In the meantime, his attempts to secure Maria’s hand in marriage were seriously thwarted by her departure to a finishing school in Paris in the winter of 1831. While Mr and Mrs Beadnell found Dickens to be a polite and amiable young man, they had no intention of making him a part of the family and probably hoped that sending Maria away would prevent such a socially unsuitable match. For Dickens, the separation seems to have strengthened his feelings and her absence left him at a genuine loss. During that bleak winter, he spent his evenings aimlessly wandering the streets and observing the people and the comings and goings of the Seven Dials and the slums of St Giles.
Maria did, however, return to London in 1832, exciting a great deal of happiness and hope in Dickens. During his numerous visits to Lombard Street, he was coolly received by the family and struggled to secure time alone with Maria. He resorted to sending messages through various go-betweens, usually Henry Kolle or one of the household maids. At his twenty-first birthday party, he finally got the chance to speak to Maria in private but his declaration of love was coldly rebuffed, prompting him to write in a letter the following:
Our meetings of late have been little more than so many displays of heartless indifference on one hand; while on the other they have never failed to prove a fertile source of wretchedness and misery ... I desire the merit of having ever throughout our intercourse, acted fairly, intelligently and honourably; under kindness and encouragement one day and total change of conduct the next.
A final meeting with Maria occurred on 27 April 1832. Dickens had arranged an evening of theatrical entertainment at his parents’ house on Bentnick Street, to which the Beadnell family was invited. Maria appeared nonplussed by the entertainment, which Dickens had not only written, but also produced and performed. In a final letter, he wrote:
I will openly and at once say that there is nothing that I have more at heart, nothing I more and sincerely and earnestly desire, than to be reconciled to you ... I have never loved and I can never love any human creature breathing but yourself.’ Maria’s reply demonstrated that the cause was truly lost.
Like the Blacking Factory and his father’s imprisonment at Marshalsea, losing Maria was an immensely traumatic experience for Dickens. He would never forget the pain and humiliation of Maria’s rejection, and wrote that the experience imbued him with ‘habit of suppression’, which rendered him ‘chary of showing my affections, even to my children, except when they are very young.’
December 1833 saw the publication of Dickens’ first piece of creative writing, entitled A Dinner at Poplar Walk. Though he received no payment from the Monthly Magazine for the story, the publication of his work brought him a great sense of pride and achievement. Between January and June 1834, a further four stories, Mrs Joseph Porter Over the Way, Horatio Sparkins, The Bloomsbury Christening and The Boardinghouse appeared in the Monthly Magazine along with the anonymous short story, Sentiment, in Bell’s Weekly Magazine. In August, The Boardinghouse II appeared in the Monthly Magazine, significant as the first work to use Dickens’ pseudonym, ‘Boz’. This originated from the nickname of Dickens’ youngest brother, Augustus, ‘Moses’. When pronounced through the nose, it made the word ‘Boses’ and was then shortened to Boz.
That month also brought Dickens a new appointment as a parliamentary reporter for the one of the most popular newspapers in the country, the Morning Chronicle. Although the post brought Dickens an impressive weekly salary of five guineas (around £230 in modern currency), much of it went to ease his father’s ongoing financial troubles. In September he began work on the Chronicle’s latest creative project, Street Sketches, an illustrated look at life in the city. Through his success at the Morning Chronicle, he was introduced to George Hogarth, editor of the Evening Chronicle, and great admirer of his work. Hogarth persuaded Dickens to begin working on a similar endeavour to Street Sketches, called Sketches of London for the Evening Chronicle at an additional two guineas per week.
The final months of 1834 saw Dickens working hard to save his father from another spell in the debtors’ prison. He borrowed money from friends, mortgaged his income and arranged for the family to move to cheaper accommodation at 21 George Street, Adelphi. Dickens did not accompany the family to this house and instead began renting rooms at 13 Furnival’s Inn with his younger brother, Frederick.
Catherine Dickens
A friendship blossomed with George Hogarth and, in May 1835, Dickens became engaged to his eldest daughter, Catherine. While Catherine had the same brown hair, blue eyes and slender frame as his first love, she had a gentler nature than Maria Beadnell, a characteristic that greatly appealed to Dickens. In the same month as the engagement, Dickens moved to Selwood Terrace, Brompton, to be closer to Catherine.
As the Evening Chronicle finished publishing its Sketches of London, Dickens began working on twelve new sketches for the Sunday sporting paper, Bell’s Life In London that included a depiction of life in the Seven Dials. Towards the end of 1835, the publisher John Macrone approached Dickens with the idea of collating his many sketches into a single edition. In return he offered Dickens the sum of £100 for the copyright. Dickens met Macrone through the historical novelist, William Harrison Ainsworth, and this acquaintance is testament to his increasing importance on London’s literary scene. Dickens agreed to Macrone’s offer and George Cruikshank, the well-known caricaturist, was invited to illustrate the two-volume work, Sketches By Boz. It was published on 8 February 1836 and was an instant success; the first step on the road to fame and fortune.
Frontispiece of the First Edition of ‘Sketches by Boz’, 1836
A month after the appearance of Sketches by Boz, Dickens was approached by the publishers, Edward Chapman and William Hall, to write the text for a new series of illustrations by Robert Seymour. With a salary of £14 per month, Dickens accepted without hesitation and persuaded Chapman and Hall to focus the project on his writings rather than Seymour’s illustrations.
On 31 March 1836, the first instalment of the Chapman and Hall project, entitled The Pickwick Papers, was published. The initial print run of 1,000 copies showed only modest sales and the situation was made considerably worse by Seymour’s suicide on 20 September. All parties did, however, decide to continue with The Pickwick Papers. Dickens negotiated a salary increase to £21 per month, and an increase in the amount of writing, from 26 printed pages to 32, with fewer illustrations. In the aftermath of Seymour’s death, Chapman and Hall hired Robert William Buss. Buss was soon fired, owing to the ‘inferiority of his work’ and replaced by Hablot Browne.
In the meantime, Dickens married Catherine at St Luke’s Church in Chelsea on 2 April. A week’s honeymoon in Chalk, Kent, followed and the pair then set up home in the three-roomed flat at 15 Furnival’s Inn. The newlyweds were then joined by Catherine’s sister, Mary.
While the second and third instalments of The Pickwick Papers suffered from poor sales, the fourth brought a dramatic change in fortunes as Dickens introduced the new character, Sam Weller. As Pickwick grew in popularity, Dickens set out writing The Strange Gentleman, a burletta (a type of comic opera) that opened at St James’ Theatre on 26 September. A second edition of Sketches of Boz followed in October alongside preparations for the comic operetta, The Village Coquettes. It was also during this month that Dickens resigned from the Morning Chronicle to edit a new monthly magazine, Bentley’s Miscellany.