Charles went on down to the old blacking-factory by Hungerford Stairs, a ramshackle building almost hanging over the river, damp and overrun with rats. His place was in a recess of the counting-room on the first floor, and as he covered the bottles with the oil-paper tops and tied them on with string he could look from time to time through a window at the slow coal barges swinging down the river.
There were very few boys about the place; at lunch time he would wander off by himself, and selecting his meal from a careful survey of several pastry-cook's windows invest his money for the day in fancy cakes or a tart. He missed the company of friends of his own age; even Fanny, his oldest sister, he saw only on Sundays when she came back to the Marshalsea from the place where she worked, to spend the day with her family. It was only grown-up people that he saw most of the time, and they were too busy with their own affairs to take much interest in the small, shabby boy who looked just like any one of a thousand other children of the streets. Of all the men at the factory it was only the big clumsy fellow named Fagin who would stop to chat with the lad.
So it was that Charles was forced to make friends with whomever he could, people of any age or condition, and was driven to spend much of his spare time roaming about the streets, lounging by the river, reading stray books by a candle in the prison or in the little attic where he slept. It was not a boyhood that seemed to promise much.
In spite of this hard life which he led, Charles rarely lost his love of fun or his natural high spirits. When he was about twelve years old his father came into a little money, which enabled him to pay his debts so that he was released from prison. He was also able to send his son to school. Here he quickly blossomed out into a leader among the boys. He was continually inventing new games, and queer languages, which were made by adding extra syllables to ordinary words. Frequently he and several of his school friends would go out into the street and talk to each other in this language of their own, understanding what each other said, but pretending to be foreigners to every one who heard them.
Charles was also continually writing short stories, which he lent to his friends on payment of marbles or slate-pencils or white mice, which the boys were very fond of keeping in their desks. He and a few others built a small theatre and painted gorgeous scenery for it, and then gave regular plays, which he specially wrote for the theatre, to the great entertainment of the other boys and the masters. This comfortable school life was a great contrast to the hard knocks he had to endure when he was at the blacking factory, and he flourished under its influence and began to show something of his real talent for entertaining those about him.
Mr. Dickens, however, soon concluded that Charles ought to be making a start in some business, and so a few years after he had entered school he was placed as clerk in the office of a solicitor in Lincoln's Inn. Here he had to run errands through the busy streets of London's business life, copy all legal documents, and answer the clients who came to call on the firm.
The other clerks found young Dickens immensely entertaining. He could mimic every one who called at the office, and in addition he knew the different cockney voices of all the rabble of the London streets. He had learnt to know the queer types of people who drifted about the river banks and the poorer sections of the city. He knew every small inflection of their voices and their every trick and gesture, and now he acted them out to the great delight of the other clerks. But he could put his powers of mimicry to greater uses. He went to the theatre, particularly to hear Shakespeare's plays, as often as he could, and then would repeat long passages from the plays, giving the exact voice and manner of the leading actors. Many friends predicted that Charles would be a great actor himself some day, and so perhaps he might had not his interest all been drawn another way.
Charles Dickens at Eighteen