Charles Dickens: A Life

by Claire Tomalin

  11. John Forster, The Life of Charles Dickens, III (London, 1874), Chapter 14, ‘Personal Characteristics’. He also took Forster to the markets ‘from Aldgate to Bow’ on Christmas Eve.

  12. Norfolk Street became Cleveland Street, as it is today.

  13. He gave his Buckingham Street rooms, where he lodged in 1834, to young David Copperfield, and the habit of plunging into the Roman bath.

  14. D to John Kolle, [?Aug. 1832], P, I, p. 9.

  15. See David Copperfield, Chapters 38 and 43. Dickens remembered his shorthand, which was Gurney’s, well enough to teach it to his son Henry forty years later.

  16. ‘Doctors’ Commons’ in Sketches by Boz first appeared in the Morning Chronicle, 11 Oct. 1836, and drew on a case on which Dickens reported on 18 Nov. 1830. The courts were moved in 1857, the buildings demolished later.

  17. ‘Shabby-genteel People’ first published 5 Nov. 1834 in the Morning Chronicle.

  18. Dickens’s later love, Nelly Ternan, was also a third and petted daughter. Alfred Beadnell died in India in Aug. 1839, and his father sent Dickens letters relating to the death, receiving in return a long and curious letter of condolence: ‘He spoke of returning to England where at best he could have been with you but for a time. He is now with you always. The air about us has been said to be thick with guardian angels, and I believe it, in my soul. The meeting with you to which he now looks forward is darkened by no thought of separation. The idea of death, which would seem to have been frequently present to him, is past – and he is happy.’ D to G. Beadnell, 19 Dec. 1839, P, I, p. 619.

  19. ‘City of London Churches’, AYR, 5 May 1860, reprinted in The Uncommercial Traveller. Michael Slater suggests the church was St Michael Queenhithe, which stood on what is now Huggin Hill, not far from the Beadnells’ house in Lombard Street, and has since disappeared.

  20. Gerald Grubb gives a persuasive account of Dickens’s start as a parliamentary reporter in the Dickensian [1940], pp. 211–18, which relies partly on the information Dickens gave himself to a German scholar, Dr Kunzel, in 1838, and also on his statement to Wilkie Collins that he made his start in the gallery ‘at about eighteen’. Grubb also cites Samuel Carter Hall, who said Dickens at fourteen was bringing in ‘penny-a-line stuff’ to the British Press, where his father worked, in 1826.

  21. From ‘A Parliamentary Sketch’, published in finished form in Dec. 1836 in Sketches by Boz: Second Series and based on two earlier pieces published in 1835. A portrait of a foolish MP, Cornelius Brook Dingwall, appears in a story called ‘Sentiment’ published in Bell’s Weekly Magazine in 1834: ‘He had a great idea of his own abilities, which must have been a great comfort to him, as nobody else had.’

  22. D to F, [?15 Sept. 1844], P, IV, p. 194.

  23. D to Lord Stanley, 8 Feb. 1836, P, I, pp. 126–7. Dickens told his American friends, the Fieldses, about this incident, and it is also mentioned by Forster in Life, I, Chapter 4.

  24. According to Charles Kent, Charles Dickens as a Reader (London, 1872; reprinted with an introduction by Philip Collins, Farnborough, 1971).

  25. D to Thomas Beard, 2 Feb. 1833, P, I, p. 15. Fn. gives Mrs Dickens’s invitation, mentioning ‘Quadrilles/8 o’clock’.

  26. D to Maria Beadnell, 18 Mar. 1833, P, I, p. 17.

  27. D to Maria Beadnell, 16 May 1833, P, I, p. 25.

  28. D to Mrs Winter, 22 Feb. 1855, P, VII, p. 545.

  29. D to Maria Beadnell, 19 May 1833, P, I, p. 29.

  30. D to Mrs Winter, 22 Feb. 1855, P, VII, p. 543.

  31. D to F, letter of 1845, cited in Forster’s Life, II, Chapter 9.

  32. D to F, 30–31 Dec. 1844, P, IV, p. 245.

  33. Macready’s diary for 5 Dec. 1838, given in Philip Collins (ed.), Dickens: Interviews and Recollections, I (London, 1981), p. 29.

  34. Charles Kent, Charles Dickens as a Reader, p. 263.

  35. Henry Rowley Bishop (1786–1855) was the composer, the American John Payne (1791–1852) the librettist. The story of a Sicilian peasant girl and a duke was immensely popular, and ‘Home, Sweet Home’ became one of the best known of all English songs.

  36. Amateurs and Actors was a musical farce by Richard Brinsley Peake, who wrote much of Charles Mathews’s material. The best character in it – and the most original – is the Charity Boy, always hungry, ill-used, Geoffry Muffincap; he does not know who his parents are and calls himself a Norphan. He is hired as a servant for 18d. a week, his earnings all being taken by the master of the workhouse.

