Page:Notes and Queries - Series 11 - Volume 5.djvu/106

 NOTES AND QUERIES.

fll S. V. FEB. 3, 1912.

Young Dickens had the looking after his six younger brothers and sisters, " and going on such poor errands as arose out of our poor way of living." To be taken out for a walk about Covent Garden or the Strand perfectly entranced him with pleasure ; and a walk through Seven Dials, which had for him " a profound attraction of repulsion," would make him supremely happy. " Good heavens ! " he would exclaim, " what wild visions of prodigies of wickedness, want, and beggary arose in my mind out of that place ! " Once he made a stolen visit to Covent Garden. This he did upon reading Col- man's description of it in his ' Broad Grins,' and he told Forster that he remembered " snuffing up the flavour of the faded cabbage leaves as if it were the very breath of comic fiction." His biographer remarks of this : " Nor was he far wrong, as comic fiction then and for some time after was. It was reserved for himself to give sweeter and fresher breath to it."

At the age of ten we find young Dickens at work at the blacking warehouse at Hun- gerford Stairs, where for six shillings a week he worked in " the crazy, tumbledown old house" abutting on the river,

" and literally overrun with rats. Its wainscotted rooms, and its rotten*' floors and staircase, and the old grey rats swarming down in the cellars, and the sound of the squeaking and scuffling coming up the stairs at all times, and the dirt and decay of the place, rise up visibly before me, as if I were there again. The counting-house was on the first floor, looking over the coal barges and the river. There was a recess in it, in which I had to sit and work. My work was to cover the pots of paste-blacking ; first with a piece of blue paper ; to tie them round with a string ; and then to clip the paper close and neat all round, until it looked as smart as a pot of ointment from an apothecary's shop."

Old Hungerford Stairs, looking on to the river, were used for business purposes long after young Dickens had left, and I have often when a child, in charge of a servant, walked past where the factory used to be, on to the oyster barges that used to be moored there, and many a peck was pur- chased for home consumption. Hunger- ford Fish Market occupied the site of the Charing Cross Station, while the present station yard was used by the Camden Town and Highgate omnibus until 1 862.

Two or three other boys were employed on the same work as young Dickens : one was Bob Fagin, an orphan who lived with his brother-in-law, a waterman ; another, Paul Green, lived with his father, who " had

the additional distinction of being a fire- man, and was employed at Drury Lane Theatre," where, continues Dickens in his account to Forster, " another relation of Paul's, I think his little sister, did imps in the Pantomime. No words," he goes oh,

" can express the secret agony of my soul as I sank into this companionship ; compared these everyday associates with those of my happier childhood ; and felt my early hopes of growing up to be a learned and distinguished man, crushed in my breast. The deep remembrance I had of being utterly neglected and hopeless ; of the shame I felt in my position ; of the misery it was to my young heart to believe that, day by day, what I had learned and thought, and delighted in, and raised my fancy and my emulation up by, was passing away from me, never to be brought back any more ; cannot be written. My whole nature was so penetrated with the grief and humiliation of such considerations, that even now, famous and caressed and happy, I often forget in my dreams that I have a dear wife and children; even that I am a man ; and wander desolately back to that time of my life."

In the whole history of Britain's literature no other author has ever written such words as these. From what Dickens told Forster, we learn how, with the exception of his lodging and poor clothes, which were paid for, he supported himself on his weekly wage of six shillings. For breakfast he provided himself with a penny loaf and a pennyworth of milk, keeping another small loaf and some cheese for his supper on his return. Sometimes on his way to Hungerford Stairs, being " so young and childish," he could not resist the stale pastry put out at half price at the confectioners' doors in Totten- ham Court Road, and so spent the money tie had kept for his dinner, which would then frequently be a saveloy with a roll, washed down with a glass of ale or porter, or at other times a slice of pudding bought 'rom a pudding shop. For tea he would go to a coffee-shop and have half a pint of offee, and a slice of bread and butter ; but when he had no money he would spend the time in going to Covent Garden and staring at the pineapples ; if a shilling or so were given him, he would spend it on a dinner or a tea. It was a grand thing to lim to walk home on a Saturday night with six shillings in his pocket, and " to look in the shop windows and think what it would buy." Hunt's roasted corn, as a British and Datriotic substitute for coffee, was in great vogue. This he would buy and roast on the Sunday ; he would also take home a cheap Deriodical The Portfolio which contained selected pieces ; but for the poor castaway " from Monday morning until Saturday