Book the First: Poverty Chapter 7 The Child of the Marshalsea

When she fell asleep in the little armchair by the
high fender, the turnkey would cover her with his pocket-handkerchief;
and when she sat in it dressing and undressing a doll which soon came
to be unlike dolls on the other side of the lock, and to bear a horrible
family resemblance to Mrs Bangham--he would contemplate her from the
top of his stool with exceeding gentleness. Witnessing these things,
the collegians would express an opinion that the turnkey, who was a
bachelor, had been cut out by nature for a family man. But the turnkey
thanked them, and said, 'No, on the whole it was enough to see other
people's children there.'

At what period of her early life the little
creature began to perceive that it was not the habit of all the world to
live locked up in narrow yards surrounded by high walls with spikes at
the top, would be a difficult question to settle. But she was a very,
very little creature indeed, when she had somehow gained the knowledge
that her clasp of her father's hand was to be always loosened at the
door which the great key opened; and that while her own light steps were
free to pass beyond it, his feet must never cross that line. A pitiful
and plaintive look, with which she had begun to regard him when she was
still extremely young, was perhaps a part of this discovery.