by Carlo DeVito
Maybe one of them had a copy of the newest publication, the News of the World, which had published its first issue that month. Certainly news was still coming out of Greece about the uprising in that country the month before on September 3. Or possibly Mitton might have had the September 28 issue of The Economist, another new journal. The election of the Lord Mayor of London was in its final days, as workmen busily fitted out Guildhall for the Lord Mayor’s Banquet. And of course there was great fascination with Burgess, a clerk in the power-of-attorney office at the Bank of England, who had recently absconded with more than £8,000.
Dickens was vexed. He was heading to Manchester to give a speech along with Benjamin Disraeli and Richard Cobden. Disraeli was an accomplished novelist turned politician, having gained a seat in Parliament; he would later become prime minister. Cobden was also a Member of Parliament and had cofounded the Anti-Corn Law League to fight against the law that helped wealthy landowners by imposing high tariffs on imported wheat, which in turn drove up the average cost of bread; at the same time, industry and business owners were trying to lower average workers’ wages.
All three were supposed to speak at the Manchester Athenaeum, an organization which provided the working class with education and culture in an effort to better their lives. Dickens himself had grown absolutely resolute in his position that an educated working class would be a benefit to both themselves as well as the nation.
Dickens had a profound concern for the working class, and especially the countless exploited children who had been forced to work in factories at a young age. Charles’ father, John Dickens, was forced by his creditors into the Marshalsea debtors’ prison in Southwark, London, in 1824. Charles had taken a job just two weeks before his father was sent to Marshalsea. He worked and pawned his mother’s jewelry and family furniture in a local shop on Hampstead Road, not far from the Euston train shed, where he became well known until they had run out of things to sell. His mother and the youngest children then joined John Dickens at Marshalsea (a common occurrence in those days). Charles, then twelve years old, boarded with Elizabeth Roylance, a family friend, at 112 College Place, Camden Town. According to Dickens, she was “a reduced [impoverished] old lady, long known to our family.” Dickens was forced to work in a boot black factory labeling pots of boot black six days a week, from 8 a.m. to 8 p.m., for six shillings a week, and was allowed to visit with his family at Marshalsea on Sundays. Child laborers, as he had once been forced to experience firsthand, suffered immensely from ignorance and want.
The courtyard at Marshalsea Prison.
“Dickens lived in what in effect was a slum—Camden Town in north London, cramped, damp, depressing, shrouded in smog and fog of what he called ‘a great and dirty city’,” wrote actor and scholar Simon Callow. “He now descended into hell, working a ten hour work day, engaged in the most menial of tasks, in the most sordid of conditions, surrounded by the roughest of working companions. He was tormented by the loss of his former happiness, and by the collapse of his dreams of growing up to be a learned and distinguished man.”
“His schoolboy’s few clothes became increasingly shabby and he detested the difficult-to-remove and defiling polish that grimed his hands and fingernails. As an adult he would be obsessive about his cleanliness. He would also be fetishistic about his clothes, from the dandy splendor of his twenties and thirties to the elegant seriousness of his later dress,” wrote biographer Fred Kaplan more than a century later.
Now, amongst the papers he had with him was his speech, which in part read, “And this I know, that the first unpurchasable blessing earned by every man who makes an effort to improve himself in such a place as the Athenaeum, is self-respect—an inward dignity of character, which, once acquired and righteously maintained, nothing—no, not the hardest drudgery, nor the direst poverty—can vanquish. Though he should find it hard for a season even to keep the wolf—hunger—from his door, let him but once have chased the dragon—ignorance—from his hearth, and self-respect and hope are left him. You could no more deprive him of those sustaining qualities by loss or destruction of his worldly goods, than you could, by plucking out his eyes, take from him an internal consciousness of the bright glory of the sun.”
But Dickens was flummoxed. He had given speeches before but he was never really sure of their effectiveness. Was this the best way to reach people on the subject? How could he be more convincing? He had thought to publish a pamphlet on this same subject, but wondered what effect such a publication might have.
