Dickens

by Fred Kaplan

  As the months went by, his friendship with Kolle flared. His friendship with Mitton strengthened. Probably through his father, he met Thomas Beard, a young reporter, five years older than himself. Beginning in 1832, John Dickens and Beard were colleagues on the staff of the Morning Herald. A generous, enthusiastic young man, Beard, a talented reporter from a family of brewers in Sussex, provided amiable companionship on long walks and in evening entertainments at taverns and in theatres. They were soon to be colleagues, and to begin a lifelong personal and family intimacy. Still living with his own family, Charles moved with them from one residence to another, ending finally at 18 Bentinck Street, near Cavendish Square. When his parents were inconveniently located, he rented furnished lodgings for himself, including rooms on Cecil Street and, in 1831, rooms that he shared briefly on Buckingham Street.31 He began to work long hours, transcribing debates. Having impressed his uncle with his intelligence and competence, he was awarded with some managerial and secretarial responsibilities at the Mirror of Parliament. In November 1831, for the second time, John Dickens declared himself an insolvent debtor, a kind of painful bad joke played out in the background of his son’s attempt to rise in the world and win a bride.

  Charles’s effort to triumph with Maria persisted for about two years. With the details of his family history obscured by silence, he behaved as if they had never been poor, let alone debtors. He believed that he could persuade Maria and her parents, the former with “the simple truth and energy” of his love, the latter with the claim that he would “raise himself by his own exertions and unceasing assiduity.” He had little real sense of what a poor match she would be for him. By the spring of 1832, the end of the painful game was becoming clear to him. His struggle to accept defeat lasted for another year. At the beginning of February 1833, at a coming-of-age party, which he seems to have originated and paid for, but for which his mother sent out the invitations, Maria apparently insulted him, though without being aware how deeply, by telling him that he was a boy. The word “scorched [his] brain.”32

  In the months ahead he elaborately justified himself. He accused Maria of “heartless indifference” and he dramatized his wounded feelings. He also ferociously attacked Mary Anne Leigh for meddling mischieviously, and he denounced his sister Fanny, whom “no consideration on earth shall induce me ever to forget or forgive,” because she had not told him of Mary Anne’s interference and misrepresentation. There was more temporary rhetorical bluster in his criticism of Fanny than long-lasting anger. He was unable, though, to distinguish between them. In May, he told Maria that “I have no hopes to express nor wishes to communicate. I am past the one and must not think of the other.” He was true to his feelings when he too readily exclaimed that “I have been so long used to inward wretchedness, and real, real misery.” He also claimed that toward Maria he had “never had and never can have an angry feeling.” Later in May, aware of the futility of his proposals, “sans pride, sans reserve sans anything but an evident wish to be reconciled,” he made one final effort to convince her of his worthiness. “I never have loved and I never can love any human creature living but yourself … and the love I now tender you is as pure, and as lasting as at any period of our former correspondence.”33 His rhetoric was self-defining. His intensity was at its highest at the moment when the loss was irrecoverable. Fortunately, the relationship was at an end. Two years later he had no trouble pledging his love to someone else.

  SITTING IN HIS RENTED OFFICE IN THE DULL WORLD OF THE ECCLESIAStical courts, he wrote in March 1832 to George Bartley, the manager of Covent Garden Theatre, requesting an audition. He told him how young he was “and exactly what I thought I could do; and that 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.”34

  Vocation had become a problem much on his mind. His uncertain earnings as a free-lance stenographer at Doctors’ Commons, the ecclesiastical court, and his lowly status in the hierarchy of journalism neither helped him with Maria nor fulfilled his own ambition. Since childhood he had been fascinated by theatrical performance, the brilliance of Grimaldi, the terror of Shakespeare, the histrionics of Charles Kean. He could not stay away from the theatre. Eager to please in a childhood world in which he needed to demonstrate that he was worthy of being loved, he had developed a performance personality, wearing the various masks that would earn him applause. He had been an entertainer, a song-and-dance child, singing for his emotional supper. He had become a self-conscious actor and playwright, performing in his own and other people’s stage dramas. Perhaps he could solve his vocational problem by becoming an actor.

