‘A Dickensian scandal for the 21st century’ blares one newspaper headline. ‘No one should have to live in such Dickensian conditions,’ says another. Today ‘Dickensian’ means squalor, it means wretched living conditions, oppression and darkness.

Yet Dickens finished his first novel with a glance at the sunny Mr Pickwick and his friends: ‘There are dark shadows on the earth, but its lights are stronger in the contrast. Some men, like bats or owls, have better eyes for the darkness than for the light. We, who have no such optical powers, are better pleased to take our last parting look at the visionary companions of many solitary hours, when the brief sunshine of the world is blazing full upon them.’ The brief sunshine of the world blazed out in full in Dickens’ work and, early in his career in particular, that was the way his contemporaries saw it. For them, ‘Dickensian’ meant comic; for others, it meant convivial good cheer.
¹It was not until the twentieth century, as social conditions began to improve, that ‘Dickensian’ took on its dark tinge. In Dickens’ own time, the way that people lived was not Dickensian, merely life.

The greatest recorder the London streets has ever known – through whose eyes those streets have become Dickensian – was not born in London at all, but in Portsmouth, on 7 February 1812, where his father, a clerk in the navy pay office, was working. Apart from a brief foray to the capital as a toddler,
Dickens moved to the city that gave meaning to his life and his fiction only when he was ten, arriving from Chatham, where his father had been posted, on the Commodore stagecoach, ‘packed, like game – and forwarded, carriage paid’, at the coaching inn in the heart of Cheapside, in the City of London.
²In 1815, he and his family had lodged in Norfolk Street, near Tottenham Court Road, just steps away from the grim-faced Cleveland Street Workhouse. On their return to London in 1822, they moved to the newly developing, lower-middle-class district of Camden Town slightly to the north. Bayham Street was still rural enough for grass to grow down the centre of the road, and the houses that lined the street were new. This is not to say the Dickenses lived lavishly. Dickens’ parents, five children, a servant and the stepson of Mrs Dickens’ deceased sister were all crammed into the little two-storey, yellow-brick house. Dickens’ authorized biographer and lifelong friend, John Forster, called Camden Town ‘about the poorest part of the London suburbs’ and described the house as a ‘mean small tenement, with a wretched little back-garden abutting on a squalid court’. (The word ‘court’ in nineteenth-century London always meant a dead-end alley that housed slum lodgings.) Yet the residents listed by one of Dickens’ childhood neighbours – small shopkeepers; the local building contractor – do not bear this out, nor does the rent of £22 per annum – well beyond the reach of the washerwoman Forster claimed was their nearest neighbour. It seems as if, unconsciously, ‘Dickensian’, meaning the dark without the light, was retrospectively being imposed on Dickens himself.

The dark came soon enough. In December 1823, the Dickens family moved to Gower Street North, to a house double the size of the one in Bayham Street. Mrs Dickens was hoping to start a school for young ladies to supplement John Dickens’ income. While not poor, the Dickenses had by now an even larger family – seven children – and could never manage to live within their income. In the quasi-autobiographical
David Copperfield
,
Mr Micawber – a surprisingly affectionate portrait of John Dickens from an author more usually exasperated or enraged by his feckless father – famously pronounced, ‘Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen nineteen six, result happiness. Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty pounds ought and six, result misery.’
³And despite the comically pompous tone, the Dickenses’ lives were indeed made miserable, particularly young Charles’s. As the debts mounted, Mrs Dickens’ step-nephew offered to help. He was the new office manager of Warren’s Blacking Factory, near the Strand, which manufactured shoe polish and the blackleading applied to fire grates and kitchen ranges.

