Dickens's Miserable Children

His own childhood had been painful enough. At 12, and with his father imprisoned for debt, he had gone to work in factory, pasting labels onto jars of shoe polish for a few necessary shillings each week. Later he put that memory into a novel, but his own children learned only after his death that David Copperfield had been drawn from life. Still, his experience of privation had not, for the times, been in any way remarkable, and the extraordinary thing was instead his ability to recall its every detail and to get it all onto the page. The blundering big bodies of adults, the arbitrary rules and inexplicable punishments, the fear and confusion and loneliness—Charles Dickens made us understand that children were neither blank slates nor miniature grown-ups. He created our image of childhood, and if some of his characters now seem too innocent to be credible, you can find his Pip or Estella in every middle-school classroom.