The Mystery of Charles Dickens

by A. N. Wilson

  Once he had acquired Gad’s Hill, the emblematic division of Dickens’s life into two – the innocent childhood, sunlit world of Kent, and the grimy world of money-making London – was fixed, and, just as he made an almost weekly journey between the two, so his imagination sang its divided songs of innocence and experience. Early in Barnaby Rudge, Dickens mentions the story of Valentine and Orson (‘Ursine’ in the version in which he read it – Percy’s Reliques of English Poetry). It was a ballad that haunted his boyhood reading and defined his analysed, projected adult divided self. The ballad tells of twin brothers, Valentine and Orson, who are lost in the woods moments after their birth. Valentine was found by King Pepin and grew up in the royal court. He was upright, gentle and controlled. The other twin, Orson (Ursine, or Bear’s son, from the Latin ursinus), was reared as a savage boy by bears in the forest. He was covered in fur. He drinks the blood of men and terrorizes the neighbouring countryside. Sir Valentine comes to save the terrified population, by confronting the club-wielding savage who has been ‘reared by ruthless beares’. He overcomes the wild brother and brings him back to court, where he tames him, makes him civilized. In the most popular of Dickens’s moral fables, A Christmas Carol, mention is made once more of Valentine and Orson when, in Stave Two, Scrooge discovers his childhood self reading, ‘one solitary child’, about Ali Baba and ‘Valentine and his wild brother Orson’.

  Dickens’s novels tell the story over and over again of his divided self. The villainous characters so often, down to the tiniest and most apparently trivial detail, have characteristics that were peculiarly his. That habit, of not telling us something, with a strange twinkle in his eye, of calling out ‘Warren’s Blacking’ to an audience who do not know what secret he was conveying, is one of the everlasting threads in the tapestry.

  A conspicuous example occurs when Nicholas Nickleby is sent off to teach in the hideous Dotheboys Hall and his mother exclaims:

  ‘Poor dear boy – going away without his breakfast, too, because he feared to distress us!’

  ‘Mighty fine certainly,’ said Ralph, with great testiness. ‘When I first went to business, ma’am, I took a penny loaf and a ha’porth of milk for my breakfast as I walked to the city every morning; what do you say to that? Breakfast! Pshaw!’ [NN 5]

  This is almost word for word the same as his reminiscence in the Autobiographical Fragment: ‘My own exclusive breakfast, of a penny cottage loaf, and a pennyworth of milk, I provided for myself.’3 No reader of Nicholas Nickleby could possibly have known, when they read the exchange, what Dickens was doing – transposing his innocent childhood self into the heartless soul of a novel’s villain. It is the same phenomenon of the final Christmas memory game at Gad’s. It is all of a piece with those moments in the fiction where he holds before us linguistic sexual references, which the ‘innocent’ selves of narrator or reader cannot allow themselves to recognize. The companion of the Artful Dodger, boy procurer for the manifestly paedophile Fagin, is called Master Bates. ‘With this irrepressible ebullition of mirth, Master Bates laid himself flat on the floor: and kicked convulsively for five minutes in an ecstasy… At the sight of the dismayed look with which Oliver regarded his tormentors… Master Bates fell into another ecstasy.’ [OT 16] And so forth.

  ‘The Dodger made no reply; but, putting his hat on again, and gathering the skirts of his long-tailed coat under his arm, thrust his tongue into his cheek, slapped the bridge of his nose some half-dozen times in a familiar and expressive manner, and, turning on his heel, slunk down the court. Master Bates followed, with a thoughtful countenance.’ [OT 12] This is not so much a smutty joke, shared between an adult Dickens and his more knowing readers, as it is of a part with his constant habit of concealing things by placing them on the surface of conversation or narrative. The secrets are on the surface. The true histories, mythologized, lie beneath.

  This is the reason that, if we look for the biographies of many of Dickens’s contemporaries, we look in their letters and diaries and in the reminiscences; but if we try to do the same for Dickens, we are always led back to the novels. His letters, and the one remaining engagement diary, give us only hints. The full story is what he wrote out for us himself. And the novels come out of the warfare, or companionship, or both, of the two brothers: Valentine, the privileged prince from the court of King Pepin, trying to civilize the bear-child covered in hair; the man of peace and the hairy savage wielding a club.

