Charles Dickens: A Life

by Claire Tomalin

  It is not easy to follow his day-to-day activities during the late 1820s and early 1830s because he was doing so much, taking in so much, spreading himself over so many activities, feeling everything with such intensity; and when he talked about those years afterwards he crammed too much into his accounts. He was living mostly with his parents, who moved in dizzying fashion from one lodging to another. In 1829 they left The Polygon for Norfolk Street, off Fitzroy Square.12 Sometime in 1830 they had lodgings in George Street, off the Strand – this was the year of the death of George IV and accession of his brother William IV. In 1831 they were in Margaret Street, near Cavendish Square, but in the later part of the year John Dickens tried to put a distance between himself and his creditors by moving up to Hampstead and even further to North End. They were all there with him in the spring of 1832, except that Charles deserted them for a while and took a lodging in Cecil Street, one of many such small streets running south of the Strand to the river, and discovered he could take healthy plunges into the Roman bath in nearby Strand Lane, where a spring of fresh water ran through a pool.13 This was when the Reform Bill was going through, to become law in June. He rejoined the family when they moved back to town – Fitzroy Street – later in the year and went with them to Highgate in August for a fortnight of fresh air. There, he told a friend, he ‘discovered a green lane which looks as if nature had intended it for a Smoking place’.14 He took up riding and became what was known as a Cockney rider, hiring horses to get as many miles out of town as he could. By the end of 1832 the whole family was in Bentinck Street, near Manchester Square.

  For all John Dickens’s shortcomings, he led a good example to his eldest son in one important respect: by setting himself to learn shorthand and making a success of it. In 1828 he went to work as a parliamentary reporter for a brother-in-law who was still prepared to speak to him, the enterprising John Barrow, who was just starting up a newspaper, the Mirror of Parliament. Barrow’s intention was to rival Hansard by offering a complete record of what went on at the House of Commons, and he needed a team of reliable reporters to make a success of it. A fourth Barrow brother, Edward, also joined the paper as a reporter, and Charles was inspired to learn shorthand too. He gave a fictional account of the struggle to master it in David Copperfield, in which David learns to write it down only to find he cannot read it back and has to start all over again; he also gave David swift success in becoming a parliamentary reporter.15

  This was not quite what happened in reality. Charles left Molloy’s office sometime in 1829, when he had mastered shorthand well enough to find work as a reporter in the ecclesiastical courts at Doctors’ Commons, close to St Paul’s Cathedral, where his great-aunt Charlton’s husband was a senior clerk. The courts held at Doctors’ Commons dealt mostly with marriage, divorce and wills, and were held in a great pillared room decorated with the coats of arms of judges who had sat there over the centuries, a place of arcane practices where proctors argued in wigs and furred and scarlet gowns. Dickens found it fusty and even sinister, as he made clear in a descriptive piece he published in 1836.16 It was his first view of such outworn rituals kept creakily going, and convinced him that they would be better swept away.

  The work he was able to get there was in any case irregular. He had to wait in a box to be chosen by one of the proctors to provide his shorthand services, and outside of the law terms there was none. But he was not idle. On reaching eighteen in 1830 he applied to the British Museum for a ticket to the Reading Room. Once again the Charltons proved helpful, and Mr Charlton was his sponsor. The ticket was renewed at least four times and for several years he read in the Reading Room when he could. A few of his book slips survive and show that he looked at Shakespeare’s plays, at Goldsmith’s History of England and at some Roman history, and returned to the Hollar engravings of Holbein’s Dance of Death; also an eighteenth-century medical book on male midwives, perhaps seeking information about the mysterious anatomy of the other sex.

