For twelve hours a day, six days a week, Charles Dickens pasted labels to bottles of shoe polish at the rat-infested, dilapidated Warren’s Blacking factory. He was ridiculed and harassed by the older, bigger workers and shamed by the stigma of working in such filthy, low-class surroundings. Intellectually frustrated, resentful of his older sister (who was studying at the Royal Academy of Music), and hurt by his parents’ lack of interest in his education, Dickens despaired.
When his father was arrested for nonpayment of a debt, Dickens’ mother and younger siblings moved into prison with his father, leaving the twelve-year-old alone on the outside to continue working. His older sister remained at the music academy. Lonely, scared, and abandoned, Dickens lived in a run-down neighborhood close to the prison so that he could visit his family. It was a firsthand experience of poverty and prison life and a reinforcement of the considerable insecurity and emotional abandonment that marked his childhood.
A small inheritance a few months later allowed his family to leave prison. Dickens was finally allowed to attend school over his mother’s objections — she did not want to lose his income. School was short-lived though: At fifteen, Dickens had to return to work. Dickens never got over the time he spent at Warren’s and his fierce sense of betrayal and rage at his mother’s callousness stayed with him for life. Recalling that time, he said: “I never afterwards forgot, I never shall forget, I never can forget, that my mother was warm for my being sent back [to Warren’s Blacking].”
