"A small boy, barely 12 years old, sits in a rat-infested London warehouse, endlessly, wrapping, tying, and pasting labels onto jars of black boot polish. He has walked five miles to get to work, and after 10 hours, will walk that many more to get back to his rented room. He sees his family only on Sundays, when he visits London’s Marshalsea prison, where his father has been jailed for debt.
The child’s whole family except for one sister, in fact, now resides in the debtors prison. This childhood episode shadowed Charles Dickens’ life and colored his writing. Dickens went on to achieve unprecedented celebrity as the most popular novelist of his century, and his fictional tales about abused, neglected, parentless children still resonate with readers over 150 years after they were written."
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