The miseries of his early struggles with bread-winning in Warren's Blacking Factory,--in association with one Fagin, who afterward took on immortalization at the novelist's hands,--for a weekly wage of but six shillings per week, is an old and realistic fact which all biographers and most makers of guide-books have worn nearly threadbare.
That the family were sore put in order to keep their home together, first in Camden Town and later in Gower Street, North, is only too apparent. The culmination came when the elder Dickens was thrown into Marshalsea Prison for debt, and the family removed thither, to Lant Street, near by, in order to be near the head of the family.
This is a sufficiently harrowing sequence of events to allow it to be left to the biographers to deal with them to the full. Here the author glosses it over as a mere detail; one of those indissoluble links which connects the name of Dickens with the life of London among the lower and middle classes during the Victorian era.
An incident in "David Copperfield," which Dickens has told us was real, so far as he himself was concerned, must have occurred about this period. The reference is to the visit to "Ye Olde Red Lion" at the corner of Derby Street, Parliament Street, near Westminster Bridge, which house has only recently disappeared. He has stated that it was an actual experience of his own childhood, and how, being such a little fellow, the landlord, instead of drawing the ale, called his wife, who gave the boy a motherly kiss.
The incident as recounted in "David Copperfield" called also for a glass of ale, and reads not unlike:
"I remember one hot evening I went into the bar of a public-house, and said to the landlord: 'What is your best--your _very best_ ale a glass?' For it was a special occasion. I don't know what. It may have been my birthday. 'Twopence-halfpenny,' says the landlord, 'is the price of the Genuine Stunning Ale.' 'Then,' says I, producing the money, 'just draw me a glass of the Genuine Stunning, if you please, with a good head to it.'"
After a time his father left the Navy Pay Office and entered journalism. The son was clerking, meanwhile, in a solicitor's office,--that of Edward Blackmore,--first in Lincoln's Inn, and subsequently in Gray's Inn. A diary of the author was recently sold by auction, containing as its first entry, "13_s_ 6_d_ for one week's salary." Here Dickens acquired that proficiency in making mental memoranda of his environment, and of the manners and customs of lawyers and their clerks, which afterward found so vivid expression in "Pickwick."