18 KNOWING DICKENS
at Warren’s Blacking warehouse at Hungerford Stairs off the Strand. His job
was to paste labels on jars of boot blacking; his cohorts were working-class
boys.
On 20 February John Dickens was arrested for debt and confined in the
Marshalsea Prison in the Borough of Southwark. Charles continued to live
with his mother and siblings at Gower Street until the end of March, when
the rest of the family moved into the Marshalsea, placing Charles in lodgings
with a family friend in Camden Town. Finding the separation unbearable,
he ventured to complain, and after three weeks a new lodging was found
for him on Lant Street next to the prison. Now he could have breakfast
and supper with his family before and after his workday across the river
at Warren’s. By May John Dickens had inherited a legacy from his mother
that allowed him to pay his debt; he was released on May 29 after three
months in the Marshalsea.
This may have been a crucial juncture, for Charles was not released from
work when he rejoined his liberated family in new Camden Town lodgings.
At some point Warren’s itself moved from Hungerford Stairs to Chandos
Street in Covent Garden. In the new warehouse Charles and his co-worker
Bob Fagin sometimes worked in the window for light, their dexterity attract-
ing the attention of passers-by. In June of 1824, Charles attended Fanny’s
prize concert at the Royal Academy and wept at the difference in their posi-
tions. His parents did not get around to removing him from the warehouse
for some time; there is no established date for his release, nor is there a clear
story about why John Dickens decided to take his son out of the warehouse
when he did. Biographical guesses about the full length of Dickens’s service
at Warren’s range from five or six months to twelve or thirteen months.
Once released, he was sent to school at the nearby Wellington Academy,
where he resumed the trappings of a marginally middle-class boyhood.
When he wrote about the experience later, Dickens claimed he was unable
to express the depth of the shame, humiliation, disappointment, and isolation
he had suffered during his time at Warren’s.
In From Copyright to Copperfield, Alexander Welsh protested against the
long biographical and critical tradition of representing Warren’s as an origi-
nary trauma, proposing in its place an Eriksonian model of development in
stages and giving a leading role to a period of internal readjustment triggered
by Dickens’s first trip to America in 1842. Though Welsh’s challenge is a
salutary one, I have come to believe that Dickens’s memories of Warren’s
were of a piece with his responses to his American critics: in both cases a
blow to his idea of himself occasioned lifelong waves of resentment and
pages of brilliantly accusatory rhetoric. “Memory” includes my treatment of