by Fred Kaplan
The family was musical. His mother loved dancing. His sister Fanny had talent, soon translated into piano and voice lessons and then specialized training for a musical career. Charles’s “comic singing gave the sociable John Dickens such delight that he often hoisted [him] up on a table to entertain the guests … or strolled down into the lower part of the town with the youngster to show him off there.” No doubt these songs, Dickens recalled, “were warmly applauded by all, and justly so, for they were admirably sung.” But he later remarked that he “must have been a horrible little nuisance to many unoffending grown-up people who were called upon to admire” him. His father pulled the strings. He “never recalled [these performances] that his own shrill little voice of childhood did not again tingle in his ears.”14 From early on, he developed a performance personality, encouraged to believe that applause was approval.
The theatre was his model. In a culture unable to transmit voice or image except through print and illustrations, the living stage flourished. In the city and in the country, from serious drama and opera to comedy, spectacle, and musical, in established theatres and in temporary outdoor sites frequented by traveling companies, the theatre was a magical presence, a precious alternate world. The excitement of the stage and of the histrionic, of an exaggerated bright spectacle that heightened life, caught his imagination from an early age. The first theatre performance he saw seems to have been a pantomime, of the sort he described when he edited for publication the memoirs of Joseph Grimaldi, the best-known clown of his childhood. “The delights—the ten thousand million delights of a pantomime … [to] which a long row of small boys, with frills as white as they could be washed, and hands as clean as they would come, were taken to behold the glories … What mattered it that the stage was three yards wide, and four deep? We never saw it. We had no eyes, ears or corporeal sense, but for the pantomime.” His dazzled eyes were wide open when he saw Grimaldi perform in London during the 1819–20 holiday season. In response to “the humour of Joe,” he clapped his “hands with great precocity.”15
There was also theatre at home, both in the household and in the Theatre Royal in Rochester. Charles brought his friends into the living room for impromptu performances of charades, pantomimes, comedies, melodramas, magic-lantern shows. Actor, director, producer, even script writer, he could conceive of and control the entire world of performance, the clever child glowing with the satisfaction of being center stage. In the autumn of 1821, he wrote a tragedy called Misnar, the Sultan of India, a brief adaptation of one of James Ridley’s pseudo-oriental Tales of the Genii (1794), and enjoyed the notoriety his authorship produced in his childish circle. A new friend, James Lamert, the son of Aunt Fanny’s suitor, Dr. Matthew Lamert, stimulated his imagination by organizing and directing sophisticated amateur theatricals. He also took him to the Theatre Royal, on whose stage the tragedian Edmund Kean and the comedian Charles Mathews performed. He saw his first professional performances of serious drama. Shakespeare’s Richard III and the witches in Macbeth made his heart “leap with terror.” Goldsmith’s depiction of “the funny countryman … of noble principles,” who would “crunch up his little hat and throw it on the ground, and pull off his coat, saying ‘Dom thee, squire, coom on with thy fistes then,’” brought tears of laughter to his eyes.16 Shakespeare and Goldsmith became the charged poles of his imagination. They were to be the two favorite authors of his maturity.