  For some time, he had been attending the theatre constantly. Fortunately, it was cheap, with half-price admission after the first act. He later claimed to have gone to some performance—pantomime, comedy, farce, extravaganza, spectacle, ballet, opera, melodrama, tragedy—every night for about three years. In late 1832 he saw the famous William Charles Macready perform at Drury Lane. For “three or four successive years” he regularly attended the At Homes of the comedian Charles Mathews, whom he idolized, “travelling entertainments” that emphasized imitation and mimicry. Apprenticing himself to the best acting available, he practiced diligently all the movements and gestures, “often four, five, six hours a day.” From a well-known manual he learned a widely practiced system for memorizing parts that he used successfully throughout his life both in amateur theatricals and for public speeches.

  To Charles’s delight, Bartley responded to his request for an audition “almost immediately,” setting an appointment for April. Fanny agreed to be his accompanist. Though unpaid bills had forced her to leave the Royal Academy at the end of June 1827, she had become an instructor there, and had been earning a living as a teacher and professional accolades as a performer. With high hopes, Charles practiced his repertoire of comic songs and skits. When the day came he “was laid up … with a terrible bad cold and an inflammation of the face.” Though he commented years later about how near he “may have been to another sort of life,” his heavy cold may have been as much ambivalence and stage fright as organic illness. Whatever his fascination with the theatre, he might have found the life of an actor ultimately as tediously repetitious as the duties of a court stenographer. His need to control the conditions of his professional life would have been much more difficult to achieve in the world of the Victorian stage than in a writer’s study. He wrote to Bartley, explaining his indisposition, and “added that [he] would resume [his] application next season.”35

  By then, though, his restless imagination was being increasingly absorbed by the new interest he felt in journalism. At the same time, with a flurry of confused, self-lacerating correspondence, he was liberating himself from Maria. His hopes were over. But the theatre was still a preoccupation. By April 1833, he had given up the idea of becoming a professional actor. Yet, as if to affirm the theatre’s enduring importance to him, he plunged into organizing, producing, directing, and acting in an evening of private theatricals at the Dickens home on Bentinck Street. Rooms were emptied and furniture rearranged. “The whole family was infected with the mania for Private Theatricals.” During the month in which he made his last proclamations of undying love for Maria, he not only worked long hours in the gallery but carried on the preparation for the performances of an opera in two acts, Clari, or, The Maid of Milan; an interlude, The Married Bachelor; and a farce, Amateurs and Actors. He wrote a prologue, organized rehearsals, assigned parts, supervised costumes, lighting, staging, and scenery, with an enthusiasm for total control that energized himself and his colleagues.

  Enlisting his friends and family, he became the absolute manager. Henry Kolle and Henry Austin, an architect and engineer who soon was to marry Dickens’ sister Letitia, were in charge of the lighting. Austin acted as his secretary. Austin’s sister Amelia read the prologue. There was a band and scenery. A playbill was printed. He sent the actors, in Austin’s handwriting, a
peremptory list of regulations: “I. Mr. Dickens is desirous that it should be distinctly understood by his friends that it is his wish to have a series of Weekly Rehearsals for some time, experience having already shown that the Rehearsals are perhaps the most amusing part of private Theatricals.… 2. It is earnestly hoped that Ladies and Gentlemen who may have somewhat inferior parts assigned them in any piece, will recollect the impossibility of giving every performer a principal character, and that they will be consequently induced rather to consult the general convenience and amusement than individual feeling upon the subject.… 3 [Costume]. 4.… a punctual attendance at Rehearsals, and an early knowledge of the several parts, are most especially necessary. 5. It is proposed that a Rehearsal shall take place every Wednesday at 7 o’clock precisely—Charles Dickens, Stage Manager.”36

