Charles Dickens: A Life

by Claire Tomalin

  He was soon putting on a private theatrical performance of his own, in April 1833, in the family’s upstairs lodgings at No. 18 Bentinck Street, with himself as stage manager, actor, singer, prologue writer, scenery-builder and accordionist in the band. He organized friends to paint the scenery and do the lighting, and rehearsed the actors for weeks, every Wednesday evening, sending them strict summonses. As was normal in the theatre then, there were to be three pieces played. They were all up-to-date works, the principal one, Clari; or, The Maid of Milan, an English opera first performed at Covent Garden only ten years before – the tale of a peasant girl abducted by a nobleman, who sang the immensely popular song, ‘Home, Sweet Home’.35 Fanny Dickens naturally took the lead, with Letitia and Charles playing her mother and father. One of the two farces was The Married Bachelor, in which servants pitted their wits against their employers, while the other, Amateurs and Actors, featured a half-starved orphan boy from the workhouse, part comic and part pathetic.36 Uncle Edward Barrow took this interesting role, and also directed the band. Family and friends were all pressed into performing: John Dickens, Tom Mitton, John Kolle and two new friends, Tom Beard, a fellow reporter recently arrived in London, and Henry Austin, a young architect and engineer.

  During the June parliamentary recess Dickens set about trying to find more work. In July he dined with his uncle John Barrow to meet John Payne Collier, a journalist and man of letters on the staff of the Morning Chronicle, the leading Liberal newspaper, who was in a position to recommend him for a job there. When Collier asked Barrow about his nephew’s education, he was given a vague answer, with a reference to his having assisted Warren, the blacking man. The dinner was a success to the extent that it culminated in Charles singing one of his favourite popular songs, ‘The Dog’s Meat Man’, and one of his own, ‘Sweet Betsy Ogle’. It sounds as though everybody drank a good deal, and although Collier later said he liked Charles and had recommended him for a job, none was offered. Barrow was living in the outer suburb of Norwood, having left his wife and set up house with another woman, Lucina Pocock, whose black eyes appealed to Charles, and this autumn he often stayed with them. In October he got up more theatricals, this time writing his own comic play, ‘O’thello’.

  He was also working on stories and sketches and, released from love and serious theatrical ambition, finding his voice. Kolle and his wife, Maria’s sister, remained friends he trusted and relied on, and in December he wrote to Henry Kolle asking for ‘Mrs K’s criticism of a little paper of mine (the first of a Series) in the Monthly (not the New Monthly) Magazine of this month’. The Monthly was a very small circulation magazine run from premises in Johnson’s Court, off Fleet Street, and Dickens had dropped his first offering ‘stealthily one evening at twilight, with fear and trembling, into a dark letter box in a dark office up a dark court’, after they had closed.37 A postscript to his letter to Kolle confessed, ‘I am so dreadfully nervous, that my hand shakes to such an extent as to prevent my writing a word legibly.’38 He was not paid for his work, and it appeared anonymously, but there it was, as he had written it, in print. He bought a copy of the Monthly magazine from a shop in the Strand and walked with it to Westminster Hall ‘and turned into it for half an hour, because my eyes were so dimmed with joy and pride, that they could not bear the street, and were not fit to be seen there’.39 It was a moment never to be forgotten, and by coincidence the man who served him in the bookshop in the Strand was William Hall, whom he met and recognized two years later when the publishers Chapman & Hall approached him with a commission.40

  The sketch was ‘A Dinner at Poplar Walk’, only nine pages, but a remarkable first effort. It cuts a sharp slice through London and suburban life as Dickens observed them in 1833, and presents a small dramatic episode. It is played out between two cousins and two views of life: a forty-year-old bachelor clerk with precise habits, lodged in town, and his cheerful younger cousin who lives in the suburbs with a wife and son. Hoping to coax a legacy, the younger cousin calls on the elder with an invitation to dinner, bringing his dog with him, which turns out to be a mistake. Dickens had already mastered comic dialogue: ‘… damn the dog! he’s spoiling your curtains,’ points out the cheerful owner of the dog to the sour owner of the curtains. The detail of each man’s domestic surroundings, and the agony of the bachelor cousin travelling on unreliable transport – the coach from Bishopsgate Street, every half-hour to the Swan at Stamford Hill – to a social event he has no wish to attend, are unsparingly laid out, and very funny. Both cousins are absurd but neither is wholly unsympathetic, and the drama bites, without villain, hero, moral or sentimentality.41 Order and muddle are set against each other, a theme that would run through his writing, and through his life.

