Charles Dickens: A Life

by Claire Tomalin

  Another treat for Fanny and Charles was to be taken by their father aboard the Chatham, the small naval yacht in which he sailed on Pay Office business to Sheerness and back. They had to be punctually at the dockyard to catch the tide, there was the bustle of the sailors handling ropes and sails as they moved through a mass of shipping, Upnor Castle on the far side of the river with its grey towers, the slop and splash of brown water as the Medway widened between its mud banks, a few churches in sight, low islands and ancient forts, Hoo Ness and Darnet Ness, rebuilt to guard against Napoleon. After hours of sailing, as they approached Sheerness and the Thames estuary, the far Essex bank came into view five miles away across a world of water. This landscape and the sludge-coloured tidal rivers haunted him all his life and became part of the fabric of his late novels. His father also pointed out, when they were walking together, the house set on the top of Gad’s Hill, on the Rochester to Gravesend road, where Sir John Falstaff held up the travellers and was commemorated by an inn named for him. Gad’s Hill Place was a plain, solid brick house with wide views over the countryside stretching away below, and it immediately appealed to the child. He decided he would like to live in it, his father told him that if he worked very hard he might one day do so, and a version of this exchange was repeated whenever they passed it, as they did many times during the years in Kent. Years later he summed up what he liked about its situation to a friend: ‘Cobham Woods and Park are behind the house; the distant Thames in front; the Medway, with Rochester, and its old castle and cathedral on one side. The whole stupendous property is on the old Dover Road.’23

  Their parents’ closest friends among the neighbours were the Newnhams, a retired tailor and his genteel and kindly wife, with a comfortable income. Newnham lent John Dickens money and, unlike most of his creditors, who were disappointed by his failure to repay loans, kept in friendly touch with the family even after they left Chatham. The youngest Dickens was given the name ‘Augustus Newnham’ in their honour, but the Newnhams were more interested in the daughters, and in due course left small legacies to Letitia and Fanny. Although John Dickens was now earning a substantial salary of more than £350 a year, he was getting into difficulties again. In the summer of 1819 he borrowed £200 from a man he knew in London, at Kennington Green, which he agreed to pay back at £26 a year; it should have taken a little more than eight years, but his financial incompetence was such that he was still paying it off thirty years later. Worse, he asked his brother-in-law Thomas Barrow to guarantee a deal that brought him £200 in cash, and then failed to make the required payments to the third party involved. Barrow was obliged to pay back the £200 and more, and he was so angry that he told Dickens he would not have him under his roof again.

  In 1821 they were obliged to leave Ordnance Terrace and move down the hill to a house in a less salubrious street: No. 18 St Mary’s Place, next to a Baptist chapel and close to the dockyard. There were two more children in the family by now: Harriet born in the summer of 1819, and Frederick a year later. Money was tight, John Dickens was not popular with his relations in London, and there were no more trips to the metropolitan pantomime. A big fire in Chatham gave him a chance to earn something by his pen, and he wrote it up for The Times, which printed the story and paid him. He gave two guineas to the fund for the victims of the fire, probably more than his fee for writing the piece, but it showed the world that he was a gentleman.

  That winter of 1821 their aunt married Dr Lamert and left with him for Cork in Ireland, where he had a new appointment. They took the Dickenses’ maid Jane Bonny with them, and left James Lamert to lodge with them. He was fond of Charles, and kept up the visits to the theatre. And now Fanny and Charles were sent to a proper school, Mr Giles’s ‘classical, mathematical and commercial’ establishment. William Giles was the son of a local minister, had himself been to Oxford, was a good teacher and ran his school well. He recognized that he had an unusual pupil and Charles responded to his encouragement and worked hard. He also had fun. When asked to recite, he gave a piece out of The Humourist’s Miscellany, and the other children applauded enough for two encores. He was liked by teachers and fellow pupils, and gaining confidence in his abilities. Mr Giles served him ill in one way, by teaching him to take snuff, a kind known as ‘Irish blackguard’, and although Charles gave up the habit after a few years and did not resume it, he had got the taste for tobacco, and he became a serious smoker at the age of fifteen.24

