Charles Dickens: A Life (15 page)

The Journalist

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 comfortably 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.

His decision to marry her was quickly made, and he never afterwards gave any account of what had led him to it, perhaps because he came to regard it as the worst mistake in his life. We can see that the Hogarth family admired him and approved of his suit, and that Catherine was a nicely brought-up and uncomplicated young woman. She wrote to a cousin soon after meeting him, ‘Mamma and I were at a Ball on Saturday last and where do you think at Mr Dicken’s [
sic
]. It was in honour of his birthday. It was a batchelors party at his own chambers. His Mother and sisters presided. one of them a very pretty girl who sings beautifully … Mr Dickens improves very much on acquaintance he is very gentlemanly and pleasant.’
¹²
Soon she was evidently in thrall to him. He saw in her the offer of affection, compliance and physical pleasure, and he believed he was in love with her. That was enough for him to ask her to be his wife. There were many protestations of enduring love in his letters. She was not clever or accomplished like his sister Fanny and could never be his intellectual equal, which may have been part of her charm: foolish little women are more often presented as sexually desirable in his writing than clever, competent ones. He wanted to be married. He did not want a wife who would compel his imagination.