  Even in the Reading Room his eyes were not always on the books. One of his early descriptive pieces describes a fellow reader, a man in a threadbare suit with a steadily diminishing number of buttons. His shabbiness fascinated Dickens and when he disappeared for a week he assumed he had died. But he was wrong, and the man reappeared, looking different, in a bright black suit. Slowly Dickens realized it was the original suit, ‘revived’ by being painted over in glossy black paint. Soon the pale seams, knees and elbows reappeared, and a rainy day entirely removed the ‘reviver’. Dickens leaves the story there. It is one of several pieces in which he gives a deadpan account of respectable failures and victims of London, lonely men who never rise to any success. Another is a clerk he sees in St James’s Park, who eats and lodges alone: ‘Poor, harmless creatures such men are; contented but not happy; broken-spirited and humbled, they feel no pain but they never know pleasure.’ The tone is dispassionate, but these men are emblematic warnings of what can easily happen to young men who fail to seize and make the most of their chances.17

  How did he appear to other people at this stage of his life? There is a miniature portrait of him at eighteen, by his uncle Edward Barrow’s wife, Janet, a professional painter, who shows him as a self-conscious clever boy, wide-eyed, with a half-smile, a large black stock round his neck, his thick, dark curly hair cut short. He looks promising, interesting, but not yet ready to play a romantic lead. This did not stop him attempting the role, because this was the year he met and fell in love with Maria Beadnell. She seemed enchantingly pretty to him, even with eyebrows that almost met in the middle. She had a small pet dog, and an album in which he wrote an acrostic on her name; she had been to Paris, and she played the harp. He remembered afterwards that she wore blue gloves, and particularly entranced him in a raspberry-coloured dress with black velvet trimming at the top, cut into vandykes. She was capricious and, to judge by what she later became, silly. His account of falling in love in David Copperfield used his memories of her, making her into a doll-like creature with the mentality of a six-year-old, who screams and sobs in terror when he suggests she might learn to cook and keep accounts before their marriage. Maria was in fact two years older than him, and they met in May 1830, when he was eighteen to her twenty: he was smitten at once and remained obsessed by her for three years.

  Working at Doctors’ Commons in the City was convenient for visiting her since she lived in Lombard Street. Her father was a City bank official and she had grown up in this comfortable home, the third and youngest daughter, and so the pet of the household; there was also an elder brother, Alfred, away in India, a lieutenant in the Army.18 The Beadnells entertained a good deal, and Dickens met there Henry Kolle, an admirer of Maria’s elder sister Anne. Dickens and Kolle both enjoyed singing, Anne played the lute and Maria the harp, and there was music. He made no attempt to hide what he felt for Maria, and in the early stages of his devotion she responded to his energetic wooing and seemed happy to believe they might one day be married. Looking back at that time, he described how, one day when they were caught in the rain as they walked together in the City, evidently unchaperoned, he took her into a church in Huggin Lane, near Mansion House, and said, ‘Let the blessed event … occur at no altar but this!’ and she consented that it should be so.19 But the tenderness of this moment passed, and the Beadnell parents decided he would not do as a suitor for their daughter. Although Mr Beadnell was only a clerk at the bank at Mansion House, he was evidently a senior clerk, and his brother was the manager of the bank, raising him well above the Dickens family financially. Kolle and Anne became formally engaged, but Kolle was a bank clerk with a steady income and a respectable father in business, whereas Dickens had no financial security and a barely presentable father. Mrs Beadnell did not even bother to get his name right, always addressing him as ‘Mr Dickin’.

  He saw that to have any hope of impressing her parents and winning her hand he must become something more than a reporter in Doctors’ Commons. He began to turn up at the editorial office of
his uncle John Barrow’s Mirror of Parliament, where his father and his uncle Edward were already employed, offered his help informally, and so managed to make a start on parliamentary reporting. He soon showed he could match their skills and was tried out among the reporters at the House of Commons. The House was another fusty old place, but more alive than Doctors’ Commons, and once he had proved himself he did not have to wait around to be offered work. Instead he had to be available for debates which might go on into the small hours, sitting in the cramped gallery, straining to hear the exchanges below in the thick atmosphere of the chamber and writing on his knees by the light of the gas chandeliers. He quickly made a reputation for speed and accuracy, and may have contributed to the full report of the first major debate on the proposed Reform Act, in March 1831, given in the Mirror of Parliament. After a time he was given a staff job, and in 1832 he was also reporting for another newly established paper, the True Sun.20

