Charles Dickens: A Life

by Claire Tomalin

  The shortage of money in his own family led his mother to think how she could put her talents to use now that her husband’s salary was not growing fast enough to keep pace with the needs of the children. It was after all the very problem that had driven her father to embezzle, and after consulting with friends she decided on a bold plan. She would run a school, on the principle that she was able to teach her own children and therefore might as well teach others. In the autumn of 1823 she took a lease on a large house in Gower Street North and put up a brass plate announcing: ‘Mrs Dickens’s Establishment’. She was encouraged by Huffam, who had contacts in the east, and who thought she would be sure to get pupils from among the many British children sent home by their parents from India. Bayham Street was abandoned, along with a pile of unpaid bills, and the family moved down the hill to take up their abode in the much more spacious house in Gower Street North.8 Charles was sent out with circulars advertising the school, and began to hope it might lead to his being sent to school himself. His hopes did not last long. No pupils arrived and no inquiries were made. All that happened was that they were pursued by creditors with increasing ferocity, their furious knockings and shoutings at the front door driving his father to ignominious hiding places upstairs. Finally he could hide no more and he was arrested for debt in February 1824.

  John Dickens was taken first to a sponging house, kept by a bailiff as a preliminary place for holding debtors. Here Charles was sent by his mother to attend on him, and used by his father as a messenger to carry his various apologies and requests for help to family and friends. No help came from his brother William in Oxford Street, or from Mrs Dickens senior, or from his Barrow brothers-in-law. They had all had enough. Charles was frightened. He loved his father, for all his failings, and now saw him about to be taken to the Marshalsea debtors’ prison, across the river in Southwark. Before he was escorted away he made a dramatic statement to his son, to the effect that the sun was setting on him for ever. Whatever he meant to convey, the child was reduced to despair.

  Yet when his mother sent him to the Marshalsea the next day, he found his father had cheered up. He offered Charles the sound advice Dickens later credited to Mr Micawber: that with an income of £20 a year an expenditure of £19.19s.6d. meant happiness, but an expenditure of one shilling more meant unhappiness.9 Then he sent his little son to borrow a knife and fork from Captain Porter in the room above, and prepared to settle in comfortably, since he would continue to receive his salary and no longer be pestered by his creditors. There was after all something to be said for prison, even though the buildings were old and shabby and there was only a small fire in the grate of his room.

  In Gower Street things got worse from day to day. Charles, as the man of the family, just twelve years old, was sent out to a pawnbroker in the Hampstead Road, first with the books he loved, then with items of furniture, until after a few weeks the house was almost empty and the family was camping out in two bare rooms in the cold weather. All 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 humour.

  Now James Lamert came to see Mrs Dickens with a helpful proposal. He was currently managing a small but steady business in a warehouse belonging to his cousin George, at Hungerford Stairs between the Strand and the river bank, where boot and shoe blacking was manufactured and put into pots to be sold. Seeing the situation of the Dickens family, he suggested that Charles might help out by coming to work at Warren’s factory, a light job, covering and labelling the pots of blacking. He would be paid six shillings a week, and Lamert promised that he personally would give him lessons during his lunch hour to keep up his education. When Dickens came to write his account of this, twenty-five years later, he dwelt with horror and indignation on such a proposal being made for a young, sensitive and promising child, and on his parents’ indifference to what it meant for him: ‘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.’10 The contrast between the blacking-factory job and the idea of Cambridge University is startling, because it suggests how strong his hopes and self-belief had been, even though no one in his family had attended a university, or would do so for another forty years.

  He was small for his age, and still subject to the attacks of pain in his side that had stopped him joining in boys’ games in Kent; and he wore a child’s pale suit of trousers and jacket to go to work. On the first day Lamert must have walked with him to Charing Cross, through the Hungerford Market and on to the Hungerford Stairs, where the dirty, tidal Thames rose and fell dramatically each day. The Embankment was not yet made, and the river bank was broken ground and ditches, with working boats and barges constantly passing. The warehouse was set up in a half-ruined building above the river, and Dickens particularly remembered that there were rats in the basement, so many of them that you could hear their squeaking when you were in the rooms upstairs. A small staff worked there, of men and boys. Of the boys he got to know, an older one, Bob Fagin, was an orphan living with his brother-in-law, a waterman; and Poll Green was the son of a fireman with a Drury Lane connection – and his sister ‘did imps in pantomimes’, a detail that interested Charles enough to fix itself in his mind. At first he was put to work apart from them in the counting house, but soon it was found easier for them to work together and he moved downstairs. The lunchtime lessons lapsed. He was known to them all as ‘the young gentleman’, and they were kind to him, Bob Fagin in particular, who looked after him with much tenderness when he was taken ill with the sharp pain in his side one day. All the same, ‘No words can express the secret agony of my soul as I sank into this companionship … the sense I had of being utterly neglected and hopeless; of the shame I felt in my position … My whole nature was penetrated with grief and humiliation.’11

