Charles Dickens: A Life (7 page)

This is a very small episode in the life of Dickens, but it allows us to see him in action, going to the workhouse just along the road from his own home, and deciding to help a young woman whose character and history are quite without interest or colour, and who comes from the very bottom of the social heap, a workhouse child, a servant and a victim – a victim of ignorance, of gullibility, of an unknown seducer and a harsh employer, and of the assumptions made by respectable jurors. He is at his best as a man, determined in argument, generous in giving help, following through the case, motivated purely by his profound sense that it was wrong that she should be victimized further.

What makes his behaviour the more remarkable is that he was himself living under intense pressure at this time in 1840. He was very successful, and also exhausted. He had spent the past four years in the hard labour of writing three long novels in monthly instalments, huge efforts of imagination and penmanship that had lifted him from obscurity to fame and comfort. Their publication as serials established a new style in publishing and reached a new public, because the paper numbers were cheap to buy and could be passed round, collected and preserved; and they found readers who were for the first time buying fiction to keep on a shelf at home. The names of his characters passed into the language: Pickwick, Sam Weller, Fagin, Oliver, Squeers, Smike. The voice of Dickens, offering fun and jokes, then switching to pathos, with a good peppering of indignation, seemed like the voice of a friend. His stories were dramatized and played in theatres all over the country – Mary Anne Keeley took the part of Smike at the Adelphi. His success was unprecedented and thrilling, but he felt the strain, because his income and standard of living depended on keeping up the pace. He had no savings, lived from month to month, and worried about money; yet he had just vowed not to commit himself to another serial novel, having convinced himself that he could earn as much for less work by becoming editor of a new weekly journal. In January 1840, in the very month of the inquest, he was starting work on the first numbers.

He was able to keep many servants, a horse for himself, and a coach, with a fourteen-year-old lad to drive it, John Thompson, who would remain in his service in different capacities for the next twenty-six years. He took his family out of town for a month in June and again in September, and also made short pleasure trips with his wife – ‘my missis’ or ‘my better half’. At the same time he was being lionized, invited by the ultra-respectable and rich Miss Coutts (court dress required when royalty present), by the less respectable but very clever Lady Holland, and by the wholly unrespectable, brilliant and charming Lady Blessington and her companion Count D’Orsay. His missis did not go with him to these ladies’ houses, or to the breakfast given by Richard Monckton Milnes, man of letters and Tory Member of Parliament. Lord Northampton, President of the Royal Society, invited him to a reception at his house in Piccadilly. Thomas Carlyle got him to attend an early meeting about the establishment of the London Library, and Dickens became a supporter and subscriber. There was a great demand for engravings of his portrait, and his head was being modelled by an admiring sculptor.

This was Dickens nearly halfway through his life: he was twenty-eight in February 1840, and had another thirty years ahead of him. He was living in a country that had been at peace for a quarter of a century. There had been no foreign wars, and no revolution at home, partly thanks to the Reform Bill of 1832, passed under the old King, William IV, in which parliamentary constituencies were redrawn and the electorate widened, cautiously. But the courts and alleys of London remained squalid with poverty, overcrowding and disease, and the rich in their great houses were unshaken. Railways were changing the habits of the nation more than votes, and railway stations at Euston and Paddington already connected London to the north and the West Country. New Oxford Street had just been cut, and the Finchley Road, the Caledonian and Camden Road, and Charles Barry was designing Trafalgar Square. In January the penny post was established, covering the whole country: in its first year it would double the volume of letters written. London was preparing for a royal wedding on 10 February, when the young Queen Victoria was to be married to a German prince, Albert of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha. In parliament there was a debate over what allowance should be paid to the foreign Prince. It was settled at £30,000, and in the streets people sang, ‘Prince Hallbert he vill alvays be/My own dear Fancy Man’ – at any rate according to Dickens.
⁴
The novelist pretended to fall in love with the Queen, went to Windsor and lay down on the ground outside the castle to show his passion, to the considerable surprise of passers-by.

