Charles Dickens: A Life (14 page)

From the day he stopped reporting the doings of the House, he chose never to return to it and never had a good word for it. He felt it had little connection with what he saw going on in the world outside, the poverty, ignorance and degradation of so many men, women and children who lived without hope or comfort, and who needed to be noticed and helped; and he came to endorse the view of his contemporary, the historian Henry Thomas Buckle, who believed lawgivers were more likely to get in the way of what needed to be done than to help society. Dickens thought he could do more good as a writer who drew attention to abuses than in any other way, and he turned down several invitations to stand for parliament himself, and attacked the bombastic and cliché-ridden style of the typical MP with contempt. Nothing ever thrilled him about the Commons or the Lords, not the oratory, not the causes, not the personalities of the politicians.

Reporting kept him busy, but not too busy to keep up his studies in the Reading Room. When parliament was sitting, it was hard to visit the Beadnells or have any social life, since he had to be at the House in the afternoon and evening. He could read at the Museum in the mornings and, when parliament was in recess, all through the day, but earn nothing unless he could find other work. During 1832 the Beadnells took action to end their daughter’s flirtation by sending her to Paris again, and when she returned it was clear that she had lost interest in him. She came to his twenty-first birthday party – ‘the important occasion of my coming of age’, celebrated with dancing of quadrilles – and used the occasion to make it plain she did not take his suit seriously.
²⁵
‘Our meetings of late have been little more than so many displays of heartless indifference on the one hand while on the other they have never failed to prove a fertile soil of wretchedness in a pursuit which has long since been worse than hopeless,’ he wrote to her, returning her letters and a present she had given him in happier times. He decided she had been playing a game, toying with his admiration, and that it meant nothing to her. He was left with ‘a feeling of utter desolation and wretchedness’.
²⁶
Her sister Anne wrote to him saying she did not understand Maria, or know what she felt, and counselling patience; while his sister Fanny failed to pass on something Maria had said, at which Charles raged, ‘if I were to live a hundred years I would never forgive it.’
²⁷

He told Maria later that ‘When we were falling off each other I came from the House of Commons many a night at two or three o’clock in the morning only to wander past the place she was asleep in.’
²⁸
This meant walking from Westminster into the City, and, having patrolled Lombard Street, setting off back to Bentinck Street. It must have taken two hours and got him home not much before morning. Still in the grip of his obsession, he did nothing half-heartedly, and night-walking was a sort of tribute to her – although she had no idea he was doing it – and a way of dealing with his pain. In May he was still writing tormented letters, telling her, ‘I never have loved and I never can love any human creature breathing but yourself.’
²⁹
Three days later, on 22 May, he saw her at her sister’s wedding to Henry Kolle, where he acted as best man, and that was the end. Maria remained unmarried until, at the age of thirty-five, she became the bride of a saw-mill manager in Finsbury, at which time Dickens was travelling in Italy and already the father of five children. Ten years after that, in 1855, he wrote to her again to say that the ‘wasted tenderness of those hard years’ made him suppress emotion, ‘which I know is no part of my original nature, but which makes me chary of showing my affections, even to my children, except when they are very young’.
³⁰
He blamed the coldness he was aware of in himself on the pain of that young experience, when love had seemed a matter of life and death, overwhelming and unrepeatable. He believed that he had felt more intensely then than at any time since, so that even the memory of those intense feelings became precious to him, a gold standard for love. At the same time, in writing about it in
David Copperfield
, he allowed David the best of all worlds, letting him marry Dora and then sending her into a decline to die young, leaving her husband heartbroken but also relieved that he has been rescued from his mistake. There was a web of ironies here that only he understood.