  What is most remarkable is the strength of the image he had of himself, his belief in his own capacities and potential, justified by everything that came after, but quite uncertain then. Looking back, he lays stress on the pathos of his situation, and on his vulnerability, and to be sure he was lonely and often hungry, and desperately missed his father and mother; and the misery was made worse by the knowledge that they had willingly put him into this situation. To begin with he walked from Gower Street each day, but soon Mrs Dickens decided she must give up the house there and join her husband in the Marshalsea Prison with the smaller children. The little servant was put into lodgings in Southwark, Fanny remained at the Academy, and Charles was lodged with a woman he disliked, a Mrs Roylance in Little College Street in Camden Town, who took in children cheaply and treated them accordingly. He had to share a room with two other boys, and his walk to and from work was considerably lengthened. On Sundays he collected Fanny from the Academy and they went together to the Marshalsea to spend the day with their parents.

  One Sunday night he told his father how much he hated being separated from the family all week, with nothing to return to each evening but ‘a miserable blank’. It was the first time he had said anything about what he felt, and tears came into his eyes as he spoke. Seeing his distress, his father responded, and another lodging was found for him close to the prison, in Lant Street, where a kindly landlord with a gentle wife gave him a room. His window looked over a timber yard, which pleased him, and now he was able to breakfast and take his supper in the prison with his own family, and life seemed much better. He still wandered in his spare time, exploring the Adelphi arches, Piranesi-like structures beneath the Adam houses and the Strand, where the land sloped down to the river; he looked into the shops in the Blackfriars Road, and occasionally watched a travelling puppet-show van at the corner of a street; and when, waiting on London Bridge for the gates to be opened, he sometimes met the little nameless maid wh
o served his parents, he would entertain her with stories he made up about the Tower of London and the wharves. There were even days when he played on the coal barges in the Thames with Bob and Poll.

  Dickens details the life of the small boy he was with apparently good recall and sureness of touch, and his narrative is as painful as anything in his novels. It immediately links him with the many children who endure suffering in their pages: Oliver, Smike, Nell, Paul, Florence, Esther, Jo, David and Little Dorrit – who is of course the ‘child of the Marshalsea’, created more than thirty years later, when the prison had long been closed. As his friend and biographer John Forster wrote of these fictional children after Dickens’s death, ‘They were not his clients whose cause he pleaded with such pathos and humour, and on whose side he got the laughter and tears of all the world, but in some sense his very self.’12 Yet Dickens’s own account also shows him to have been resourceful, careful, well organized and with a sense of his own dignity even at that tender age. He did after all succeed in making his father change the living arrangements he disliked. He was able to work out his own budget and make sure his earnings would last until the next pay day by dividing the coins and wrapping them up into seven little parcels, each labelled with a day of the week, and not to be touched in advance. He maintained his dignity at his workplace, never expressing what he felt about it, never letting anyone know his father was in prison, never allowing anyone to see his distress. He even kept a sense of occasion, and allowed himself, on his birthday, to go into a public house in Westminster and order a glass of the ‘very best ale … with a good head to it’, to the considerable surprise of the landlord and his wife. And he became conscious of his own powers of observation and memory after watching a group of prisoners one evening at the Marshalsea, when they had gathered to sign a petition that they should be allowed to drink a toast to the King on his birthday. He saw that it was a scene of comedy and pathos, made a mental note of the different manner of each of the men, and thought about them over and over again when he was at work, re-creating them in his mind.

  At the end of April old Mrs Dickens died. Her elder son, William, arranged for her funeral service to be held at St George’s, Hanover Square, where she had been married, and she was buried in its graveyard in the Bayswater Road, without a memorial stone. John Dickens could not attend, and William was clearly aware of his plight because he immediately paid off his brother’s outstanding debt of £40, long before any inheritance could come through.13 This allowed John Dickens to petition for release from prison, and at the end of May he was discharged from the Marshalsea as an ‘insolvent debtor’. He had already prepared a request to the Navy Pay Office to be retired early with an invalid’s pension, although he was not yet forty, and he had obtained a certificate from a doctor to say that he was suffering from a bladder complaint. For the moment, while the Admiralty considered his request, he went back to work at Somerset House.

  The whole family lodged briefly with Mrs Roylance until they found a house to rent in Somers Town, at No. 29 Johnson Street. The movements of the Dickens family from house to house, lodging to lodging, are so many that they are confusing to anyone reading about them, and indeed anyone writing about or researching them. But, as already indicated, they remained in what can roughly be called North London – Camden Town, Somers Town, the areas round Fitzroy Square and Manchester Square, with excursions to Islington, Hampstead and North End. They did not go south of the Thames – apart from the Marshalsea – or venture west into Paddington or north into Holloway. William Dickens continued to live in Oxford Street with his wife until he died in December of the following year, aged only forty-three, and childless.

