Book The First: Poverty Chapter 18 Little Dorrit's Lover

Little Dorrit had not attained her twenty-second birthday without
finding a lover. Even in the shallow Marshalsea, the ever young Archer
shot off a few featherless arrows now and then from a mouldy bow, and
winged a Collegian or two. Little Dorrit's lover, however, was not a Collegian.

He was the sentimental son of a turnkey. His father hoped, in the fulness of time,
to leave him the inheritance of an unstained key; and had from his
early youth familiarised him with the duties of his office, and with an
ambition to retain the prison-lock in the family. While the succession
was yet in abeyance, he assisted his mother in the conduct of a snug
tobacco business round the corner of Horsemonger Lane (his father being
a non-resident turnkey), which could usually command a neat connection
within the College walls.

Years agone, when the object of his affections was wont to sit in her
little arm-chair by the high Lodge-fender, Young John (family name,
Chivery), a year older than herself, had eyed her with admiring wonder.
When he had played with her in the yard, his favourite game had been to
counterfeit locking her up in corners, and to counterfeit letting
her out for real kisses. When he grew tall enough to peep through the
keyhole of the great lock of the main door, he had divers times set down
his father's dinner, or supper, to get on as it might on the outer side
thereof, while he stood taking cold in one eye by dint of peeping at her
through that airy perspective.