SOURCE: Forster, John. “Hard Experiences in Boyhood (1822-4).” In The Life of Charles Dickens, pp. 19-33. London: J. M. Dent & Sons, 1966.

In the following excerpt, originally published in 1890, Dickens's friend and biographer John Forster offers Dickens's own recollection of the Warren's Blacking Factory period of his boyhood and how this was incorporated into his fiction from Oliver Twist to Martin Chuzzlewit and David Copperfield.

The incidents to be told now would probably never have been known to me, or indeed any of the occurrences of his childhood and youth, but for the accident of a question which I put to him one day in the March or April of 1847.

I asked if he remembered ever having seen in his boyhood our friend the elder Mr. Dilke, his father's acquaintance and contemporary, who had been a clerk in the same office in Somerset House to which Mr. John Dickens...