And so, sometime around his twelfth birthday, Charles was taken out of school and sent to work in a factory for 6s a week. Less than a month later, his father was arrested for debt, and by April 1824 the household in North Gower Street was broken up. The novice child-worker lived alone in lodgings in Little College Street in Camden Town, while, to save money, the rest of the family moved into the Marshalsea prison nearly four miles away, where John Dickens was already incarcerated. David Copperfield once more speaks for the boy Charles, abandoned as he appeared to be: ‘I know enough of the world now, to have almost lost the capacity of being much surprised by anything; but it is matter of some surprise to me, even now, that I can have been so easily thrown away at such an age. A child of excellent abilities, and with strong powers of observation, quick, eager, delicate, and soon hurt bodily or mentally, it seems wonderful to me that nobody should have made any sign in my behalf. But none was made; and I became, at ten years old, a little labouring hind.’
⁴

The labouring hind had no idea when, or even if, this purgatory, his being ‘thrown away’, was ever to end. There was every possibility that he would be a factory-hand for the rest of his life. At some point in his life Dickens attempted to write an autobiography. It was never finished, but he
handed what he had written to John Forster, to be used in his friend’s biography of him after his death. In this fragment, in his novels and, most likely, in his own mind, Dickens backdated the episode so that it occurred not when he was twelve, but when he was ten, making him more pathetically defenceless still. The trauma to the child endured. That terrible year, 1824, is the central date not only of the child labour episode in
David Copperfield
, but also of key sections of
Little Dorrit
and
Great Expectations
. For Dickens, until the old market at Hungerford, where Warren’s was located, had been rebuilt (see Plate 14), until ‘the very nature of the ground changed, I never had the courage to go back to the place where my servitude began…For many years, when I came near…I crossed over to the opposite side of the way’, while the route past the Marshalsea ‘made me cry’ long into adulthood. It may be that the confusion over the status of Bayham Street can be attributed to this long-lasting distress. When the Dickens family lived there, it was a respectable lower-middle-class street; by the time John Forster saw it, it had become a slum. Dickens knew that it had been different in his childhood, but the worse it was perceived, the more he had achieved: the squalor of the area was a mark of how far he had come.

By 1825, John Dickens had been released from prison and the family was once more in decent lodgings in north London, with Charles back at school. But within two years John Dickens was in financial difficulties again, and the young Dickens, still only fifteen, left school for the final time. This time, his prospects were more hopeful. Mrs Dickens’ family was again called on, and her aunt’s lodger, a young solicitor named Blackmore, hired the boy as a clerk. Now his fierce determination to fput the blacking factory behind him had an outlet. After leaving the Navy Office, John Dickens had found work as a parliamentary reporter, and in 1828 Charles followed suit, becoming successful enough in less than a year to leave clerking behind and set up as a freelance shorthand-writer. In 1833, when he was just twenty-one, his first story, ‘A Dinner at Poplar Walk’, was published in the
Monthly Magazine
. The would-be author had sent it in anonymously, and when he found it printed, ‘I walked down to Westminster Hall, and turned into it for half an hour, because my eyes were so dimmed with joy and pride.’ Soon he was producing newspaper and magazine sketches regularly, under
the pseudonym Boz. (Boz, pronounced today with a short ‘o’, was probably pronounced by Dickens as ‘Boze’. He had given his youngest brother the nickname Moses, which the toddler then mangled as ‘Boses’, and soon the family shortened it to Boz.)

In 1834, at the age of twenty-two, Dickens started work at the
Morning Chronicle
, ultimately earning five guineas a week, or £273 per annum, a decent middle-class salary.
⁵In 1836, his first novel, a series of comic sketches about the doings of Mr Pickwick and his friends, was published. The additional £14 a month that it brought in gave him the security he needed to marry Catherine Hogarth, the daughter of the editor of the
Evening Chronicle
, who was publishing his ‘Sketches of London’ (later expanded into
Sketches by Boz
). By June 1836, the serial had become an unprecedented triumph: each issue, which had initially sold 400 copies monthly, was now selling 40,000. In July, Boz was revealed to be Charles Dickens and, as Byron had done before him, he awoke to find himself famous.

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