His childhood was a very unhappy one. He describes himself in one
of his essays as "a very queer, small boy," and his biographer tells us
that he was very sickly as well as very small. He had little schooling,
and numberless hard knocks, and rough and toilsome was the first quarter
of his journey through life. Many of the passages in 'David Copperfield'
are literally true pictures of his own early experiences, and much of
that work may be accepted as autobiographical. He was fond of putting
himself and his own people into his books, and of drawing his scenes and
his characters from real life, sometimes only slightly disguised.
Tradition says that he built both Mr. Micawber and Mr. Turveydrop out of
his own father; that Mrs. Nickleby was based upon his own mother; and
that his wife, who was the Dora of 'Copperfield' in the beginning of
their married life, became in later years the Flora of 'Little Dorrit.'
The elder Dickens had unquestionably some of the traits ascribed to the
unpractical friend of Copperfield's youth, and something of the cruel
self-indulgence and pompous deportment of the dancing-master in 'Bleak
House.' And it was during his father's imprisonment for debt when the
son was but a youth, that Dickens got his intimate knowledge of the
Marshalsea, and of the heart-breaking existence of its inmates. Some
years before 'Copperfield' was written, he described in a fragment of
actual autobiography, quoted by Forster, the following scene:--

"My father was waiting for me in the lodge [of the Debtor's
Prison]; and we went up to his room, on the top story but one, and
cried very much. And he told me, I remember, to take warning by the
Marshalsea, and to observe that if a man had twenty pounds a year,
and spent nineteen pounds nineteen shillings and sixpence, he would
be happy; but that a shilling spent the other way would make him
wretched."

In these chambers Dickens afterwards put Mr. Dorrit. And while the
father remained in confinement, the son lived for a time in a back attic
in Lant Street, Borough, which was to become the home of the eccentric
Robert Sawyer, and the scene of a famous supper party given to do honor
to Mr. Pickwick "and the other chaps." "If a man wishes to abstract
himself from the world, to remove himself from the reach of temptation,
to place himself beyond the possibility of any inducement to look out of
the window, he should by all means go to Lant Stre