  ‘My parents, at the best, were of that sort whose care soon ends, and whose duty is soon done; who cast their offspring loose, early, as birds do theirs, and, if they do well, claim the merit, and if ill, the pity.’ [HM 1]

  John Dickens, who was twenty-six years old when his son Charles was born, was a clerk in the Navy Pay Office. It was an exciting time to be playing a small, bureaucratic part in that most vital of national roles, financing the Royal Navy. Seven years before Dickens was born, Nelson had been shot dead by a French sniper, but not before guaranteeing victory at the Battle of Trafalgar and thereby checking the power of Napoleon. The war continued until Dickens was three years old. The Hundred Days – the dramatic period after Napoleon left Elba and gathered about him his scattered armies, marching northwards through France, filled the whole of Europe with alarm. ‘BONEY BROKE LOOSE’ was the title of one cartoon by George Cruikshank, displayed in the print-shop windows of London.

  By then the Dickenses had begun a three-year stint living in the capital, where John was working as a clerk at Somerset House. They took lodgings in a house belonging to a cheesemonger named John Dodd. The family consisted of John and Elizabeth Dickens, their firstborn Fanny (b. 1810), Charles (b. 1812) and little Alfred, who was born in London and would die in infancy. From the windows of 10 Norfolk Street three-year-old Charles was held up to see candles lit in every household in celebration of the defeat of Napoleon at Waterloo.

  Norfolk Street – part of present-day Cleveland Street, leading down to Charles Street, present-day Mortimer Street – was chosen because of the proximity of John Dickens’s mother, who had retired as a domestic servant and was living in Marylebone. Both John and Elizabeth had family nearby. John’s brother William ran a coffee shop on the south side of Oxford Street. A cousin had a draper’s shop directly opposite, No. 35. One of Elizabeth Dickens’s brothers, Mr Barrow, lived in Berners Street, and in the same street her great-aunt Charlton kept a boarding house.

  John Dickens was the child of domestic servants. His father – dead by the time Charles was born – had been steward at Crewe Hall, in Cheshire. His mother had been a housekeeper there: the model, presumably, for old Mrs Rouncewell in Bleak House. (Before her marriage she had been a servant in the house of the Marquess of Blandford in Grosvenor Square.) The servants of the upper classes were witnesses to the unbridged gulf between the upper class of that century and the rest of the world. Living in their country seats and their vast London houses, they never consorted with the middle classes. Their servants, too, existed in this bubble, detached from the world where people went to offices or factories to earn money, travelled on the newly invented trains or on horse-drawn omnibuses and lived in overcrowded rented rooms, with shared outdoor lavatories and very little running water, even for the more genteel types of folk. The servants of the upper class were often confused into supposing that they too were gentlefolk, or if not actual gentlefolk, more like them than they were like the majority of their fellow citizens, who were seen from carriage windows or glimpsed in the street, but never known. John Dickens would grow up into a delightful fantasist, who conceived of himself as a gentleman. He spoke with a rarefied genteel voice and, fatefully, always lived beyond his very modest means. William Dickens, the novelist’s grandfather, had died in 1785, and the Crewes had taken a kindly interest in the welfare of his surviving sons. Lord Crewe, who at the time was MP for Chester, persuaded his friend George Canning, then Treasurer of the Navy, to give the nineteen-year-old John Dickens a post at Somerset House in London, as a clerk in the Navy Pay O
ffice.

  A clerk in the same office was Thomas Culliford Barrow, the son of a musical instrument-maker. John Dickens and Barrow became friends, and on 13 June 1809, in the church nearest to their office, St Mary-le-Strand, John married Barrow’s sixteen-year-old sister, a small, pretty, comical figure named Elizabeth. The following year Elizabeth’s father ran away with over £5,000 of embezzled cash. Not long after the marriage, John Dickens went to Portsmouth Dockyard as a pay clerk, and it was near there, at 387 Mile End Terrace, on 7 February 1812, that Charles Dickens was born.

