Charles Dickens: A Life (8 page)

John Dickens may have been the son of the elderly butler, but it is also possible that he had a different father – perhaps John Crewe, exercising his
droit de seigneur
, cheering himself up for his wife’s infidelities, or another of the gentlemen who were regular guests at the Crewe residences. Or he may have believed that he was. His silence about his first twenty years, his habit of spending and borrowing and enjoying good things as though he were somehow entitled to do so, all suggest something of the kind, and harks back to the sort of behaviour he would have observed with dazzled eyes at Crewe Hall and in Mayfair. This was the style of Sheridan, and also Fox, who gambled away several fortunes and borrowed from all his friends without a thought of ever repaying any of them. What is worth noting is that he can be presumed to have grown up with a group of men as models who were, as well as gamblers and drinkers, the most eloquent of their time. The housekeeper’s boy developed his own elaborate turns of phrase, which his son found entertaining enough to record, and to turn to comic use in his writing; he described, for instance, a letter from his father in which he wrote that ‘he has reason to believe that he will be in town with the pheasants, on or about the first of October’, and went on to observe that his father has discovered on the Isle of Man ‘troops of friends, and every sort of continental luxury at a cheap rate’. Another of his grand pronouncements, putting down a boastful friend, was ‘The Supreme Being must be a very different individual from what I have every reason to believe him to be, if He would care in the least for the society of your relations.’
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John Dickens also developed his own habits of extravagance and debt, which nearly wrecked his son’s life and drove him to rage and despair.
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John Dickens was a character – he was the model for his son’s most famous character, Micawber. He was also lucky. In 1806 John Crewe was raised to the peerage by Fox, who died that year. George Canning, no Whig but a liberal Tory, and the cleverest of the younger generation of politicians, had become a friend of the Crewes, and since he was Treasurer of the Navy from 1804 to 1806, he was in a position to hand out a job to the son of their housekeeper.
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She was now an elderly woman and delighted the Crewe grandchildren with her storytelling. And when Sheridan followed Canning as Treasurer, he was also in a position to have John Dickens promoted. Two years later John’s salary was up to £110 and he was able to marry, in June 1809, just before his transfer to the Portsmouth dockyard. Sheridan died in 1816, Lady Crewe in 1818 and her onetime housekeeper in 1824: old Mrs Dickens left enough money to help her son John out of the trouble he had got into, but she died too soon to see the achievements of her grandson Charles, or to tell him tales of life at Crewe Hall and Lower Grosvenor Street.

So much for the background of John Dickens, something he seems not to have spoken about to his son Charles, who in turn never said anything about it. The Navy Pay Office was a good employer and the interminable wars with the French, now almost in their twentieth year, meant there was plenty of work for him in Portsmouth. Elizabeth Dickens’s brother Thomas Barrow worked alongside her husband – this was how the couple had met – and her father, Charles Barrow, was also employed at Somerset House in London under the impressive title of ‘Chief Conductor of Monies in Town’. But little Charles never knew the grandfather for whom he was named because Mr Barrow had to leave England suddenly in 1810 when it was discovered that he had been defrauding the Navy Pay Office for seven years. Life was hard with ten children, he pleaded, and he had been driven to it by need, but criminal proceedings were started and he fled across the Channel. This was only a few months after witnessing the marriage of his daughter to John Dickens at the church of St Mary-le-Strand in June 1809. She was in Portsmouth when he was disgraced and made his secret escape abroad, and, while the subject would surely not have been mentioned at Mile End Terrace, it meant there was a secret hanging in the air, a story that could not be told. Both Charles Dickens’s grandfathers were unknown and unmentioned figures.

As daughters often do, Elizabeth had chosen a husband who shared some of her father’s traits, and in particular the taste for living above his income. John Dickens was expansive by nature, with a tendency to speak in loose, grand terms, and an easy way with money. When required to describe himself he wrote ‘gentleman’ on documents and announced himself as ‘Esquire’ in the newspaper announcement of his first son’s birth.
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He liked to dress well, as young Regency bucks did, he bought expensive books and enjoyed entertaining friends, from whom he might later ask for a loan. His voice had a slight thickness, as though his tongue was a little too large for his mouth, but he was likeable, plump and full of fun, and he and Elizabeth made a cheerful couple.