BUT NEITHER THE GLITTER OF THE THEATRE NOR THE BENEFICENCE. of Kent could disguise the fact that he was also nightmare’s child. Some of his fears were those widely shared by all children. He felt the unavoidable youthful anxieties, particularly about his separation from his mother. He felt the burden created by his father’s expectations. As an adult, remembering his childhood, he recognized that, whatever the widespread pattern, he had been the victim of what he humorously but seriously called frequent acts of “boyslaughter.” Some of them were benign. They came from the hateful changes that time works on everyone, including the demolishment of his boyhood landmarks. When he returned to Rochester in middle age, he remarked that the owner of the new coach business had done him an injury by tearing down the familiar building and substituting new buildings and a different name. Like many others, he had “committed an act of boyslaughter, in running over my childhood in this rough manner.”17
The fragility of life struck him with a particularity that expressed itself in singular images. He was taken by Mary Weller through the streets of Rochester to lyings-in, so many that he wondered afterward if he hadn’t escaped his true profession of midwife. As often as not, the infants died. He accompanied Mary to the receptions for the mothers of the dead children. In one instance, a multiple birth had produced four or five dead infants, who were laid out “side by side, on a clean cloth on a chest of drawers,” which reminded him “of pigs’ feet as they are usually displayed at a neat tripe-shop.”18 As the increasingly reluctant father of ten children, he did not escape, as he later joked painfully, many lying-in scenes of his own, separate from his novels. He heard the voices and moans of women in labor, the wails of newborn children. His novels memorialize the dying of children, the deaths of brothers, like the first Alfred, and sisters, and the rows of small tombstones that dominate Pip’s early childhood, and the imaginative transmutation of those dead infants into food laid out in the butcher’s window. Many of his most potent descriptions of death and dying associate the bodies of the dead with food for the living. As an adult, he frequently expressed his feeling that he had become the sole source of food for an impossibly large family. From childhood on, he became obsessed with cannibalism, with images and scenes of human beings ingesting other human beings, of people being transformed into food, and also with the act of eating, both as festival and as Thyestes’ feast. When he projected the pattern onto the world at large, it became a key to his understanding of relationships between people and an image of society’s exploitativeness.
His need as a child to protect himself against diminishment, even annihilation, had its special points of location and expression. Reading was a way to augment the self with a private protective treasure. Writing became a way to increase the self. Probably he heard family discussions, if not arguments, about money. Early acquainted with its value, he had little or none in his pocket. What he had, he protected. When a subscription was being raised for the mother of the dead infants, he was frightened that the little bit of pocket money he had might be pressured out of him. When he “was earnestly exhorted to contribute,” he “resolutely declined: therein disgusting the company, who gave me to understand that I must dismiss all expectations of going to Heaven.”19 At an early age he began to learn to say no, to exert his will to protect himself. The likelihood, though, of not going to a literal heaven had little terror for him. His family was not religious. Neither ritual nor theology had a place in its daily activities, except insofar as the public calendar mandated for people of such easygoing Anglicanism occasional attendance at church and the celebration of holidays. From an early age, hell was a place of the mind, an inner world of tensions, anxieties, and nightmares, the more terrifying because it could not be controlled.
For the demons of the mind to emerge aggressively, all one had to do was put one’s head down on the pillow. “Are not the sane and the insane equal at night as the sane lie a dreaming? Are not all of us outside” the madhouse “who dream more or less in the condition of those inside it, every night of our lives?” Fascinated by dreams, he later located the primal force of life in unconscious and semiconscious states, for dreams are “the insanity of each day’s sanity,” significant and frightening in what they reveal about our true selves. He made the voyage into dreams, folk tales, horror stories, unwillingly but inescapably. They did much to determine the phantasmagoric and nightmarish tone of his own stories and novels. Like the tale of Captain Murderer, which Mercy apparently told him frequently, many of the stories of his childhood and his own later fiction were stories of cannibalism, of the self bei
ng dissected, devoured, served for someone else’s sustenance, of the nightmare destiny of both the devoured and the devouring. They were Faustian stories, such as the one, which he later wrote out in detail, in which a shipbuilder named Chips makes a compact with the devil in the form of a rat. No matter how hard he tries to escape, the rat sticks to him “like pitch.” The devil-rat multiplies into many rats on shipboard, gleefully exclaiming, though only the privileged Chips, who has special powers of understanding and language, can understand them, “we’ll drown the crew, and we’ll eat them too!… And what the rats—being water-rats—left of Chips, at last floated to shore, and sitting on him was an immense over-grown rat, laughing.…” Boyslaughter and laughter were part of the same voyage.20
SOME OF THE LAUGHTER IN THE HOUSEHOLD BEGAN TO BE MUTED BY family misfortunes. They were of the most hauntingly pernicious kind for people aspiring to retain their lower-middle-class gentility. John Dickens could not maintain his style of living without small loans, most of them from tradespeople in the currency of goods and services, to be paid for in part or in full at the next payday. That he was paid quarterly made the pattern of small borrowings seem sensible. He began to find himself with more debts and anticipated expenses than cash. He borrowed money from his mother, to be deducted from what would be his share of her small estate. It was painful to him to confirm her opinion that he was irresponsible, “that lazy fellow John … against whose idleness and general incapacity she was never tired of inveighing.” In the summer of 1819, he borrowed two hundred pounds in a business arrangement to be repaid at 26 pounds a year for the rest of his life. He did not keep up the payments. His brother-in-law Thomas Barrow, who had countersigned the loan, was forced to retire it in full in 1821. Dickens never repaid him. His friend on Ordnance Terrace, Richard Newnham, also lent him money, which some years later he generously forgave.21 Tradespeople, though, could not afford to be forgiving. Their knocking at the door trying to collect small debts frayed the family’s nerves and threatened their sense of self-worth.
