into a mere warehouse boy.

So little Charles, aged from eleven to twelve, first blacked boots,
and minded the younger children, and ran messages, and effected the
family purchases--which can have been no pleasant task in the then
state of the family credit,--and made very close acquaintance with the
inside of the pawnbrokers' shops, and with the purchasers of
second-hand books, disposing, among other things, of the little store
of books he loved so well; and then, when his father was imprisoned,
ran more messages hither and thither, and shed many childish tears in
his father's company--the father doubtless regarding the tears as a
tribute to his eloquence, though, heaven knows, there were other
things to cry over besides his sonorous periods. After which a
connection, James Lamert by name, who had lived with the family before
they moved from Camden Town to Gower Street, and was manager of a
worm-eaten, rat-riddled blacking business, near old Hungerford Market,
offered to employ the lad, on a salary of some six shillings a week,
or thereabouts. The duties which commanded these high emoluments
consisted of the tying up and labelling of blacking pots. At first
Charles, in consideration probably of his relationship to the manager,
was allowed to do his tying, clipping, and pasting in the
counting-house. But soon this arrangement fell through, as it
naturally would, and he descended to the companionship of the other
lads, similarly employed, in the warehouse below. They were not bad
boys, and one of them, who bore the name of Bob Fagin, was very kind
to the poor little better-nurtured outcast, once, in a sudden attack
of illness, applying hot blacking-bottles to his side with much
tenderness. But, of course, they were rough and quite uncultured, and
the sensitive, bookish, imaginative child felt that there was
something uncongenial and degrading in being compelled to associate