of
everybody in the house.

Nevertheless, as time went on, his own education still unconsciously
went on as well, under the sternest and most potent of teachers; and,
neglected and miserable as he was, he managed gradually to transfer to
London all the dreaminess and all the romance with which he had invested
Chatham. There were then at the top of Bayham Street some almshouses,
and were still when he revisited it with me nearly twenty-seven years
ago; and to go to this spot, he told me, and look from it over the
dust-heaps and dock-leaves and fields (no longer there when we saw it
together) at the cupola of St. Paul's looming through the smoke, was a
treat that served him for hours of vague reflection afterwards. To be
taken out for a walk into the real town, especially if it were anywhere
about Covent Garden or the Strand, perfectly entranced him with
pleasure. But most of all he had a profound attraction of repulsion to
St. Giles's. If he could only induce whomsoever took him out to take him
through Seven-Dials, he was supremely happy. "Good Heaven!" he would
exclaim, "what wild visions of prodigies of wickedness, want, and
beggary arose in my mind out of that place!" He was all this time, the
reader will remember, still subject to continual attacks of illness,
and, by reason of them, a very small boy even for his age.

That part of his boyhood is now very near of which, when the days of
fame and prosperity came to him, he felt the weight upon his memory as
a painful burden until he could lighten it by sharing it with a friend;
and an accident I will presently mention led him first to reveal it.
There is, however, an interval of some months still to be described, of
which, from conversations or letters that passed between us, after or
because of this confidence, and that already have yielded fruit to these
pages, I can supply some vague and desultory notices. The use thus made
of them, it is due to myself to remark, was contemplated then; for
though, long before his death, I had ceased to believe it likely that I
should survive to write about him, he had never withdrawn the wish at
this early time strongly expressed, or the confidences, not only then
but to the very eve of his death reposed in me, that were to enable me
to fulfill it.[4] The fulfillment indeed he had himself rendered more
easy by partially uplifting the veil in _David Copperfield_.

The visits made from Bayham Street were chiefly to two connections