The train lurched forward. Until 1844 trains were pulled up the incline to Camden Town by cables because the London and Birmingham Railway’s Act of Parliament prohibited the use of locomotives in the Euston area, a long-lasting gift to the contentious farmers who’d lost their battle with the railroad.
Going north, as he passed Camden Town, Dickens could not help but wince. There was the old neighborhood of his youth, when his family had moved to London, where the old house was. As he looked out to the right, passing Delancey Street, he gazed up that road for a brief instant, remembering the left-hand turn onto Bayham Street, to the tiny house where he and his mother and father and six brothers and sisters lived all packed together, while his father squandered money he didn’t have and tried to support his family on a clerk’s salary.
Those were dark times for Dickens. And while his current circumstances were worrisome due to the disappointing sales of Chuzzlewit, he was still far away from there in many ways. But his memories of Camden Town were never pleasant and seemed never far away. They were more like a lurking ghost, looming always like hunger at the door.
Wrote biographer Claire Tomalin, “All of these experiences—of debt, fear, angry creditors, bailiffs, pawnbrokers, prison, living in freezing empty rooms and managing on what can be borrowed or begged—were impressed on his mind and used again and again in his stories and novels, sometimes grimly, sometimes with humor.”
The train rumbled toward the Birmingham train station, used by passenger trains between 1838 and 1854 when it was the terminus for both the London and Birmingham Railway and the Grand Junction Railway. This was the halfway point of Dickens’ train ride. With its Doric columns, grand arches, and four platforms, Birmingham (later name Curzon Street Station) was a bustling railway hub.
The sluggish sales of Martin Chuzzlewit ate at Dickens. He did not understand its failure. Was his career at an end?
His friend and biographer Forster tried to explain it by way of saying, “The primary cause of this, there is little doubt, had been the change to weekly issues in the form of publication of his last two stories; for into everything in this world mere habit enters more largely than we are apt to suppose. Nor had the temporary withdrawal to America been favorable to an immediate resumption by his readers of their old and intimate relations. This also is to be added, that the excitement by which a popular reputation is kept up to the highest selling mark, will always be subject to lulls too capricious for explanation.”
“I am so irritated, so rubbed in the tenderest part of my eyelids with bay-salt,” wrote Dickens to Forster, “that a wrong kind of fire is burning in my head, and I don’t think I can write. Nevertheless . . . I am bent on paying the money.” Dickens was fuming, but he wasn’t completely unhinged. Always a smart businessman, he asked Forster to sound out Bradbury and Evans, a printer, before axing Chapman and Hall. Though Forster and Mitton were both friends of Dickens, the two did not like each other. But it is sure that Dickens and Mitton must have spent some time talking on this point.
Dickens was distraught and frustrated, later writing to Forster, “You know, as well as I, that I think Chuzzlewit is in a hundred points immeasurably the best of my stories. That I feel my power now, more than I ever did. That I have a greater confidence in myself than I ever had. That I know, if I have health, I could sustain my place in the minds of thinking men, though fifty writers started up tomorrow. But how many readers do not think! How many take it upon trust from knaves and idiot
s, that one writes too fast, or runs a thing to death! How coldly did this very book go on for months, until it forced itself up in people’s opinion, without forcing itself up in sale! If I wrote for forty thousand Forsters, or for forty thousand people who know I write because I can’t help it, I should have no need to leave the scene. But this very book warns me that if I can leave it for a time, I had better do so, and must do so.”
Money was in the forefront of Dickens mind. His wife Catherine was with child. The baby would be due in January. Dickens was by all accounts a wonderful father, but he was already vexed, for his household had grown quickly. They already had four children, and now with the fifth there would be nurses to pay, the visitation of the mother-in-law, and the providing for of the other children as well. This new mouth to feed, while of course a joyous blessing, must have seemed yet another layer of expense in Dickens’ eyes.
While visiting Broadstairs, a vacation home popular with Dickens and his family near the shore, he awoke from a dream one night during the summer just past. The dream stuck with Dickens, and plagued him.
