Charles Dickens: A Life (9 page)

Looking back on those years, he remembered himself as a delicate and sometimes lonely child, unable to join in the games of the local boys, neighbours and sons of naval officers, who spent the summer playing cricket and Prisoner’s Base. He had begun to suffer from spasms in his side, so painful they kept him from running about, and he would lie in the grass to see the other boys playing their games, or sit near them with a book in his hand, his left wrist clasped in his right hand, swaying slightly as he read.
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So he grew used to watching, and being set apart from those he watched. At night he was in thrall to his nurse’s bedtime stories of a Captain Murderer who cooked and ate his brides in pies, and a shipwright Chips haunted by rats: they terrified and delighted him in equal measure. On other nights his aunt Fanny ‘hummed the evening hymn to me, and I cried on my pillow’.
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The pains in his side came and went, and he was not always passive. His singing of comic songs was encouraged by his family, who hoisted him up on to chairs and tables to perform. His father made a friend of the landlord of the Mitre Tavern in Chatham High Street, John Tribe, and Fanny and Charles were both taken there to show off their singing skills in comic solos and duets.
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Once you have enjoyed performance and applause, you want to try again, and Dickens’s lifelong passion for both began here. He was the junior partner for the moment, since Fanny’s musical skills were so advanced, and she was two years ahead of him in everything. Both were sent to a dame school above a shop to be put through the standard lessons, where the discipline consisted of a rap or a blow and not much was learnt.

They were also taken to the theatre, the Rochester Theatre Royal built by the great Mrs Baker, once a puppeteer and married to a clown, who became a formidable businesswoman and ran the Kent circuit with a mixture of Shakespeare, pantomime and variety. Mrs Baker died in 1816, but the theatre continued with the mixture as before and there the children enjoyed
Richard III
and
Macbeth
– alarming yet also instructive in the way of the theatre, as it let them see that the witches and King Duncan all reappeared as other characters. And twice, in 1819 and 1820, when he was seven and eight, there were expeditions to London during the pantomime season, to see the great Grimaldi clowning his way through song and dance and comic impersonations.
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More theatre enthusiasts were introduced into the family circle by aunt Fanny, who was courted by a Dr Lamert working at the Ordnance Hospital, with a teenage son, James, both lovers of the drama. As well as taking the children to the theatre in town, the doctor and his son got up their own productions and put them on in an empty room in the hospital. It was easy to see that it could be even more fun building sets and putting on greasepaint and costumes than watching other people doing it. Soon Charles was writing his own tragedy,
Misnar, the Sultan of India
. The manuscript did not survive, but he remembered his pride in writing it. ‘I was a great writer at eight years old or so,’ he joked later, and ‘an actor and a speaker from a baby.’
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Another treat for Fanny and Charles was to be taken by their father aboard the
Chatham
, the small naval yacht in which he sailed on Pay Office business to Sheerness and back. They had to be punctually at the dockyard to catch the tide, there was the bustle of the sailors handling ropes and sails as they moved through a mass of shipping, Upnor Castle on the far side of the river with its grey towers, the slop and splash of brown water as the Medway widened between its mud banks, a few churches in sight, low islands and ancient forts, Hoo Ness and Darnet Ness, rebuilt to guard against Napoleon. After hours of sailing, as they approached Sheerness and the Thames estuary, the far Essex bank came into view five miles away across a world of water. This landscape and the sludge-coloured tidal rivers haunted him all his life and became part of the fabric of his late novels. His father also pointed out, when they were walking together, the house set on the top of Gad’s Hill, on the Rochester to Gravesend road, where Sir John Falstaff held up the travellers and was commemorated by an inn named for him. Gad’s Hill Place was a plain, solid brick house with wide views over the countryside stretching away below, and it immediately appealed to the child. He decided he would like to live in it, his father told him that if he worked very hard he might one day do so, and a version of this exchange was repeated whenever they passed it, as they did many times during the years in Kent. Years later he summed up what he liked about its situation to a friend: ‘Cobham Woods and Park are behind the house; the distant Thames in front; the Medway, with Rochester, and its old castle and cathedral on one side. The whole stupendous property is on the old Dover Road.’
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Their parents’ closest friends among the neighbours were the Newnhams, a retired tailor and his genteel and kindly wife, with a comfortable income. Newnham lent John Dickens money and, unlike most of his creditors, who were disappointed by his failure to repay loans, kept in friendly touch with the family even after they left Chatham. The youngest Dickens was given the name ‘Augustus Newnham’ in their honour, but the Newnhams were more interested in the daughters, and in due course left small legacies to Letitia and Fanny. Although John Dickens was now earning a substantial salary of more than £350 a year, he was getting into difficulties again. In the summer of 1819 he borrowed £200 from a man he knew in London, at Kennington Green, which he agreed to pay back at £26 a year; it should have taken a little more than eight years, but his financial incompetence was such that he was still paying it off thirty years later. Worse, he asked his brother-in-law Thomas Barrow to guarantee a deal that brought him £200 in cash, and then failed to make the required payments to the third party involved. Barrow was obliged to pay back the £200 and more, and he was so angry that he told Dickens he would not have him under his roof again.

