things on the cheery side, and to laugh with his multitudinous public.
Dickens's biographer makes a fanciful suggestion that the fact of his having observed low life at so tender an age (from ten to twelve) accounts for the purity of tone with which that life is treated in the novelist's works. In its proper place, I shall take a different view of Dickens's method in this matter; it is not to be supposed for a moment that the boy, familiar with London on its grimiest side, working in cellars, inhabiting garrets, eating in cookshops, visiting a debtors' prison (his father was there detained in the Marshalsea), escaped the contamination of his surroundings. London in all its foulness was stamped on the lad's memory. He escaped in time, that was all, and his most fortunate endowment did the rest.
The year 1825, then, saw him at a day-school in North London; the ordinary day-school of that time, which is as much as to say that it was just better than no school at all. One cannot discover that he learnt anything here, or from any other professed teacher, beyond the very elements of common knowledge. And here again is a point on which, throughout his life, Dickens felt a certain soreness; he wished to be thought, wished to be,
