I know enough of the world now , to have almost lost the capacity of being much surprised by anything ; but it is matter of some surprise to me , even now , that I can have been so easily thrown away at such an age . A child of excellent abilities , and whit strong powers of observation , quick , eager , delicate , and soon art bodily or mentally , it seems wonderful to me that nobody should have made any sign in my behalf . But none was made ; and I became , at ten years old , little labouring hind in the service of Murdstone and Grinby.

Murdstone and Grinby 's trade was among a good many kinds of people , but an important branch of it was the supply of wines and spirit to certain packet-ships . I forget now where they chiefly went, but I think there were some among them that made voyages both to the East and West Indies . I know that a great many empty bottles were one of the consequences of this traffic, and that certain men and boys were employed to examine them against the light, and rejet those that were flawed, and to rinse and wash them. When the empty bottles ran short, there were labels to be pasted on full ones, or corks to be fitted to them, or seals to be put upn the corks, or finished bottles to be packed in casks . All this work was my work, and of the boys employed upon it I was one .

No words can express the secret agony of my soul as I sank into this companioship ; compared these henceforth every-day associates with those of my happier childhood - not to say with Steerforth , Traddles , and the rest of those boys ; and felt my hopes of growing up to be a learned and distinguished man crusched in my bosom . The deep remembrance of the sense I had , of being utterly without hope now ; of the shame I felt in my position ; of the misery it was to my young heart to believe that day by day what I had learned , and thought , and delighted in , and raised my fancy and my emulation up by , would pass away from me , little by little , never to be brought back any more ; cannot be written . As often as Mick Walker went away in the course of that forenoon , I mingled my tears with the water in which I was washing the bottles ; and sobbed as if there were a flaw in my own breast , and it were in danger of bursting .

David Copperfield, after his mother's death , leaves Blunderstone for London. Mr murdstones, infact, obliges him to go and work at Murdstones and Grimby's wine warehouse. At the age of ten David becomes a little labouring boy. He works together with other three or four boys that work under the control of an adult supervisor. David describes the misery and the dirty of the working place . At the end of the nineteenth century the juvenile exploitation work and the hard conditions were considered a normal situation. But David can't express the secrety agony of his soul. He sees his future in a negative way and he has no hope: no possibility of learning and becoming a distinguished man. The misery of his work and of his social condition repress all his dreams and his expectations.