Charles Dickens: A Life (10 page)

Camden Town, where the Dickens family had installed itself, was one of the areas of expansion. They fitted tightly into a narrow terraced house, No. 16 Bayham Street: three floors, basement, ground and first, an exiguous garret above and a wash house out at the back. Into this small space went the six children, including the new baby, Alfred, their nameless maid and their lodger James Lamert. Where and how they slept is hard to work out, and a further mystery is that, when two-year-old Harriet fell ill with smallpox later that year and died, the others escaped infection.
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Bayham Street had been cut through the gardens of the Mother Red Cap Inn on the Hampstead Road and the houses were built during the last years of the war, so they were quite new. There was no sense of community, as there had been in Chatham, and afterwards Dickens could recall only two neighbours, the washerwoman next door and a Bow Street officer across the road. As he began to get his bearings, he failed to find other children to make friends with, and although there were still hay fields behind the house he had no memory of playing there; but he did remember walking alone to the almshouses along the road, from which there was a view through the smoky air and over some great dust heaps to the dome of St Paul’s, a sight that caught his imagination. Inside the house there was always plenty to do in the way of keeping the four little ones amused and giving his mother and the maid a hand. Fanny managed to work at her music – a piano must somehow have been squeezed in for her – and so effectively that a family friend noticed how gifted she was, and within a year recommended her as a pupil to the newly established Royal Academy of Music.

What Charles most enjoyed was being taken into town by one or the other of his parents. It could only have been his mother who took him to see his uncle Thomas Barrow, her eldest brother, who had not allowed John Dickens under his roof since he had fleeced him of his £200. Barrow had started working for the Navy Pay Office at the age of eleven, when he and John Dickens first met, and he was currently living in lodgings in Gerrard Street in Soho, recovering from a major operation: he had broken a thigh at fifteen, the leg failed to mend properly and now at last it had to be amputated. The amputation succeeded so well that he was able to get on with his life better than before, and indeed married the following year, had a family, and was further promoted at the Pay Office. In spite of his difficult early years he was a man of some culture, and one of his visitors at Gerrard Street, seen and remembered by Charles, was Charles Dilke, a fellow worker at the Pay Office and later editor of the
Athenaeum
magazine: Dilke was also a friend of Keats, who had just died. Barrow’s will-power and determination to succeed against the odds, so different from John Dickens’s lackadaisical incompetence, must have impressed itself on his nephew. Charles grew fond of him, and visited him often over a period of a few months, becoming his ‘little companion and nurse’, which suggests that he learnt to make his way to Soho on his own; and his conduct over the next decade showed a stoicism and perseverance that might have been modelled on Thomas Barrow’s.
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Below his uncle’s lodgings in Gerrard Street lived the widow of a bookseller, a Mrs Manson, who was keeping up her late husband’s business. Meeting Charles on the stairs, she took a liking to him and offered to lend him books. They could not have found a more appreciative reader.
Broad Grins
, a popular miscellany of comic verse by the playwright George Colman, became a favourite, and Charles was so impressed by the description of Covent Garden in one of the pieces that he took himself – again, on his own – to the real Covent Garden, where he snuffed up the smell of cabbage leaves ‘as if it were the very breath of comic fiction’.
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Another was Holbein’s
Dance of Death
, a series of black-and-white prints showing death as a grinning skeleton collecting his victims among rich and poor, old people and children, kings, queens, priests and lawyers. Holbein shows naked bodies as well as clothed, life as well as death, and the prints caught the boy’s attention and stayed in his mind.

During his early months in London a family friend from Kent offered to take him out for the day, set off with him and failed to keep an eye on him, so that Charles was lost in the Strand, somewhere near Northumberland House as he remembered. He spent a long day wandering by himself into the City, past the Guildhall, the Mansion House, Austin Friars and India House in Leadenhall Street; then, having a shilling in his pocket, he took himself into a theatre in Goodman’s Fields, off the Whitechapel Road. Coming out at the end of the performance into darkness and rain, he very sensibly found a watchman who took him to the watchhouse, where he fell asleep, waking up to find his father had arrived to fetch him home. He had shed some tears, been frightened by a chimney sweep and tormented by several boys but, by his own account, had not thought of his mother, and had made up his mind that he would never be found. Yet he remained remarkably composed and fatalistic about what might happen to him next.

His Dickens grandmother was now approaching eighty and living in Oxford Street with his uncle William, and although it is not known whether he visited her, it is certain that he received from her, as eldest grandson, a large silver watch that had belonged to her husband, which he then carried about in his pocket.
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He did remember being taken to see his godfather Christopher Huffam in Church Row at Limehouse. There Huffam ran his business as a ship rigger, dealing in whatever was needed for sailing ships. He was a cheerful, kindly man, who tipped Charles half-a-crown on his birthday and invited him to sing his comic songs, which led a fellow guest to declare that the boy was a prodigy.
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The praise was important to him, because the last praise he had been given was at Mr Giles’s school, and he was anxious to continue his education. As the summer ended and holiday time was over, he could not understand why he was not sent to school, but kept at home with nothing to do but run errands, clean his father’s boots before he set off for Somerset House each morning and look after the younger children. His parents could have seen to it, he believed, and could have afforded it had they only organized their spending better: ‘something might have been spared,
as certainly it might have been
, to place me at any common school.’
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James Lamert tried to cheer him up by making him a toy theatre. His other occupation was writing descriptions of people he observed. These men and women were not glamorous or heroic, but odd, and old: one was the talkative barber who came to shave his uncle Barrow in Gerrard Street, and knew a great deal about the late wars and the mistakes made by Napoleon. The other was the deaf woman who helped in the kitchen at Bayham Street and prepared ‘delicate hashes with walnut-ketchup’, which he liked. Few children of ten or eleven write character sketches of old people without any prompting, and this was a more certain pointer to his prodigious future than his singing of comic songs. He was proud of his writing, but privately, showing it to no one, and so was given no encouragement to write more. His parents were preoccupied with their many young children and with money troubles. There were sorrows too: in September they heard from Ireland of the death of the children’s aunt Fanny, their mother’s sister, who had been a much loved part of their lives throughout the years at Chatham. She had been married for less than a year, and now she was gone, carried off like one of the figures in the Holbein prints.