  In honor of Shakespeare’s birthday, the plays were performed on April 23, 1833. Dickens played the starring roles in a cast that contained most of his friends and family. Only his mother was excluded. Thomas Mitton, Henry Austin, Letitia Dickens, Fanny Dickens, his younger brothers Frederick and Alfred, and even John Dickens, as the farcical Mr. Elderberry, had parts. Like his son, the portly journalist delighted in footlights and performance, though he was always limited in his son’s casting to one role. The next year he played it explicitly, performing as the “Great Unpaid” in another private theatrical, a musical parody of Othello written and arranged by his son, in which he sang,

  Oh! take me home to my “missus” dear;

  Tell her I’ve taken a little more wine

  Than I could carry, or very well bear;

  Bid her not scold me on the morrow

  For staying out drinking all the night;

  But several bottles of soda borrow,

  To cool my coppers and set me right.37

  The final break with Maria, amid a flurry of angry communications, came the next month. It left him posturing that he had a broken heart, that he would never cease to love her. The break, though, was a timely one. That he had the courage to accept it marked a stage in his maturity. In his fiction he would transform Maria into a youthful version of his mother, the prototype of the flighty, self-indulgent coquette whose feelings never run deep enough to know and express real love. In his life, he remained both attracted to and critical of such an embodiment of female ego, whose physical beauty and domineering manner attracted him erotically. Pain and pleasure, rejection and acceptance, were closely allied in his emotional and sexual life. Against that attraction, against women like Maria and his mother, he needed an antidote, a pure sister, an ideal wife. He also needed to find a counterbalancing satisfaction in his work, in the praise, admiration, and love of his friends and admirers. By 1832 he had begun to create a circle, an extended family. Though some of his family members belonged, he reached out to Mitton, Austin, Kolle, and soon Thomas Beard, in his first successful effort at building a supportive, protective community whose love for him would be unqualified.

  His journalistic work began to take on a new energy and excitement. In March 1832 he had become a parliamentary reporter for a new paper, the True Sun, while continuing to work for the Mirror of Parliament, where his uncle expanded his responsibilities. In his effort to gain recognition as the official parliamentary record, Barrow drew on his nephew’s organizing skills to create “masses of papers, plans, and prospectusses.” Much of the work was done at his uncle’s home in Norwood, where he was well enough over Maria by late 1833 to be attracted by “a very nice pair of black eyes.” Recognized as extraordinarily competent at shorthand and a disciplined, vigorous worker, “the most rapid, the most accurate, and the most trustworthy reporter then engaged on the London press,” he began to be asked to do special assignments, many of which were to take him in the next few years across and around England to report on important elections and to transcribe lengthy speeches.38

  Still living with his family on Bentinck Street, he saw his father not only at home but at work. On the surface, he dealt considerately with him and with his mother, and warmly with his two sisters. Two of his brothers, Alfred and Frederick, toward whom he felt affectionate and protective, were becoming teenagers. When he had begun working at Ellis and Blackmore in 1827, his mother had been nursing an infant. With their usual disregard for the relationship between income and expenses and with the same inability to prevent conception that their son later displayed, the Dickenses had had another child, named Augustus, at a time when children were neither emotionally nor financially desirable.

  Soon disaster struck again. In November 1834, John Dickens was arrested for an outstanding bill owed to his wine merchant. Pressed for rent arrears at Bentinck Street, John confessed that “we have been living in apartments … much beyond our means … our establishment is about being broken up … Charles … into chambers and your humble servant ‘to the winds.’” Charles had previously resolved “to leave home.”39 He could now afford it, and the independence essential to his maturity had become a necessity that he needed to embrace.

