Exhibits recall Dickens' factory horror - and boy workmate called Fagin

It was an experience that deeply marked his childhood but shaped his life's work: 200 years ago, 11-year old Charles Dickens was taken out of school to work in a rat-infested factory on the banks of the Thames to support his family as his father sank into debt.

- Harriet Sherwood

Now the Charles Dickens Museum in London is marking the bicentenary of the bleak period of the author's childhood by displaying letters from his father that illustrate the difficulties in the father-son relationship.

The museum is also displaying an early edition of The Life of Charles Dickens, the three-volume biography of the author by his friend John Forster that revealed the grim facts of his childhood.

In September 1823, the young Dickens was removed from school and sent to work, 10 hours a day, six days a week, at Warren's blacking factory, near where Charing Cross station is today. A few months later, John Dickens, Charles's father, was arrested and imprisoned for three months in the Marshalsea debtors' prison in Borough.

Charles spent a year fixing labels to bottles of blacking or boot polish. He never spoke of the experience, but wrote an account of it for Forster, whose biography was published two years after Dickens' death in 1870.