She was a slim, energetic young woman, and she allegedly spent the evening before the birth of her son out dancing.
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She also appreciated music and books, and knew some Latin. Her father, before he went to work for the Navy Pay Office, had been an instrument-maker and music teacher, and also ran a circulating library in London. The Barrows were better educated than the Dickenses, and she had talented brothers. Thomas, her husband’s colleague, overcame the matter of his father’s fraud by his own trustworthiness and diligence, and rose high in the Navy Pay Office. John Barrow published poetry and a historical novel, and started his own newspaper, and Edward Barrow was a good amateur musician with artistic tastes – he married a painter of miniatures from a family of artists – and he worked as a parliamentary reporter. They were all helpful to their sister and brother-in-law, and became significant figures in Charles’s young life.

When he was only five months old the family was obliged to move to a smaller house on a poor street, with no front garden.
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They were already short of money, and the house would have matched the one described by Jane Austen in
Mansfield Park
at exactly this time, where Fanny Price visited her parents in Portsmouth, and found the passage and stairs so narrow and the walls so thin that you could hear all the noises from room to room.
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Here a third child, Alfred, was born, and died at six months in September 1814. The family moved again, to a better house in Portsea, at No. 39 Wish Street, and a nurse cared for Fanny and Charles; he claimed to remember her carrying him out to see the soldiers exercising. That winter their father was summoned to work at Somerset House, and the family went with him to London. They left Portsmouth under snow, according to Dickens’s own recollection, and did not return.
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They found lodgings in Norfolk Street (Cleveland Street today), only recently paved over and transformed from one of the old ‘Green Lanes’ out to the country into a residential road that took you to the new suburbs of Somers Town and Camden Town. This was the north edge of London, where big town houses were under construction in Fitzroy Square, while to the east of Tottenham Court Road there were still farms and fields. John Dickens’s brother, William, was still running his coffee shop in Oxford Street, and in 1815 he married; but John, in spite of his steady employment with the Navy Pay Office, where he was now earning £200 a year, found it as hard to manage as ever and took to asking their mother for money, as she noted when she came to write her will. Whether old Mrs Dickens ever sat with Fanny and Charles while their mother was busy, or told them stories, is not recorded. In April 1816 a fourth Dickens child was born – Letitia, who was to outlive all the others.
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While the younger Dickenses were in London the war against Napoleon and the French finally came to an end in 1815. Now that the Navy needed fewer officers, the work of the Pay Office was changing, and in December 1816 John Dickens was sent out of town again. This time it was only thirty miles away, to Kent. He went first for a few weeks to Sheerness dockyard, where the River Medway runs into the Thames estuary through the salt marshes, and then on to Chatham, where Rochester Castle stands above the bridge over the Medway, and Chatham and Rochester are effectively one town folded around the spectacular double curve of the river, with the Kentish hills rising sharply above. The Romans settled there, and it had a great castle and a cathedral, a medieval bridge, ancient streets, inns and houses, fine dwellings for the naval officers and great industrial buildings in the dockyards. The newest construction was Fort Clarence, a gigantic brick-built defence meant to deter Napoleon, put up in 1812 and named for the Lord High Admiral of the Navy, Prince William, Duke of Clarence, destined to become King in 1830. Landscape and buildings are dramatic, and they imprinted themselves strongly on the imagination of the small boy. Here Dickens became fully aware of the world around him and began to store up impressions.

