BOYHOOD AND YOUTH IN LONDON.
It was in the early spring of 1823 that Charles Dickens made
acquaintance with London for the second time, that vast Metropolis which
henceforth continued to exercise a fascination over him, and in the
study of which, as well as of its various types of humanity, he found a
perpetual charm. His early impressions, however, were not of the
brightest, having (as he subsequently observed) exchanged “everything
that had given his ailing little life its picturesqueness or sunshine”
for the comparatively sordid environment of a London suburb, and
suffered the deprivation of the companionship of his playfellows at
Chatham to become a solitary lad under circumstances that could not fail
to make sorrowful the stoutest heart, not the least depressing being his
father’s money involvement with consequent poverty at home. John
Dickens, whose financial affairs demanded retrenchment, had rented what
Forster describes as “a mean, small tenement” at No. 16 (now No. 141),
Bayham Street, Camden Town, to-day one of the poorest parts of London,
but not quite so wretched then as we are led to suppose by the reference
in Forster’s biography. The cottages in Bayham Street, built in 1812,
were comparatively new in 1823, and then stood in the midst of what may
be regarded as rural surroundings, there being a meadow at the back of
the principal row of houses, in which haymaking was carried on in its
season, while a beautiful walk across the fields led to Copenhagen
House. Dickens averred that “a washer-woman lived next door” to his
father, and “a Bow Street officer lived over the way.” We learn, too,
that at the top of the street were some almshouses, and when revisiting
the spot many years later Dickens told his biographer that “to go to
this spot and look from it over the dust-heaps and dock-leaves and
fields at the cupola of St. Paul’s looming through the smoke was a treat
that served him for hours of vague reflection afterwards.” A writer who
vividly remembered Camden Town as it appeared when John Dickens lived
there has placed upon record some interesting particulars concerning it.
He says: “In the days I am referring to gas was unknown. We had little
twinkling oil-lamps. As soon as it became dark, the watchman went his
rounds, starting from his box at the north end of Bayham Street, against
the tea-gardens of the Mother Red Cap, then a humble roadside house,
kept by a widow and her two daughters, of the name of Young. Then the
road between Kentish and Camden Towns was very lonely—hardly safe after
dark. These certainly were drawbacks, for depredations used frequently
to be committed in the back premises of the houses.... The nearest
church was Old St. Pancras, then in the midst of fields.”[17] Exception
has been taken to Forster’s use of the word “squalid” as applied to the
Bayham Street of 1823, and with justification, for persons of some
standing made it their abode, and we learn that in certain of the twenty
or thirty newly-erected houses there lived Engelhart and Francis Holl,
the celebrated engravers, the latter the father of Frank Holl, the Royal
Academician; Charles Rolls and Henry Selous, artists of note; and Angelo
Selous, the dramatic author. Thus it would appear that Bayham Street,
during the early part of its history, was eminently respectable, and we
are compelled to presume that Dickens’s unfavourable presentment of the
locality was the outcome of his own painful environment, such as would
be forcibly impressed upon the mind of a sickly child (as he then was)
and one keenly susceptible to outward influences. Undoubtedly, as
Forster remarks, “he felt crushed and chilled by the change from the
life at Chatham, breezy and full of colour, to the little back garret in
Bayham Street,” and, looking upon the dingy brick tenement to-day, it is
not difficult to realize this fact; for, although the house itself could
not have been less attractive than his previous home on “the Brook” at
Chatham, the surroundings did not offer advantages in the shape of
country walks and riverside scenery such as the immediate neighbourhood
of Chatham afforded.[18]
[Illustration: 16 (NOW 141) BAYHAM STREET, CAMDEN TOWN. (_Page 24._)
Dickens and his parents lived here in 1823. The house was also the
residence of Mr. Micawber, and the district is mentioned in “Dombey
and Son” under the name of Staggs Gardens.]
Bayham Street was named after Bayham Abbey in Sussex, one of the seats
of the Marquis Camden. Eighty years ago this part of suburban London was
but a village, and Bayham Street had grass struggling through the
newly-paved road. Thus we are forced to the conclusion that the misery
and depression of spirits, from which little Charles suffered while
living here, must be attributed to family adversity and his own isolated
condition rather than to the character of his environment. At this time
his father’s pecuniary resources became so circumscribed as to compel
the observance of the strictest domestic economy, and prevented him from
continuing his son’s education. “As I thought,” said Dickens on one
occasion very bitterly, “in the little back-garret in Bayham Street, of
all I had lost in losing Chatham, what would I have given—if I had had
anything to give—to have been sent back to any other school, to have
been taught something anywhere!”
