Charles Dickens: A Life (13 page)

The young Dickens wanted to laugh, and to make others laugh, and he took his own impoverished and uncertain background, its anxieties over etiquette, entertaining, wooing and marriage, money problems, inheritances and culture, and poked fun at every aspect of it. Two stories are set in a boarding house, such as the one his great-aunt Charlton ran. Another is about the difficulty of finding a husband for daughters over twenty-five, and the humiliation of discovering that the young man who seemed like a desirable suitor is nothing better than a shop assistant. The farce has an edge of contempt when he deals with a wealthy hypochondriac, or a doctor who grows rich on telling women what they want to hear, or a man who makes money on the stock exchange and immediately aspires to break into a higher level of society. The same broker’s man who tells a funny story about agreeing to serve at the dinner table of a temporarily embarrassed rich man, pretending to be a servant to allow him time to raise the money he needs, has other stories of destitution and dying wives. And the comic tale of the inoffensive Mr Watkins Tottle, persuaded by a smart friend to stave off impending bankruptcy by proposing to a rich spinster, turns grim when she refuses him, and he kills himself rather than be taken to the sponging house. The young Dickens can pull jokes out of misery and pitch harmless decent people into disaster. Watching his father’s manoeuvres gave an edge to many of his observations. Was his father a gentleman or a fraud? A victim or a swindler?

Dickens was a loyal family member, and although he suffered from his father’s inability to stay out of debt, the idea of the large family as a force for good, convivial and energizing, remained powerful for him. Some of his earliest surviving letters are notes to friends summoning them to parties, music or dancing at home, and show how easy he felt there. A Christmas sketch published in 1835 suggests that the gathering of children, cousins and old people round the turkey and pudding does more to perpetuate good feeling than any number of religious homilies penned or spoken.
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In November 1827 a new brother made his appearance, and was named for an emperor, Augustus. Charles took to calling him Moses by the time he was a toddler, nicknaming him after the son of the Vicar of Wakefield in Goldsmith’s story, a favourite book. ‘Moses’ became ‘Boses’ when spoken through the nose, and Charles was prone to colds in the head, so ‘Boses’ became ‘Boz’, which in turn became the pen name adopted by him for his first published writing, in 1834. Dickens liked to keep hold of every part of his life, and relate each to the others. Years later, when he had his own family, he would take John Forster out with him to walk about the streets of Somers Town and Kentish Town on Christmas mornings, past the shabby-genteel houses, to watch the dinners preparing or coming in. This is the behaviour of a man who treasures the past and seeks to recapture and relive it.
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It is not easy to follow his day-to-day activities during the late 1820s and early 1830s because he was doing so much, taking in so much, spreading himself over so many activities, feeling everything with such intensity; and when he talked about those years afterwards he crammed too much into his accounts. He was living mostly with his parents, who moved in dizzying fashion from one lodging to another. In 1829 they left The Polygon for Norfolk Street, off Fitzroy Square.
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Sometime in 1830 they had lodgings in George Street, off the Strand – this was the year of the death of George IV and accession of his brother William IV. In 1831 they were in Margaret Street, near Cavendish Square, but in the later part of the year John Dickens tried to put a distance between himself and his creditors by moving up to Hampstead and even further to North End. They were all there with him in the spring of 1832, except that Charles deserted them for a while and took a lodging in Cecil Street, one of many such small streets running south of the Strand to the river, and discovered he could take healthy plunges into the Roman bath in nearby Strand Lane, where a spring of fresh water ran through a pool.
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This was when the Reform Bill was going through, to become law in June. He rejoined the family when they moved back to town – Fitzroy Street – later in the year and went with them to Highgate in August for a fortnight of fresh air. There, he told a friend, he ‘discovered a green lane which looks as if nature had intended it for a Smoking place’.
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He took up riding and became what was known as a Cockney rider, hiring horses to get as many miles out of town as he could. By the end of 1832 the whole family was in Bentinck Street, near Manchester Square.