  37. His own account in the 1847 preface to the cheap edition of The Pickwick Papers.

  38. D to Henry Kolle, 3 Dec. 1833, P, I, p. 32. He described delivering the piece, ‘A Dinner at Poplar Walk’, to Johnson’s Court in his introduction to the cheap edition of Pickwick in 1847.

  39. Ibid.

  40. It was usual for publishers to sell books from their premises.

  41. The title of the story was changed when it was collected in Sketches by Boz (First Series) to ‘Mr Minns and His Cousin’. One of the guests at the dinner is given an obsessive desire to tell stories about Sheridan, ‘that truly great and illustrious man’, but is prevented.

  42. The novel could have been Oliver Twist.

  4 The Journalist 1834–1836

  1. It was George Stephenson’s project and began to be built in the summer of 1836, a passenger railway running from Blackwall on the north bank of the Thames through the East End, with stations at Poplar, West India Dock, Limehouse, Stepney and Shadwell, terminating at the Minories. Part of it was built on a brick viaduct, part through a cutting, and it used cable haulage. It opened in July 1840. It is hard not to think that Dickens would have gone to look at it, especially since Austin became his brother-in-law in 1837. What Austin saw of the housing of the poor during the construction of the railway gave him his great interest in improving housing, and especially sanitation, which he shared with Dickens.

  Dickens did travel on it in 1848, describing it in ‘The Chinese Junk’ in the Examiner, 24 June 1848: ‘You may take a ticket, through and back, for a matter of eighteen pence … The flying dream of tiles and chimney pots, backs of squalid houses, frowzy pieces of waste ground, narrow courts and streets, swamps, ditches, masts of ships, gardens of dock-weed, and unwholesome little bowers of scarlet beans, whirls away in half a score of minutes.’

  The railway did not succeed and was overtaken by other lines. Although a few trains were still running up to 1951, all traces of it have now disappeared. See Nick Catford’s admirable account of it on http://www.disused-stations.org.uk/p/poplar/index.shtml.

  2. 1 July 1834, Hansard, from which the account of what was said in parliament given in this paragraph is derived.

  3. Poulett Scrope, Thomas Attwood, Sir Henry Willoughby are the three speakers mentioned here. The quality of the arguments used against the amendments to the Poor Law is impressive. The debates, recorded in Hansard, can be read online.

  4. One example: about 1860, Joseph Arch’s father was dying, penniless after a life of labour. Arch took him in and his wife had to give up her charring to look after him. Arch asked parish guardians to give his wife 1s.6d. a week, 6d. less than she had earned, towards nursing his father. He was told that his father could go into the workhouse. He refused angrily, his father died in his home, and the Arches got into debt. See Joseph Arch: The Story of His Life, Told by Himself (1898).

  5. The phrase is given by Forster in his Life of Charles Dickens, I (London, 1872), Chapter 4. The first piece to be signed ‘Boz’ was in the Aug. issue of the Monthly magazine.

  6. D to Mitton and Thomas Beard, Nov., Dec. 1834, P, I, pp. 43–51.

  7. Furnival’s Inn was on the north side of Holborn, between Leather Lane and Brooke Street. It was demolished in 1906.

  8. When Fred went out in the evening, Dickens would sometimes send for a friend to keep him company, as on 31 Dec. 1835 when he invited Mitton round, even though he was busy writing.

  9. D to Thomas Beard, 16 Dec. 1834, P, I, p. 50; D to Henry Aust
in, 20 Dec. 1834, P, I, p. 51. The brandy could have come from his French employer.

  10. D to Thomas Beard, 11 Jan. 1835, P, I, p. 53.

  11. Dickens’s view of the Hogarths’ superior standing is suggested in a letter, D to Catherine Hogarth, [?June 1835], P, I, p. 67, in which he is asking her to be at the head of his breakfast table, and says, ‘you might without difficulty head a more splendid one my dear girl, through life.’

  12. Catherine Hogarth to her cousin, 11 Feb. 1835, Philip Collins (ed.), Dickens: Interviews and Recollections, I (London, 1981), p. 16.

  13. D to Catherine Hogarth, [?June 1835], P, I, p. 64. In fact they were not able to marry until Apr. 1836.

  14. D to Catherine Hogarth, [?late May 1835], P, I, p. 61. The letter suggests they have been engaged for three weeks. It was carried by Fred, and Dickens’s warning seems to have been effective.

  15. D to Catherine Hogarth, 4 Nov. 1835, P, I, pp. 86–7.

  16. D to Catherine Hogarth, 1 Dec. and 16 Dec. 1835, P, I, pp. 100, 107. His experience in covering elections did nothing to encourage him to respect the political process: he saw violence, corruption and stupidity at work, which he would satirize in Pickwick.

