while he remembered anything, and the recollection of which, at
intervals, haunted him and made him miserable, even to that hour.

Very shortly afterwards I learnt in all their detail the incidents that
had been so painful to him, and what then was said to me or written
respecting them revealed the story of his boyhood. The idea of _David
Copperfield_, which was to take all the world into his confidence, had
not at this time occurred to him; but what it had so startled me to
know, his readers were afterwards told with only such change or addition
as for the time might sufficiently disguise himself under cover of his
hero. For the poor little lad, with good ability and a most sensitive
nature, turned at the age of ten into a "laboring hind" in the service
of "Murdstone and Grinby," and conscious already of what made it seem
very strange to him that he could so easily have been thrown away at
such an age, was indeed himself. His was the secret agony of soul at
finding himself "companion to Mick Walker and Mealy Potatoes," and his
the tears that mingled with the water in which he and they rinsed and
washed out bottles. It had all been written, as fact, before he thought
of any other use for it; and it was not until several months later, when
the fancy of _David Copperfield_, itself suggested by what he had so
written of his early troubles, began to take shape in his mind, that he
abandoned his first intention of writing his own life. Those warehouse
experiences fell then so aptly into the subject he had chosen, that he
could not resist the temptation of immediately using them; and the
manuscript recording them, which was but the first portion of what he
had designed to write, was embodied in the substance of the eleventh and
earlier chapters of his novel. What already had been sent to me,
however, and proof-sheets of the novel interlined at the time, enable me
now to separate the fact from the fiction, and to supply to the story of
the author's childhood those passages, omitted from the book, which,
apart from their illustration of the growth of his character, present to
us a picture of tragical suffering, and of tender as well as humorous
fancy, unsurpassed in even the wonders of his published writings.

The person indirectly responsible for the scenes to be described was the
young relative James Lamert, the cousin by his aunt's marriage of whom I
have made frequent mention, who got up the plays at Chatham, and after
pa