Read an Excerpt

The Charles Dickens Miscellany

The History Press

GROWING UP

• Chatham •

'Here the most durable of his early impressions were received,' wrote John Forster, Dickens' first biographer. How did the young Charles end up in Chatham? His father, John, was a clerk who worked for the navy and had set up home in Portsmouth with his wife Elizabeth. Here, three children were born: Fanny, Charles and Alfred, although Alfred died when he was just 6 months old.

In 1817 John Dickens was posted to the dockyard in Chatham and he took a house in Ordnance Terrace to accommodate his growing family: Letitia had been born during a brief stay in London in 1816, and Harriet (who died in childhood) and Frederick followed. Elizabeth's widowed sister Mary Allen was also part of the household. There was one move within Chatham: to St Mary's Place in 1821, where another Alfred was born.

John and his family took a full part in the life of the community. They were friendly with neighbours and with the family of a local landlord, Mr Tribe; Charles and Fanny were frequently set up by their father on a table in the Mitre Inn to entertain the company with songs and ballads of the day. And it was in Chatham that Dickens began his education. He tells us through John Forster that he was taught to read by his mother, but he probably also attended a dame school with Fanny. It was not until 1821 and the move to St Mary's Place that the children were educated more formally. The new school was in Clover Lane, now Clover Street, and run by William Giles, son of the minister of the Baptist chapel next door to the family home.

• The Theatre •

Mary Allen married for a second time while the Dickens family were in Chatham. This was to a widowed doctor, Matthew Lamert, at St Mary's church in 1821. Matthew had a son, James, who was a little older than the young Charles, and who became a great influence upon this early part of Charles' life. Most importantly, he accompanied Dickens to his first visits to the theatre. This was the beginning of a life-long passion. 'I tried to recollect,' he said in 1846, 'whether I had ever been in any theatre in my life from which I had not brought away some pleasant association, however poor the theatre, and I protest ... I could not remember even one.'

In fact, Dickens always had a great relish for bad theatre, and revisits Rochester in 'Dullborough Town', in The Uncommercial Traveller, to enjoy again the somewhat shaky productions he saw there. He does not spare the company, which is hard pressed to cover a long cast list:

Many wondrous secrets of Nature had I come to the knowledge of in that sanctuary: of which not the least terrific were, that the witches in Macbeth bore an awful resemblance to the Thanes and other proper inhabitants of Scotland; and that the good King Duncan couldn't rest in his grave, but was constantly coming out of it and calling himself somebody else.

• Money •

John Dickens' job entitled him and his family to regard themselves as middle class. The law, the armed forces, finance, medicine and the machinery of government had all spawned huge bureaucracies and new professions that were filled by an ever-growing army of clerks and administrators. They strove, like John, to educate their boys to equip them for office life and sometimes their girls to make homes and ornament them with their accomplishments. But the new middle classes had little money behind them if they went wrong or couldn't support their large families in seizing the opportunities they had anticipated. Things could unravel very quickly.

John drew a good salary at the dockyard and he appears to have been without expensive vices. He certainly got through his money, though. And more. He borrowed £200 in 1819 and could not keep up the repayments. The debt had to be covered by his brother-in-law, Thomas Barrow. It is possible that an attempt to save money was behind the move to St Mary's Place in 1821.

By the time John was recalled to London in 1822 the debts were considerable. And the new post meant a drop in salary. His reaction to these difficulties (and perhaps this was characteristic) was to send Fanny to school to study music – quite an investment. Twice, in 1823, there were summonses for the non-payment of rates. Rent no doubt was also in arrears, and there must have been numerous outstanding tradesmen's accounts. Elizabeth Dickens attempted to set up a genteel school herself and even went as far as obtaining a suitable property. No pupils ever came.

This precarious existence must have shaped the adult Charles' attitude to money. Part of his appetite for work certainly derived from the promise of monetary reward and, conversely, an anxiety about security. But he remained his father's son in terms of his spending, throwing money at his houses, his clothes, travel and parties. Such were his outgoings, and the complicated nature of his obligations to his publishers, that, despite his huge success, it was not until his seventh novel emerged that he could declare himself secure and free of financial embarrassments. And his childhood family – John, Elizabeth and his surviving brothers and sisters – continued to be something of a worry long after Charles had grown up. John borrowed money in his son's name; he started to sell samples of his writing and his signature; he wrote begging letters to publishers, bankers and friends. Charles became so exasperated that he eventually banished both parents to Devon, where they lived for more than three years before returning to London in 1842.

