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There are, however, the Interpolated Tales of madness, betrayal, and murder, and Mr. Pickwick is forced to become a prisoner in his own room in the Fleet, for three months. The horrors young Charles Dickens had witnessed as a boy working in the blacking warehouse while his father was imprisoned for debt in the Marshalsea are not eliminated from Pickwick's world; indeed, his awareness of their existence is what allows Mr. Pickwick to become a fully loving, if finally not fully effective human being, who, with Sam's help, can see reality and relieve evil--to the best of his limited abilities.
Even as Pickwick Papers was enjoying its huge success, Dickens started Oliver Twist; or The Parish Boy's Progress in January, 1837; it continued in monthly numbers through 1838. In Oliver , Dickens explores the social evils attendant upon a political economy that made pauperism the rule rather than the exception. Oliver flees the cruel Sowerbys where he is apprenticed as an undertaker, having been sold to them by the workhouse for daring to ask for more -- food, love, nutrition, warmth -- and seeks his fortune in the criminal slum world of London proper. Befriended by the irrepressible Artful Dodger, he discovers warmth and good humor in Fagin's den, among thieves, pickpockets, prostitutes, and burglars. Dickens presents an unrelenting portrait of the filth and squalor that surround poverty and, refusing to romanticize the criminal world, at the same time makes it clear that this sector has been abandoned by society just as surely as Oliver and the other Parish Boys have been abandoned by an unresponsive system. This is the world the young Dickens saw at the blacking warehouse.