  The task of paying the officers and men of the Royal Navy was vital work, in which John Dickens the clerk played his tiny role. His wages were never very high. When he was moved from Portsea to London, his pay did not match the increased costs of living in the capital, and the lodgings in the cheesemonger’s house were modest. The family were probably squeezed into four rooms at the top of Mr Dodd’s house.4 This was the house where they lived for a couple of years, before John was sent back to work in Sheerness, Kent, in Chatham dockyards.

  Ruth Richardson, in Dickens and the Workhouse, a brilliant piece of literary detective work (from which all the information in the previous paragraphs is culled), has established not only that Mr Dodd’s house and shop are still standing in Marylebone, but that, in the Dickenses’ day, they were a few doors down from the Cleveland Street Workhouse. Between the ages of three and five, Charles would scarcely have been able to form a judgement of this institution, but his family could scarcely have been unaware of it.

  The Barrows, Elizabeth’s family, were lowly enough; the Dickenses were servants who had been wholly dependent on the benevolence of their employers. They were, in short, nobodies, and those were perilous times in which to be a nobody. The Royal Navy did not merely seal the fate of Napoleon and guarantee an eventual victory by the Allied Powers, Russia, Prussia and Britain. It also protected and guaranteed the spread of British trade in the post-war years and protected the belligerent success of the new capitalist order – the order that had been brought to birth by the Industrial Revolution.

  This revolution – originating with the personal ingenuity of eighteenth-century technocrats, scientists and entrepreneurs such as Josiah Wedgwood, Matthew Boulton and James Watt – had led to an increase in the capacity of manufacture and trade of which previous generations could not have dreamed. The agricultural economy was to be transformed, in a few generations, into an urban, industrialized economy. The rural population flocked to the towns for work. The huge cities – London the hugest – that form the backdrop of all Dickens’s greatest works were the monstrous, cruel, vibrant, life-pulsating, filth- and plague-infested death-factories that generated the wealth of the Empire. Mills, factories, canals, machines, works, chimneys, belching and polluting smoke and a leap in the population were not accompanied by a steady upward curve of economic growth. On the contrary. The first fifteen or twenty years of Dickens’s life saw the greatest turmoil yet known in European economic history. This was capitalism without any of the safety nets deemed essential by the post-Weimar, post-Soviet world. Banks went to the wall with no protection from a non-existent World Bank or International Monetary Fund. The fate of the two most famous British novelists in the early nineteenth century – Charles Dickens and Sir Walter Scott – should not so much make us suppose they were notably improvident (though they were); their experience could have been replicated in the lives of the nation’s butchers, bakers and candlestick-makers. Sir Walter, the richest and most successful author of his day, was himself, following the crash of the London banks in 1826 and the subsequent ruin of the printers and publishers whom he had underwritten, ruined; Charles Dickens, at the other end of the social and economic scale, experienced the imprisonment of his father for debt.

  Capital, which Karl Marx saw as a monster devouring the human race, institutionalized the penalties for the victims it was ready to devour: at the bottom end of the scale, the workhouse was deliberately designed to be a place of dread for the ‘undeserving poor’. Meanwhile, for those aspirant strugglers whose income could not match their expenses, there loomed the prospect of the debtors’ gaol. Dickens grew up, quite literally, in the shadow of both these institutions. As a young child, he was breathing the stench of the Cleveland Street Workhouse. Its insanitary conditions caused the stink. The air around it was filled with clouds of dust as the inmates were set to their tasks – carpet-beating in the yards, or stone-breaking, particles of which flew out into the street.

  The novel, perhaps more than any other literary form, celebrates the distinctiveness of self, of character, whereas institutions, especially punitive ones such as workhouses, boarding schools and prisons, did the opposite, attempting to reduce human beings to mere numbers, statistics.