Instead of improving, the elder Dickens’s affairs grew from bad to
worse, and all ordinary efforts to propitiate his creditors having been
exhausted, Mrs. Dickens laudably resolved to attempt a solution of the
difficulty by means of a school for young ladies. Accordingly, a house
was taken at No. 4, Gower Street North, whither the family removed in
1823. This and the adjoining houses had only just been built. The
rate-book shows that No. 4 was taken in the name of Mrs. Dickens, at an
annual rental of £50, and that it was in the occupation of the Dickens
family from Michaelmas, 1823, to Lady Day, 1824, they having apparently
left Bayham Street at Christmas of the former year. No. 4, Gower Street
North stood a little to the north of Gower Street Chapel, erected in
1820, and still existing on the west side of the road; the house, known
in recent times as No. 147, Gower Street, was demolished about 1895, and
an extension of Messrs. Maple’s premises now occupies the site. When, in
1890, I visited the place with my friend the late Mr. W. R. Hughes
(author of “A Week’s Tramp in Dickens Land”), we found it in the
occupation of a manufacturer of artificial human eyes, a sort of Mr.
Venus, with his “human eyes warious,” as depicted in “Our Mutual
Friend”; while there was a dancing academy next door, reminiscent of Mr.
Turveydrop, the professor of deportment in “Bleak House.” The Dickens
residence had six small rooms, with kitchen in basement, each front room
having two windows—altogether a fairly comfortable abode, but minus a
garden. The result of Mrs. Dickens’s enterprise proved as disastrous as
that of Mrs. Micawber’s. “Poor Mrs. Micawber! She said she had tried to
exert herself; and so, I have no doubt, she had. The centre of the
street door was perfectly covered with a great brass plate, on which was
engraved, ‘Mrs. Micawber’s Boarding Establishment for Young Ladies’; but
I never found that any young ladies had ever been to school there; or
that any young lady ever came, or proposed to come; or that the least
preparation was ever made to receive any young lady.” The actual facts
are thus recorded in fiction, and the futility of Mrs. Dickens’s
excellent intention to retrieve the family misfortunes seemed
inevitable, in spite of the energy displayed by the youthful Charles in
distributing “at a great many doors a great many circulars,” calling
attention to the superior advantages of the new seminary. The blow
proved a crushing one, rendering the prospect more hopeless than ever.
Importunate creditors, who could no longer be kept at bay, effected the
arrest of John Dickens, who was conveyed forthwith to a prison for
debtors in the Borough of Southwark; his last words to his heart-broken
son as he was carried off being similar to those despondingly uttered by
Mr. Micawber under like circumstances, to the effect that the sun was
set upon him for ever.
Forster says that the particular prison where John Dickens suffered
incarceration was the Marshalsea, and this statement appears correct,
judging from the fragment of the novelist’s autobiography which refers
to the unfortunate incident: “And he told me, I remember, to take
warning by the Marshalsea, and to observe that if a man had twenty
pounds a year, and spent nineteen pounds nineteen shillings and
sixpence, he would be happy; but that a shilling spent the other way
would make him wretched.” Another of Mr. Micawber’s wise sayings, be it
observed. That impecunious gentleman (it will be remembered) suffered
imprisonment at the King’s Bench, and it may be surmised that the
novelist purposely changed the locale that old memories should not be
revived. Of debtors’ prisons considerable knowledge is displayed in his
books, his personal acquaintance with them dating, of course, from those
days when the brightness of his young life was obscured by the “falling
cloud” to which he compares this distressing time. Realistic and
accurate pictures of the most noteworthy of these blots upon our social
system may be found in the forcible description in the fortieth chapter
of “Pickwick” of the Fleet Prison, of which the last vestiges were
removed in 1872, and the site of which is now covered by the Memorial
Hall, Farringdon Street, and by Messrs. Cassell and Co.’s printing
works; the King’s Bench Prison (long since demolished) figures
prominently in “David Copperfield”; while many of the principal scenes
in “Little Dorrit” are laid in the departed Marshalsea, which adjoined
the burial-ground of St. George’s Church in the Borough. The extreme
rear of the Marshalsea Prison, described by Dickens in the preface to
“Little Dorrit,” was transformed into a warehouse in 1887.
