-li
attention to the merits of the establishmentYet nobody ever came to
school, nor do I recollect that anybody ever proposed to come, or that at
least preparation was made to receive anybody. But I know that we got on
very badly with the butcher and baker; that very often we had not too much
for dinner.
Forster schrijft dan:
Then, at home, came many miserable daily struggles that seemed to last an
immense time, yet did not perhaps cover many weeks. Almost everything by
degrees was sold or pawned, little Charles being the principal agent in
those sorrowful transactionsSuch of the books as had been brought from
Chatham, Peregrine Pickle, Roderick Random, Tom Jones, Humphrey Clinker,
and all the rest, went first. They were carried off from the little
chiffonier, which his father called the libraryto a bookseller in the
Hampstead Road, the same that David Copperfield describes as in the City
Road; and the account of the sales, as they actually occurred and were told
to me long before David was born, was reproduced word for word in his
imaginary narrative
The keeper for this bookstallwho lived in a little house behind it, used
to get tipsy every night, and to be violently scold by his wife every
morning. More than once, when I went there early, I had audience of him in
a turn-up bedstead, with a cut in his forehead or a black eye, bearing
witness to his excesses over night (I am afraid he was quarrelsome in his
drink); and he, with a shaking hand, endeavouring to find the needful
shillings in one or other of the pockets in his clothes, which way upon the
floor, while his wife, with a baby in her arms and her shoes down at heel,
never left off rating him. Sometimes he had lost his money, and then he
would ask me to call again; but his wife had always got some (had taken
his, I dare say, while he was drunk)and secretly completed the bargain on
the stairs, as we went down together.(a)
Toen Charles' ouders door bemiddeling van James Lamert, de kans kregen hem te werk te stellen,
maakten zij daar gretig gebruik van. En zo kwam hij, 12 jaar oud - voor die tijd een normale leeftijd - in
een schoensmeer fabriekje. Zes shilling per week was geen slecht loon en de werktijden van 8 tot 8 met
een uur voor middageten en een half uur voor thee,, waren gebruikelijk. Vijf en twintig jaren later
jammert hij echter hierover nog:
In an evil hour for me, as I often bitterly thought. Its chief manager,
James Lamert, the relative who had lived with us in Bayham Street, seeing
how I was employed from day to day, and knowing what our domestic
circumstancesthen were, proposed that I should go into the blacking
workhouse, to be as useful as I could, at a salary, I think, of six
shilling a week. I am not clear whether it was six or seven. I am inclined
to believe, from my uncertainty on this head, that it was six at first, and
seven afterward. At any rate the offer was accepted very willingly by my
father and mother, and on a Monday morning I went down in the blacking
warehouse to begin my business life. It is wonderful to me, how I could
have been so easily cast away at such an age. It is wonderful to me, that,
that even after my descent into the poor little drudge I had been since we
came to London, no one had compassion enough on me - a child of singular
abilitiesquick, eager, delicate, and soon hurt, bodily or mentally - to
suggest that something might have been spared, as certainly it might have
been, to place me at any common school. Our friends, I take, were tired
out. No one made any sign. My father and mother were quite satisfied. They
a. Zie David Copperfield hoofdstuk 11