• Blacking •

Such was the family situation in 1823 that the young Charles had to go out to work, finding employment in a boot-blacking factory on the north bank of the Thames, near the site of the modern Charing Cross station. Great numbers of children in early nineteenth-century England would have done similar work – and many much, much worse. But for Dickens, it was a kind of oblivion, an end to all his hopes and dreams.

He kept this secret from almost everyone except John Forster, who revealed it in his 1872 Dickens biography. Forster himself had learnt of it in 1847, when Dickens produced what is now known as 'the autobiographical fragment', apparently intended to be only the first part of Dickens' own Life of Dickens – a plan abandoned when instead he put the substance of the fragment into David Copperfield. But, thanks to Forster's care of the original source material, we have the blacking warehouse in Dickens' own words:

It was a crazy, tumbledown old house, abutting of course on the river, and literally overrun with rats. Its wainscotted rooms and its rotten floors and staircase, and the old grey rats swarming down in the cellars, and the sound of their squeaking and scuffling coming up the stairs at all times, and the dirt and decay of the place, rise up visibly before me, as if I were there again. The counting-house was on the first floor, looking over the coal-barges and the river. There was a recess in it, in which I was to sit and work.

What was it about the episode that affected Dickens so profoundly? He thought his parents had given up on him (and bear in mind his elder sister had just been sent to a prestigious music school):

It is wonderful to me how I could have been so easily cast away at such an age. It is wonderful to me, that, even after my descent into the poor little drudge I had been since we came to London, no one had compassion enough on me ... to suggest that something might have been spared, as certainly it might have been, to place me at any common school ... No one made any sign. My father and mother were quite satisfied. They could hardly have been more so, if I had been twenty years of age, distinguished at a grammar-school, and going to Cambridge.

And he felt a kind of social extinction creeping upon him. In the fragment, he takes care to describe his working companions (especially their family connections and hence social status) before claiming:

No words can express the secret agony of my soul as I sunk into this companionship; compared these every day associates with those of my happier childhood; and felt my early hopes of growing up to be a learned and distinguished man, crushed in my breast.

• Prison •

On 20 February 1824 John Dickens was arrested. This was a distinct possibility for all debtors in the early nineteenth century if they were unable to persuade those to whom they owed money that the sum (or an agreed part of it) would eventually be forthcoming. To begin with, John was taken to a 'sponging house': secure accommodation designed to give those arrested a final chance to settle things with their creditors. Charles was sent here and there with messages and promises, to no effect. His father was taken to the Marshalsea prison, in Southwark. Charles met him there later, in the gaoler's lodge, and they both went up to his room, where, according to John Forster in his biography, they 'cried very much'.

At first John was on his own, but it was not long before the rest of the family joined him. Except Charles, of course, who continued with Warren's Blacking. A lodging was found for him at a children's boarding house in Camden, and thus, except for his rent which was paid for him, Charles set up on his own account, living off the 6s a week.

He missed everyone dreadfully and said so. Eventually another lodging was found for him near the prison, which at least eased that pain, but he remained, even in company he despised, horribly ashamed of his family circumstances. Once when he was kindly accompanied home by one of the other boys after an attack of some illness, he had to part with his companion on the doorstep of a stranger's house, pretending it was his own and not being able to get rid of him any other way.

In the end, a number of circumstances brought an opportunity for change. John Dickens declared himself insolvent, which led to his release from prison; he inherited some money, began receiving a pension from the navy and started working as a journalist. Although even these developments taken together fell some way short of relieving him of his money troubles, John felt able to dispense with the few shillings Charles was adding to the family income. It is possible that he had even become sensitive about his son's position, since there was a quarrel that led to Charles' departure. Charles himself never forgave his mother for patching up the family differences and arranging for him to go back. He never went back; he just carried the memory around with him always.

TAKING OFF

Dickens got to school eventually. He spent two years going to a place called Wellington House – which he remembered with very little affection – but when he left, at 15, he was ready for work. This came through an acquaintance of the family who found Charles work as a lawyer's clerk with the firm of Ellis and Blackmore. This lasted about eighteen months, and a short term at another solicitor's office followed. But it was dull. Other careers were calling, and it seemed that the opportunities offered by journalism were the most pressing.