The second chapter of Forster’s biography makes dismal reading,
relating, as it does, the bitter experiences of Charles Dickens’s
boyhood—experiences, however, which yielded abundant material for future
use in his stories. With the breadwinner in the clutches of the law, the
wife and children, left stranded in the Gower Street house, had a
terrible struggle for existence; we are told that in order to obtain the
necessaries of life their bits of furniture and various domestic
utensils were pawned or otherwise disposed of, until at length the place
was practically emptied of its contents, and the inmates were perforce
compelled to encamp in the two parlours, living there night and day. At
this juncture a relative, James Lamert (who had lodged with the family
in Bayham Street), heard of their misfortunes, and, through his
connection with Warren’s Blacking Manufactory at 30, Hungerford Stairs,
Strand, provided an occupation there for little Charles by which he
could earn a few shillings a week—a miserable pittance, but extremely
welcome under the circumstances, as, by exercising strict economy, it
enabled him to support himself, thus making one mouth less to provide
for at home. Hungerford Stairs (in after-life he used to declare that he
knew _Hunger_-ford well!) stood near the present Charing Cross railway
bridge (which usurps the old Hungerford Suspension Bridge, transferred
to Clifton), and the site of Hungerford Market is covered by the railway
station. Dickens has recorded that “the blacking warehouse was the last
house on the left-hand side of the way, at old Hungerford Stairs. It was
a crazy, tumble-down old house, abutting, of course, on the river, and
literally overrun with rats. Its wainscotted rooms and its rotten floors
and staircase, and the old grey rats swarming down in the cellars, and
the sound of their squeaking and scuffling coming up the stairs at all
times, and the dirt and decay of the place, rise up vividly before me,
as if I were there again.” The blacking factory, which disappeared when
Hungerford Market went, is faithfully portrayed in the eleventh chapter
of “David Copperfield,” thinly disguised as Murdstone and Grinby’s
Warehouse, “down in Blackfriars.” Dickens, like David, was keenly
sensible of the humiliation of what he could not help regarding as a
very menial occupation—the tying-up and labelling innumerable pots of
paste-blacking—which he was now destined to follow, and for the
remainder of his life he never recalled this episode without a pang.
He reminded Forster how fond he was of roaming about the neighbourhood
of the Strand and Covent Garden during the dinner hour, intently
observing the various types of humanity with precocious interest, and
storing up impressions which were destined to prove invaluable to him.
One of his favourite localities was the Adelphi, and he was particularly
attracted by a little waterside tavern called the Fox-under-the-Hill;
doubtless the incident narrated in the just-mentioned chapter of
“Copperfield”—the autobiographical chapter—is true of himself, when he
causes little David to confess to a fondness for wandering about that
“mysterious place with those dark arches,” and to wonder what the
coalheavers thought of him, a solitary lad, as he sat upon a bench
outside the little public-house, watching them as they danced.[19] The
pudding-shops and beef-houses in the neighbourhood of St. Martin’s Lane
and Drury Lane were familiar enough to him in those days; for, with such
a modest sum to invest for his mid-day meal, he naturally compared notes
as to the charges made by each for a slice of pudding or cold spiced
beef before deciding upon the establishment which should have the
privilege of his custom. He sometimes favoured Johnson’s in Clare Court,
which is identical with the place patronized by David Copperfield—viz.,
the “famous alamode beef-house near Drury Lane,” where he gave the
waiter a halfpenny, and wished he hadn’t taken it. In the recently
demolished Clare Court there existed in those days two of the best
alamode beef-shops in London, the Old Thirteen Cantons and the New
Thirteen Cantons, and we read in a curious book called “The Epicure’s
Almanack” (1815), that “the beef and liquors at either house are equally
good, and the attention of all who pass is attracted by the display of
fine sallads in the windows, which display is daily executed with great
ingenuity, and comprehends a variety of neat devices, in which the fine
slices of red beetroot are pleasingly conspicuous.” The New Thirteen
Cantons was kept by the veritable Johnson himself. We are further
informed that he owned a clever dog called Carlo, “who once enacted so
capital a part on the boards of Old Drury,” and whose sagacity “brought
as many customers to Mr. Johnson as did the excellence of his fare.”
Dickens, however, did not become acquainted with Carlo, who, a few years
before the lad knew the shop, paid the penalty of a report that the
famous animal had been bitten by a mad dog. “There were two
pudding-shops,” said Dickens to his biographer, “between which I was
divided, according to my finances.” One was in a court close to St.
Martin’s Church, where the pudding was made with currants, “and was
rather a special pudding,” but dear; the other was in the Strand,
“somewhere in that part which has been rebuilt since,” where the pudding
was much cheaper, being stout and pale, heavy and flabby, with a few big
raisins stuck in at great distances apart. The more expensive shop stood
in Church Court (at the back of the church), demolished when Adelaide
Street was constructed about 1830, and may probably be identified with
the Oxford eating-house, then existing opposite the departed Hungerford
Street; the other establishment, where Dickens often dined for economy’s
sake, flourished near the spot covered until quite recently by that
children’s paradise, the Lowther Arcade. The courts surrounding St.
