Downstream

it to his biographer John
Forster as ‘a crazy, tumble-
down old house, abutting of
course on the river, and
swarming with rats’. He was
based in the counting house
on the first floor, overlooking
the Thames, where his job
was to ‘cover the pots of
paste-blacking’ with paper.
‘No words,’ he said, ‘can
express the secret agony of
my soul’ as his ‘early hopes
of growing up to be a learned