  Dickens looked back on the years in Chatham as the idyll of his life. He had the blessings of secure family love, ideal landscape, river and town, good teaching, and his small world was beginning to expand pleasurably around him. When he reached his tenth birthday in February 1822, he was happy at school, encouraged and favoured by his teacher and enjoying his studies. At home, his mother was about to give birth to another child, who arrived on 3 April and was given the name of the baby who had died in 1814, Alfred, and of her sister’s husband, Lamert. He thrived, and they could all look forward to summer and long days out on the river or in the open country. Then they heard that their father was being taken back to London and they would have to leave with him. The pantomime visits were all the elder children remembered of London, but their mother was a Londoner by birth and her brothers were there, so she may have been pleased to be returning to town.

  They began to prepare. The children’s nurse, Mary Weller, wanted to stay in Chatham and to marry her sweetheart, who worked in the docks, and she put in an offer for the Dickenses’ chairs, which was accepted. They would take with them only a little maid they had acquired from the Chatham Workhouse, an orphan of no known parentage and seemingly no name – or at least Dickens never gives her one.25 Mr Giles offered to keep Charles until the end of the half and invited him to lodge with his family, and this was agreed to. He saw the house packed up and waved goodbye to his parents, sisters and brothers. The Giles family made a fuss of him, with Miss Giles admiring his long curly hair, and for a few weeks the routine of school continued to absorb him.

  The ten-year-old boy made his memories of the years in Kent into a treasure trove in his mind. For the rest of his life he enjoyed bringing them out, and taking friends to walk over the territory he had known and loved so well. In 1857 he described the seven miles between Maidstone and Rochester as ‘one of the most beautiful walks in England’.26 Kent was always a place of delight and pleasure, a paradise of woods and orchards, sea coast, marshes and rivers. Here he chose to spend his honeymoon, here he would go roaming alone or with chosen companions, here he took his children for long summer months, and here he bought his dream house, and died in it. Here he wished to be buried. The landscape and towns of Kent gave him settings for many of his books. His first novel, The Pickwick Papers, is partly set in Rochester and round about, and his last, the unfinished Mystery of Edwin Drood, centres on its streets and assigns real houses to its characters. David Copperfield tramps across its bridge on his way to find his aunt, who will save him from the cruelty of his stepfather, believe in him and cherish him. Great Expectations inhabits the streets and houses of Rochester and the Medway marshes and estuary. The pattern, structure and setting of human lives was the stuff of his novels, and he saw the structure and pattern of his own life as closely related to place. Journeys in and out of London make crucial turning points in his novels, for good or ill, and in July 1822 he made just such a crucial journey, aged ten, and alone. At the end of term Mr Giles gave him a copy of Goldsmith’s The Bee27 to remember him by, his few clothes were packed up, he was given sandwiches for the journey and put into the London coach. It happened to be empty, and he travelled with no one at his side through the Kentish countryside on a rainy summer’s day, and into the heart of London. He remembered it as a damp and sorrowful journey.

  2

  A London Education

  1822–1827

  The Dover-to-London mail coach, known as the Commodore, stopped in Rochester to pick up passengers at half past two in the afternoon, and three hours later ar
rived at the end of its route outside the Golden Cross Inn, Charing Cross, close to the Navy Pay Office in Somerset House, where John Dickens worked. It was a summer evening, and a hackney cab cost money, so father and son are likely to have walked north together to their new home in Camden Town, through streets now observed for the first time by a child eager to learn his surroundings.1 What he saw would become the backdrop to much of his life as well as provide scenes for his novels; and he always kept an allegiance to those districts that were his parents’ chosen territory, extending north-west from the Strand, across Oxford Street, into Bloomsbury, Marylebone and Regent’s Park, and up the Hampstead Road to St Pancras, Somers Town and Camden Town.

  The streets through which he walked beside his father were crowded, noisy and dirty. There was smoke in the air and filth on the ground, but also excitement and bustle. Carts, horses and pigs were part of the scene, men on horseback, pony traps, carriages, and among the throng of men and women there were a great many children, mostly poor, ragged and barefoot. The streets were their playground, where there was always something to look at and someone to talk to, and their workplace too, because they could earn pennies by running errands, or beg, or steal. There were food and coffee stalls on wheels, rattling hackney cabs and large hackney coaches, and street-sellers shouting their various wares – brooms, baskets and flowers. At this time there was a good deal of builders’ chaos to be got round, and scaffolding to be wondered at, where new roads were being cut and new houses built, since King George IV and his architect John Nash had set about improving London: Regent Street was under construction, as were the terraces round Regent’s Park.