Martin’s Church were formerly so thronged with eating-houses that the
district became popularly known as “Porridge Island.”
[Illustration: DICKENS AT THE BLACKING WAREHOUSE. (_Page 29._)
_From a drawing by Fred Barnard. Reproduced by kind permission of
Messrs. Chapman and Hall._]
Failing, by means of a certain “deed,” to propitiate his creditors, John
Dickens continued to remain within the gloomy walls of the Marshalsea.
The home in Gower Street was thereupon broken up, and Mrs. Dickens, with
her family, went to live with her husband in the prison. Little Charles,
however, was handed over as a lodger to a Mrs. Roylance, a reduced old
lady who afterwards figured as Mrs. Pipchin in “Dombey and Son.” Mrs.
Roylance, long known to the family, resided in Little College Street,
Camden Town; it became College Street West in 1828, and the portion
north of King Street has been known since 1887 as College Place. The
abode in question was probably No. 37, for, according to the rate-book
of 1824 (the period with which I am dealing), the house so numbered
(rated at £18) was occupied by Elizabeth _Raylase_[20] until the
following year, and demolished about 1890, at which time the street was
rebuilt.
The boy still carried on his uncongenial duties at the blacking
warehouse with satisfaction to his employers, in spite of the acute
mental suffering he underwent. Experiencing a sense of loneliness in
being cut off from his parents, brothers, and sisters, he pleaded to his
father to be allowed to lodge nearer the prison, with the result that he
left Mrs. Roylance, to take up his abode in Lant Street, Borough, where,
in the house of an insolvent court agent, a back attic had been found
for him, having from the little window “a pleasant prospect of a
timber-yard.” Of Lant Street, as it probably then appeared, we have a
capital description in the thirty-second chapter of the “Pickwick
Papers,” for here it was that Bob Sawyer found a lodgment with the
amiable (!) Mrs. Raddle and her husband, in the identical house, maybe,
as that tenanted by the insolvent court agent. “There is a repose about
Lant Street, in the Borough, which sheds a gentle melancholy upon the
soul. There are always a good many houses to let in the street; it is a
by-street, too, and its dulness is soothing. A house in Lant Street
would not come within the denomination of a first-rate residence in the
strict acceptation of the term, but it is a most desirable spot,
nevertheless. If a man wished to abstract himself from the world, to
remove himself from within the reach of temptation, to place himself
beyond the possibility of any inducement to look out of the window, he
should by all means go to Lant Street.
“In this happy retreat are colonized a few clear-starchers, a sprinkling
of journeymen bookbinders, one or two prison agents for the insolvent
court, several small housekeepers who are employed in the docks, a
handful of mantua-makers, and a seasoning of jobbing tailors. The
majority of the inhabitants either direct their energies to the letting
of furnished apartments, or devote themselves to the healthful and
invigorating pursuit of mangling. The chief features in the still life
of the street are green shutters, lodging-bills, brass door-plates, and
bell-handles, the principal specimens of animated nature, the pot-boy,
the muffin youth, and the baked-potato man. The population is migratory,
usually disappearing on the verge of quarter-day, and generally by
night. His Majesty’s revenues are seldom collected in this happy valley;
the rents are dubious, and the water communication is very frequently
cut off.”
[Illustration: LANT STREET, BOROUGH. (_Page 34._)
Showing the older residential tenements. The actual house in which
Dickens lived as a boy is now demolished.]
Lant Street, as Bob Sawyer informed Mr. Pickwick, is near Guy’s
Hospital, “little distance after you’ve passed St. George’s Church—turns
out of the High Street on the right-hand side of the way.” It has not
altered materially in its outward aspect since the time when little
Charles Dickens slept there, on the floor of the back attic, an abode
which he then thought was “a paradise.” We may suppose that such
accommodation, poor as it must have been, yielded some consolation to
the lonely child by reason of the fact that he was within easy reach of
his parents, and also because his landlord—a fat, good-natured old
gentleman, who was lame—and his quiet old wife were very kind to him;
and it is interesting to know that they and their grown-up son are
immortalized in “The Old Curiosity Shop” as the Garland family. Little
Charles looked forward to Saturday nights, when his release from toil at
an earlier hour than usual enabled him to indulge his fancy for rambling
and loitering a little in the busy thoroughfares between Hungerford
Stairs and the Marshalsea. His usual way home was over Blackfriars
Bridge, and then to the left along Charlotte Street, which (he is
careful to tell us) “has Rowland Hill’s chapel on one side, and the
likeness of a golden dog licking a golden pot over a shop door on the
other,” a quaint sign still existing here. He was sometimes tempted to
expend a penny to enter a show-van which generally stood at a corner of
the street “to see the fat pig, the wild Indian, and the little lady,”
and for long afterwards could recall the peculiar smell of hat-making
then (and now) carried on there.