Dickens was still a young man. His grammar could be shaky, his clothes too flamboyant – ‘geraniums and ringlets’ mocked Thackeray – his hospitality too splendid, his temper fierce, but his friends – mostly artists, writers and actors – loved him, and their love was reciprocated. When he went out of London in order to have peace to write, he would within days summon troops of friends to join him. He was a giver of celebratory parties, a player of charades, a dancer of quadrilles and Sir Roger de Coverleys. He suffered from terrible colds and made them into jokes: ‘Bisery, bisery,’ he complained, or ‘I have been crying all day … my nose is an inch shorter than it was last Tuesday, from constant friction.’
⁵
He worked furiously fast to give himself free time. He lived hard and took hard exercise. His day began with a cold shower, and he walked or rode every day if he could, arduous expeditions of twelve, fifteen or twenty miles out of town, often summoning a friend to go with him. He might be in his study from ten at night until one in the morning, or up early to be at his desk by 8.30, writing with a quill pen he sharpened himself and favouring dark blue ink. He was taking French lessons from a serious teacher.
⁶
He was also doing his best to help a poor carpenter with literary ambitions, reading what he had written and finding him work.
⁷

He was an obsessive organizer of his surroundings, even rearranging the furniture in hotel rooms: he wrote to Catherine from a hotel in Bath, ‘of course I
arranged
both the room and my luggage before going to bed’; and, from lodgings in Broadstairs, to an old friend, ‘the furniture in all the rooms has been entirely re-arranged by the same extraordinary character’ – he meant himself.
⁸
He smoked cigars, and often mentions his wine-dealers in letters, and the brandy, gin, port, sherry, champagne, claret and Sauternes delivered and enjoyed; and although he was very rarely the worse for drink, he sometimes confessed to feeling bad in the mornings after overindulging the night before. Raspberries were his favourite fruit, served without cream, and he was very fond of dates in boxes.
⁹
He belonged to the Garrick Club and the Athenaeum, and he knew and frequented all the theatres in London and could ask any of their managers for a box when he wanted one. Eating out, going to the theatre, adventuring through the rough areas of London with a friend or two were habitual ways of spending his evening. He also walked the streets by himself, observing and thinking. He was passionately interested in prisons and in asylums, the places where society’s rejects are kept.

He revisited the Marylebone Workhouse ten years later, in May 1850,
¹⁰
when it held 2,000 inmates of all ages from newborn to dying, and wrote a painfully vivid account of the place: the smell of so many people kept in wards together, the listlessness, the dreary diet, the sullen lethargy of the old who had nothing to look forward to except death. He found then that it was redeemed by one thing – the good care given to the pauper children, who were kept in large, light, airy rooms at the top of one of the buildings, and who impressed him as lively and cheerful as they ate their potatoes, with ‘two mangy pauper rocking-horses rampant in the corner’. But what struck him most was the grief of one of the pauper nurses, a ‘flabby, raw-boned, untidy’ woman of coarse aspect, who had been tending a ‘dropped child’ – one found in the street – and was now sobbing bitterly because the child had died. Once again he did his best to help: ‘If anything useful can be done for her, I should like to do it,’ he wrote, ‘if you can put me in the way of helping her, do me the kindness of telling me how it can be best done?’ he wrote to Jacob Bell, the philanthropist and MP.
¹¹
Once again, it was a poor woman and a dead child who spoke to him.

He saw the world more vividly than other people, and reacted to what he saw with laughter, horror, indignation – and sometimes sobs. He stored up his experiences and reactions as raw material to transform and use in his novels, and was so charged with imaginative energy that he rendered nineteenth-century England crackling, full of truth and life, with his laughter, horror and indignation – and sentimentality. Even one of his most hostile critics acknowledged that he described London ‘like a special correspondent for posterity’.
¹²
Early in his writing career he started to call himself ‘the inimitable’: it was partly a joke with him, but not entirely, because he could see that there was no other writer at work who could surpass him, and that no one among his friends or family could even begin to match his energy and ambition.
¹³
He could make people laugh and cry, and arouse anger, and he meant to amuse and to make the world a better place. And wherever he went he produced what, much later, an observant girl described as ‘a sort of brilliance in the room, mysteriously dominant and formless. I remember how everyone lighted up when he entered.’
¹⁴

The Sins of the Fathers;

Charles Dickens was born on Friday, 7 February 1812, just outside the old town of Portsmouth in the new suburb of Landport, built in the 1790s. The small terraced house is still standing in a landscape so altered by time, bombing and rebuilding that it is a wonder the inside is so well preserved. The address has changed too: in 1812 it was No. 13 Mile End Terrace, Landport; today it is No. 393 Old Commercial Road, Portsmouth.
¹
There is a patch of front garden, a small flight of steps up to the entrance, two storeys, attic and basement, good plain Georgian windows, and in 1812 there was a view over Cherry Garden Field. The terrace had no running water then, and the privy was outside. It was a modest house, but big enough for a young family. The new Dickens baby was announced in the press, ‘On Friday, at Mile-end-Terrace, the lady of John Dickens, Esq., a son’, and christened two months later on 4 March at St Mary’s Church. The name decided upon was ‘Charles John Huffham’ – Charles for his maternal grandfather, John for his father and Huffham (misspelt by the parish clerk) for a London friend of his father, Christopher Huffam of Limehouse, oar-maker and rigger of ships to the Royal Navy.
²
His mother, Elizabeth, was twenty-two, his father twenty-seven, and they already had one child, a daughter, Fanny, aged two. John Dickens walked daily into the dockyard where he had a steady job in the Navy Pay Office, handling payroll accounts at an annual salary of £110, which was set to rise.