In 1821 they were obliged to leave Ordnance Terrace and move down the hill to a house in a less salubrious street: No. 18 St Mary’s Place, next to a Baptist chapel and close to the dockyard. There were two more children in the family by now: Harriet born in the summer of 1819, and Frederick a year later. Money was tight, John Dickens was not popular with his relations in London, and there were no more trips to the metropolitan pantomime. A big fire in Chatham gave him a chance to earn something by his pen, and he wrote it up for
The Times
, which printed the story and paid him. He gave two guineas to the fund for the victims of the fire, probably more than his fee for writing the piece, but it showed the world that he was a gentleman.

That winter of 1821 their aunt married Dr Lamert and left with him for Cork in Ireland, where he had a new appointment. They took the Dickenses’ maid Jane Bonny with them, and left James Lamert to lodge with them. He was fond of Charles, and kept up the visits to the theatre. And now Fanny and Charles were sent to a proper school, Mr Giles’s ‘classical, mathematical and commercial’ establishment. William Giles was the son of a local minister, had himself been to Oxford, was a good teacher and ran his school well. He recognized that he had an unusual pupil and Charles responded to his encouragement and worked hard. He also had fun. When asked to recite, he gave a piece out of
The Humourist’s Miscellany
, and the other children applauded enough for two encores. He was liked by teachers and fellow pupils, and gaining confidence in his abilities. Mr Giles served him ill in one way, by teaching him to take snuff, a kind known as ‘Irish blackguard’, and although Charles gave up the habit after a few years and did not resume it, he had got the taste for tobacco, and he became a serious smoker at the age of fifteen.
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Dickens looked back on the years in Chatham as the idyll of his life. He had the blessings of secure family love, ideal landscape, river and town, good teaching, and his small world was beginning to expand pleasurably around him. When he reached his tenth birthday in February 1822, he was happy at school, encouraged and favoured by his teacher and enjoying his studies. At home, his mother was about to give birth to another child, who arrived on 3 April and was given the name of the baby who had died in 1814, Alfred, and of her sister’s husband, Lamert. He thrived, and they could all look forward to summer and long days out on the river or in the open country. Then they heard that their father was being taken back to London and they would have to leave with him. The pantomime visits were all the elder children remembered of London, but their mother was a Londoner by birth and her brothers were there, so she may have been pleased to be returning to town.

They began to prepare. The children’s nurse, Mary Weller, wanted to stay in Chatham and to marry her sweetheart, who worked in the docks, and she put in an offer for the Dickenses’ chairs, which was accepted. They would take with them only a little maid they had acquired from the Chatham Workhouse, an orphan of no known parentage and seemingly no name – or at least Dickens never gives her one.
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Mr Giles offered to keep Charles until the end of the half and invited him to lodge with his family, and this was agreed to. He saw the house packed up and waved goodbye to his parents, sisters and brothers. The Giles family made a fuss of him, with Miss Giles admiring his long curly hair, and for a few weeks the routine of school continued to absorb him.

