comfortable
round-backed chair, at the book-shelves behind. I began to ask myself
how books were written and how the men lived who wrote them. It is my
last glimpse of childhood. Six months later there was an empty chair
in my own home, and the tenor of my life was broken.

'Seven years after this I found myself amid the streets of London and
had to find the means of keeping myself alive. What I chiefly thought
of was that now at length I could go hither or thither in London's
immensity seeking for the places which had been made known to me by
Dickens.

'One day in the city I found myself at the entrance to Bevis Marks! I
had just been making an application in reply to some advertisement--of