Charles Dickens: A Life

A Life

VIKING
an imprint of
PINGUIN BOOKS

  List of Illustrations

  Maps

  Keys to Maps

  Cast List

  Prologue: The Inimitable

  PART ONE

  1  The Sins of the Fathers

  2  A London Education

  3  Becoming Boz

  4  The Journalist

  5  Four Publishers and a Wedding

  6  ‘Till death do us part’

  7  Blackguards and Brigands

  PART TWO

  8  Killing Nell

  9  Conquering America

10  Setbacks

11  Travels, Dreams and Visions

12  Crisis

13  Dombey, with Interruptions

14  A Home

15  A Personal History

16  Fathers and Sons

17  Children at Work

18  Little Dorrit and Friends

19  Wayward and Unsettled

  PART THREE

20  Stormy Weather

21  Secrets, Mysteries and Lies

22  The Bebelle Life

23  Wise Daughters

24  The Chief

25  ‘Things look like work again’

26  Pickswick, Pecknicks, Pickwicks

27  The Remembrance of My Friends

  Notes

  Select Bibliography

  Acknowledgements

By the same author

The Life and Death of Mary Wollstonecraft

Shelley and His World

Katherine Mansfield: A Secret Life

The Invisible Woman:

The Story of Nelly Ternan and Charles Dickens

The Winter Wife

Mrs Jordan’s Profession

Jane Austen: A Life

Several Strangers: Writing from Three Decades

Samuel Pepys: The Unequalled Self

Thomas Hardy: The Time-Torn Man

Poems of Thomas Hardy

(selected and introduced)

I dedicate this book to the memory of two remarkable women: my mother, the composer Muriel Emily Herbert, 1897–1984, who shared with me her enjoyment of Dickens when I was a child; and my French grandmother, a schoolteacher, Franceline Jennaton Delavenay, 1873–1963, who in about 1888, when she was at boarding school in Grenoble, read
David Copperfield
in its entirety in English, and loved Dickens ever afterwards.

My sister and I first realised Mr Dickens himself … as a sort of brilliance in the room, mysteriously dominant and formless. I remember how everybody lighted up when he entered.

– Annie Thackeray writing in 1913

I suppose that for at least five-and-twenty years of his life, there was not an English-speaking household in the world … where his name was not as familiar as that of any personal acquaintance, and where an allusion to characters of his creating could fail to be understood.

– George Gissing in 1898

The life of almost any man possessing great gifts, would be a sad book to himself.

– Charles Dickens in 1869

It will not do to draw round any part of such a man too hard a line.

– John Forster, friend of Dickens, in his biography

All illustrations are reproduced courtesy of the Charles Dickens Museum except where indicated.

p. 1

Crewe Hall, Cheshire, the country seat of the first Baron Crewe, where Dickens’s grandmother worked as a housekeeper (Alan Crosby,
A History of Cheshire
)

John Crewe, first Baron Crewe (© National Portrait Gallery, London)

Frances, Lady Crewe (© National Portrait Gallery, London)

Charles James Fox, statesman (© National Portrait Gallery, London)

Richard Brinsley Sheridan, statesman and playwright (Collection Michael Burden/The Bridgeman Art Library)

p. 2

No. 387 Mile End Terrace, Charles Dickens’s birthplace in Portsmouth (Mary Evans Picture Library)

No. 2 Ordnance Terrace, the Dickens family’s first house in Chatham

No. 16 Bayham Street, Camden Town, where the Dickens family lived 1822 (
Bookman
, 1914)

The Marshalsea prison yard, where John Dickens was briefly imprisoned (The Print Collector/Heritage Images)

p. 3

John Dickens, Charles’s father

Elizabeth Dickens, Charles’s mother

Hungerford Market, near Charing Cross (Mary Evans Picture Library)

Hungerford Steps, site of the first blacking factory where the young Charles Dickens worked (City of London/Heritage Images)

p. 4

The Polygon, Somers Town (Mary Evans Picture Library)

Fanny Dickens, Charles’s sister

Fred Dickens, Charles’s brother

Wellington Academy, Dickens’s school in Mornington Crescent (
Bookman
, 1914)

p. 5

Miniature of Dickens, aged eighteen, by his aunt Janet Barrow

The Adelphi Theatre, Strand (reproduced by permission of English Heritage NMR)

p. 6

Catherine Dickens (
née
Hogarth) in 1848 (© National Portrait Gallery, London)

John Forster, Dickens’s closest friend and biographer (© National Portrait Gallery, London)

Mary Hogarth, Catherine’s younger sister, from a painting by Hablot Browne

No. 48 Doughty Street, Dickens’s first house

p. 7

William Macready, leading tragic actor of his day (© National Portrait Gallery, London)

Daniel Maclise, Irish artist. Self-portrait drawn for
Fraser’s
magazine (Mary Evans Picture Library)

John Pritt Hartley, renowned comic actor (© National Portrait Gallery, London)

George Cruikshank, Dickens’s first illustrator (
Bookman
, 1914)

Hablot Browne, ‘Phiz’, illustrator of most of Dickens’s novels (
Bookman
, 1914)

p. 8

Engraving from lost miniature of Dickens by Margaret Gillies, exhibited in 1844

p. 1

No. 1 Devonshire Terrace, York Gate, Regent’s Park, which Dickens leased from 1839 to 1851

Thomas Talfourd, lawyer, politician and playwright (© National Portrait Gallery, London)

Count D’Orsay, artist and dandy (© National Portrait Gallery, London)

Lady Blessington, writer, editor, companion of D’Orsay (© National Portrait Gallery, London)

Samuel Rogers hosting a breakfast (© National Portrait Gallery, London)

Miss Coutts, philanthropist (© National Portrait Gallery, London)

p. 2

The
Britannia
, Cunard’s first paddle-steamer (licensed by Open Agency Ltd – photograph from Liverpool University Archive)

The first four Dickens children, Charley, Mary, Katey and Walter, painted by Daniel Maclise

Dickens, wife Catherine and sister-in-law Georgina, drawing by Daniel Maclise

p. 3

The beach at Broadstairs, 1851 (Illustrated London News Ltd/Mary Evans Picture Library)

Dickens reading
The Chimes
in 1844 (Mary Evans Picture Library)

p. 4

Paris, the rue de Rivoli, well known to Dickens (courtesy of antiqueprints.com)

Alphonse de Lamartine, poet and statesman (private collection/The Stapleton Collection/The Bridgeman Art Library)

Victor Hugo, poet, novelist and dramatist (Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris/Giraudon/The Bridgeman Art Library)

Boulogne-sur-Mer,
c.
1850 (The Granger Collection/Topfoto)

p. 5

William Wills, Dickens’s assistant on
Household Words

Wilkie Collins, novelist, friend of Dickens from 1851 (© National Portrait Gallery, London)

Mesmerism, an illustration from
Thérapeutique magnétique
by Baron du Potet (Bibliothèque de la Faculté de Médecin, Paris/Archives Charmet/The Bridgeman Art Library)

Alfred, Lord Tennyson, photograph by James Mudd, 1857 (Mary Evans Picture Library)

p. 6

Female convicts at Tothill Fields Prison, 1862 (Mary Evans Picture Library)

Men’s dormitory at Coldbath Fields Prison, 1857 (
Illustrated Times
)