One of the many things in David Copperfield which are autobiographical is the account [202a] of his delight over his father’s little collection of books. “From that blessed little room, Roderick Random, Peregrine Pickle, Humphrey Clinker, Tom Jones, the Vicar of Wakefield, Don Quixote, Gil Blas, and Robinson Crusoe [202b] came out, a glorious host, to keep me company. They kept alive my fancy, and my hope of something beyond that place and time—they, and the Arabian Nights, and the Tales of the Genii—and did me no harm. . . . I have been Tom
Jones (a child’s Tom Jones, a harmless creature) for a week together. . . . I had a greedy relish for a few volumes of voyages and travels . . . . and for days and days I can remember to have gone about my region of our house, armed with the centre-piece out of an old set of boot-trees: the perfect realisation of Captain Somebody of the Royal British Navy.”
After a time they moved to London, where they lived poorly in what was then a wretched enough neighbourhood, Bayham St., Camden-town. There he degenerated into a neglected domestic drudge, apparently quite without education, a state of things he inwardly resented.
In reading George Colman’s Broad Grins he came upon a description of Covent Garden, and “stole to the market by himself to compare it with the book.” He remembered Covent Garden in writing Pickwick. In chap. xlvii., Job Trotter is sent in the evening to tell Perker that Dodson and Fogg have taken Mrs Bardell in execution for her costs. Perker goes back to his dinner guests, and poor Job has to spend the night in a vegetable basket in Covent Garden.
Dickens the elder was arrested for debt and imprisoned in the Marshalsea, and the description of borrowing Captain Porter’s knife and fork, and his thinking that he should not like to borrow that gentleman’s comb, were written before he ever thought of David Copperfield. [203] There is, of course, much that is autobiographical in David Copperfield. “For, the poor little lad, with good ability and a most
sensitive nature, turned at the age of ten into a ‘labouring hind’ in the service of Murdstone and Grinby” . . . was indeed himself. Dickens described in an autobiographical fragment the details of the mechanical work of covering the pots of paste-blacking. It is interesting to find Dickens making use in Oliver Twist of the name Fagin, who was one of his fellow pasters. Another boy was Poll Green, part of whose name appears in that of the celebrated Mr Sweelepipe in Martin Chuzzlewit. Another of his characters is connected with this period, for during his father’s imprisonment the boy lodged with an old lady subsequently immortalised as Mrs Pipchin. Afterwards he remonstrated with his father with many tears, and a lodging was found for him in Lant Street in the Borough as being nearer to the prison, and here it was that Bob Sawyer lodged. The little maid who waited on his father and mother in the Marshalsea was the model for the Marchioness in the Old Curiosity Shop (Forster, i., p. 39). After a time his father came out of prison, and Charles the younger got some schooling at Wellington House Academy, which supplied “some of the lighter traits of Salem-house” in David Copperfield.
Dickens began life as a lawyer’s clerk of a humble sort, and thus gained the knowledge of which he made such admirable use in Pickwick and elsewhere.
But his energy in learning shorthand and becoming a professional reporter at the age of nineteen was a much more important step. Forster quotes Beard, “the friend he first made in that line when he
entered the gallery,” as saying that “there never was such a reporter.”
Dickens saw the last of the old coaching days, and he describes his experience as a reporter—work which largely contributed to his literary success:—