in 1812.  His father, who is supposed to be the original of Mr. Micawber, was a clerk in a navy office.  He could never make both ends meet, and after struggling with debts in his native town for many years, moved to London when Dickens was nine years old.  The debts still pursued him, and after two years of grandiloquent misfortune he was thrown into the poor-debtors’ prison.  His wife, the original of Mrs. Micawber, then set up the famous Boarding Establishment for Young Ladies; but, in Dickens’s words, no young ladies ever came.  The only visitors were creditors, and they were quite ferocious.  In the picture of the Micawber family, with its tears and smiles and general shiftlessness, we have a suggestion of Dickens’s own family life.

At eleven years of age the boy was taken out of school and went to work in the cellar of a blacking factory.  At this time he was, in his own words, a “queer small boy,” who suffered as he worked; and we can appreciate the boy and the suffering more when we find both reflected in the character of David Copperfield.  It is a heart-rending picture, this sensitive child working from dawn till dark for a few pennies, and associating with toughs and waifs in his brief intervals of labor; but we can see in it the sources of that intimate knowledge of the hearts of the poor and outcast which was soon to be reflected in literature and to startle all England by its appeal for sympathy.  A small legacy ended this wretchedness, bringing the father from the prison and sending the boy to Wellington House Academy,—­a worthless and brutal school, evidently, whose head master was, in Dickens’s words, a most ignorant fellow and a tyrant.  He learned little at this place, being interested chiefly in stories, and in acting out the heroic parts which appealed to his imagination; but again his personal experience was of immense value, and resulted in his famous picture of Dotheboys Hall, in Nicholas Nickleby, which helped largely to mitigate the evils of private schools in England.  Wherever he went, Dickens was a marvelously keen observer, with an active imagination which made stories out of incidents and characters that ordinary men would have hardly noticed.  Moreover he was a born actor, and was at one time the leading spirit of a band of amateurs who gave entertainments for charity all over England.  These three things, his keen observation, his active imagination, and the actor’s spirit which animated him, furnish a key to his life and writings.

When only fifteen years old, he left the school and again went to work, this time as clerk in a lawyer’s office.  By night he studied shorthand, in order to fit himself to be a reporter,—­this in imitation of his father, who was now engaged by a newspaper to report the speeches in Parliament.  Everything that Dickens attempted seems to have been done with vigor and intensity, and within two years we find him reporting important speeches, and writing out his notes as the heavy coach lurched and rolled