other, are alluded to in a letter written by Dickens to Forster in
later life:--

"I left, at a great many other doors, a great many circulars calling
attention to the merits of the establishment. Yet nobody ever came to
school, nor do I ever recollect that anybody ever proposed to come, or
that the least preparation was made to receive anybody. But I know that
we got on very badly with the butcher and baker; that very often we had
not too much for dinner; and that at last my father was arrested."

This period, subsequently most graphically described in _David
Copperfield_ as the "blacking bottle period," was the darkest in young
Charles's existence; but happier times and brighter prospects soon came
to drown the recollections of that bitter experience.

[Illustration: No. 1, Devonshire Terrace, Regent's Park.--_Dickens's
Residence_ 1839-50.]

Walking up Euston Road from Gower Street, we see St. Pancras Church (not
the old church of "Saint Pancridge" in the Fields, by the bye, situated
in the St. Pancras Road, where Mr. Jerry Cruncher and two friends went
"fishing" on a memorable night, as recorded in _A Tale of Two Cities_,
when their proceedings, and especially those of his "honoured parent,"
were watched by young Jerry), and proceed westward along the Marylebone
Road, called the New Road in Dickens's time, past Park Crescent,
Regent's Park, and do not stop until we reach No. 1, Devonshire
Terrace. This commodious double-fronted house, in which Dickens resided
from 1839 to 1850, is entered at the side, and the front looks into the
Marylebone Road. Maclise's beautiful sketch of the house (made in 1840),
as given in Forster's _Life_, shows the windows of the lower and first
floor rooms as largely bowed, while over the top flat of one of the
former is a protective iron-work covering, thus allowing the children to
come out of their nursery on the third floor freely to enjoy the air and
watch the passers-by. In the sketch Maclise has characteristically put
in a shuttlecock just over the wall, as though the little ones were
playing in the garden. Forster calls it "a handsome house with a garden
of considerable size, shut out from the New Road by a brick wall, facing
the York Gate into Regent's Park;" and Dickens himself admitted it to be
"a house of great promise (and great premium), undeniable situation, and
excessive splendour." That he loved it well is shown by the passage in a
letter which he addressed to Forster, "i