  The early 1830s were a dramatic time in politics, and Dickens’s sympathies were all on the side of reform; but, although the Reform Act of 1832 was followed by bills against slavery and for the protection of factory workers and miners and other causes which certainly appealed to him, no sign of his interest or enthusiasm remains in letters or other writing. He did not learn to respect the House of Commons as a place, or its procedures. He described it, when full, as ‘a conglomeration of noise and confusion’, worse than Smithfield cattle market, with all the ‘talking, laughing, lounging, coughing, oh-ing, questioning or groaning’.21 He was not gripped by the excitement of the debates, and may well have taken against its atmosphere of a club where most of the members spoke in much the same way, a style learnt at their public schools and colleges, the better ones rising to occasional wit, the majority dull, the worst fatuous. Of two striking outsiders among the new MPs, the radical William Cobbett and the Irish leader Daniel O’Connell, Dickens afterwards admired Cobbett’s writing, and accused O’Connell of making ‘fretty, boastful, frothy’ speeches.22 Others whose speeches he took down became known to him personally later: they included Lord Ashley, many of whose reforming ideas he shared; Edward Stanley, afterwards fourteenth Earl of Derby, and Prime Minister in the 1850s, who singled him out for his excellence as a reporter, and was surprised by his youthful appearance when they met;23 and Lord John (later Earl) Russell, with whom a true friendship developed. But if he had anything to say about them and the words he heard them speak and took down at the time, it has not survived. His only known mention of Earl Grey, who pushed through the Reform Act with determination and skill, was a joke: that the shape of his head ‘weighed down my youth’.24

  From the day he stopped reporting the doings of the House, he chose never to return to it and never had a good word for it. He felt it had little connection with what he saw going on in the world outside, the poverty, ignorance and degradation of so many men, women and children who lived without hope or comfort, and who needed to be noticed and helped; and he came to endorse the view of his contemporary, the historian Henry Thomas Buckle, who believed lawgivers were more likely to get in the way of what needed to be done than to help society. Dickens thought he could do more good as a writer who drew attention to abuses than in any other way, and he turned down several invitations to stand for parliament himself, and attacked the bombastic and cliché-ridden style of the typical MP with contempt. Nothing ever thrilled him about the Commons or the Lords, not the oratory, not the causes, not the personalities of the politicians.

  Reporting kept him busy, but not too busy to keep up his studies in the Reading Room. When parliament was sitting, it was hard to visit the Beadnells or have any social life, since he had to be at the House in the afternoon and evening. He could read at the Museum in the mornings and, when parliament was in recess, all through the day, but earn nothing unless he could find other work. During 1832 the Beadnells took action to end their daughter’s flirtation by sending her to Paris again, and when she returned it was clear that she had lost interest in him. She came to his twenty-first birthday party – ‘the important occasion of my coming of age’, celebrated with dancing of quadrilles – and used the occasion to make it plain she did not take his suit seriously.25 ‘Our meetings of late have been little more than so many displays of heartless indifference on the one hand while on the other they have never failed to prove a fertile soil of wretchedness in a pursuit which has long since been worse than hopeless,’ he wrote to her, returning her letters and a present she had given him in happier times. He decided she had been playing a game, toying with his admiration, and that it meant nothing to her. He was left with ‘a feeling of utter desolation and wretchedness’.26 Her sister Anne wrote to him saying she did not understand Maria, or know what she felt, and counselling patience; while his sister Fanny failed to pass on something Maria had said, at which Charles raged, ‘if I were to live a hundred years I would never forgive it.’27

