It is a point not to be overlooked that Dickens takes his characters from any occupation, but preferably, it would seem, from the humblest. Goodness of heart, wit, humour, gaiety, stout-heartedness, are proved by him to exist in the most depressing circumstances. His heroes and heroines do not wear crowns or jewels. They are not specially learned, and they are rarely wealthy or beautiful, but they are good company, light-hearted, and kind-hearted. Love, faithfulness, self-sacrifice, purity, sincerity, courage and cheerfulness shine out from his pages so brightly and so engagingly that we cannot but long to join the company of those who travel the same road. {9} CHAPTER II CHARLES DICKENS--BOY AND MAN The best way to understand Charles Dickens is to learn to know him first when he was a boy. Odd though it may sound, we can actually become acquainted with the boy Charles Dickens. David Copperfield, at least in the beginning of his story, is a close delineation of the writer's own boyhood. David's feelings, and many of the happenings of his youth, are the feelings and the happenings which made Charles Dickens the boy and the man that he was. While this is true, it is true at the same time that we should use caution lest we read into a story more than the author intends us to find either about himself or of other people. Human beings are so wonderfully and strangely made that no mortal, no matter how hard he tries, can ever draw a perfectly true or a perfectly just picture of anyone. Some quality always escapes analysis, and each person living now, or who ever has lived, remains himself only. Dickens drew a wonderful picture of himself in David Copperfield. This is one reason why we love David and understand him so well. Yet David Copperfield is not exactly Charles Dickens. We can scarcely believe for one thing that David ever could have written as well about Charles as Charles has written about David. {10} When Dickens was a boy of ten he was sent to work in a blacking warehouse by his father who was at that time in a debtors' prison. People, when Dickens was a boy, were sometimes left in prison for a long time if they could not pay their debts. Years afterwards, Dickens wrote of the secret agony of his soul while he worked at covering blacking bottles and of how he longed for companions, boys of his own age. Indeed, so unhappy were his recollections that when he was grown-up he mentioned these years to one person only, John Forster, the friend who wrote his biography; to remember this part of his life always gave him great pain.