  In January 1834 the second sketch appeared, about a family putting on a play, again drawn loosely from his home theatricals. The Monthly was keen to have more of his work, and Dickens, who was revolving an idea for a novel in his head, told Kolle that he might cut his ‘proposed Novel up into little Magazine Sketches’.42 Whether he did or not, he was launched, modestly but surely. Sketch followed sketch, and in August 1834 he signed himself for the first time ‘Boz’, and under this name rose to fame.

  He had spent seven years applying himself to master a series of different skills, always seeking to find a congenial way to earn a good income. He had served in lawyers’ offices, taught himself shorthand, taken down law cases, reported the procedures of the House of Commons and the House of Lords, prepared himself for the acting profession and turned to writing about what he saw around him for magazines. All were demanding activities and one by one he tried them, rejecting some, persevering with others. Even when he did find the right path, there was still a long way to go before he could hope to establish himself professionally. But his pursuit of various goals was so energetic, and he demonstrated such an ability to do many different things at once, and fast, that even his search for a career had an aspect of genius.

  4

  The Journalist

  1834–1836

  He had a foot on the path to success, but he was still poor, at twenty-two still living with his parents, still a freelance. Even the excitement of his sketches coming out each month was clouded by their being unpaid work, especially when one was taken over by a well-known playwright, John Buckstone, and made into a farce, produced and published without acknowledgement. Dickens remained good-tempered, acknowledged that Buckstone had put in material of his own and realized that more good than harm would come of his piracy. At home, life was not always easy. His sister Fanny left the Royal Academy this year, was honoured with an associate honorary membership, was a true musician and admired when she sang at public concerts, but she was not going to be a star; there was no question of her becoming an opera singer, and she cannot have earned much. Letitia was often ill, and John Dickens was no longer working for his brother-in-law’s Mirror of Parliament, and falling into debt yet again. Of the three younger boys, Augustus was six, Alfred twelve and Fred fourteen, and their future needed to be thought of. Charles must have doubted that their father would be capable of planning for his brothers. Here was another cause for anxiety.

  John Barrow continued to welcome Charles at home in Norwood, and he was often out at his uncle’s house. He had also built up a group of friends with whom he took long tramps and rides, the occasional river trip, evening parties – ‘having a flare’, as he put it – and companionable smoking and drinking. There were Kolle and Mitton, and now Tom Beard, a fellow reporter, five years older than Dickens, a quiet, steady Sussex man, dullish, and always ready to help when asked. Another new friend was Henry Austin, architect and engineer, a pupil of Robert Stephenson, and soon to work with him on the building of the London and Blackwall railway through the East End.1 Austin was up to date, intelligent and concerned with social issues, and Dickens liked him so much that when he moved into a place of his own at the end of the year, he invited him to share with him. Austin declined – he was living comforta
bly with his mother – but they remained close, and their friendship was strengthened when Austin married Letitia Dickens in 1837.

