r date he was
conscious of having confounded it with parchments of a much more
demoniacal description. One result from the awful document soon showed
itself in enforced retrenchment. The family had to take up its abode in
a house in Bayham Street, Camden-town.

Bayham Street was about the poorest part of the London suburbs then, and
the house was a mean small tenement, with a wretched little back-garden
abutting on a squalid court. Here was no place for new acquaintances to
him: no boys were near with whom he might hope to become in any way
familiar. A washerwoman lived next door, and a Bow-Street officer lived
over the way. Many, many times has he spoken to me of this, and how he
seemed at once to fall into a solitary condition apart from all other
boys of his own age, and to sink into a neglected state at home which
had been always quite unaccountable to him. "As I thought," he said on
one occasion very bitterly, "in the little back-garret in Bayham Street,
of all I had lost in losing Chatham, what would I have given, if I had
had anything to give, to have been sent back to any other school, to
have been taught something anywhere!" He was at another school already,
not knowing it. The self-education forced upon him was teaching him, all
unconsciously as yet, what, for the future that awaited him, it most
behooved him to know.

That he took, from the very beginning of this Bayham-Street life, his
first impression of that struggling poverty which is nowhere more
vividly shown than in the commoner streets of the ordinary London
suburb, and which enriched his earliest writings with a freshness of
original humor and quite unstudied pathos that gave them much of their
sudden popularity, there cannot be a doubt. "I certainly understood it,"
he has often said to me, "quite as well then as I do now." But he was
not conscious yet that he did so understand it, or of the influence it
was exerting on his life even then. It seems almost too much to assert
of a child, say at nine or ten years old, that his observation of
everything was as close and good, or that he had as much intuitive
understanding of the character and weaknesses of the grown-up people
around him, as when the same keen and wonderful faculty had made him
famous among men. But my experience of him led me to put implicit faith
in the assertion he unvaryingly himself made, that he had never seen any
cause to correct or change what in his boyhood was his own secret
i