The autobiographical record discloses another characteristic incident,
which was afterwards embodied in the eleventh chapter of “Copperfield.”
One evening little Charles had acted as messenger for his father at the
Marshalsea, and was returning to the prison by way of Westminster
Bridge, when he went into a public-house in Parliament Street, at the
corner of Derby Street, and ordered a glass of the _very best_ ale (the
“Genuine Stunning”), “with a good head to it.” “The landlord,” observes
Dickens, “looked at me, in return, over the bar from head to foot, with
a strange smile on his face; and instead of drawing the beer, looked
round the screen and said something to his wife, who came out from
behind it, with her work in her hand, and joined him in surveying me.
Here we stand, all three, before me now, in my study at Devonshire
Terrace—the landlord in his shirt-sleeves, leaning against the bar
window-frame, his wife looking over the little half-door, and I, in some
confusion, looking up at them from outside the partition. They asked me
a good many questions, as what my name was, how old I was, where I
lived, how I was employed, etc., etc. To all of which, that I might
commit nobody, I invented appropriate answers. They served me with the
ale, though I expect it was not the strongest on the premises; and the
landlord’s wife, opening the little half-door and bending down, gave me
a kiss that was half-admiring and half-compassionate, but all womanly
and good.” I am sure “so juvenile a customer was evidently unusual at
the Red Lion”; and he explains that “the occasion was a festive one,”
either his own birthday or somebody else’s, but I doubt whether this
would prove sufficient justification in the eyes of the rigid total
abstainer. In “David Copperfield” we find an illustration of the scene
depicted in a clever etching by “Phiz.” The public-house here referred
to is the Red Lion, which has been lately rebuilt, and differs
considerably from the unpretentious tavern as Dickens knew it;
unfortunately, the sign of the rampant red lion has not been replaced,
but in its stead we see a bust of the novelist, standing within a niche
in the principal front of the new building.
By a happy stroke of good fortune, a rather considerable legacy from a
relative accrued to John Dickens, and had been paid into court during
his incarceration. This, in addition to the official pension due for
long service at Somerset House, enabled him to meet his financial
responsibilities, with the result that the Marshalsea knew him no more.
Just then, too, the blacking business had become larger, and was
transferred to Chandos Street, Covent Garden, where little Charles
continued to manipulate the pots, but in a more public manner; for here
the work was done in a window facing the street, and generally in the
presence of an admiring crowd outside. The warehouse (pulled down in
1889) stood next to the shop at the corner of Bedford Street in Chandos
Street (the southern corner, now the Civil Service Stores); opposite,
there was the public-house where the lad got his ale. “The stones on the
street,” he afterwards observed to Forster, “may be smoothed by my small
feet going across to it at dinner-time, and back again.” The basement of
the warehouse became transformed in later years into a chemist’s shop,
and the sign of the tavern over the way was the Black Prince, closed in
1888, and demolished shortly afterwards to make room for buildings
devoted to the medical school of the Charing Cross Hospital. His release
from prison compelled the elder Dickens to seek another abode for
himself and family, and he obtained temporary quarters with the
before-mentioned Mrs. Roylance of Little College Street. Thence,
according to Forster, they went to Hampstead, where the elder Dickens
had taken a house, and from there, in 1825, he removed to a small
tenement in Johnson Street, Somers Town, a poverty-stricken
neighbourhood even in those days, and changed but little since. Johnson
Street was then the last street in Somers Town, and adjoined the fields
between it and Camden Town. It runs east from the north end of Seymour
Street, and the house occupied by the Dickens family (including Charles,
who had, of course, left his Lant Street “paradise”) was No. 13, at the
east end of the north side, if we may rely upon the evidence afforded by
the rate-book. At that time the house was numbered 29, and rated at £20,
the numbering being changed to 13 at Christmas, 1825. In July of that
year the name of the tenant is entered in the rate-book as Caroline
Dickens, and so remains until January, 1829, after which the house is
marked “Empty.”
[Illustration: THE SIGN OF THE DOG’S HEAD IN THE POT, CHARLOTTE
STREET, BLACKFRIARS. (_Page 35._)
“That turning in the Blackfriars Road which has Rowland Hill’s
Chapel on one side, and the likeness of a golden dog licking a
golden pot over a shop door at the other” (Forster).]
