peerless book, can I do better than recommend him, or her, to study
therein the story of Dickens' life at this particular time?

At last the child's solitude and sorrows seem to have grown
unbearable. His fortitude broke down. One Sunday night he appealed to
his father, with many tears, on the subject, not of his employment,
which he seems to have accepted at the time manfully, but of his
forlornness and isolation. The father's kind, thoughtless heart was
touched. A back attic was found for Charles near the Marshalsea, at
Lant Street, in the Borough--where Bob Sawyer, it will be remembered,
afterwards invited Mr. Pickwick to that disastrous party. The boy
moved into his new quarters with the same feeling of elation as if he
had been entering a palace.

The change naturally brought him more fully into the prison circle. He
used to breakfast there every morning, before going to the warehouse,
and would spend the larger portion of his spare time among the
inmates. Nor do Mr. Dickens and his family, and Charles, who is to us
the family's most important member, appear to have been relatively at
all uncomfortable while under the shadow of the Marshalsea. There is
in "David Copperfield" a passage of inimitable humour, where Mr.
Micawber, enlarging on the pleasures of imprisonment for debt,
apostrophizes the King's Bench Prison as being the place "where, for
the first time in many revolving years, the overwhelming pressure of
pecuniary liabilities was not proclaimed from day to day, by
importunate voices declining to vacate the passage; where there was no
knocker on the door for any creditor to appeal to; where personal
service of process was not required, and detainers were lodged merely
at the gate." There is a similar passage in "Little Dorrit," where the
tipsy medical practitioner of the Marshalsea comforts Mr. Dorrit in