ily removed thither, to Lant Street, near by, in
order to be near the head of the family.

This is a sufficiently harrowing sequence of events to allow it to be left
to the biographers to deal with them to the full. Here the author glosses
it over as a mere detail; one of those indissoluble links which connects
the name of Dickens with the life of London among the lower and middle
classes during the Victorian era.

An incident in "David Copperfield," which Dickens has told us was real, so
far as he himself was concerned, must have occurred about this period. The
reference is to the visit to "Ye Olde Red Lion" at the corner of Derby
Street, Parliament Street, near Westminster Bridge, which house has only
recently disappeared. He has stated that it was an actual experience of
his own childhood, and how, being such a little fellow, the landlord,
instead of drawing the ale, called his wife, who gave the boy a motherly
kiss.

The incident as recounted in "David Copperfield" called also for a glass
of ale, and reads not unlike:

"I remember one hot evening I went into the bar of a public-house, and
said to the landlord: 'What is your best--your _very best_ ale a glass?'
For it was a special occasion. I don't know what. It may have been my
birthday. 'Twopence-halfpenny,' says the landlord, 'is the price of the
Genuine Stunning Ale.' 'Then,' says I, producing the money, 'just draw me
a glass of the Genuine Stunning, if you please, with a good head to it.'"

After a time his father left the Navy Pay Office and entered journalism.
The son was clerking, meanwhile, in a solicitor's office,--that of Edward
Blackmore,--first in Lincoln's Inn, and subsequently in Gray's Inn. A
diary of the author was recently sold by auction, containing as its first
entry, "13_s_ 6_d_ for one week's salary." Here Dickens acquired that
proficiency in making mental memoranda of his environment, and of the
manners and customs of lawyers and their clerks, which afterward found so
vivid expression in "Pickwick."

By this time the father's financial worries had ceased, or at least made
for the better. He had entered the realms of journalism and became a
Parliamentary reporter, which it is to be presumed developed a craving on
the part of Charles for a similar occupation; when following in his
father's footsteps, he succeeded, after having learned Gurney's system of
shorthand, in obtaining an appointment as a reporter in the press gallery
of the House