At first, when he began his daily toil at the blacking business, some
poor dregs of family life were left to the child. His father was at
the Marshalsea. But his mother and brothers and sisters were, to use
his own words, "still encamped, with a young servant girl from Chatham
workhouse, in the two parlours in the emptied house in Gower Street
North." And there he lived with them, in much "hugger-mugger," merely
taking his humble midday meal in nomadic fashion, on his own account.
Soon, however, his position became even more forlorn. The paternal
creditors proved insatiable. The gipsy home in Gower Street had to be
broken up. Mrs. Dickens and the children went to live at the
Marshalsea. Little Charles was placed under the roof--it cannot be
called under the care--of a "reduced old lady," dwelling in Camden
Town, who must have been a clever and prophetic old lady if she
anticipated that her diminutive lodger would one day give her a kind
of indirect unenviable immortality by making her figure, under the
name of "Mrs. Pipchin," in "Dombey and Son." Here the boy seems to
have been left almost entirely to his own devices. He spent his
Sundays in the prison, and, to the best of his recollection, his
lodgings at "Mrs. Pipchin's" were paid for. Otherwise, he "found
himself," in childish fashion, out of the six or seven weekly
shillings, breakfasting on two pennyworth of bread and milk, and
supping on a penny loaf and a bit of cheese, and dining hither and
thither, as his boy's appetite dictated--now, sensibly enough, on _à
la mode_ beef or a saveloy; then, less sensibly, on pudding; and anon
not dining at all, the wherewithal having been expended on some
morning treat of cheap stale pastry. But are not all these things, the
lad's shifts and expedients, his sorrows and despair, his visits to
the public-house, where the kindly publican's wife stoops down to kiss
the pathetic little face--are they not all written in "David
Copperfield"? And if so be that I have a reader unacquainted with that