Throughout all this time of work, and love, and study, and constant moving from place to place, he was pursuing another, completely different and overpowering passion: for the theatre. Amazing as it seems, according to his own sober account it filled his life. He said that he went to a play almost every night for at least three years, ‘really studying the bills first, and going to where there was the best acting’; and, on top of this, practising ‘often four, five, six hours a day: shut up in my own room, or walking about in the fields’. This account is hard to square with his many other activities in 1829, 1830 and 1831, especially once he had started reporting parliamentary debates.
³¹
But, whether literally true or not, early in 1832 he made up his mind to explore a possible career as an actor. He asked Robert Keeley, a popular comedian specializing in low-life parts, to coach him. He had already memorized many of Charles Mathews’s ‘At Homes’, practising in front of a mirror to perfect his performances. His sister Fanny helped him rehearse and accompanied his songs on the piano. When he felt ready, he wrote to the stage manager at Covent Garden, George Bartley, asking for an audition. A day was fixed when he was to appear before Bartley and the actor Charles Kemble. Just before the appointed day he was struck down by one of his incapacitating colds: his face was inflamed, his voice gone, and an ear was giving trouble too. He wrote to cancel the audition, saying he would reapply during the next season. ‘See how near I may have been, to another sort of life,’ he told Forster as he looked back years later.
³²

He never did reapply, but he also never lost the feeling that the theatre was in some sense his true destiny, what he understood best, what he did best and enjoyed best. All his writing is theatrical, his characters are largely created through their voices, and in due course he re-created them for public performance and spoke their lines on stage himself. His plots tend towards the theatrical and melodramatic. He devoted much time and energy to amateur acting. William Macready, the great actor, on first hearing him read as a young man, wrote in his diary, ‘He reads as well as an experienced actor would – he is a surprising man.’
³³
And in the last month of his life he told a friend that his most cherished daydream was ‘“To settle down now for the remainder of my life within easy distance of a great theatre, in the direction of which I should hold supreme authority. It should be a house, of course, having a skilled and noble company, and one in every way magnificently appointed. The pieces acted should be dealt with according to my pleasure, and touched up here and there in obedience to my own judgment; the players as well as the plays being absolutely under my command. There,” said he, laughingly, and in a glow at the mere fancy, “
that’s
my daydream!”’
³⁴
The confession underlines the strength and consistency of his feeling that he and the theatre were meant for one another, even though he turned his back on the possibility of becoming a professional actor in 1832.

He was soon putting on a private theatrical performance of his own, in April 1833, in the family’s upstairs lodgings at No. 18 Bentinck Street, with himself as stage manager, actor, singer, prologue writer, scenery-builder and accordionist in the band. He organized friends to paint the scenery and do the lighting, and rehearsed the actors for weeks, every Wednesday evening, sending them strict summonses. As was normal in the theatre then, there were to be three pieces played. They were all up-to-date works, the principal one,
Clari; or, The Maid of Milan
, an English opera first performed at Covent Garden only ten years before – the tale of a peasant girl abducted by a nobleman, who sang the immensely popular song, ‘Home, Sweet Home’.
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Fanny Dickens naturally took the lead, with Letitia and Charles playing her mother and father. One of the two farces was
The Married Bachelor
, in which servants pitted their wits against their employers, while the other,
Amateurs and Actors
, featured a half-starved orphan boy from the workhouse, part comic and part pathetic.
³⁶
Uncle Edward Barrow took this interesting role, and also directed the band. Family and friends were all pressed into performing: John Dickens, Tom Mitton, John Kolle and two new friends, Tom Beard, a fellow reporter recently arrived in London, and Henry Austin, a young architect and engineer.

During the June parliamentary recess Dickens set about trying to find more work. In July he dined with his uncle John Barrow to meet John Payne Collier, a journalist and man of letters on the staff of the
Morning Chronicle
, the leading Liberal newspaper, who was in a position to recommend him for a job there. When Collier asked Barrow about his nephew’s education, he was given a vague answer, with a reference to his having assisted Warren, the blacking man. The dinner was a success to the extent that it culminated in Charles singing one of his favourite popular songs, ‘The Dog’s Meat Man’, and one of his own, ‘Sweet Betsy Ogle’. It sounds as though everybody drank a good deal, and although Collier later said he liked Charles and had recommended him for a job, none was offered. Barrow was living in the outer suburb of Norwood, having left his wife and set up house with another woman, Lucina Pocock, whose black eyes appealed to Charles, and this autumn he often stayed with them. In October he got up more theatricals, this time writing his own comic play, ‘O’thello’.

