I wonder what they thought of me!

David expresses this feeling of curiosity in Chapter XI while relating his boyhood trials working in the wine factory. Specifically, the adult David thinks back on how the people near the public house must have perceived him, a young boy eating his bread alone. As the narrator, looking back on his life in retrospect, David often makes such remarks, indicating how pathetic he finds himself as a small boy with nothing to eat, nowhere to go, and no one to care for him. The adult David feels sympathy for himself as a young, abused boy, and as he writes, he often reflects both on his own failings and on the cruelties the world visits on him as a boy. This introspection shows how the older David has learned from the experiences of his life. In particular, the early period of David’s life described in this passage closely mirrors the life of Dickens himself, who may have written these lines in honest self-reflection, picturing himself alone in London at age twelve, left alone to fend for himself as best he could.

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