With no earthly friend to help her, or so much as to see her, but
the one so strangely assorted; with no knowledge even of the common
daily tone and habits of the common members of the free community
who are not shut up in prisons; born and bred in a social
condition, false even with a reference to the falsest condition
outside the walls; drinking from infancy of a well whose waters had
their own peculiar stain, their own unwholesome and unnatural
taste; the Child of the Marshalsea began her womanly life.

No matter through what mistakes and discouragements, what ridicule
(not unkindly meant, but deeply felt) of her youth and little
figure, what humble consciousness of her own babyhood and want of
strength, even in the matter of lifting and carrying; through how
much weariness and hopelessness, and how many secret tears; she
drudged on, until recognised as useful, even indispensable. That
time came. She took the place of eldest of the three, in all
things but precedence; was the head of the fallen family; and bore,
in her own heart, its anxieties and shames.

At thirteen, she could read and keep accounts, that is, could put
down in words and figures how much the bare necessaries that they
wanted would cost, and how much less they had to buy them with.
She had been, by snatches of a few weeks at a time, to an evening
school outside, and got her sister and brother sent to day-schools
by desultory starts, during three or four years. There was no
instruction for any of them at home; but she knew well--no one
better--that a man so broken as to be the Father of the Marshalsea,
could be no father to his own children.