Famed biographer Peter Ackroyd wrote of it, “This was a dream, also, in which his apparent frustration at the fact that Catherine was about to have another child, thus adding to his already large family’s demands, is expressed in the image of a baby being skewered on a toasting fork. The dream stayed with him . . . his own feeling of helplessness and indebtedness are strangely allied with his reaction to the children of the ragged school and the laboring men of Manchester Athenaeum. So it is that the public concerns and the private fantasies come together in a complete statement.”
Dickens thought of his sister, Fanny, who now lived in Manchester. Fanny amongst all his brothers and sisters was his favorite. She was two years older than Charles. Dickens held fond memories of their days spent together with their father, John Dickens, on the navy pay yacht in Chatham. They would run about the deck and watch the shore and the seagulls as the small vessel made its way up to Medway and Sheerness. On the way they would see two naval prison ships, Eurylis and Canada, and the hospital ship Hercules.
The two had attended an old dame school (a pejorative name for a school run by an elderly lady who it was presumed knew how to read and write), which was set above an odorous dyer’s shop. Dickens later remembered the school for the woman who ran it with a birch stick. Fanny was Dickens’ confidante and conspirator in childhood. The two became bonded, and Dickens was in love with his sister (in a strictly platonic way) for the rest of his life. And she, too, was devoted to him.
It was Fanny whom he would visit by 9 a.m. on Sunday morning at the school, and then the two of them would go to Marshalsea. In 1823 Fanny had been accepted at the Royal Academy of Music in Hanover Square. She studied with a former pupil of Ludwig van Beethoven, Ignaz Moscheles. This was not an inexpensive education, at thirty-eight guineas a year, especially for a family reeling from debt. And it may be supposed that Dickens’ own education had been scuttled as a consequence of Fanny’s gift for music.
Fanny had gained a kind of notoriety in Charles’ eyes when she performed on June 29, 1824, at a public concert which was attended by Princess Augusta, the sister of King George IV. The younger Dickens was struck by the experience, recalling years later, “I could not bear to think of myself—beyond the reach of all such honorable emulation and success. The tears ran down my face. I felt as if my heart were rent. I prayed, when I went to bed that night, to be lifted out of the humiliation and neglect in which I was. I had never suffered so much before. . . . ”
Despite this episode, Fanny held Charles’ heartstrings as a boy and young man. By 1834 she was a gifted singer and gave public concerts. She had been awarded an associate honorary membership at the Royal Academy. Catherine Hogarth, Charles’ soon-to-be wife, had described Fanny as “a very pretty girl who sings beautifully.” In 1837, though, she married fellow musician Henry Burnett and the couple moved to Manchester. Fanny had given up her career in 1839 after the birth of her son Harry Burnett, who was physically disabled. According to literary historians Michael and Mollie Hardwick, Fanny “helped [her husband] in the training of the choir at Rusholme Road Congregational Chapel.”
Despite the fact that Charles was not terribly fond of Henry, seeing Fanny was always a treat. In fact, it may be supposed that the only reason he accepted the present engagement to speak was based on the opportunity to visit with his sister.
Fanny Dickens.
And while Dickens visited Manchester numerous times in his life, he had mixed feelings for the town itself. He later wrote of it, as “Coketown,” in Hard Times: “It was a town of red brick, or a brick that would have been red if the smoke and ashes would have allowed it . . . a town of machinery and tall chimneys, out of which interminable serpents of smoke trailed themselves forever and ever, and never got uncoiled. It had a black canal in it, and a river that ran purple with some ill-smelling dye.”
After arriving at Liverpool Road Station in Manchester, the two friends parted. Dickens then made his way to a suburb of Manchester named Higher Ardwick, and Mitton departed for a hotel in Manchester. Dickens refused to stay in a local hotel, “not caring to be under hourly observation.” Instead he stayed with Fanny. “The Burnetts lived in one of the dignified Georgian houses in Upper Brook Street, behind Oxford Road,” wrote Michael and Mollie Hardwick.
There was a small gathering at the Burnetts’ that night. One of the attendees was Sir E. W. Watkin, First Baronet, a well-known Member of Parliament and a railway baron to boot. Mitton came as well.
