At first, when he began his daily toil at the blacking business, some poor dregs of family life were left to the child.  His father was at the Marshalsea.  But his mother and brothers and sisters were, to use his own words, “still encamped, with a young servant girl from Chatham workhouse, in the two parlours in the emptied house in Gower Street North.”  And there he lived with them, in much “hugger-mugger,” merely taking his humble midday meal in nomadic fashion, on his own account.  Soon, however, his position became even more forlorn.  The paternal creditors proved insatiable.  The gipsy home in Gower Street had to be broken up.  Mrs. Dickens and the children went to live at the Marshalsea.  Little Charles was placed under the roof—­it cannot be called under the care—­of a “reduced old lady,” dwelling in Camden Town, who must have been a clever and prophetic old lady if she anticipated that her diminutive lodger would one day give her a kind of indirect unenviable immortality by making her figure, under the name of “Mrs. Pipchin,” in “Dombey and Son.”  Here the boy seems to have been left almost entirely to his own devices.  He spent his Sundays in the prison, and, to the best of his recollection, his lodgings at “Mrs. Pipchin’s” were paid for.  Otherwise, he “found himself,” in childish fashion, out of the six or seven weekly shillings, breakfasting on two pennyworth of bread and milk, and supping on a penny loaf and a bit of cheese, and dining hither and thither, as his boy’s appetite dictated—­now, sensibly enough, on a la mode beef or a saveloy; then, less sensibly, on pudding; and anon not dining at all, the wherewithal having been expended on some morning treat of cheap stale pastry.  But are not all these things, the lad’s shifts and expedients, his sorrows and despair, his visits to the public-house, where the kindly publican’s wife stoops down to kiss the pathetic little face—­are they not all written in “David Copperfield”?  And if so be that I have a reader unacquainted with that peerless book, can I do better than recommend him, or her, to study therein the story of Dickens’ life at this particular time?

At last the child’s solitude and sorrows seem to have grown unbearable.  His fortitude broke down.  One Sunday night he appealed to his father, with many tears, on the subject, not of his employment, which he seems to have accepted at the time manfully, but of his forlornness and isolation.  The father’s kind, thoughtless heart was touched.  A back attic was found for Charles near the Marshalsea, at Lant Street, in the Borough—­where Bob Sawyer, it will be remembered, afterwards invited Mr. Pickwick to that disastrous party.  The boy moved into his new quarters with the same feeling of elation as if he had been entering a palace.