The happy occasion of Mary Allen’s marriage to Matthew Lamert in December 1821 had the inconvenient consequence of depriving them of her regular contribution to the family budget. The Lamerts moved to Ireland, though young James Lamert, Matthew’s son by a previous marriage, stayed behind, living with the Dickens family temporarily. In March 1822, Alfred Lamert Dickens was born, the sixth child of the household.
Meanwhile, Charles’s attendance at Giles’s school fed his aspirations toward gentility. The curriculum emphasized penmanship, elocution, vocabulary, arithmetic, history, geography, and Latin. He won a prize for a recitation. His white beaver hat became a symbol of his sense of his own worth. It represented his need for praise, his hope for distinction, his sense that Gad’s Hill Place and what it represented could be his one day. Fortunately, the family’s financial discomfort did not impinge upon his school attendance.
In June 1822, unexpectedly, John Dickens was transferred back to London. The ten-year-old Charles must have heard the laughter of the devil-rat. The family was on the move again, with the loss of “outport” pay, with the difficulty of finding housing, and under the strain of unpaid bills and almost no cash. Chatham and Rochester had been a comfortable home, the place he most identified with, the center of his personal security in a world that had become constructively stabilized. The cathedral had been like a pillar anchoring his world. What was happening was threateningly destabilizing. Where would they live? What school would he go to? Would he have friends, people to care for him, to nurture his sensibility and his aspirations? Despite his terror, he had to imagine that he would. He could not have anticipated that the reality would be even more damaging than he feared.
CHAPTER TWO
The Hero of My Own Life
(1822–1834)
PREPARATIONS TO LEAVE WERE SOON UNDER WAY, THE FAMILY’S possessions packed and shipped to London by boat. Unexpectedly, at the last moment, a special arrangement was made for Charles. He would not go to London with the family. Staying with William Giles, he would attend school in Chatham for another quarter. Given a temporary reprieve, he had one last summer in Kent. Three months later, his teacher gave him a book of essays by Goldsmith as a going-away present. On a dismal day in September 1822 he was packed “like game,” amid the odorous damp straw, into the Rochester-to-London coach, and forwarded to Cheapside. “There was no other inside passenger, and I consumed my sandwiches in solitude and dreariness, and it rained hard all the way, and I thought life sloppier than I had expected to find it.”1
Delivered to his parents’ new home at 16 Bayham Street, Camden Town, he found casual disorder, the chaos of domestic and financial confusion. His salary insufficient to pay current expenses and previous obligations, John Dickens struggled to pay an outstanding “bond” with the only recourses available to him, the pursuit of new loans and the curtailment of current expenses. Both created the tensions of humiliation and deprivation. Probably the parents were less vulnerable than Fanny and Charles, who were old enough to feel the anxiety and observe the daily insults but not old enough to have any sense of control over their own lives. John Dickens may have been sure that “something would turn up.”2 But the effort to deal with retrenchment, avoid creditors, and find new sources of money drained the family’s emotional resources.
