Robert Douglas-Fairhurst’s title begs several questions, for there were many turning points in Dickens’s life. The first came in 1824 when his father was incarcerated in the Marshalsea debtors’ prison. Dickens’s mother and younger siblings moved in with his father, but Dickens, aged 12, was sent to work among, as he recalled, “common labouring boys” in Warren’s blacking warehouse. It was a humiliation he never forgot or forgave, and the dilapidated, rat-infested warehouse came back to him in nightmares all his life.
As a junior clerk in a law firm he was crazy about the theater and yearned to be an actor. In 1832 the manager of Covent Garden Theatre agreed to give him an audition, but on the fateful day he developed a sore throat and had to cancel, so he decided to be a writer instead.