For all John Dickens’s shortcomings, he led a good example to his eldest son in one important respect: by setting himself to learn shorthand and making a success of it. In 1828 he went to work as a parliamentary reporter for a brother-in-law who was still prepared to speak to him, the enterprising John Barrow, who was just starting up a newspaper, the
Mirror of Parliament
. Barrow’s intention was to rival Hansard by offering a complete record of what went on at the House of Commons, and he needed a team of reliable reporters to make a success of it. A fourth Barrow brother, Edward, also joined the paper as a reporter, and Charles was inspired to learn shorthand too. He gave a fictional account of the struggle to master it in
David Copperfield
, in which David learns to write it down only to find he cannot read it back and has to start all over again; he also gave David swift success in becoming a parliamentary reporter.
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This was not quite what happened in reality. Charles left Molloy’s office sometime in 1829, when he had mastered shorthand well enough to find work as a reporter in the ecclesiastical courts at Doctors’ Commons, close to St Paul’s Cathedral, where his great-aunt Charlton’s husband was a senior clerk. The courts held at Doctors’ Commons dealt mostly with marriage, divorce and wills, and were held in a great pillared room decorated with the coats of arms of judges who had sat there over the centuries, a place of arcane practices where proctors argued in wigs and furred and scarlet gowns. Dickens found it fusty and even sinister, as he made clear in a descriptive piece he published in 1836.
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It was his first view of such outworn rituals kept creakily going, and convinced him that they would be better swept away.

The work he was able to get there was in any case irregular. He had to wait in a box to be chosen by one of the proctors to provide his shorthand services, and outside of the law terms there was none. But he was not idle. On reaching eighteen in 1830 he applied to the British Museum for a ticket to the Reading Room. Once again the Charltons proved helpful, and Mr Charlton was his sponsor. The ticket was renewed at least four times and for several years he read in the Reading Room when he could. A few of his book slips survive and show that he looked at Shakespeare’s plays, at Goldsmith’s
History of England
and at some Roman history, and returned to the Hollar engravings of Holbein’s
Dance of Death
; also an eighteenth-century medical book on male midwives, perhaps seeking information about the mysterious anatomy of the other sex.

Even in the Reading Room his eyes were not always on the books. One of his early descriptive pieces describes a fellow reader, a man in a threadbare suit with a steadily diminishing number of buttons. His shabbiness fascinated Dickens and when he disappeared for a week he assumed he had died. But he was wrong, and the man reappeared, looking different, in a bright black suit. Slowly Dickens realized it was the original suit, ‘revived’ by being painted over in glossy black paint. Soon the pale seams, knees and elbows reappeared, and a rainy day entirely removed the ‘reviver’. Dickens leaves the story there. It is one of several pieces in which he gives a deadpan account of respectable failures and victims of London, lonely men who never rise to any success. Another is a clerk he sees in St James’s Park, who eats and lodges alone: ‘Poor, harmless creatures such men are; contented but not happy; broken-spirited and humbled, they feel no pain but they never know pleasure.’ The tone is dispassionate, but these men are emblematic warnings of what can easily happen to young men who fail to seize and make the most of their chances.
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How did he appear to other people at this stage of his life? There is a miniature portrait of him at eighteen, by his uncle Edward Barrow’s wife, Janet, a professional painter, who shows him as a self-conscious clever boy, wide-eyed, with a half-smile, a large black stock round his neck, his thick, dark curly hair cut short. He looks promising, interesting, but not yet ready to play a romantic lead. This did not stop him attempting the role, because this was the year he met and fell in love with Maria Beadnell. She seemed enchantingly pretty to him, even with eyebrows that almost met in the middle. She had a small pet dog, and an album in which he wrote an acrostic on her name; she had been to Paris, and she played the harp. He remembered afterwards that she wore blue gloves, and particularly entranced him in a raspberry-coloured dress with black velvet trimming at the top, cut into vandykes. She was capricious and, to judge by what she later became, silly. His account of falling in love in
David Copperfield
used his memories of her, making her into a doll-like creature with the mentality of a six-year-old, who screams and sobs in terror when he suggests she might learn to cook and keep accounts before their marriage. Maria was in fact two years older than him, and they met in May 1830, when he was eighteen to her twenty: he was smitten at once and remained obsessed by her for three years.