  He told Maria later that ‘When we were falling off each other I came from the House of Commons many a night at two or three o’clock in the morning only to wander past the place she was asleep in.’28 This meant walking from Westminster into the City, and, having patrolled Lombard Street, setting off back to Bentinck Street. It must have taken two hours and got him home not much before morning. Still in the grip of his obsession, he did nothing half-heartedly, and night-walking was a sort of tribute to her – although she had no idea he was doing it – and a way of dealing with his pain. In May he was still writing tormented letters, telling her, ‘I never have loved and I never can love any human creature breathing but yourself.’29 Three days later, on 22 May, he saw her at her sister’s wedding to Henry Kolle, where he acted as best man, and that was the end. Maria remained unmarried until, at the age of thirty-five, she became the bride of a saw-mill manager in Finsbury, at which time Dickens was travelling in Italy and already the father of five children. Ten years after that, in 1855, he wrote to her again to say that the ‘wasted tenderness of those hard years’ made him suppress emotion, ‘which I know is no part of my original nature, but which makes me chary of showing my affections, even to my children, except when they are very young’.30 He blamed the coldness he was aware of in himself on the pain of that young experience, when love had seemed a matter of life and death, overwhelming and unrepeatable. He believed that he had felt more intensely then than at any time since, so that even the memory of those intense feelings became precious to him, a gold standard for love. At the same time, in writing about it in David Copperfield, he allowed David the best of all worlds, letting him marry Dora and then sending her into a decline to die young, leaving her husband heartbroken but also relieved that he has been rescued from his mistake. There was a web of ironies here that only he understood.

  Throughout all this time of work, and love, and study, and constant moving from place to place, he was pursuing another, completely different and overpowering passion: for the theatre. Amazing as it seems, according to his own sober account it filled his life. He said that he went to a play almost every night for at least three years, ‘really studying the bills first, and going to where there was the best acting’; and, on top of this, practising ‘often four, five, six hours a day: shut up in my own room, or walking about in the fields’. This account is hard to square with his many other activities in 1829, 1830 and 1831, especially once he had started reporting parliamentary debates.31 But, whether literally true or not, early in 1832 he made up his mind to explore a possible career as an actor. He asked Robert Keeley, a popular comedian specializing in low-life parts, to coach him. He had already memorized many of Charles Mathews’s ‘At Homes’, practising in front of a mirror to perfect his performances. His sister Fanny helped him rehearse and accompanied his songs on the piano. When he felt ready, he wrote to the stage manager at Covent Garden, George Bartley, asking for an audition. A day was fixed when he was to appear before Bartley and the actor Charles Kemble. Just before the appointed day he was struck down by one of his incapacitating colds: his face
was inflamed, his voice gone, and an ear was giving trouble too. He wrote to cancel the audition, saying he would reapply during the next season. ‘See how near I may have been, to another sort of life,’ he told Forster as he looked back years later.32

  He never did reapply, but he also never lost the feeling that the theatre was in some sense his true destiny, what he understood best, what he did best and enjoyed best. All his writing is theatrical, his characters are largely created through their voices, and in due course he re-created them for public performance and spoke their lines on stage himself. His plots tend towards the theatrical and melodramatic. He devoted much time and energy to amateur acting. William Macready, the great actor, on first hearing him read as a young man, wrote in his diary, ‘He reads as well as an experienced actor would – he is a surprising man.’33 And in the last month of his life he told a friend that his most cherished daydream was ‘“To settle down now for the remainder of my life within easy distance of a great theatre, in the direction of which I should hold supreme authority. It should be a house, of course, having a skilled and noble company, and one in every way magnificently appointed. The pieces acted should be dealt with according to my pleasure, and touched up here and there in obedience to my own judgment; the players as well as the plays being absolutely under my command. There,” said he, laughingly, and in a glow at the mere fancy, “that’s my daydream!”’34 The confession underlines the strength and consistency of his feeling that he and the theatre were meant for one another, even though he turned his back on the possibility of becoming a professional actor in 1832.