Then began for Charles the most miserable time of his life.  The poor, sickly little chap was set to work in a blacking factory.  His work was to cover the pots of paste-blacking, tie them down neatly and paste on the labels.  Along with two or three others boys he worked all day long for six or seven shillings a week.  Oh, how the little boy hated it!  He felt degraded and ashamed.  He felt that he was forgotten and neglected by every one, and that never never more would he be able to read books and play pretending games, or do anything that he loved.  All week he worked hard, ill clad and only half fed, and Sunday he spent with this father at the prison.  It was a miserable, sordid, and pitiful beginning to life.

How long this unhappy time lasted we do not know.  Dickens himself could not remember.  He seldom spoke of this time, but he never forgot the misery of it.  Long afterwards in one of his books called David Copperfield, when he tells of the unhappy childhood of his hero, it is of his own he speaks.

But presently John Dickens got out of prison, Charles left the blacking factory, and once more went to school.  And although in after years he could never bear to think of these miserable days, at the time his spirits were not crushed, and at school he was known as a bright and jolly boy.  He was always ready for any mischief, and took delight in getting up theatricals.

At fifteen Dickens left school and went into a lawyer’s office, but he knew that he had learned very little at school, and now set himself to learn more.  He went to the British Museum Reading-room, and studied there, and he also with a great deal of labor taught himself shorthand.

He worked hard, determined to get on, and at nineteen he found himself in the Gallery of the House of Commons as reporter for a daily paper.  Since the days when Samuel Johnson reported speeches without having heard them things had changed.  People were no longer content with such make-believe reporting, and Dickens proved himself one of the smartest reporters there had ever been.  He not only reported the speeches, but told of everything that took place in the House.  He had such a keen eye for seeing, and such a vivid way of describing what he saw, that he was able to make people realize the scenes inside the House as none had done before.

Besides reporting in the Houses of Parliament Dickens dashed about the country in post-chaises gathering news for his paper, writing by flickering candle-light while his carriage rushed along, at what seemed then the tremendous speed of fifteen miles an hour.  For those were not the days of railways and motors, and traveling was much slower than it is now.

But even while Dickens was leading this hurried, busy life he found time to write other things besides newspaper reports, and little tales and sketches began to appear signed by Boz.  Boz was a pet name for Dickens’s youngest brother.  His real name was Augustus, but he had been nicknamed Moses after Moses in the Vicar of Wakefield.  Pronounced through the nose it became Boses and then Boz.  That is the history of the name under which Dickens at first wrote and won his earliest fame.