When he was twelve years old, his father lost his money and was thrown into a debtors’ prison. It was a queer way they had then of treating a person who couldn’t pay his debts. They shut him up where he couldn’t earn anything. Charles had to visit pawn-shops to try to borrow money for the family. Then he was put to work in a big, gloomy establishment where they made blacking for shoes. His work was to sit all day on a bench pasting labels on the boxes. Then he would have to find ways of keeping alive on a few pennies he got each day. But though he had a very hard time for a year or two, he spent his time greatly to his own and our advantage. Before he was thirteen, he had accumulated a great deal of experience. He had kept his eyes open and had seen a side of life that most people never see at all. When I think of Dickens and of his way of finding out obscure people, and making them interesting, I remember the advice I once read in a newspaper as to how to find a collar-button. When a collar-button rolls off the dressing-table, it seems to have an uncanny way of rolling out of sight. The gentleman who is in need of it feels himself greatly aggrieved over the collar-button’s easy way of getting lost. Now the newspaper man said that the reason the man doesn’t see the collar-button is that he stands too high above it. If he will forget all about his dignity and lie down on the floor, he can’t help but see what he is looking for. In order to see it he must get down to the level where the collar-button is. There he will see it shining like a little mountain of gold. I think that explains why Dickens sees so much more in his characters than other persons would who did not have his advantages. He does not look down on his characters. He meets them on their own level, because he has been there. And so he makes us see them. He learned very early that, no matter where a person is, he is always the centre of his little world. He always has something that he is afraid of and always has something that he hopes for. And he learned to sympathize not only with the big hopes and fears but with the little hopes and fears. They are the things which wise people often overlook, but they are really very important, for there are so many of them. Dickens did not write children’s stories, that is, stories about children who stayed as children. Of course there are children in his novels just as there are in the London streets--plenty of them. But they are all mixed up with the older people. And then they are all the time growing up just as they do in real life. You get acquainted with a small boy in one chapter; and the next time you meet him he is at boarding-school, and before the end of the book he is out walking with children of his own.