  CHAPTER THREE

  The First Coming

  (1834–1837)

  HE HAD NOT BEEN CAST BY HIS FAMILY FOR THE ROLE OF EMINENT writer, let alone genius, of his age. “None of us guessed at it,” his father said, “and when we heard that he had become a reporter … my brother-in-law Barrow … and other relations anticipated a failure.”1 No one had seen harbingers of distinction. At school, he was no more than bright and responsive, with a retentive memory. His preoccupation with theatre and literature enriched his inner life, adding to his social presence more than expressing special talents or unusual promise. As a child, his frailty undercut his natural energy. Severely depressed by his six months in the blacking factory, recovering gradually from the diminishment of expectations inflicted on him by his parents’ limitations, he began to reveal energy and compensatory self-confidence. But initially he had no vocational focus. Much of his childhood energy had gone into keeping himself as healthy as possible in a repressive environment. Much of the energy of his next decade had been absorbed by the slow process of emotional healing. He neither steadily glowed nor fitfully sparkled before an impressionable world. When he left his legal clerkship to attempt to be a reporter, his family thought he had aimed too high. When, in the next two years, he went from legal to parliamentary reporting, they expected a failure. Understandably, they were unprepared for the explosive release of energy and talent that transformed him in a three-year period into an internationally celebrated writer. Even he was startled. His ability to reimagine himself could not keep pace with his achievements.

  In August 1834, he applied to become a reporter for the Morning Chronicle. Since at twenty-two he hardly looked his age and had little formal education, almost no one thought he could be competent.2 On the recommendation of his uncle, who had unsuccessfully attempted to get him employed by The Times, and with the help of Thomas Beard, already on the staff, he unexpectedly got the job. By December he had been working for the Chronicle for five months. When the family dispersed in December, Dickens was ready. Since publishing his first “article” in the Monthly Magazine in December 1833, he had published seven more by the time of his appointment to the Chronicle, and another seven by the end of 1834. The Monthly Magazine paid nothing for them. It seemed possible, though, that he might persuade the editor of the Chronicle, who had given thought to the possibility that it would be a good thing to publish some of his employee’s sketches, to pay him for them. Here, then, was a potential additional source of income. When he and fourteen-year-old Frederick moved into 13 Furnival’s Inn in Holborn, even having to borrow small sums to cover his moving expenses did not dampen his triumphant sense of having come into his own. One of his first impulses was to make a housewarming party.

  The Chronicle paid him five guineas a week. Unlike his income from court stenography and the Mirror of Parliament, it was a secure annual salary. When Parliament was not in session, he was assigned to do theatre reviews and general reporting. His dutie
s were demanding, and meant long hours, usually nights, taking his turn with other Chronicle reporters in the hot crowded gallery of the House, and rapid coach, carriage, and horseback trips to provincial political events in order to record important speeches and to get the transcriptions into print as soon as possible. The need to beat out the competition put an added premium on quickness and accuracy and on making rapid-express arrangements to get the copy back to the office. Just a few weeks after joining the Chronicle, he was sent to Edinburgh to report on a political banquet given for Earl Grey. It was his first travel outside southeastern England. Journeying by steamer up the coast, Dickens and Beard were a professional team on the first of a series of ventures that bound them together as friends and colleagues. In November, he reported a meeting of the Birmingham Liberals. At the beginning of January 1835, they spent almost a week reporting on the general-election nominations in Colchester, Braintree, Chelmsford, Sudbury, and Bury Saint Edmunds. In May, they reported on the Exeter speech of Lord John Russell, the leading Whig politician of the day, in November his speech to the British Reformers in Bristol, then an election meeting in Birmingham, a “town of dirt, ironworks; radicals, and hardware.” In December, they covered the by-elections at Northampton. At the end of January 1836, they attended two political dinners given for the Irish nationalist Daniel O’Connell in Liverpool and Birmingham. On one occasion, after two good-natured colleagues held “a pocket handkerchief” over his notebook during a rainstorm to keep it dry, he returned to London with “a slight touch of rheumatism” and “perfectly deaf.” In every kind of weather, from sunshine to pelting rain, dry or soaked, clean or muddy, indoors or outdoors, he observed the British political process at work.3