![]() 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. Two or three other boys were kept at similar duty down-stairs on similar wages. 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 on again with more pots. My work was to cover the pots of paste-blacking first with a piece of oil-paper, and then with a piece of blue paper to tie them round with a string and then to clip the paper close and neat, all round, until it looked as smart as a pot of ointment from an apothecary’s shop. There was a recess in it, in which I was to sit and work. The counting-house was on the first floor, looking over the coal-barges and the river. Its wainscoted rooms, and its rotten floors and staircase, and 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 visibly before me, as if I were there again. It was a crazy, tumble-down old house, abutting of course on the river, and literally overrun with rats. The blacking-warehouse was the last house on the left-hand side of the way, at old Hungerford Stairs. They could hardly have been more so if I had been twenty years of age, distinguished at a grammar-school, and going to Cambridge. My father and mother were quite satisfied. It is wonderful to me 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 abilities, quick, 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. It is wonderful to me how I could have been so easily cast away at such an age. However, it was the psychological trauma of the situation, and that nobody seemed at all even mildly interested in his plight, that Dickens would later lament the most when describing what he considered the low point of his life: His weekly pay for this was six shillings (about £22 or $29 today) with which he had to entirely support himself on.īeyond having to endure insanely long work hours at a monotonous task, he also was subjected to appalling work conditions, including the occasional physical abuse. His job there was to spend six days per week pasting labels on jars of shoe polish. The 12 year old boy was moved into cheap lodgings away from his family, removed from school, and sent to Warren’s Shoe Blacking Factory. As was the practice at the time, most of the family joined him in jail – but not so for Charles, who was deemed old enough to make his own way in the world. ![]() After all, he wrote “A Christmas Carol” to bring more attention to the plight of the children of the poor- a subject Dickens was extremely passionate about owing to his own experience with poverty as a child.ĭickens was born on Februin rural England to a middle class family turned impoverished when his father, a clerk named John, mismanaged his finances and ended up being sent to Marshalsea debtors’ prison. For all the things that Charles Dickens’ “A Christmas Carol” is known for, Tiny Tim, a relatively minor character in terms of appearances in the story (but, importantly, one of wholesome heart despite his physical condition), was one of the characters that Dickens wanted people to pay the most attention to.
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