That fall and winter of 1822–23 contrasted bleakly with his previous years in Kent. “Solitude and dreariness” were the initial qualities of the London life to which the coach from Chatham had brought him. He had hoped that at least his new life would be no worse than what had been before, but he quickly discovered that his comforting assumptions were unwarranted. He was caught in the trap of his parents’ preoccupation with survival. Benign neglect soon became pernicious irresponsibility. He had expected to be enrolled in school, even if the particulars of his future were somewhat vague. Whatever the details, he had already imagined himself a man with a profession, enjoying success. He would be a gentleman by talent and achievement. Such was the implied promise of his father’s expectations, and of the praise that he had received from family, friends, and teachers. As the months passed, though, he was not enrolled in school. Left mainly to drift, he did minor chores in and outside the house, polishing his father’s boots, going on odd errands, looking after his younger sisters and brothers.
Fortunately, there was relief from boredom and failure, especially since his parents desired to maintain as normal a family life as possible and their stubborn emotional resilience helped them to survive their continuing embarrassments. Both had a reckless kind of mercuriality, an ability to turn quickly from tears to laughter. Unlike their son, they could compartmentalize misfortune. One of Charles’s pleasanter memories of this time was a toy theatre that James Lamert, still living with them, made for him. But that preferable alternative world could be sustained only in the imagination. Another helpful diversion was visits to Christopher Huffam, his godfather, at Church Row, Limehouse, on the Thames, and to Thomas Barrow, his uncle, who lived on Gerrard Street, Soho. Just as the toy theatre provided continuity with his childhood theatrical obsession, the visits to Huffam affirmed his powers as a performer and his visits to Barrow his view of himself as a serious reader and potential author. The Huffam family had been in the ship-rigging business for two generations. Huffam and John Dickens had become friends, probably through the navy and marine connection. Encouraging Charles’s song-and-dance performances, Huffam pronounced the boy a prodigy. Thomas Barrow, Elizabeth’s brother and John Dickens’ colleague, indirectly provided him with books. Having recently had a leg amputated, the result of a serious break years before, he lived over a bookshop whose widowed owner, Mrs. Manson, took a maternal fancy to Charles. She regularly lent him books, Jane Porter’s Scottish Chiefs, Hans Holbein’s Dance of Death, George Coleman’s comic descriptions of London scenes, Broad Grins. 3
The visits became excursions into the wider world of London experience. Though excluded from the advantages of formal educat
ion, he discovered that the streets had their texts and lessons. A comic description of Covent Garden in Broad Grins intrigued him sufficiently to tempt him to “steal down to the market by himself to compare it with the book.” The smell of rotting cabbage leaves became fixed in his memory. The stateliness of St. Paul’s, the squalor of Seven Dials, these first restless days in London began his observation and absorption of the multiplicity of the city, the mediation that language provides between the individual and the fullness of the world. Even at this early age, he began to develop his sense of himself as the eye that observes, records, and evaluates. Some years and many walks later, he found the words that his eyes anticipated in Covent Garden and Seven Dials. He saw “dirty men, filthy women, squalid children, fluttering shuttlecocks, noisy battledores, reeking pipes, bad fruit, more than doubtful oysters, attenuated cats, depressed dogs, and anatomical fowls.” St. Paul’s, as for other literary Londoners, took on a special emotional significance. It seemed to tower above and dwarf the child and the man. But his interest, from the beginning, was more in the rotting cabbage leaves than in the monumental structures. Some of what he observed, he had an impulse to describe. Influenced by his teething on eighteenth-century essays and fiction, he thought in terms of the character sketch, the memorability of distinctive people. He wrote one sketch describing his uncle’s barber in Soho, another describing a deaf old woman servant at Bayham Street.4 Though he thought them clever and admired them himself, he showed them to no one.
WHATEVER TALENT HE HAD, IT WAS OF NO PRACTICAL USE TO HIS distracted parents. They were of little use to him. At his age, and in these circumstances, to be intelligent, sensitive, articulate, and attracted to literature was as much a burden as a blessing. What could he do, as eight months went by and no provision was made for him other than to continue, by default, his desultory life? What he most wanted was direction, involvement, and attention. Restless, he was filled with undirected energy. Convivial and friendly by strategy as well as by nature, he needed companionship of the sort that his siblings and his parents did not provide. Even when the temper of the household was amiable, it did not speak directly to his needs. The digressions of the toy theatre, of visits to his uncle and his godfather, of reading and of street scenes, were unsatisfying without a focus from which they could be diversions.