And so it came to pass. But not before our hero had undergone many, many trials, to the first of which he was about to submit.
It’s worth stopping for a moment to look at the ten-year-old Charles Dickens. He was vivacious, imaginative, amusing, dreamy, affectionate, at times a little over-emotional; he read a great deal, he loved the theatre and dressing up and playing games; as a pupil he was eager and apt; he was good-looking, polite and charming, confident in the love both of his parents and of his siblings, of his extended family and his many friends. He was the crown prince of his little kingdom. He can have had nothing but optimism for the future. In all of these things, he was like many, many children who go on to live perfectly ordinary lives. What happened to him next all but destroyed his life, but it turned him into Charles Dickens. Had he not been the ten-year-old that he was, with that strong base of love and confidence and approval, it would surely have finished him off.
TWO
Paradise Lost
John Dickens was summoned back to Navy Pay Office headquarters at Somerset House in June 1822, not a moment too soon; despite the improvement in his salary, his alarmingly mounting debts were becoming difficult to deal with. He sold up the family’s effects at The Brook, such as they were, and they headed west, finding accommodation in Camden Town in the north of London, near King’s Cross. Charles was not with the family: his schoolmaster, William Giles, had asked for him to be allowed to stay behind to finish his final term of work; which he duly did, lodging with Giles. At some point in the autumn he made his own way to London. It was not an encouraging start:
As I left Chatham in the days when there were no railroads in the land, I left it in a stage-coach. Through all the years that have since passed, have I ever lost the smell of the damp straw in which I was packed – like game – and forwarded, carriage paid, to the Cross Keys, Wood Street, Cheapside, London? There was no other inside passenger, and I consumed my sandwiches in solitude and dreariness … and I thought life sloppier than I had expected to find it.
His arrival at Camden Town in the north of London only confirmed this perception. ‘A little back-garret’, he called his room. In fact, No. 16 Bayham Street was a relatively new dwelling, part of a development scheme completed ten years earlier, not unlike the houses they had occupied in Chatham; all the other houses were occupied by professionals of one sort or another – an engraver, a retired linen draper, a retired diamond merchant, and so on. There were fields behind the houses where in summer hay was still made. The area was semi-rustic, the houses having been built on part of the former gardens of the Mother Red Cap tavern, an old highwayman’s inn. It was, in fact, village-like.
But to the boy, after populous, bustling Chatham, the street must have seemed bleak and woebegone: ‘as shabby, dingy, damp, and mean a neighbourhood as one would desire not to see,’ he wrote, thirty years later. ‘Its poverty was not of the demonstrative order. It shut the street doors, pulled down the blinds, screened the parlour windows with the wretchedest plants in pots, and made a desperate stand to keep up appearances.’ As with the council estates of the 1950s, the price of amenities was the loss of community. The easy openness of Chatham seemed far way: this was the heartless Metropolis. In his former existence, misfortune had been handled discreetly – he himself had known nothing about his father’s troubles – but here
to be sold up was nothing particular. The whole neighbourhood felt itself liable, at any time, to that common casualty of life. A man used to come into the neighbourhood regularly, delivering the summonses for rates and taxes as if they were circulars. We never paid anything until the last extremity and Heaven knows how we paid it then.
Any possible sense of gentility had disappeared. There were, he said, no visitors ‘but Stabber’s Band, the occasional conjuror and strong man; no costermongers.’ There were a few shabby shops – a tobacconist, a weekly paper shop. And at the corner, a pub. ‘We used to run to the doors and windows to look at a cab, it was such a rare sight.’
This isolated little outpost was no more than thirty minutes’ walk from his old lodgings in bustling Norfolk Street in Marylebone, but to the ten-year-old boy, it evidently felt like some kind of abandoned urban village. London was in the process of expanding, and Camden was one of the points on the pioneer trail. It was not a slum; not at all. But it lacked roots, identity, humanity. No. 16 itself, with only four rooms, was horribly cramped. There were six children and their two parents, plus a servant girl they had brought with them from the workhouse in Chatham, and James Lamert. Charles had nowhere to go and nothing to do. There were no more agreeable visits to the Mitre to be held up for admiration; he knew no one of his own age with whom to dress up and put on a play; and above all, he had no schooling, which he missed bitterly. His appetite for learning had grown and grown in Chatham. His so obviously not attending school proclaimed the family’s poverty to the world; his pride was stung. John Dickens seemed, he said, ‘to have utterly lost at this time the idea of educating me’. For want of anything to do, he was reduced to cleaning his father’s boots and running ‘such poor errands as arose out of our poor way of living’. His only diversion was the toy theatre that his friend James had built for him: he spent hours and hours intensely absorbed in it. It was, Lamert said, ‘the only fanciful reality in his present life’. John Dickens was naturally distracted by his financial situation: with the loss of the Outpost Allowance, his salary had declined from £400 to £350; and new debts were mounting. He had not paid the rates, and had been running up bills with the local tradesmen. And yet somehow they managed to find the thirty-eight guineas a year for twelve-year-old Fanny, whose musical gifts had gained her a place at the Royal Academy of Music, to board from April of 1823. Charles loved his sister deeply, but this must have been a slap in the face to him: to see such thought, care and money lavished on her while his needs were entirely ignored acutely enhanced his sense of abandonment.
The speed with which everything that had made life good had disappeared was shocking enough. John was clearly powerless to do anything about it; and Charles’s mother – sharp, witty, vivacious Elizabeth – was perhaps not the person to turn to for comfort; besides, she had her hands full. This was the beginning of a very swift growing up for the boy, the start of a premature assumption of responsibility for his own life that was to be the making of him. Or at least, of ‘Charles Dickens’.
As a distraction, he was packed off to his mother’s brother, Uncle Thomas, who lived over a bookseller’s in Soho, about forty-five minutes away; the bookseller’s wife let the book-hungry boy loose in the shop for hours at a time. More ambitiously, the eleven-year-old boy walked the seven miles to the house of his godfather Christopher Huffam, a certified naval rigger, in Limehouse, in Dockland. Huffam and his friends encouraged Charles to perform his repertory of comic songs for them, which cheered him up no end – an audience again at last. One of Huffam’s chums declared the boy ‘a progidy’. He then walked the seven miles back home to Camden. Here in the vast metropolis he began his life-long career as a walker, pounding the streets of London, looking at nothing, he said, but seeing everything. Early in 1823, not long after the Dickenses had returned to London, he was taken to see the Church of St Giles-in-the-Fields with its notorious attendant slums, which would in time become one of his favourite haunts. On this occasion, he somehow got detached from the adult responsible for him, and wandered aimlessly across the whole of London, eking out the one-and-fourpence in his pocket. He told himself that he was Dick Whittington and would soon be called upon to be Lord Mayor of London, then changed plan, determining instead to enlist in the army as a drummer