  For the moment Dickens was in the House reporting for the True Sun and the Mirror. The most important debates that summer were on proposed amendments to the Poor Law. Conditions were very bad all over the country, half-starved agricultural workers protesting, burning ricks and attempting to form trade unions. When a group of Dorset labourers was sentenced to transportation for this last offence, they were called the ‘Tolpuddle Martyrs’ by other trade unionists and a protest march was held in London on their behalf. The view of most parliamentarians was that the poor needed tough treatment, and if they could not support themselves, through old age, misfortune or having too many children to feed, or were laid off by their usual employers, rather than being given piecemeal payments by the parish to keep them going in their cottages, they should be forced into enlarged workhouses. Here they would be housed, scantily fed and humiliated by being made to wear uniforms, and their families would be broken up, husbands and wives, mothers and children, put into separate dormitories. To most landowners and middle-class members of parliament this made good sense, but not to all, and many expressed revulsion at what they saw as punishing the poor for being poor. The strongest speaker in the House against the harsh proposed amendments to the Poor Law was William Cobbett, who attacked them day after day, asking for an inquiry into the causes of the present conditions of the poor before any new bill should be passed, warning the legislators that ‘they were about to dissolve the bonds of society’ and that to pass their law would be ‘a violation of the contract upon which all the real property of the kingdom was held’.2 He particularly objected to the separation of families, and to workhouse inmates being obliged to wear badges or distinctive clothing. Other MPs predicted that the workhouses would become ‘prisons for the purpose of terrifying applicants from seeking relief’. One simply called the bill ‘absurd’. A country landowner pointed out that there were petitions from all over the country against it, and pleaded especially that the aged poor should not be taken from their cottages and sent away to workhouses.3 In the last debate Daniel O’Connell said that although, as an Irishman, he would not say much, he objected to the bill on the grounds that it ‘did away with personal feelings and connections’. This was a view to which Dickens would certainly have subscribed. As a parliamentary reporter he must have attended many of the debates, and taken away enough from them to give impetus to one of the themes of his second novel, Oliver Twist. The passing of the amended bill must also have made him doubt the effectiveness of parliament, where informed and intelligent voices lost the argument; the evil consequences they predicted were felt all over England for many decades.4

  Through the recommendation of Tom Beard, Dickens was at last offered a permanent job by the Morning Chronicle in August, with a salary of five guineas a week, giving him financial security for the first time, and allowing him to begin to plan how best to put his life in order. The offices of the Morning Chronicle were on familiar territory in the Strand, at No. 332, and the editor, John Black, had a high opinion of the talents of his new employee. Black was a Scot, a friend of James Mill and follower of Jeremy Bentham, and he ran the Chronicle as a reforming paper, and set out to rival The Times, encouraged by a tough new owner, John Easthope, a Liberal politician who had made a fortune on the stock exchange. Dickens would be a key member of the team taking on The Times. Black was also delighted to publish more of his sketches of London life: Dickens called him ‘my first hearty out-and-out appreciator’.5 From now on he signed his sketches ‘Boz’, and under that name, and with a wider readership, he began to attract more attention.

  For his first reporting job Black sent him to Edinburgh to cover a celebratory banquet for Earl Grey, who was being given the freedom of the city. It was work, but also a treat, and Beard went with him. The two reporters travelled up by steamboat and put in a good account of the bands, the flags and especially the dinner, where they made it clear that the guests fell so greedily on the lobsters, roast beef and other luxury foods provided that they had polished off almost everything on the tables before the Earl arrived.

  More sardonic amusement in October, when a fire burnt down the House of Commons. No life was lost, and Dickens observed that the cause was the belated burning of old wooden tallies used for accounting through the centuries until the 1820s, which he saw as symbolic of the disastrous consequences of English attachment to worn-out practices and traditions. In November the aged Prime Minister, Lord Melbourne, was asked to resign by the King, who invited the still older Wellington to take over; when Wellington sensibly refused, the King was obliged to summon the liberal Conservative Robert Peel. Attentive as he had to be to these political manoeuvres, Dickens was now distracted by problems of his own at home, where his father had again been arrested and removed to a sponging house, in imminent danger of prison for paying neither his wine merchant nor his rent. Their landlord refused to wait any longer, and Charles feared that he might be taken too, since he was living at the same address. This would provide ‘the next act in this “domestic tragedy”’, he joked, or half joked. It happened just as he was looking at chambers in Furnival’s Inn on Holborn, with the intention of separating himself from the family, but had not yet fixed a date. So now a flurry of letters went out to Tom Mitton and Tom Beard, asking for loans and begging them to visit his father. Both obliged, Charles raised five pounds ‘from my French employer’ – an unexplained reference suggesting he had taken on more freelance work – and there was enough cash to release the elder Dickens before the younger had to leave for Birmingham, where he was due to report on a Liberal congress.6