He arrived round about his fifth birthday, with his two sisters, seven-year-old Fanny and baby Letitia. Their father was busily engaged, in and out of the vast Chatham dockyard, often aboard the old Navy yacht
Chatham
, sailing up the Medway to Sheerness and back. He installed his family in another small, neat, Georgian terraced house at the top of the steep hill rising above Chatham and Rochester, with views down to the river. No. 2 Ordnance Terrace is still there, battered by time and neglect, and you can see it was one of a group of modest terraces built near the large houses in the New Road laid out along the hilltop in the 1790s. The town was prosperous, rough and lively, crammed with working people serving the needs of the Navy, and the Army too, since Chatham was also a recruiting centre for soldiers. There were many blacksmiths and rope-makers there, and their apprentices had their own songs and celebrations when they paraded with bands, wearing masks and collecting money.

Up the hill at Ordnance Terrace things were quieter. There was plenty of open space, with farmland at the back and the grassy expanse of a hay field in front, where the children could play safely, picnic under the hawthorn trees and make friends with their neighbours. George and Lucy, children of Mr Stroughill, the plumber next door, became their playmates, and Charles fell in love with Lucy, whom he claimed to remember afterwards as ‘peach-coloured, with a blue sash’. The grass on which they sat eating sweets together has long since gone, sliced off by a Victorian railway cutting, and large trees along its edge obscure the view, but you can still get a sense of how agreeable it must have been. Each house has a few steps up to its narrow front door, with a small fanlight above; below, a basement; one front window on the ground floor, two each on the first and second floors. Into this simple box went Mr and Mrs Dickens, her sister Mary Allen, known as ‘Aunt Fanny’, widow of a naval officer, the three children, their nurse Mary Weller and the maid Jane Bonny.

By now the boy could just about read, although not yet the splendid and expensive volume his father brought home,
The History and Antiquities of Rochester and Its Environs
, newly published with a folding map and five plates. It was his mother who gave him daily lessons in reading over a period of time, and taught him ‘thoroughly well’, he told his friend John Forster. Forster says Dickens used almost exactly the words he gave to David Copperfield, ‘I faintly remember her teaching me the alphabet; and when I look upon the fat black letters in the primer, the puzzling novelty of their shapes and the easy good nature of O and S, always seem to present themselves before me as they used to do.’
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This makes Elizabeth Dickens sound like a mother who cherished her son through careful teaching which sparked his imagination, and from then on words were associated with pleasure and he was set on his path. Without her he might not have embarked on his own crash course of literary studies through the library of books left by his father in the little room next to his bedroom at the top of the stairs. They were hefty eighteenth-century travel books and novels: Defoe’s
Robinson Crusoe
, Fielding’s
Tom Jones
, Goldsmith’s
The Vicar of Wakefield
, Smollett’s
Roderick Random, Peregrine Pickle
and
Humphry Clinker
; also Mrs Inchbald’s collection of farces, some volumes of the
Tatler
and the
Spectator
, and fairy stories, the
Arabian Nights
and
The Tales of the Genii.
Catching the light of the long summer evenings as he sat alone at the top of the house, he travelled, suffered and triumphed with the heroes of the small print, his imagination free of constraint.

According to one account, his nurse Mary Weller described him as ‘a terrible boy to read’. She also remembered him coming downstairs and asking for the kitchen to be cleared for a game. Then George from next door would bring his magic lantern and Charles and Fanny would sing, recite and perform, a favourite piece for him being Dr Watts’s ‘The Voice of the Sluggard’, with gestures and actions. She found him ‘a lively boy, of a good, genial, open disposition’, and Mrs Dickens was ‘a dear, good mother’.
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He himself kept a vivid memory of his mother taking him out to see a royal carriage passing through town. Years later he told the son of a friend, as they walked together up a street in Chatham where there was a low wall with an iron railing on the top, ‘I remember my poor mother, God forgive her, put me up on the ledge of that wall, so that I might wave my hat and cheer George IV – the Prince Regent – who was driving by.’ The ‘poor mother, God forgive her’ was from the adult Dickens, who had a low opinion of George IV, but as a boy small enough to be lifted up on to the wall he would without doubt have taken innocent pleasure in waving his hat at the Prince, richly dressed and bloated, as he went past in his magnificent carriage.