His father, John, is the most mysterious figure in Dickens’s background. Nothing is known of John’s education and nothing certain of his first twenty years. His mother, born Elizabeth Ball in Shropshire in 1745, was a servant, and at the age of thirty-six, when she was working as a maid to Lady Blandford in London, she married William Dickens, a manservant in the household of John Crewe, a landowning gentleman with estates in Cheshire and a town house in Lower Grosvenor Street, Mayfair. This was in November 1781. Her husband was a good bit older than her, probably in his sixties. With her marriage she too came to work in the Crewe household. A son, also named William, was born to them in 1782. By 1785 William Dickens senior had been promoted to the position of butler, but in October of the same year he died, in London. A second son, John, was born to Elizabeth Dickens in the same year, not in London, and was said to have been a posthumous child, and this boy was to be the father of Charles Dickens. She remained in service with the Crewes, and moved with them between Crewe Hall and Mayfair. In 1798, for instance, when John Dickens was thirteen, she was in London – ‘Paid Mrs Dickens Servant in your town house 8.8.0’ reads the Crewe household accounts book.
³

John did not follow his parents into service: he was going to do better. Many years later the Crewes’ granddaughter said she remembered ‘old Mrs Dickens’ grumbling about ‘that lazy fellow John … who used to come hanging about the house’ and how she had given him ‘many a sound cuff on the ear’.
⁴
Someone came to the rescue, and his next appearance is in April 1805 when he is twenty, and appointed to the Navy Pay Office in London at five shillings a day. The Treasurer of the Navy at this point was George Canning, a friend of the Crewe family, and the job undoubtedly came to John Dickens through Canning’s patronage, on which all such appointments depended. The Navy needed staff to keep the war against France running effectively, and young Dickens proved bright enough to give satisfaction. Two years later, on 23 June 1807, he was promoted to 15th Assistant Clerk at £70 a year with two shillings extra for every day of actual attendance. This was a fortune compared with anything his father had ever earned.

Why was John Dickens favoured in this way? The assumption is that the Crewes put forward his name to Canning in gratitude to his mother for being a loyal servant. His elder brother, William, however, made his own way, running a coffee shop in Oxford Street. What made the difference between Mrs Dickens’s two sons? John saw himself as a man of taste, with cultural interests. Another thing we know about him is that he acquired quite a large collection of books, essays, plays and novels of the eighteenth century: was he given them?
⁵
Books were expensive. Living in a grand household, where he could observe and hear brilliant people, appears to have had an effect on him, and the Crewe household was where you might overhear some of the best conversation in the land. John Crewe’s wife, Frances, was well read, well informed and witty, as well as a noted beauty, and around the Crewes a remarkable circle of politicians and writers gathered, the most eminent being Charles James Fox, Edmund Burke and Richard Brinsley Sheridan, the playwright, theatre-owner and politician who became the darling of society. During the election of 1784 Frances Crewe led a canvassing party, and when victory was celebrated at her house, the Prince of Wales made the toast ‘True blue and Mrs Crewe’ and she replied ‘True blue and all of you’, expressing her sense of the fellowship among the Whig group. She conducted a long love-affair with Sheridan, who had dedicated his play
The School for Scandal
to her in 1777. In 1785 the affair was still causing distress to Sheridan’s wife, Elizabeth, who wrote to her friend Mrs Canning, ‘S is in Town – and so is Mrs Crewe. I am in the country and so is Mr Crewe – a very convenient Arrangement, is it not?’
⁶
Both Sheridans were nonetheless regular visitors to Crewe Hall, and in 1790 Mrs Sheridan had another story to tell, of how her husband was found locked in a bedroom in an unfrequented part of the house with the governess. He was notoriously promiscuous, but his behaviour was far from unusual in the circles in which he mixed. He also became Treasurer of the Navy in 1807, the year John Dickens got his promotion.