Shift the line of division a little, so that instead of separating borrowers and lenders, it separates those who pay their debts from those who do not pay them, and then Dickens the elder may succeed to something of Bigod’s kingship.  He was of the great race of debtors, possessing especially that ideal quality of mind on which Lamb laid such stress.  Imagination played the very mischief with him.  He had evidently little grasp of fact, and moved in a kind of haze, through which all clear outlines would show blurred and unreal.  Sometimes—­most often, perhaps—­that haze would be irradiated with sanguine visionary hopes and expectations.  Sometimes it would be fitfully darkened with all the horrors of despair.  But whether in gloom or gleam, the realities of his position would be lost.  He never, certainly, contracted a debt which he did not mean honourably to pay.  But either he had never possessed the faculty of forming a just estimate of future possibilities, or else, through the indulgence of what may be called a vague habit of thought, he had lost the power of seeing things as they are.  Thus all his excellencies and good gifts were neutralized at this time, so far as his family were concerned, and went for practically nothing.  He was, according to his son’s testimony, full of industry, most conscientious in the discharge of any business, unwearying in loving patience and solicitude when those bound to him by blood or friendship were ill or in trouble, “as kind-hearted and generous a man as ever lived in the world.”  Yet as debts accumulated, and accommodation bills shed their baleful shadow on his life, and duns grew many and furious, he became altogether immersed in mean money troubles, and suffered the son who was to shed such lustre on his name to remain for a time without the means of learning, and to sink first into a little household drudge, and then into a mere warehouse boy.

So little Charles, aged from eleven to twelve, first blacked boots, and minded the younger children, and ran messages, and effected the family purchases—­which can have been no pleasant task in the then state of the family credit,—­and made very close acquaintance with the inside of the pawnbrokers’ shops, and with the purchasers of second-hand books, disposing, among other things, of the little store of books he loved so well; and then, when his father was imprisoned, ran more messages hither and thither, and shed many childish tears in his father’s company—­the father doubtless regarding the tears as a tribute to his eloquence, though, heaven knows, there were other things to cry over besides his sonorous periods.  After which a connection, James Lamert by name, who had lived with the family before they moved from Camden Town to Gower Street, and was manager of a worm-eaten, rat-riddled blacking business, near old Hungerford Market, offered to employ the lad, on a salary of some six shillings a week, or thereabouts.  The duties which commanded these high emoluments consisted