  When he got back to London his father had taken ‘to the winds’, as he himself put it, in fact to North End, beyond Hampstead, which he thought remote enough to be out of reach of creditors. The rest of the family moved into rooms in George Street, near the Adelphi, to be close to Fanny’s singing engagements, and Charles now established himself in his own rented, unfurnished chambers in Furnival’s Inn.7 He was paying £35 for a year’s lease, for which he had three rooms on the third floor, with use of a cellar and a lumber room in the roof. Since Henry Austin had turned down his invitation, he invited his brother Fred (Frederick, not Alfred) to join him. Although he was establishing his independence, Dickens always wanted people about him. He entirely lacked the romantic writer’s need to be alone, and instead of being glad to be rid of younger brothers he was eager to have Fred, who had a ready laugh and a wish to please.8 They had to do their own housekeeping, and living without their mother they were soon in difficulties about their laundry. Everyone in the family was short of money, and their younger brother Alfred was forced to walk to Hampstead and back in his dancing pumps, carrying messages to and from their father, as Charles had done before him. Charles’s current shoes were also in holes, and he had nothing left to pay for repairs after moving house. Tom Beard stumped up with another loan, and Charles invited his friends to George Street to celebrate his mother’s birthday on 21 December, when she would be forty-five. There was to be another party of his own – ‘a flare’ – in his chambers, in spite of the fact that he had no dishes, no curtains and no money. No matter, ‘I have got some really extraordinary french brandy.’9

  In January 1835 he was covering election meetings in Chelmsford, ‘the dullest and most stupid place on earth’, where he could not even find a newspaper on Sunday.10 Sometimes driving a hired gig with an unpredictable horse, and sometimes taking the stagecoach, he got round Braintree, Sudbury, Colchester and Bury St Edmunds and came away with no better opinion of any of them, or of the part played by electioneering in the political process. There would be more travelling into the provinces to report on political meetings, long, damp and freezing coach journeys and dashes back to London to get his copy in before the reporter for The Times. Meanwhile another invitation came to write more of his London sketches or stories for a new sister evening paper to the
Chronicle. Its co-editor was George Hogarth, like John Black a Scotsman, and both saw that Dickens was the most gifted of the young journalists on the staff. When he asked if he might be paid for his contributions to the Evening Chronicle, his salary was raised to seven guineas a week.

  Hogarth, a fatherly fifty-year-old, invited Dickens to visit him at his home in Kensington. He was a man of wide cultural interests, had recently written and published Musical History, Biography and Criticism, and his career was worth hearing about: he had been a lawyer in Edinburgh, and a friend of Lockhart and Walter Scott, for whom he had acted professionally. In 1830 he decided to move south, using his knowledge of music and literature to help him find work as a journalist and critic, and made a success of his second profession. Dickens would not have been told that he had to leave Scotland for financial reasons, but he did learn that Mrs Hogarth came of a prosperous and hard-working family, and that her father had been a collector and publisher of songs, and an intimate of Robert Burns. Their recollections of such friendships with great men were important to the Hogarths, and impressed Dickens.

  They had a large and still growing family, and when he made his first visit to their house on the Fulham Road, surrounded by gardens and orchards, he met their eldest daughter, nineteen-year-old Catherine. Her unaffectedness appealed to him at once, and her being different from the young women he had known, not only in being Scottish but in coming from an educated family background with literary connections. The Hogarths, like the Beadnells, were a cut above the Dickens family, but they welcomed Dickens warmly as an equal, and George Hogarth’s enthusiasm for his work was flattering.11 Catherine was slim, shapely and pleasant-looking, with a gentle manner and without any of Maria Beadnell’s sparkling beauty; but his experience with Maria’s beauty and unpredictable behaviour had marked him as a burn marks, and left its scar. Better less sparkle and no wound.