Brighter days were in store for the Dickens family, and especially for
little Charles, whose father could now afford to send him to a good
school in the neighbourhood, much to the boy’s delight. Owing to a
quarrel (of which he was the subject) between John Dickens and James
Lamert, the father declared that his boy should leave the blacking
warehouse and go to school instead. Thus terminated, suddenly and
unexpectedly, that period of his life which Charles Dickens ever
regarded with a feeling of repugnance. “Until old Hungerford Market was
pulled down,” he tells us, “until old Hungerford Stairs were destroyed,
and the very nature of the ground changed, I never had the courage to go
back to the place where my servitude began.” He never saw it, and could
not endure to go near it, and, in order that a certain smell of the
cement used for putting on the blacking-corks should not revive
unpleasant associations, he would invariably, when approaching Warren’s
later establishment in Chandos Street, cross over to the opposite side
of the way.
He was about twelve years of age when he and the blacking-pots parted
company for ever, and the new and more promising prospect opened before
him—a future replete with possibilities, and yielding opportunities of
which he knew the value and made the best use. The school to which he
was sent as a day-scholar was called the Wellington House Academy, the
proprietor being a Welshman named William Jones, whose “classical and
commercial” seminary stood at the north-east corner of Granby Street,
Hampstead Road. The residential portion still exists, although doomed to
early demolition; but the detached schoolroom and large playground
disappeared in 1835, on the formation of the London and Birmingham
Railway, as it was then called. In a paper entitled “Our School,”
contributed to _Household Words_ in 1851, Dickens gives a thinly-veiled
account of Jones’s Academy, and those of his pupils who yet survive
readily understand the various allusions, and vouch for the general
accuracy of the presentment. “It was a school,” he says, “of some
celebrity in its neighbourhood—nobody could say why; the master was
supposed among us to know nothing, and one of the ushers was supposed to
know everything.” There can be no doubt that Wellington House Academy
and its proprietor are revived in “David Copperfield” as Salem House and
Mr. Creakle.
The most accessible route for young Dickens to follow between his home
in Johnson Street and the school was by way of Drummond Street, then a
quiet semi-rural thoroughfare, bounded on the north side by the cow
pastures belonging to an ancestor of the late Cecil Rhodes (of South
African fame), many members of whose family were located here. Dr.
Dawson, a schoolfellow of Dickens at Wellington House, well remembered
him acting as ringleader of other lads, and, simulating poverty,
imploring charity from people in Drummond Street, especially old ladies.
[Illustration: 29 (NOW 13) JOHNSON STREET, SOMERS TOWN, (_Page 38._)
The home of Dickens in 1824.]
Among other associations of the future novelist with this locality may
be mentioned his attendance (in company with Dr. Dawson) at the Sunday
morning services in Somers Chapel (now called St. Mary’s Parish Church),
in Seymour Street (then partly fields), Somers Town,[21] concerning
which act of piety Dr. Dawson regrets to observe that his lively and
irreverent young friend “did not attend in the slightest degree to the
service, but incited me to laughter by declaring his dinner was ready,
and the potatoes would be spoiled, and, in fact, behaved in such a
manner that it was lucky for us we were not ejected from the chapel.” He
remained at Wellington House Academy about two years (1824-1826),
without achieving any particular distinction as a pupil. Thus ended his
school training, elementary at the best, and it has been truly observed
that a classical education might have “done for” him—that “Boz,” like
Burns, might have acquired all necessary erudition in a Board school.
“Pray, Mr. Dickens, where was your son educated?” conjured a friend of
John Dickens, who significantly and pertinently replied, “Why, indeed,
sir—ha! ha!—he may be said to have educated himself!” a response which
the novelist used good-humouredly and whimsically to imitate in
Forster’s hearing.
On relinquishing his studies at the age of fourteen, Charles Dickens for
a brief period was installed as clerk in the service of Mr. Molloy, a
solicitor in New Square, Lincoln’s Inn. His father, however, presently
transferred him to the offices of Messrs. Ellis and Blackmore,
attorneys, at No. 1, Raymond Buildings, Gray’s Inn (second floor), the
clerks’ office looking out upon the roadway; here he performed similar
duties from May, 1827, to November, 1828, at a weekly salary of 13s.
6d., rising to 15s. Although he did not relish the law, and failed to
appreciate the particular kind of responsibility devolving upon him as a
humble apprentice to that profession, the few months thus employed by
him were productive of fruitful results, for they afforded him
opportunities of studying the idiosyncrasies of lawyers, their clerks
and clients, which can only be obtained by intimate association. In the
words of David Copperfield, he said: “I looked at nothing that I know
of, but I saw everything,” with the result that he culled from his
mental storehouse those vivid pictures of legal life and character as
portrayed in “The Pickwick Papers,” “Sketches by Boz,” and later works.
