Tucked within the pages of Charles Dickens’ Great Expectations, there is a brief conversation between poor orphan Pip and struggling village blacksmith, Joe Gargery, when Warren’s Blacking Warehouse is mentioned.
It’s a fleeting reference to the real-life Victorian shoe polish factory where Dickens toiled 10-hour days as a 12-year-old boy plunged into poverty.
His father John, a clerk, was arrested and locked up in Marshalsea, a notorious debtors’ prison when he fell on hard times. It became Dickens’ job to push his childhood aside, leave his beloved school, and support his family.
