Charles Dickens: A Life (12 page)

Becoming Boz

In February 1827 Dickens was fifteen, and within a few weeks of his birthday his formal education came to an end. The reason was simple: his father could no longer pay the fees. John Dickens had been supplementing his pension by writing articles on marine insurance, as City correspondent for a newspaper grandly named the
British Press
, but when a recession hit England at the end of 1826 the paper collapsed. He had no money put by against misfortune and, as usual, many debts. Now he was unable to pay the rates, and the family was evicted from the house in Johnson Street. To add to their problems, Mrs Dickens found she was pregnant again. She was only thirty-eight, yet it came as a surprise after a gap of five years. Fanny’s fees at the Royal Academy of Music were so badly in arrears that she had to leave; but she showed such promise and determination that she was able to make an arrangement which allowed her to return and pay for her studies by taking on part-time teaching. The younger boys, Alfred, aged five, and seven-year-old Fred, remained at their school in Brunswick Square. Eleven-year-old Letitia came into a small inheritance from their old neighbour, Mr Newnham at Ordnance Terrace, who had wisely left the bequest in trust, which saved it from being swallowed up by her father.
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She seems to have stayed at home to be taught by their mother. But for Charles there was only one possible course: he must go out and earn his living.

Whatever he felt about having his education stopped short again, he was prepared to take his place in the adult world, and also to accept his mother’s help in finding him work, in spite of her bad behaviour over the blacking-factory job. One of her aunts, a Mrs Charles Charlton, was married to a senior clerk in Doctors’ Commons, and they kept a lodging house in Berners Street, letting out rooms to lawyers. Elizabeth Dickens had met a young partner in a law firm there, Edward Blackmore, and she thought he might give Charles a job with Ellis & Blackmore, and took him along to be inspected. Blackmore judged Charles a very presentable boy, with a fresh intelligent face, neat clothes and good manners, and offered him ten shillings and sixpence a week. For this he would be working six days a week in an office in Gray’s Inn, called a clerk but really no more than an office boy. He would not be acquiring any formal qualifications, but it was a start.

The Dickens family found new lodgings four streets south of Johnson Street, at No. 17 The Polygon. The Polygon had been an architectural innovation of the 1790s: a ring of four-storey houses built round a central garden, intended as the first part of the builder’s plan for a superior suburb, next to the green meadows rising towards Hampstead, while still within walking distance of central London. The plan failed when money ran low during the war years, and streets of small terraced houses were put up, hemming in The Polygon, and Somers Town became shabby-genteel. William Wills, who worked with Dickens later, also moved there in the 1820s when his father, a Plymouth shipowner, lost his money, and walked daily to work in the Strand. When the Dickens family arrived, there were still a few artists and writers living in The Polygon, giving it a touch of distinction, and years later Charles chose to install a character, the artistic and improvident Harold Skimpole (of
Bleak House
), in one of its decaying dwellings. Skimpole camped out in a single prettily furnished room while his wife and daughters managed as best they could in the rest of the house, and the local tradesmen’s bills went unpaid, a situation Dickens understood perfectly.
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His father too had a vision of a life of culture and comfort which was always just out of his reach.

In May, Fanny, currently the most successful member of the family, sang in a benefit concert at Drury Lane for the singer and comedian John Pritt Harley, and in the same month Charles started work. His daily walk to Gray’s Inn took him half an hour. It was all familiar territory, and if memories of the unhappiness of three years earlier came into his mind as he made his way over some of the same ground, he put them aside. Now he was eager to live the life of a young Londoner.
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He was always well turned out, kept his hair carefully combed, and he had a distinctive way of dressing: an Army cap with a strap going round his chin, more straps holding his trousers over his boots and a tight dark blue jacket, with a black neckerchief concealing the shirt beneath. The dandy of the late 1830s was already forming.