The Dickens family at this time had left the unattractive environment of
Johnson Street and made their home at the Polygon, Somers Town, a much
more respectable and refined quarter, where Harold Skimpole (in “Bleak
House”) afterwards settled, and “where there were at that time a number
of poor Spanish refugees walking about in cloaks, smoking little paper
cigars.” The Polygon was so called from the arrangement of the houses in
the form of a circle; it stood within Clarendon Square, and, on
completion, became the aristocratic part of Somers Town; many successful
artists and engravers selecting it as a place of residence.[22] The name
of Dickens, however, does not appear in the contemporary rate-book, but
we find recorded there the significant fact that No. 17 was then “let to
lodgers”—a very unusual entry—and this, added to the fact that the rents
were comparatively high, justifies the assumption that the Dickens
family were lodgers only at the house bearing that number. At this time
John Dickens, with commendable energy and perseverance, had acquired the
difficult art of shorthand writing, with a view to obtaining a
livelihood as a Parliamentary reporter. He apparently changed his
address with some frequency, in 1832-1833 living for a time at Highgate,
whither Charles accompanied him, and lodging during brief intervals in
the western part of London. Certain letters written by the son to an
intimate friend indicate such addresses as North End (? Fulham) and
Fitzroy Street.
[Illustration: WELLINGTON HOUSE ACADEMY, HAMPSTEAD ROAD. (_Page
39._)
The school of Dickens, 1824-1826.]
The father, on securing an appointment as a reporter for the _Morning
Herald_, established himself and his family (including Charles), at No.
18, Bentinck Street, Manchester Square. The rate-book, however, does not
give his name as the tenant of this or any other house in the street, so
we must assume that the family were again merely lodgers. This house and
its neighbours were recently demolished, being replaced by a row of
mansions, and, oddly enough, the name of the occupier of No. 19 in 1895
bore the novelist’s patronymic.
On leaving Ellis and Blackmore’s office in November, 1828, Charles
Dickens abandoned the pursuit of the law for ever.
The profession of journalism offering him superior attractions, he was
tempted to become a newspaper reporter. With that object in view, he
gave himself up to the study of stenography, devoting much of his time
at the British Museum acquiring a knowledge of the subject, and
practising in the Law Courts of Doctors’ Commons with extraordinary
assiduity until he arrived at something like proficiency. The
impediments that beset him are duly set forth in the pages of “David
Copperfield,” the incidents there narrated being based upon the author’s
heart-breaking experience in endeavouring to master the mysteries of
shorthand. Like David, he passed a period of probation, lasting nearly
two years, reporting for the Proctors at Doctors’ Commons, St. Paul’s
Churchyard. The scene of his labours is thus described in “Sketches by
Boz”: “Crossing a quiet and shady courtyard paved with stone, and
frowned upon by old red-brick houses, on the doors of which were painted
the names of sundry learned civilians, we paused before a small,
green-baized, brass-headed nailed door, which, yielding to our gentle
push, at once admitted us into an old quaint-looking apartment, with
sunken windows and black carved wainscotting, at the upper end of which,
seated on a raised platform of semicircular shape, were about a dozen
solemn-looking gentlemen in crimson gowns and wigs.” The courts were
destroyed in 1867, and in their place a Royal Court of Probate was
established at Westminster Hall.
According to the autographs on certain British Museum readers’ slips,
Charles Dickens was residing, in 1831, at No. 10, Norfolk Street,
Fitzroy Square, the same street (now Cleveland Street, east side of
Middlesex Hospital) in which his father was domiciled for a while in
1814.
About the year 1833 Charles rented bachelor apartments in Cecil Street
(Strand), as evidenced by a letter of that period to an intimate friend,
where he says: “The people at Cecil Street put too much water in the
hashes, lost the nutmeg-grater, attended on me most miserably ... and so
I gave them warning, and have not yet fixed on a local habitation.”