  A new church of St Pancras, built of white Portland stone, with great eye-catching caryatids in imitation of ancient Greek statues, had just appeared on the south side of the New Road – it was not renamed the Euston Road until 1838, after the building of Euston Station. When his parents were children the New Road had divided London from the fields to the north, but as the population grew streets and housing spread over the farmland and market gardens. In the parish of St Pancras alone the population grew between 1811 and 1831 from 46,000 to 100,000.

  Camden Town, where the Dickens family had installed itself, was one of the areas of expansion. They fitted tightly into a narrow terraced house, No. 16 Bayham Street: three floors, basement, ground and first, an exiguous garret above and a wash house out at the back. Into this small space went the six children, including the new baby, Alfred, their nameless maid and their lodger James Lamert. Where and how they slept is hard to work out, and a further mystery is that, when two-year-old Harriet fell ill with smallpox later that year and died, the others escaped infection.2 Bayham Street had been cut through the gardens of the Mother Red Cap Inn on the Hampstead Road and the houses were built during the last years of the war, so they were quite new. There was no sense of community, as there had been in Chatham, and afterwards Dickens could recall only two neighbours, the washerwoman next door and a Bow Street officer across the road. As he began to get his bearings, he failed to find other children to make friends with, and although there were still hay fields behind the house he had no memory of playing there; but he did remember walking alone to the almshouses along the road, from which there was a view through the smoky air and over some great dust heaps to the dome of St Paul’s, a sight that caught his imagination. Inside the house there was always plenty to do in the way of keeping the four little ones amused and giving his mother and the maid a hand. Fanny managed to work at her music – a piano must somehow have been squeezed in for her – and so effectively that a family friend noticed how gifted she was, and within a year recommended her as a pupil to the newly established Royal Academy of Music.

  What Charles most enjoyed was being taken into town by one or the other of his parents. It could only have been his mother who took him to see his uncle Thomas Barrow, her eldest brother, who had not allowed John Dickens under his roof since he had fleeced him of his £200. Barrow had started working for the Navy Pay Office at the age of eleven, when he and John Dickens first met, and he was currently living in lodgings in Gerrard Street in Soho, recovering from a major operation: he had broken a thigh at fifteen, the leg failed to mend properly and now at last it had to be amputated. The amputation succeeded so well that he was able to get on with his life better than before, and indeed married the following year, had a family, and was further promoted at the Pay Office. In spite of his difficult early years he was a man of some culture, and one of his visitors at Gerrard Street, seen and remembered by Charles, was Charles Dilke, a fellow worker at the Pay Office and later editor of the Athenaeum magazine: Dilke was also a friend of Keats, who had just died. Barrow’s will-power and determination to succeed against the odds, so different from John Dickens’s lackadaisical incompetence, must have impressed itself on his nephew. Charles grew fond of him, and visited him often over a period of a few months, becoming his ‘little companion and nurse’, which suggests that he learnt to make his way to Soho on his own; and his conduct over the next decade showed a stoicism and perseverance that might have been modelled on Thomas Barrow’s.3

  Below his uncle’s lodgings in Gerrard Street lived the widow of a bookseller, a Mrs Manson, who was keeping up her late husband’s business. Meeting Charles on the stairs, she took a liking to him and offered to lend him books. They could not have found a more appreciative reader. Broad Grins, a popular miscellany of comic verse by the playwright George Colman, became a favourite, and Charles was so impressed by the description of Covent Garden in one of the pieces that he took himself – again, on his own – to the real Covent Garden, where he snuffed up the smell of cabbage leaves ‘as if it were the very breath of comic fiction’.4 Another was Holbein’s Dance of Death, a series of black-and-white prints showing death as a grinning skeleton collecting his victims among rich and poor, old people and children, kings, queens, priests and lawyers. Holbein shows naked bodies as well as clothed, life as well as death, and the prints caught the boy’s attention and stayed in his mind.

