ABSTRACT
In the plaintive account of that period in his boyhood when he was made to become just what he was to cause the 10-year-old David Copperfield to become, ‘a little labouring hind’,‘a little labouring hind’, 1 Dickens describes the daily journeys he was obliged to take to and from the rat-infested, riverside warehouse where he worked – Warren’s Blacking at Hungerford Stairs, Westminster – and his lodgings on the other side of the river in Lant Street, Southwark. ‘My usual way home’, he wrote in the famous fragment of autobiography that in January 1849 he showed his friend and future biographer, John Forster ‘was over Blackfriars-bridge, and down that turning in the Blackfriars-road which has Rowland Hill’s chapel on one side, and the likeness of a golden dog licking a golden pot over a shop door on the other’ 2 .