We learn from Charles Dickens the younger that his father, before
occupying chambers in Furnival’s Inn, had apartments in Buckingham
Street, and it is, therefore, not unlikely that he went thither from
Cecil Street; the same authority adds that “if he lived in David
Copperfield’s rooms—as I have no doubt he did—he must have kept house on
the top floor of No. 15 on the east side—the house which displays a
tablet commemorating its one-time tenancy by Peter the Great, Czar of
all the Russias.”[23] David, in describing his chambers, observes that
“they were on the top of the house ... and consisted of a little
half-blind entry where you could see hardly anything, a little
stone-blind pantry where you could see nothing at all, a sitting-room,
and a bedroom. The furniture was rather faded, but quite good enough for
me; and, sure enough, the river was outside the windows.” Here, or at
Cecil Street, Dickens doubtless met that martyr to “the spazzums,” the
immortal Mrs. Crupp, and the “young gal” whom she hired for festive
occasions, such as David’s dinner-party.
In 1832, after gaining experience at Doctors’ Commons, an opening was
found for a reporter on the staff of the _True Sun_, a London morning
paper, then just launched; and here it may be observed that newspaper
reporting in those days, before railways and electric telegraphs, was
not unattended by great difficulties and even danger, for Dickens
himself relates how he had frequently to travel by post-chaise to remote
parts of the country to record important speeches, and how, on the
return journey, he transcribed his notes on the palm of his hand by the
light of a dark lantern while galloping at fifteen miles an hour at the
dead of night through a wild district, sometimes finding himself belated
in miry country roads during the small hours in a wheelless carriage,
with exhausted horses and drunken post-boys, and then succeeding in
reaching the office in time for publication. While thus representing the
_True Sun_ he joined the reporting staff of the _Mirror of Parliament_
(then a comparatively new paper, conducted by his uncle, John Henry
Barrow, barrister-at-law), and in 1834 associated himself with the
_Morning Chronicle_,[24] one of the leading London journals, and a
formidable rival of the _Times_.
[Illustration: 1 RAYMOND BUILDINGS, GRAY’S INN. (_Page 41._)
In the corner house were the offices of Ellis and Blackmore,
attorneys, with whom Dickens was a clerk in 1827-1828.]
As a Parliamentary reporter he won great and enviable distinction, it
being an undoubted fact that of the eighty or ninety so employed with
him in the “gallery” of the House of Commons, he retained the premier
position by reason of his marvellous dexterity, accuracy, and capacity
for work. It was, of course, in the _old_ House, not the present
palatial edifice, that Charles Dickens followed this avocation, where
the accommodation provided for the newspaper representatives proved most
unsatisfactory, the “gallery” in the House of Lords being no better than
a “preposterous pen” (as Dickens described it), in which the reporters
were “huddled together like so many sheep,” while the reporters in the
Commons carried on their duties in the Strangers’ Gallery until a
separate gallery was provided for their use in the temporary House
constructed in 1834. The “gentlemen of the press” are now treated with
much greater consideration; instead of the dark lobby, or “pen,” there
are large writing-rooms, separate apartments for smoking, reading,
dining, and dressing, as well as a stationer’s shop, a post-office, and
a refreshment-bar.
Dickens’s final appearance at the House of Commons as a reporter was at
the close of the session of 1836, when, like David Copperfield, he
“noted down the music of the Parliamentary bagpipes for the last time.”
For he had already tasted the delights of authorship, having written
some original papers for the _Evening Chronicle_ and other periodicals,
and henceforth he determined to adopt literature as a profession. His
first paper appeared (entitled “A Dinner at Poplar Walk”)[25]
anonymously in the _Monthly Magazine_ nearly three years prior to his
retirement from the Press Gallery—that is, in December, 1833—and he has
himself described how, “with fear and trembling,” he stealthily dropped
the manuscript into “a dark letter-box, in a dark office, up a dark
court in Fleet Street,” and how suffused with tears of joy and pride
were the eyes of the young author when he beheld his little effusion “in
all the glory of print” that “they could not bear the street and were
not fit to be seen there.” The “dark court” referred to was Johnson’s
Court, Fleet Street, the location of the office of the old (and long
since defunct) _Monthly Magazine_; the court still exists, but the
office was demolished quite recently for the extension of the premises
of Mr. Henry Sells, who, happily, has preserved, as a memorial of the
novelist, the door to which the veritable “dark letter-box” was
attached. The story of Dickens’s early essays has often been related,
and needs no repetition here. Suffice it to say that upon the success or
failure of that maiden effort a very great deal depended, as he intended
to be guided by the dictum of the publisher and of the public, and there
is every probability that, had this initial sketch been unfavourably
received, the young writer would have directed his attention to the
stage, which for him always possessed a magnetic attraction; thus,
instead of becoming a famous author, he would have blossomed into a
popular actor, thereby missing his true vocation.
[Illustration: CHARLES DICKENS IN 1830.
The earliest authentic portrait known.
_From the miniature by Mrs. Janet Barrow. Reproduced by permission
of F. Sabin, Esq._]