The other clerks took to him. He was such a good mimic that he had them laughing with his imitations of everyone who amused him – people he listened to in the streets, the old woman who swept the offices, clients and lawyers. He could do comic songs and turn himself into various well-known singers of the day. Soon he was spending his earnings on going to the theatre with his new companions, discussing actors and plays, and always ready to give them long passages of Shakespeare. In the summer of 1828 the veteran comedian Charles Mathews was at Drury Lane doing his hugely popular one-man shows in which he played multiple parts, calling them ‘monopolylogues’, and Mathews became the actor Dickens admired above all others. For the next six years he appeared at the Adelphi Theatre every season, and Dickens went as often as he could, learning his performances by heart, words, songs, movements and gestures.
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It was just as well he was soon given a rise to thirteen shillings a week. There was an occasional dinner with a friend, and on special occasions a brandy or whisky grog and a mild Havana cigar. He found out what it was like to be drunk and to feel ill in the morning. When their boss Blackmore got married he gave the whole office dinner, and one clerk stayed away sick the next day, insisting on his return that it was not the drink that had made him ill, ‘It was the
salmon
!’ Dickens laughed, stored it up and used it in his first novel, where the respectable Mr Pickwick makes the same excuse after getting drunk: ‘It was the
salmon
!’ There was no disapproval in Dickens’s joking, because wine and spirits were among the legitimate pleasures of life for him, along with cigars, and he was always ready to mock the temperance movement.

He soon knew his way around all the streets, courts, alleys, inns, chambers and gardens of the legal district. When the firm moved to upstairs premises with a view over Holborn, the clerks amused themselves by dropping cherry stones from the windows on passers-by, and those who came up to complain were met by Dickens acting injured innocence to perfection, and went away baffled. If office life was dull, outside in the streets there was everything to learn. This is the least documented time in his life, but the sketches he wrote in the 1830s tell us what he observed, what interested him and what sort of young man he was. The law did not impress him, then or ever, except for the particular eccentricities and general obduracy of its practitioners, although he understood that it was a respectable way to make money. He was exploring the world in which he found himself, and gathering himself together to make some sort of assault upon it, but had not yet discovered what his line of attack would be.

In November 1828 he left Ellis & Blackmore and went to work for another solicitor, Charles Molloy, in Chancery Lane, where he knew one of the clerks, Thomas Mitton, whose family also lived in The Polygon, his father keeping a pub near by. Mitton was serving his articles with Molloy in order to become a lawyer himself. The two young men made friends and Mitton went on to act as Dickens’s solicitor. Dickens thought about getting a legal qualification himself, not as a solicitor but at the Bar, and continued to think about it on and off for years. He went so far as to enter his name at the Middle Temple in 1839, without going any further; but the law in its many ramifications fascinated him, and lawyers figure in almost all his novels. They are not heroes: Dodson & Fogg in
The Pickwick Papers
, Sampson Brass in
The Old Curiosity Shop
, Mr Tulkinghorn and Mr Vholes in
Bleak House
all display varieties of evil behaviour; Mr Jaggers in
Great Expectations
does something to redeem the profession but remains sinister. Mr Wickfield is a feeble country solicitor who takes to drink, and his ambitious clerk Heep is an out-and-out villain. Only Traddles, who is about to become a judge at the end of
David Copperfield
, is an honourable man, and Grewgious, in
The Mystery of Edwin Drood
, preserves his virtue by performing no legal function beyond acting as Receiver and Agent to two estates, and deputing any work involved to a solicitor.

The law struck Dickens as a murky business that thrived on delay, complication and confusion, whereas he had a passion for order. If he was born with it, it must have been strengthened in response to the chaotic conditions of his youth, and his father’s inability to keep control of things. Yet, determined as he was to set his own life in perfect order, the next ten years were ones of continuous confusion in his affairs as he worked through a series of self-imposed tasks, mastering different skills and experimenting to find out what suited him best. Whether it was paid work or self-education, whatever he took on was done with energy and determination. There were many distractions and he never ceased to do his best to be a helpful son and brother, however intensely he was pursuing his various goals. During these same years, while still a boy himself, he also made up his mind to get a wife in the hope of setting up a home of his own. Eighteen was much too young to be thinking about marriage, but as soon as he fell in love he sought commitment, determined to have everything put in order. All about him in London was the sexual chaos of the streets and the theatres, where he could see how prostitution thrived. If it was a temptation, it was one he wanted to shut off.

