could hardly have been more so, if I had been twenty years of age,
distinguished at a grammar-schooland going to Cambridge.
The blacking warehouse was the last house on the left-hand side of the way,
at old Hungerford Stairs. It was a crazy, tumble-down old house, abutting
of course on the river, and literally overrun with rats. Its wainscotted
rooms and its rotten floors and staircasean the old grey rats swarming
down in the cellars, and the sound of their squeaking and scuffling coming
up the stairs at all times and the dirt and decay of the place rise up
visible before me, as if I were there again. The counting house was on the
first floor, looking over the coal-barges and the river. There was a recess
in it, in which I was to sit and work. My work was to cover the pots of
pasteblacking; first with a piece of oil-paper, and then with a piece of
blue paper; to tie them round with a stringand then to clip the paper
close and neat, al] round, until it looked as smart as a pot of ointment
from an apothecarys shop. When a certain number of grosses of pots had
attained this pitch of perfection, I was to paste on each a printed label;
and then go again with more pots. Two or three other boys were kept at
similar duty downstairs on similar wages. One of them came up, in a ragged
apron and a paper cap, on the first Monday morning, to show me the trick of
using the string and tying the knot. His name was Bob Fagin; and I took the
liberty of using his name, long afterwardsin Oliver Twist.
Our relative had kindly arranged to teach me something in the dinner-hour;
from twelve to one, I think it was; every day. But an arrangement so
incompatible with counting-house business soon died away, from no fault of
his or mine; and for the same reason, my small work-table, and my grosses
of pots, my papers, string, scizzorspaste-potand labels, little by
little, vanished out of the recess in the counting-house, and kept company
with the other small work-tablesgrosses of pots, papers, string,
scizzorsand paste-potsdownstairsIt was not long before Bob Fagin and
I, and another boy whose name was Paul Green, but who was currently
believed to have been christened Poll (a belief which I transferred, long
afterwards to MrSweedlepipein Martin Chuzzlewit)worked generally, side
by side. But Fagin, who was an orphan, and lived with his brother-in-law, a
waterman. Poll Green's father had the additional distinction of being a
fireman, and was employed at Drury Lane Theatre; where another relation of
Poll's, I think his little sister, did imps in the pantomines.
No words can express the secret agony of my soul as I sunk into this
companionship; compared these every-day associates with those of my happier
childhood; and felt my early hopes of growing up to be a learned and
distinguished man, crushed in my breast. The deep remembrance of the sense
I had of being utterly neglected and hopelessof the shame I felt in my
position; of the misery it was to my young heart to believe that, day by
day, what I had learned, and thought, and delighted in, and raised my fancy
and my emulation up by, was passing away from me, never to be brought back
any more; cannot be written. My whole nature was so penetrated with the
grief and humiliation of such considerationsthat even now, famous and
caressed and happy, I often forget in my dreams that I have a dear wife and
children; even that I am a man; and wander desolately back to that time of
my life.
But I held some station at the blacking warehouse too. Besides that my
relative at the counting-house did what a man so occupied, and dealing with
a thing so anomalouscould, to treat me as one upon a different footing
from the rest, I never said, to man of boy, how it was that I came to be
there, or gave the least indication of being sorry that I was there. That I
suffered in secret, and that I suffered exquisitely, no one ever knew but
I. How much I suffered, it is, as I have said already, utterly beyond my
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