Jasper County Democrat, Volume 6, Number 47, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 27 February 1904 — Dickens’ School Pets. [ARTICLE]

Dickens’ School Pets.

When Charles Dickens was a boy at Wellington House academy it was the secret pride of the students there that they owned more white mice, red polls and linnets than any other set of boys within their ken. These were kept in hat boxes, drawers and even in the school desks. A small but very accomplished mouse which lived in the corner of a Latin dictionary in Dickens’ desk and could draw Roman chariots, Are paper muskets and scale pasteboard ladders fell at last into an overfull Ink pot and lost both its white coat and its life. Dickens nevertheless won a prize for his Latin.