Shut off, but also observe. He was always looking, listening to the voices and reacting to the dramas, absurdities and tragedies of London life. From these early observations he built up a store of knowledge that would nourish his art for the rest of his life. In his early writings, sketches written for papers and magazines, he describes, for instance, exactly how the men of North London walked to work, six days a week, in their thousands, setting off early from the suburbs of Somers Town and Camden Town, Islington and Pentonville, where the bakers opened an hour earlier than those in town, so that the vast population of clerks pouring into the City, Chancery Lane, Gray’s Inn, Lincoln’s Inn and all the other Inns of Court could get their morning rolls before they started walking. He noticed the middle-aged men, ‘whose salaries have by no means increased in the same proportion as their families’, plodding steadily along, knowing almost everybody by sight after twenty years’ walking, but not wasting their energy in stopping to shake hands or speak; and in
A Christmas Carol
he would make Bob Cratchit walk, and sometimes run, the three miles from Camden Town to the City every day, to earn his fifteen shillings a week, not much more than Dickens was paid for his first office job. He saw the small office lads ‘who are made men before they are boys’, and alongside them the girls, milliners’ and stay-makers’ apprentices, ‘the hardest worked, the worst paid, and too often, the worst used class of the community’.
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Another picture: two sisters coming out of a prisoners’ van, handcuffed together, thirteen and sixteen, the younger hiding her face and crying into her handkerchief. A woman in the crowd that has gathered shouts, ‘How long are you for, Emily?’ The elder girl shouts back, ‘Six weeks and hard labour … and here’s Bella a-going too for the first time. Hold up your head, you chicken … Hold up your head, and show ’em your face. I an’t jealous, but I’m blessed if I an’t game!’ Dickens thinks the girls have been put to work as prostitutes by a vicious mother, and sympathizes with little Bella’s shame and horror, but he also enjoys Emily’s bold defiance and her readiness to play to the crowd. In this she is just like the thirteen-year-old boy in court who defies the judge, telling him he has witnesses to his character ‘fifteen gen’lm’n is a vaten outside, and vos a vaten all day yesterday; vich they told me the night afore my trial vos a’comin’ on.’ No witnesses are found, and the boy will be re-created as the Artful Dodger, whose act of defiance in the dock, from which he threatens to have his friends ask questions in parliament about his case, is one of the high points of
Oliver Twist
, where Dickens invites his readers to approve of such wit and total lack of contrition.
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And here is a pale, bony little girl with a necklace of blue glass beads, being trained up by her mother for the stage in a small private theatre off the Strand, where one of Dickens’s colleagues made an appearance or two, and just possibly Dickens himself also.
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The little girl will dance her first hornpipe on stage ‘after the tragedy’. She is a forerunner of the gin-fed Infant Phenomenon in
Nicholas Nickleby.
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He takes us inside a smart new Gin Shop, all plate glass, Turkey carpets, royal arms, stucco, mahogany and varnish to please the poor and get their money, where girls of fourteen or fifteen, with matted hair, are seen ‘walking about barefoot, and in white greatcoats, almost their only covering’. And also to the Eagle pleasure gardens between Pentonville and the City, where courting couples go on summer Sundays to enjoy tea and a concert at the Rotunda. Jemima Evans of Camden Town is there, wearing ‘a white muslin gown carefully hooked and eyed, a little red shawl, plentifully pinned, a large white straw bonnet trimmed with red ribbons, a small necklace, a large pair of bracelets, Denmark satin shoes, and open-worked stockings; white cotton gloves on her fingers, and a cambric pocket handkerchief, carefully folded up, in her hand’. She is so closely observed she could be painted, and we can hear her voice too: she pronounces Evans ‘Ivins’, finds the gardens ‘ev’nly’ and calls for an ‘Horficer!’ when there is a brawl.
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