He was also working on stories and sketches and, released from love and serious theatrical ambition, finding his voice. Kolle and his wife, Maria’s sister, remained friends he trusted and relied on, and in December he wrote to Henry Kolle asking for ‘Mrs K’s criticism of a little paper of mine (the first of a Series) in
the Monthly
(not the New Monthly) Magazine of this month’. The
Monthly
was a very small circulation magazine run from premises in Johnson’s Court, off Fleet Street, and Dickens had dropped his first offering ‘stealthily one evening at twilight, with fear and trembling, into a dark letter box in a dark office up a dark court’, after they had closed.
³⁷
A postscript to his letter to Kolle confessed, ‘I am so dreadfully nervous, that my hand shakes to such an extent as to prevent my writing a word legibly.’
³⁸
He was not paid for his work, and it appeared anonymously, but there it was, as he had written it, in print. He bought a copy of the
Monthly
magazine from a shop in the Strand and walked with it to Westminster Hall ‘and turned into it for half an hour, because my eyes were so dimmed with joy and pride, that they could not bear the street, and were not fit to be seen there’.
³⁹
It was a moment never to be forgotten, and by coincidence the man who served him in the bookshop in the Strand was William Hall, whom he met and recognized two years later when the publishers Chapman & Hall approached him with a commission.
⁴⁰

The sketch was ‘A Dinner at Poplar Walk’, only nine pages, but a remarkable first effort. It cuts a sharp slice through London and suburban life as Dickens observed them in 1833, and presents a small dramatic episode. It is played out between two cousins and two views of life: a forty-year-old bachelor clerk with precise habits, lodged in town, and his cheerful younger cousin who lives in the suburbs with a wife and son. Hoping to coax a legacy, the younger cousin calls on the elder with an invitation to dinner, bringing his dog with him, which turns out to be a mistake. Dickens had already mastered comic dialogue: ‘… damn the dog! he’s spoiling your curtains,’ points out the cheerful owner of the dog to the sour owner of the curtains. The detail of each man’s domestic surroundings, and the agony of the bachelor cousin travelling on unreliable transport – the coach from Bishopsgate Street, every half-hour to the Swan at Stamford Hill – to a social event he has no wish to attend, are unsparingly laid out, and very funny. Both cousins are absurd but neither is wholly unsympathetic, and the drama bites, without villain, hero, moral or sentimentality.
⁴¹
Order and muddle are set against each other, a theme that would run through his writing, and through his life.

In January 1834 the second sketch appeared, about a family putting on a play, again drawn loosely from his home theatricals. The
Monthly
was keen to have more of his work, and Dickens, who was revolving an idea for a novel in his head, told Kolle that he might cut his ‘proposed Novel up into little Magazine Sketches’.
⁴²
Whether he did or not, he was launched, modestly but surely. Sketch followed sketch, and in August 1834 he signed himself for the first time ‘Boz’, and under this name rose to fame.

He had spent seven years applying himself to master a series of different skills, always seeking to find a congenial way to earn a good income. He had served in lawyers’ offices, taught himself shorthand, taken down law cases, reported the procedures of the House of Commons and the House of Lords, prepared himself for the acting profession and turned to writing about what he saw around him for magazines. All were demanding activities and one by one he tried them, rejecting some, persevering with others. Even when he did find the right path, there was still a long way to go before he could hope to establish himself professionally. But his pursuit of various goals was so energetic, and he demonstrated such an ability to do many different things at once, and fast, that even his search for a career had an aspect of genius.