  What an excellent example of the power of dress, young Oliver Twist was! Wrapped in the blanket which had hitherto formed his only covering, he might have been the child of a nobleman or a beggar; it would have been hard for the haughtiest stranger to have assigned him his proper station in society. But now that he was enveloped in the old calico robes which had grown yellow in the same service, he was badged and ticketed, and fell into his place at once – a parish child – the orphan of a workhouse – the humble, half-starved drudge – to be cuffed and buffeted through the world – despised by all, and pitied by none. [OT 1]

  Dickens carried inside him the everlasting consciousness that poverty could lead you inescapably to this dreadful institution. His first truly finished work of art, Oliver Twist, concerned the accouchement in a workhouse of a woman with pretensions to gentility. The child, Oliver, is a victim – not just of the bullying workhouse beadle, Mr Bumble, not just of the criminal gang, run by Fagin, who kidnap him, but a victim as Dickens himself was, and so many million others were, of having been born in England in the nineteenth century. The sheer heartlessness of its laws and institutions was a given.

  Dickens reckoned himself a radical, though he was by no stretch of the modern usage left-wing. He dreaded institutions. Humphry House, a sensible twentieth-century don (who wrote one of the very best studies of the novelist – The Dickens World), mocked Betty Higden’s stupidity (in Our Mutual Friend) for preferring to die on the street, with money for her funeral sewn into her clothing, rather than be trapped behind the doors of a workhouse. Dickens did not mock her. Whether he is contemplating the petty corruption and cruelty of Mr Bumble in Oliver Twist’s workhouse, or the pointless charitable endeavours of Mrs Jellyby in Bleak House, or the clumsy noisy philanthropy of Honeythunder in The Mystery of Edwin Drood, he hated – while endeavouring to engage in it himself – systems of organized charity, and he certainly distrusted the state, at national or local level, trying to better the lives of the poor. The sheer nastiness of the England into which he had been born: that is what he confronted in Oliver Twist. Oliver, and Little Jo in Bleak House, and all the other strays and starvelings who drift across Dickens’s pages, are to be saved not by a Circumlocution Office or a Parish Board, but by kindness. The novels endure, through all the changes in British political history, and make their appeal throughout the world in whatever form of society they are translated and read precisely because of their anti-institutionalism, their appeal to each of us to try to be a bit kinder. It is Mr Brownlow who saves Oliver Twist, not the Poor Laws, with their hateful workhouses and their beadles and boards.

  An example of the institutional heartlessness which the child Dickens could see on his doorstep was the stipulation of the Poor Laws that individuals must apply to their own parish for assistance. This meant that paupers from neighbouring parishes, or people taken suddenly ill, such as Oliver Twist’s mother, did not have to be admitted either to hospitals or workhouses. The Middlesex Hospital, next door during Charles’s first spell of living in London, regularly turned away destitute patients who might, in modern parlance, have been ‘bed-blockers’, had they been admitted.5 The Cleveland Street Workhouse was actually meant to serve the parish of St Paul’s, Covent Garden.
St Paul’s was nearly a mile to the south, so if you were a destitute person in Cleveland Street, you might not be able to receive assistance either from the hospital or the workhouse. A news report of 1810 stated:

  A scene, most shocking to humanity, was witnessed on Wednesday evening near Fitzroy Square. A poor woman, actually in labour, and attended by her midwife, was delivered of a child at the door of a poor-house, to which she in vain requested admittance. A crowd was naturally collected, and the utmost indignation was expressed at the brutal indifference shown by the officers of the poor-house, for while the poor creature was labouring in agony, they remained inexorable. The infant perished during this inhuman scene. At length the people broke open the doors of the house and carried the unhappy mother into one of the wards.6

  Streets on which scenes could take place, streets full of smells and fear and pickpockets, were alarming. When John Dickens was posted back to Kent, the family felt themselves transported into happiness. For a short time they were in the naval town of Sheerness on the Isle of Sheppey, in a house that abutted a theatre. They could hear laughter and applause coming through the walls, and used to join in the singing of the national anthem at the end of each show.

  Then they were moved to Chatham dockyards, where they lived until 1822. All biographers agree these were Dickens’s happy years. You could not escape the humiliations of the class system, even in Chatham. As Mr Jingle reminded the Pickwick Club, ‘queer place – dockyard people of upper rank don’t know dockyard people of lower rank – dockyard people of lower rank don’t know small gentry – small gentry don’t know tradespeople – commissioner don’t know anybody’. [PP 2]