“We were indebted for the presence of Charles Dickens to the kind influence of his elder sister—Mrs. Burnett— a self-denying saint, if ever one existed,” wrote Watkin.
“I shall enforce the necessity and usefulness of education,” Dickens told the group, according to Watkin. “I must give it to them strong.”
The one person Dickens did wish to see was Rev. William Giles, the schoolteacher of his youth in those idyllic days before the move to London (and eventually Camden Town) that Dickens still daydreamed about. It was thought that Giles had attended some classes at Oxford. His school focused on letter-writing and composition. Dickens remembered the school fondly, especially its fields where the boys played sports and acted out heroic feats. Giles was a helper, a teacher, and a guide for Dickens in the best of all possible ways that a teacher can be, and Dickens remained fond of him for the rest of his life. He was one of those adults who bent down to help a young child, in Dickens’ eyes.
The next day was the gala itself. Disraeli and Cobden were up on the stage with Dickens. All three gave rousing speeches. Dickens railed against the want of education in England at that time, saying that day upon the stage, “How often have we heard from a large class of men wise in their generation, who would really seem to be born and bred for no other purpose than to pass into currency counterfeit and mischievous scraps of wisdom, as it is the sole pursuit of some other criminals to utter base coin—how often have we heard from them, as an all-convincing argument, that ‘a little learning is a dangerous thing?’ Why, a little hanging was considered a very dangerous thing, according to the same authorities, with this difference, that, because a little hanging was dangerous, we had a great deal of it; and, because a little learning was dangerous, we were to have none at all. Why, when I hear such cruel absurdities gravely reiterated, I do sometimes begin to doubt whether the parrots of society are not more pernicious to its interests than its birds of prey. I should be glad to hear such people’s estimate of the comparative danger of ‘a little learning’ and a vast amount of ignorance; I should be glad to know which they consider the most prolific parent of misery and crime . . . I should be glad to assist them in their calculations, by carrying them into certain gaols and nightly refuges I know of, where my own heart dies within me, when I see thousands of immortal creatures condemned, without alternative or choice, to tread, not what our great poet calls the ‘primrose path’ to the everlasting bonfire, but one of jaded flints
and stones, laid down by brutal ignorance, and held together, like the solid rocks, by years of this most wicked axiom.”
It was, according to Dickens’ friend Forster, “a matter always nearest his heart, the education of the very poor. He protested against the danger of calling a little learning dangerous.”
Dickens concluded his speech, saying, “I am quite certain that long after your institution, and others of the same nature, have crumbled into dust, the noble harvest of the seed sown in them will shine out brightly in the wisdom, the mercy, and the forbearance of another race.”
“The soiree of the next evening was brilliant,” remarked E.W. Watkin in his memoirs many years later. “Dickens was at his very best; and it must have been difficult indeed to follow so admirable a speaker. But Mr. Disraeli certainly shared the honors and the applause of this great meeting. His speech, in fact, created so decided a sensation that I was asked to invite him to preside at the soiree of the coming year of 1844—which he did.
The gala over, Dickens was restless, and after much fanfare he took a long walk around Manchester. He kept turning over the speeches of the night in his head, and was plagued by the simple fact that getting his point across speech by speech was a nice effort, but not effective.
“Something about ‘the bright eyes and beaming faces’ on which he had looked down at the Manchester Athenaeum had given him the inspiration for a glowing, heart-moving story in which he would appeal to people’s essential humanity,” wrote famed British literary lion Edgar Johnson.
Indeed, Dickens had recently taken an interest in Ragged Schools. Ragged Schools were charitable schools dedicated to the free education of destitute children in nineteenth century Britain. The schools were developed in working-class districts of the rapidly expanding industrial towns. They provided free education, food, clothing, lodging, and other home missionary services for these children. Working in the poorest districts, teachers (who were often local working people) initially utilized stables, lofts, and railway arches for their classes. There was an emphasis on reading, writing, arithmetic, and study of the Bible.