Mr. Micawber being once more “in pecuniary shackles,” my aunt, so grateful, as we all were, for the services he had rendered, suggested emigration to Australia to him; he at once responded to the idea.

“The climate, I believe, is healthy,” said Mrs. Micawber.  “Then the question arises:  Now, are the circumstances of the country such that a man of Mr. Micawber’s abilities would have a fair chance of rising?—­I will not say, at present, to be governor or anything of that sort; but would there be a reasonable opening for his talents to develop themselves?  If so, it is evident to me that Australia is the legitimate sphere of action for Mr. Micawber.”

“I entertain the conviction,” said Mr. Micawber, “that it is, under existing circumstances, the land, the only land, for myself and family; and that something of an extraordinary nature will turn up on that shore.”

But the defeat of Heep and Micawber’s departure belong to the days of my manhood.  Let me look back at intervening years.

V.—­I Achieve Manhood

My school-days!  The silent gliding on of my existence—­the unseen, unfelt progress of my life—­from childhood up to youth!

Time has stolen on unobserved, and I am the head boy now in the school, and look down on the line of boys below me with a condescending interest in such of them as bring to my mind the boy I was myself when I first came here.  That little fellow seems to be no part of me; I remember him as something left behind upon the road of life, and almost think of him as of someone else.

And the little girl I saw on that first day at Mr. Wickfield’s, where is she?  Gone also.  In her stead, the perfect likeness of the picture, a child likeness no more, moves about the house; and Agnes—­my sweet sister, as I call her in my thoughts, my counsellor and friend—­the better angel of the lives of all who come within her calm, good, self-denying influence—­is quite a woman.

It is time for me to have a profession, and my aunt proposes that I should be a proctor in Doctors’ Commons.  I learn that the proctors are a sort of solicitors, and that the Doctors’ Commons is a faded court held near St. Paul’s Churchyard, where people’s marriages and wills are disposed of and disputes about ships and boats are settled.

So I am articled, and later, when my aunt has lost her money, through no fault of her own, but through the rascality of Uriah Heep, and I seek Mr. Spenlow to know if it is possible for my articles to be cancelled, it is, I am assured, Mr. Jorkins who is inexorable.

“If it had been my lot to have my hands unfettered, if I had not a partner—­Mr. Jorkins,” says Mr. Spenlow.  “But I know my partner, Copperfield.  Mr. Jorkins is not a man to respond to a proposition of this peculiar nature.  Mr. Jorkins is very difficult to move from the beaten track.”

The years pass.

I have come legally to man’s estate.  I have attained the dignity of twenty-one.  Let me think what I have achieved.