  During his early months in London a family friend from Kent offered to take him out for the day, set off with him and failed to keep an eye on him, so that Charles was lost in the Strand, somewhere near Northumberland House as he remembered. He spent a long day wandering by himself into the City, past the Guildhall, the Mansion House, Austin Friars and India House in Leadenhall Street; then, having a shilling in his pocket, he took himself into a theatre in Goodman’s Fields, off the Whitechapel Road. Coming out at the end of the performance into darkness and rain, he very sensibly found a watchman who took him to the watchhouse, where he fell asleep, waking up to find his father had arrived to fetch him home. He had shed some tears, been frightened by a chimney sweep and tormented by several boys but, by his own account, had not thought of his mother, and had made up his mind that he would never be found. Yet he remained remarkably composed and fatalistic about what might happen to him next.

  His Dickens grandmother was now approaching eighty and living in Oxford Street with his uncle William, and although it is not known whether he visited her, it is certain that he received from her, as eldest grandson, a large silver watch that had belonged to her husband, which he then carried about in his pocket.5 He did remember being taken to see his godfather Christopher Huffam in Church Row at Limehouse. There Huffam ran his business as a ship rigger, dealing in whatever was needed for sailing ships. He was a cheerful, kindly man, who tipped Charles half-a-crown on his birthday and invited him to sing his comic songs, which led a fellow guest to declare that the boy was a prodigy.6 The praise was important to him, because the last praise he had been given was at Mr Giles’s school, and he was anxious to continue his education. As the summer ended and holiday time was over, he could not understand why he was not sent to school, but kept at home with nothing to do but run errands, clean his father’s boots before he set off for Somerset House each morning and look after the younger children. His parents could have seen to it, he believed, and c
ould have afforded it had they only organized their spending better: ‘something might have been spared, as certainly it might have been, to place me at any common school.’7

  James Lamert tried to cheer him up by making him a toy theatre. His other occupation was writing descriptions of people he observed. These men and women were not glamorous or heroic, but odd, and old: one was the talkative barber who came to shave his uncle Barrow in Gerrard Street, and knew a great deal about the late wars and the mistakes made by Napoleon. The other was the deaf woman who helped in the kitchen at Bayham Street and prepared ‘delicate hashes with walnut-ketchup’, which he liked. Few children of ten or eleven write character sketches of old people without any prompting, and this was a more certain pointer to his prodigious future than his singing of comic songs. He was proud of his writing, but privately, showing it to no one, and so was given no encouragement to write more. His parents were preoccupied with their many young children and with money troubles. There were sorrows too: in September they heard from Ireland of the death of the children’s aunt Fanny, their mother’s sister, who had been a much loved part of their lives throughout the years at Chatham. She had been married for less than a year, and now she was gone, carried off like one of the figures in the Holbein prints.

  The winter went by, with no change, except that James Lamert moved out, perhaps because there was really not room for him, and also because he had found a job in a cousin’s business. In the spring of 1823 Fanny was awarded a place at the Royal Academy of Music, newly established in Tenterden Street off Hanover Square, and she was to be one of the first boarders, starting in April. She was twelve, and she would be studying the piano with Ignaz Moscheles, a pupil of Beethoven, as well as harmony with the principal, Dr Crotch, and singing. The fees were thirty-eight guineas a year, and although Dickens maintained that he never felt any jealousy of what was done for her, he could not help but be aware of the contrast between his position and hers, and of their parents’ readiness to pay handsome fees for her education, and nothing for his. It is such a reversal of the usual family situation, where only the education of the boys is taken seriously, that the Dickens parents at least deserve some credit for making sure Fanny had a professional training, although none for their neglect of her brother. For the next six months he continued without formal education of any kind, but instead was free to wander about London, learning the layout and character of districts and streets, and observing the contrast between Regent Street, which was opened this year, so wide and fine with its colonnade, and the narrow lanes not far from it, around Seven Dials for instance, where second-hand clothes for sale were hung outside the shops, and he was inspired to imagine the life stories of those who had last worn them and been reduced to selling them.