  17. D to Catherine Hogarth, 18 Dec. 1835, P, I, pp. 109–10.

  18. D to Macrone, 27 and 29 Oct. 1835, P, I, pp. 83, 84.

  19. D to Macrone, 7 Jan. 1836, P, I, p. 115.

  5 Four Publishers and a Wedding 1836

  1. D to Catherine Hogarth, [?21 or 22 Jan. 1836] and [?23 Jan. 1836], P, I, pp. 119, 120.

  2. According to George Sala, a protégé of Dickens decades later, the woman Macrone treated so badly was his aunt Sophia, and her loan was never repaid.

  3. Fletcher’s bust of Dickens was exhibited at the R A, but Dickens thought it ‘not like – especially about the head.’

  4. See Chapter 3 above.

  5. D to Catherine Hogarth, 11 Mar. 1836, P, I, p. 139.

  6. D to Catherine Hogarth, [?20 Mar. 1836], P, I, pp. 140–41.

  7. D to T. C. Barrow, 31 Mar. 1836, P, I, pp. 144–5.

  8. He makes a joke of the difference between their rates of walking in a letter to his brother-in-law Austin, 7 Mar. 1844: ‘I was coming to you yesterday, and brought Kate to walk half the way. She walked so impossibly slowly, that I was benighted at Covent Garden Market, and came back again.’ P, IV, p. 64.

  9. D to Catherine Hogarth, [?19 Nov. 1835], P, I, p. 95.

  10. Lillian Nayder’s biography of Catherine, The Other Dickens (Ithaca, NY, 2010), makes a brave attempt to establish her as a capable and intelligent woman, but essentially confirms the picture of a woman whose capacities, whatever they might have been under different circumstances, were stifled in her marriage.

  11. D to Hullah, 20 Sept. 1836, P, I, p. 175. Dickens won the argument, and the line remained in the Lord Chamberlain’s copy and the published version.

  12. Mary Scott Hogarth to her cousin Mary Hogarth, 15 May 1836, P, I, p. 689, in Appendix E.

  13. 31 Dec. 1836, cited in Philip Collins (ed.), Dickens: The Critical Heritage (London, 1971), p. 10.

  14. G. S. Lewes reported seeing the butchers’ boys. Ibid., p. 64.

  15. The agreement with Bentley for the novels was made 22 Aug. 1836, for editing the Miscellany on 4 Nov. 1836. Both agreements are given in P, I, p. 649.

  16. Edward Street, north of the City Road, was the address, a long way for him to go.

  17. John Pritt Harley, the son of a London draper, born 1786, apprenticed to another draper, worked as a law clerk and began to act in 1806, first as an amateur, then in companies in Kent and the north. From 1815 he worked in London, playing clowns in Shakespeare and farces, highly acclaimed and popular, and known as ‘Fat Jack’, being very thin. He acted with Macready at Covent Garden in 1838, joined Kean’s company in 1850. He was taken ill during a performance and died a few hours later, penniless, in 1858.

  18. It is Bill Sikes’s description of Fagin in Chapter 13.

  19. D to Chapman & Hall, 1 Nov. 1836, P, I, pp. 188–9.

  20. D to Macrone’s printer Hansard, [?1 Dec. 1836], P, I, p. 203 and fn. 1.

  21. D to Bentley, 12 Dec. 1836, P, I, p. 211.

  22. Forster’s review appeared in the Examiner, a radical paper edited by Albany Fonblanque, already an admirer of Dickens’s work, and to whom he had sent a ‘Book of the Songs’ in the opera.

  23. D to Hullah, 11 Dec. 1836, P, I, p. 210.

  24. D to Harley, 7 Apr. 1837, P, I, p. 246.

  25. D to Thomas Beard, [?Dec. – close to Christmas – 1836], P, I, p. 217.

  6 ‘Till Death Do Us Part’ 1837–1839

  1. D to J. P. Collier, 6 Jan. 1837, P, I, p. 220.

  2. Mary uses the words ‘dreadful trial’ in describing her sister’s feelings, which might mean the failure to breastfeed but seems more likely to refer to the birth. Mary Hogarth to her cousin Mary Scott Hogarth, 26 Jan. 1837, Philip Collins (ed.), Dickens: Interviews and Recollections, I (London, 1981), p. 17.

  3. D’s diary for 6 Jan. 1838, P, I, p. 630.

  4. Dickens gives the warning in the preface to the 1848 edition of Nicholas Nickleby.

  5. Only about forty-five pages of the manuscript of The Pickwick Papers have survived, and 480 – about two fifths – of the manuscript of Oliver Twist. They are the corrected first drafts sent to the printer.

