et." Lant Street still
exists, as Mr. Pickwick found it, and as Dickens knew it between 1822
and 1824. He had numerous lodgings, alone and with his family, during
those hard times; all of them of the same miserable, wretched character;
and it is interesting to know that the original of Mrs. Pipchin was his
landlady in Camden Town, and that the original of the Marchioness waited
on the elder Dickens during his stay in the Marshalsea.

The story of the unhappy drudgery of the young Copperfield is the story
of the young Dickens without exaggeration.

"No words can express the secret agony of my soul as I sunk into
this companionship," he wrote in 1845 or 1846,--"compared these
every-day associates with those of my happier childhood, and felt
my early hopes of growing up to be a learned and distinguished man
crushed in my breast. The deep remembrance of the sense I had of
being utterly neglected and hopeless; of the shame I felt in my
position; of the misery it was to my young heart to believe that,
day by day, what I had learned, and thought, and delighted in, and
raised my fancy and my emulation up by, was passing away from me,
never to be brought back any more, cannot be written. My whole
nature was so penetrated with the grief and humiliation of such
considerations, that even now, famous and caressed and happy, I
often forget, in my dreams, that I have a dear wife and children;
even that I am a man; and I wander desolately back to that time of
my life."

In the course of a few years, happily, the cloud lifted; and in 1831,
when Dickens was a youth of nineteen, we find him beginning life as a
reporting journalist. He wrote occasional "pieces" for the magazines,
and some faint hope of growing up to be a distinguished and learned man
rose again, no doubt, in his breast. N. P. Willis met him one day in
1835, when, as Willis expresses it, Dickens was a "paragraphist" for the
London Morning Chronicle. The "paragraphist," according to Willis, was
lodging in the most crowded part of Holborn, in an uncarpeted and
bleak-looking room, with a deal table, two or three chairs, and a few
books. It was up a long flight of stairs, this room; and its occupant
"was dressed very much as he has since described Dick Swiveller--minus
the swell look. His hair was cropped close to his head, his clothes were
scant, though jauntily cut; and after exchanging a ragged offi