The ten-year-old boy made his memories of the years in Kent into a treasure trove in his mind. For the rest of his life he enjoyed bringing them out, and taking friends to walk over the territory he had known and loved so well. In 1857 he described the seven miles between Maidstone and Rochester as ‘one of the most beautiful walks in England’.
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Kent was always a place of delight and pleasure, a paradise of woods and orchards, sea coast, marshes and rivers. Here he chose to spend his honeymoon, here he would go roaming alone or with chosen companions, here he took his children for long summer months, and here he bought his dream house, and died in it. Here he wished to be buried. The landscape and towns of Kent gave him settings for many of his books. His first novel,
The Pickwick Papers
, is partly set in Rochester and round about, and his last, the unfinished
Mystery of
Edwin Drood
, centres on its streets and assigns real houses to its characters. David Copperfield tramps across its bridge on his way to find his aunt, who will save him from the cruelty of his stepfather, believe in him and cherish him.
Great Expectations
inhabits the streets and houses of Rochester and the Medway marshes and estuary. The pattern, structure and setting of human lives was the stuff of his novels, and he saw the structure and pattern of his own life as closely related to place. Journeys in and out of London make crucial turning points in his novels, for good or ill, and in July 1822 he made just such a crucial journey, aged ten, and alone. At the end of term Mr Giles gave him a copy of Goldsmith’s
The Bee
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to remember him by, his few clothes were packed up, he was given sandwiches for the journey and put into the London coach. It happened to be empty, and he travelled with no one at his side through the Kentish countryside on a rainy summer’s day, and into the heart of London. He remembered it as a damp and sorrowful journey.

A London Education

The Dover-to-London mail coach, known as the Commodore, stopped in Rochester to pick up passengers at half past two in the afternoon, and three hours later arrived at the end of its route outside the Golden Cross Inn, Charing Cross, close to the Navy Pay Office in Somerset House, where John Dickens worked. It was a summer evening, and a hackney cab cost money, so father and son are likely to have walked north together to their new home in Camden Town, through streets now observed for the first time by a child eager to learn his surroundings.
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What he saw would become the backdrop to much of his life as well as provide scenes for his novels; and he always kept an allegiance to those districts that were his parents’ chosen territory, extending north-west from the Strand, across Oxford Street, into Bloomsbury, Marylebone and Regent’s Park, and up the Hampstead Road to St Pancras, Somers Town and Camden Town.

The streets through which he walked beside his father were crowded, noisy and dirty. There was smoke in the air and filth on the ground, but also excitement and bustle. Carts, horses and pigs were part of the scene, men on horseback, pony traps, carriages, and among the throng of men and women there were a great many children, mostly poor, ragged and barefoot. The streets were their playground, where there was always something to look at and someone to talk to, and their workplace too, because they could earn pennies by running errands, or beg, or steal. There were food and coffee stalls on wheels, rattling hackney cabs and large hackney coaches, and street-sellers shouting their various wares – brooms, baskets and flowers. At this time there was a good deal of builders’ chaos to be got round, and scaffolding to be wondered at, where new roads were being cut and new houses built, since King George IV and his architect John Nash had set about improving London: Regent Street was under construction, as were the terraces round Regent’s Park.

A new church of St Pancras, built of white Portland stone, with great eye-catching caryatids in imitation of ancient Greek statues, had just appeared on the south side of the New Road – it was not renamed the Euston Road until 1838, after the building of Euston Station. When his parents were children the New Road had divided London from the fields to the north, but as the population grew streets and housing spread over the farmland and market gardens. In the parish of St Pancras alone the population grew between 1811 and 1831 from 46,000 to 100,000.