  6. D to Bentley, 24 Jan. 1837, P, I, p. 227.

  7. Mary Hogarth to her cousin Mary Scott Hogarth, 26 Jan. 1837, Collins, Interviews and Recollections, I, p. 17.

  8. The house is now the Charles Dickens Museum.

  9. Bentley published his editions of Austen in 1833. Forster noted that Dickens had not read any Austen when writing Nickleby, and, according to a later friend, the poet Frederick Locker-Lampson, ‘he did not unduly appreciate Miss Jane Austen’s novels’. Collins, Interviews and Recollections, I, p. 117.

  10. Bentley’s recollection is given in P, I, p. 253, fn. 2.

  11. Letter to unknown person, probably relation of Mary, June 1837, P, I, p. 268.

  12. D to Thomas Beard, 17 May 1837, P, I, p. 259.

  13. D to Richard Johns, 31 May 1837, P, I, p. 263.

  14. D to Mrs Hogarth, 26 Oct. 1837, P, I, p. 323.

  15. D to Richard Johns, 31 May 1837, P, I, p. 263; D to Thomas Beard, 17 May 1837, P, I, p. 260.

  16. D to Thomas Beard, 12 May 1837, P, I, p. 258.

  17. It is still standing, a private house behind walls, known as Wylds.

  18. John Forster, The Life of Charles Dickens, I (London, 1872), Chapter 6.

  19. Only those who subscribed to the 39 Articles of the Church of England could graduate.

  20. Quotes from James A. Davies, John Forster: A Literary Life (New York, 1983), p. 9, and from Richard Renton, John Forster and His Friendships (London, 1912), p. 12.

  21. Forster, Life, I, Chapter 4.

  22. It is possible, although not certain, that she had engaged in several love-affairs and even borne children to her publisher, as well as having flings with Forster’s friends Maclise and Bulwer. Her story ended tragically when she married the Governor of the Gold Coast in 1838, travelled with him to Africa and died there of poisoning, possibly suicide.

  23. D to F, 3 Nov. 1837, P, I, p. 328.

  24. D to F, [?26 July 1837], P, I, p. 287; D to F, [?Aug. 1837], P, I, p. 297; D to F, 24 Sept. 1837, P, I, p. 312; D to F, [?Oct. 1837], P, I, p. 317; D to F, 11 Jan. 1838, P, I, p. 353. This was their first visit to Jack Straw’s Castle, according to Forster.

  25. He put together a collection of entertaining pieces called The Pic Nic Papers. It was not easy to organize, and did not appear until 1841, but then provided £450 for Eliza Macrone and her two children. Macrone died in Sept. 1837, the Sketches were reissued from Nov. by Chapman & Hall in pink covers at one shilling a number.

  26. Macready noted his disapproval in his diary: William Toynbee (ed.), The Diaries of William Charles Macready, II (London, 1912), pp. 45–6. For arguments on both sides see Robert L. Patten, Charles Dickens and His Pu
blishers (Oxford, 1978), p. 85.

  27. F to Bentley, 22 Oct. 1838, cited by Davies in Forster, from manuscripts in the Berg Collection, New York Public Library.

  28. Forster, Life, I, p. 105.

  29. Unsigned review in the Examiner, 2 July 1837. Auden said in his essay that Mr Pickwick ceases to be a god and becomes human at this point.

  30. D to F, 2 July 1837, P, I, pp. 280–81. Dickens transposes the words of the marriage service, ‘till death us do part’.

  31. D to F, [?11 Feb. 1838], P, I, pp. 370–71.

  32. D to F, [?6 Dec. 1839], P, I, p. 612.

  33. D to F, 8 July 1840, P, II, p. 97.

  34. D to J. Chapman, 3 Aug. 1842, P, III, p. 302. Dickens tells the story of his meeting with a ‘most intimate friend’ on his return from the US without naming him, but there can be no doubt about his identity.

  7 Blackguards and Brigands 1837–1839

  1. Galas had been held in 1827 and 1830, but in Dec. 1839 there was a row at the dinner when Forster, who wanted the proceedings to be dignified, told off some members for unseemly behaviour during a speech, leading to a mass exit and the demise of the club.

  2. Clarkson Stanfield (1793–1867) was named for the abolitionist Thomas Clarkson, a friend of his father, who was a Catholic actor and author. Born in Sunderland, Clarkson kept to his father’s religion. He was in the Navy at fifteen and served under Captain Charles Austen (younger brother of Jane Austen) for two years aboard the Sheerness guardship Namur. He took Turner to the lunch party Dickens gave to celebrate Martin Chuzzlewit in 1844. He painted particularly admired backdrops for Dickens’s later amateur productions.

  3. The Copyright Act ensured that every book published in the author’s lifetime remained his property (in England at least) and for seven years after his death belonged to his heirs. Should the author die fewer than forty-two years after the first publication of a book, the heirs would be entitled to the copyright for forty-two years after his death.