Working at Doctors’ Commons in the City was convenient for visiting her since she lived in Lombard Street. Her father was a City bank official and she had grown up in this comfortable home, the third and youngest daughter, and so the pet of the household; there was also an elder brother, Alfred, away in India, a lieutenant in the Army.
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The Beadnells entertained a good deal, and Dickens met there Henry Kolle, an admirer of Maria’s elder sister Anne. Dickens and Kolle both enjoyed singing, Anne played the lute and Maria the harp, and there was music. He made no attempt to hide what he felt for Maria, and in the early stages of his devotion she responded to his energetic wooing and seemed happy to believe they might one day be married. Looking back at that time, he described how, one day when they were caught in the rain as they walked together in the City, evidently unchaperoned, he took her into a church in Huggin Lane, near Mansion House, and said, ‘Let the blessed event … occur at no altar but this!’ and she consented that it should be so.
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But the tenderness of this moment passed, and the Beadnell parents decided he would not do as a suitor for their daughter. Although Mr Beadnell was only a clerk at the bank at Mansion House, he was evidently a senior clerk, and his brother was the manager of the bank, raising him well above the Dickens family financially. Kolle and Anne became formally engaged, but Kolle was a bank clerk with a steady income and a respectable father in business, whereas Dickens had no financial security and a barely presentable father. Mrs Beadnell did not even bother to get his name right, always addressing him as ‘Mr Dickin’.

He saw that to have any hope of impressing her parents and winning her hand he must become something more than a reporter in Doctors’ Commons. He began to turn up at the editorial office of his uncle John Barrow’s
Mirror of Parliament
, where his father and his uncle Edward were already employed, offered his help informally, and so managed to make a start on parliamentary reporting. He soon showed he could match their skills and was tried out among the reporters at the House of Commons. The House was another fusty old place, but more alive than Doctors’ Commons, and once he had proved himself he did not have to wait around to be offered work. Instead he had to be available for debates which might go on into the small hours, sitting in the cramped gallery, straining to hear the exchanges below in the thick atmosphere of the chamber and writing on his knees by the light of the gas chandeliers. He quickly made a reputation for speed and accuracy, and may have contributed to the full report of the first major debate on the proposed Reform Act, in March 1831, given in the
Mirror of Parliament
. After a time he was given a staff job, and in 1832 he was also reporting for another newly established paper, the
True Sun
.
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The early 1830s were a dramatic time in politics, and Dickens’s sympathies were all on the side of reform; but, although the Reform Act of 1832 was followed by bills against slavery and for the protection of factory workers and miners and other causes which certainly appealed to him, no sign of his interest or enthusiasm remains in letters or other writing. He did not learn to respect the House of Commons as a place, or its procedures. He described it, when full, as ‘a conglomeration of noise and confusion’, worse than Smithfield cattle market, with all the ‘talking, laughing, lounging, coughing, oh-ing, questioning or groaning’.
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He was not gripped by the excitement of the debates, and may well have taken against its atmosphere of a club where most of the members spoke in much the same way, a style learnt at their public schools and colleges, the better ones rising to occasional wit, the majority dull, the worst fatuous. Of two striking outsiders among the new MPs, the radical William Cobbett and the Irish leader Daniel O’Connell, Dickens afterwards admired Cobbett’s writing, and accused O’Connell of making ‘fretty, boastful, frothy’ speeches.
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Others whose speeches he took down became known to him personally later: they included Lord Ashley, many of whose reforming ideas he shared; Edward Stanley, afterwards fourteenth Earl of Derby, and Prime Minister in the 1850s, who singled him out for his excellence as a reporter, and was surprised by his youthful appearance when they met;
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and Lord John (later Earl) Russell, with whom a true friendship developed. But if he had anything to say about them and the words he heard them speak and took down at the time, it has not survived. His only known mention of Earl Grey, who pushed through the Reform Act with determination and skill, was a joke: that the shape of his head ‘weighed down my youth’.
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