"The blacking warehouse was the last house on the left hand side of the way, at old Hungerford Stairs. It was a crazy tumble-down old house abutting, of course, on the river, and literally overrun with rats. The wainscotted rooms and its rotten floors and staircase and the old grey rats swarming down in the cellars, and the sound of their squeaking and scuffling coming up the stairs at all times, and the dirt and decay of the place, rise up visibly before me as if I were there again. My work was to cover the pots of paste blacking first with a piece of oil paper and then with a piece of blue paper, to tie them round with a string, and then to clip the paper close and neat all round, until it looked as smart as a pot of ointment from an apothecary's shop. When a certain number of grosses of pots had attained this pitch of perfection, I was to paste on each a printed label, and then go on again with more pots."
With regard to the way he lived at this time, he says:
"Usually I either carried my dinner with me or went and bought it at some neighbouring shop. In the latter case it was commonly a saveloy and a penny loaf, and sometimes a fourpenny plate of beef from a cookshop, sometimes a plate of bread and cheese and a glass of beer from a miserable old public-house over the way--the 'Swan,' if I remember right, or the Swan and something else that I have forgotten. Once I remember tucking my own bread (which I had brought from home in the morning) under my arm, wrapped up in a piece of paper like a book, and going into the best dining-room in Johnson's Alamode Beef House in Charles' Court, Drury Lane, and magnificently ordering a small plate of Alamode beef to eat with it. What the waiter thought of such a strange little apparition coming in all alone, I don't know, but I can see him now staring at me as I ate my dinner, and bringing up the other waiter to look. I gave him a halfpenny, and I wish now that he had not taken it."
Soon after Dickens entered upon his engagement at the uncongenial blacking establishment, his mother's home was broken up and she joined his father in the debtors' prison, and Master Charles was then placed with a Mrs. Roylance at Camden Town, with whom he lodged for some time, boarding himself on his six shillings a week, which he apparently found by no means an easy job, as his appetite seems to have troubled him considerably by this.