Charles Dickens: A Life (70 page)

John Dickens saw himself as a gentleman of cultivated tastes, dressed smartly, borrowed money and ran up bills with his wine merchant. His wife Elizabeth’s father also got into financial trouble, stealing from the Navy Pay Office for seven years until he was discovered and fled abroad.

Charles was put to work in a rat-infested warehouse on the Thames, below the Hungerford Market (
above
) now Charing Cross Station. His job was to cover and label pots of shoe blacking. He was bitter at being left without education, but he managed to live within his earnings, dividing the few coins he was paid into seven paper parcels each week to make sure he did not run out of money. After a time he persuaded his father to find him lodgings near the prison so that he could be close to his family. He observed the prisoners and thought about them as characters, and he also made up stories to amuse the little maid from the workhouse who still served the Dickenses.

Released from prison, John Dickens settled his family in The Polygon, a circle of houses in Somers Town, one of the new suburbs of North London, soon engulfed by more streets and sinking into shabbiness. It appears in
Bleak House
as the home of Harold Skimpole.

Charles’s sister Fanny had gifts as a pianist and singer that won her prizes at the Royal Academy of Music, but her career was cut short and she died of tuberculosis in her thirties.

Charles loved his brother Fred, took him to live with him and found him a job, but Fred’s scrounging and fecklessness became intolerable and he was cast aside and died penniless and alone.

Wellington Academy, where Charles had his second taste of education, was a low-grade private school at Mornington Crescent. He kept mice in his desk, learnt a bit of Latin and enjoyed boyish games. At fifteen he had to leave because of his father’s renewed financial troubles, to become a smart office boy in a law firm.

At eighteen Charles had his portrait painted by his uncle Edward Barrow’s wife Janet Ross, a professional artist. Dark curls, big eyes, carefully chosen clothes and a look that might be quizzical or apprehensive: he was about to fall in love with Maria Beadnell, who would torment him, and with the theatre, which grew into a lifelong obsession. He was also mastering shorthand to become a reporter.

The Adelphi Theatre on the Strand, where Dickens went almost nightly in the late 1820s and early 1830s to see the comic actor Charles Mathews perform his famous monopolylogues, studying his technique in order to become an actor. Later many adaptations of Dickens’s books were played in the theatre.

In 1836 Dickens married Catherine Hogarth, daughter of a cultivated Scots family. Pleasant and docile, she could never match his energy or willpower.