  By the time John Dickens returned to Somerset House the blacking business had moved from Hungerford Stairs to premises in Covent Garden, a place well known to Charles, and which, in other circumstances, he particularly liked. Now he walked from Somers Town, and sometimes was given some ‘cold hotch potch in a small basin tied up with a handkerchief’ for his lunch, which he carried with him. Nobody suggested he might leave the blacking business. He and Bob, who were the quickest of the boys, were positioned in a window of the house where they worked, on the corner of Chandos Street and Bedford Street, and passers-by sometimes stopped to admire their dexterity as they closed and labelled the jars of blacking.14 One day Charles saw his father walk in ‘when we were very busy, and I wondered how he could bear it’. Somerset House was not far from Covent Garden, and on another occasion John Dickens walked past with a colleague from his office, the same Charles Dilke his son had met at Thomas Barrow’s, and this time the two men stopped to watch the boys at work. Either Dilke recognized Charles or John Dickens explained that the smaller boy was his son: and Dilke, a sensitive and kindly man, went in and gave him half a crown, and received in return a very low bow.15 This scene, described by Dilke, not Dickens, does more to suggest the humiliation he felt in being put in such a position than anything else: pitied and tipped, while his father stood simpering by.

  Meanwhile Fanny was redeeming the family pride at the Academy, winning a prize and a silver medal. On 29 June 1824 she performed at a public concert at which Princess Augusta, the King’s sister, presented the prizes. The Dickens family was in the audience, and Charles’s reaction was painful, though silent. ‘I could not bear to think of myself – beyond the reach of all such honourable 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.’ He went on, ‘There was no envy in this.’ It seems more likely that the envy was sternly repressed, adding to his pain.16

  How long he remained pasting and labelling is unsure, not least because he could not remember himself. It seems to have lasted for a little over a year, from February 1824, when he was twelve, to March 1825, when he was thirteen.17 It was in March that his father was granted his pension and retired from the Pay Office. The Admiralty lords chose to be generous and ordered that he should be given £145.16s.8d. a year; they were also keen to be rid of a recent bankrupt. The payments he had to make on his existing debts took a bite out of the pension, but he was now free to find other work, the bladder complaint having no effect on his ability to do so.

  John Dickens’s next action was to quarrel with James Lamert. Charles was asked to take a letter from his father to Covent Garden when he went to work, and he watched Lamert grow angry as he read it. The subject of the letter was his own position at the blacking warehouse, and Charles suspected it might be something to do with his sitting in the window and being noticed by passers-by, but whether it was that or something else, he was upset when Lamert accused his father of insulting him. Lamert did not vent his anger on Charles; he remained gentle with him but told him he had better go home. An old soldier who worked with him said reassuringly that it would be for the best, and, ‘with a relief so strange that it was like oppression, I went home.’18

  His mother immediately offered to make up the quarrel with Lamert. She wanted Charles to go back to his job; she may no doubt have remembered how her brother Tom had started work at eleven, and made a good thing of it, and she went to see Lamert the next morning, returning with an invitation to her son to return to the blacking factory. It seems extraordinary and incomprehensible to us now, and it was intolerable to him then. ‘I do not write resentfully or angrily: for I know how all these things have worked together to make me what I am: but I never afterwards forgot, I never shall forget, I never can forget, that my mother was warm for my being sent back.’19 His father now suddenly woke from his long trance, remembered that his son needed to be educated and said he must after all go to school. Charles was sent round with a card asking for terms to Wellington House Academy, a nearby boys’ school said to be good, where Latin, mathematics and English were taught, together with dancing.

  The most surprising part of this whole affair is also told by Dickens: that neither his father
nor his mother ever mentioned the blacking factory or Charles’s year as a child labourer again in their lives – not a word, not a hint. ‘From that hour … my father and mother have been stricken dumb upon it. I have never heard the least allusion to it, however far off or remote, from either of them.’20 It was as though it had not happened. John Forster, who was the first to be told the whole story more than twenty years later, believed that it had given Dickens his exceptional determination and energy to ride over obstacles, with ‘a sense that everything was possible to the will that would make it so’, and also a cold, fierce aggression that burst out occasionally, quite at odds with his normal generosity and warmth. And Dickens himself invoked the unhappy time during his childhood to explain, during the great crisis in his life, the reappearance of ‘the character formed in me then’.21 Well, perhaps, but if the experience did some damage it strengthened his character too. It also gave him a subject he used again and again in his books, where a vulnerable and suffering child is shown either succumbing to ill-treatment and dying, as Nell, Paul and Jo do, or enduring and triumphing over it, as Oliver, the Marchioness, Florence, Esther, Sissy and Little Dorrit do in their different ways. In some cases there is ambiguity. Tiny Tim is allotted alternative possible fates. Louisa Gradgrind grows through the disastrous course of life she has embarked on, emerging wiser but scarcely happy. Pip too remains unresolved: he has survived, but he is damaged; he has done some good and some harm to those around him, and the best he can hope for is to end his days with a measure of self-knowledge – and in this way it is the truest of the novels. In the same book Estella is allowed to survive and understand the reason for the mistakes she has made, but not rewarded for her understanding.22