• Reporting •

Dickens had family in the business, which helped. His father was writing occasional pieces, but he also had a maternal uncle making something of a name for himself in the field. This was John Henry Barrow, who in 1828 launched The Mirror of Parliament.

It was not long before Dickens was part of John Barrow's parliamentary reporting team and he was soon striking out writing for other publications, including the radical newspaper The True Sun. He tried, with Barrow's support, for a position on the Morning Chronicle. At first, nothing was available, but he was finally offered a permanent position in August 1834. The Morning Chronicle was a liberal paper and Dickens' job was to report on all parliamentary matters. This, of course, included elections (there were two in 1835) and political meetings – all around the country, before there was barely such a thing as a railway in the land. Deadlines were nevertheless overwhelmingly important and Dickens experienced many freezing, wet stagecoach journeys, bouncing about, writing on his knees, racing back to London to get his account in before the rival reporters on The Times.

• Acting •

Dickens had nourished an appetite for performing from a very young age and went so often to the theatre during his first independent years in London that it was not long before he speculated upon the possibilities of a theatrical career. He was a huge fan of the comic actor Charles Mathews, who had become something of a phenomenon on the London stage with what he called his 'At Homes'. These were solo shows which combined the physical slickness of the quick-change artist with an extraordinary talent for mimicry and comic timing. They included Mathews' 'monopolylogues', in which he impersonated a variety of widely differing comic characters linked together by a short narrative. Dickens saw him many times, learned some of the 'At Homes' by heart and imitated the physical skills. When Dickens applied for an audition at Covent Garden in 1832, he described himself very much in the Mathews mould: 'I believed I had a strong perception of character and oddity, and a natural power of reproducing in my own person what I observed in others.' (John Forster's The Life of Charles Dickens)

He got the chance, with an invitation to do 'anything of Mathews' that he might choose, but he had to cancel, because of a terrible cold, and the acting career never materialised.

This was, of course, by no means the end of Dickens' involvement with the stage. Indeed, his amateur efforts – and there were two in 1833, in the Dickens family lodgings – were taken quite as seriously (at least by him) as many professional productions. Acting and performing is a theme that genuinely runs through his entire life and animates his art.

• Writing •

Although Charles Dickens wasn't paid for his first published piece of work, 'A Dinner at Poplar Walk', he knew what it all meant. In the preface to the cheap edition of The Pickwick Papers, he tells us that he practically smuggled it into the magazine's offices – it was 'dropped stealthily one evening at twilight, with fear and trembling, into a dark letter box, in a dark office, up a dark court in Fleet Street' – and its emergence in print was an occasion of some emotion: 'I walked down to Westminster Hall, and turned into it for half an hour, because my eyes were so dimmed with joy and pride, that they could not bear the street, and were not fit to be seen there.'

More pieces for the Monthly Magazine followed. These were comic stories, which owed a lot to the theatrical farces so common on the London stage. It was at the end of one of these pieces, published in May 1834, that he signed his name as 'Boz', the nom de plume by which he first began to establish his reputation, and indeed his brand. As 'Boz', Dickens began to collect readers.

He was given further opportunities to please them. He began to write occasional pieces for the Morning Chronicle in addition to his reporting. These were his 'sketches' – informal surveys of parts of London, London themes or observations of London people, held together by a conversational tone rather than a narrative: a Londoner talking to Londoners. When an evening sister paper to the Morning Chronicle was launched, Dickens obtained a salary to continue his writing explorations in the same vein. The new editor was George Hogarth, who was to become Dickens' father-in-law within a few short months.

The increasing exposure brought Dickens to the attention of Harrison Ainsworth, a writer not much read today, but a real star of the literary scene at this time. Ainsworth must have admired Boz's work, because he introduced him to his own publisher, John Macrone, and very soon a collected volume of the newspaper and magazine pieces was on the cards. Somehow Macrone secured the services of George Cruikshank, the leading illustrator of the day. The resulting publication emerged in February 1836 as Sketches by Boz. It sold so well that a second edition was needed that year, and two more in 1837. Macrone soon started talking to Dickens about a second series, which appeared at the very end of 1836. Life was getting busy.

---

Excerpted from The Charles Dickens Miscellany by Jeremy Clarke. Copyright © 2014 Jeremy Clarke. Excerpted by permission of The History Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

---