The winter went by, with no change, except that James Lamert moved out, perhaps because there was really not room for him, and also because he had found a job in a cousin’s business. In the spring of 1823 Fanny was awarded a place at the Royal Academy of Music, newly established in Tenterden Street off Hanover Square, and she was to be one of the first boarders, starting in April. She was twelve, and she would be studying the piano with Ignaz Moscheles, a pupil of Beethoven, as well as harmony with the principal, Dr Crotch, and singing. The fees were thirty-eight guineas a year, and although Dickens maintained that he never felt any jealousy of what was done for her, he could not help but be aware of the contrast between his position and hers, and of their parents’ readiness to pay handsome fees for her education, and nothing for his. It is such a reversal of the usual family situation, where only the education of the boys is taken seriously, that the Dickens parents at least deserve some credit for making sure Fanny had a professional training, although none for their neglect of her brother. For the next six months he continued without formal education of any kind, but instead was free to wander about London, learning the layout and character of districts and streets, and observing the contrast between Regent Street, which was opened this year, so wide and fine with its colonnade, and the narrow lanes not far from it, around Seven Dials for instance, where second-hand clothes for sale were hung outside the shops, and he was inspired to imagine the life stories of those who had last worn them and been reduced to selling them.

The shortage of money in his own family led his mother to think how she could put her talents to use now that her husband’s salary was not growing fast enough to keep pace with the needs of the children. It was after all the very problem that had driven her father to embezzle, and after consulting with friends she decided on a bold plan. She would run a school, on the principle that she was able to teach her own children and therefore might as well teach others. In the autumn of 1823 she took a lease on a large house in Gower Street North and put up a brass plate announcing: ‘Mrs Dickens’s Establishment’. She was encouraged by Huffam, who had contacts in the east, and who thought she would be sure to get pupils from among the many British children sent home by their parents from India. Bayham Street was abandoned, along with a pile of unpaid bills, and the family moved down the hill to take up their abode in the much more spacious house in Gower Street North.
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Charles was sent out with circulars advertising the school, and began to hope it might lead to his being sent to school himself. His hopes did not last long. No pupils arrived and no inquiries were made. All that happened was that they were pursued by creditors with increasing ferocity, their furious knockings and shoutings at the front door driving his father to ignominious hiding places upstairs. Finally he could hide no more and he was arrested for debt in February 1824.

John Dickens was taken first to a sponging house, kept by a bailiff as a preliminary place for holding debtors. Here Charles was sent by his mother to attend on him, and used by his father as a messenger to carry his various apologies and requests for help to family and friends. No help came from his brother William in Oxford Street, or from Mrs Dickens senior, or from his Barrow brothers-in-law. They had all had enough. Charles was frightened. He loved his father, for all his failings, and now saw him about to be taken to the Marshalsea debtors’ prison, across the river in Southwark. Before he was escorted away he made a dramatic statement to his son, to the effect that the sun was setting on him for ever. Whatever he meant to convey, the child was reduced to despair.

Yet when his mother sent him to the Marshalsea the next day, he found his father had cheered up. He offered Charles the sound advice Dickens later credited to Mr Micawber: that with an income of £20 a year an expenditure of £19.19
s
.6
d
. meant happiness, but an expenditure of one shilling more meant unhappiness.
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Then he sent his little son to borrow a knife and fork from Captain Porter in the room above, and prepared to settle in comfortably, since he would continue to receive his salary and no longer be pestered by his creditors. There was after all something to be said for prison, even though the buildings were old and shabby and there was only a small fire in the grate of his room.

In Gower Street things got worse from day to day. Charles, as the man of the family, just twelve years old, was sent out to a pawnbroker in the Hampstead Road, first with the books he loved, then with items of furniture, until after a few weeks the house was almost empty and the family was camping out in two bare rooms in the cold weather. All these experiences – of debt, fear, angry creditors, bailiffs, pawnbrokers, prison, living in freezing empty rooms and managing on what can be borrowed or begged – were impressed on his mind and used again and again in his stories and novels, sometimes grimly, sometimes with humour.

Now James Lamert came to see Mrs Dickens with a helpful proposal. He was currently managing a small but steady business in a warehouse belonging to his cousin George, at Hungerford Stairs between the Strand and the river bank, where boot and shoe blacking was manufactured and put into pots to be sold. Seeing the situation of the Dickens family, he suggested that Charles might help out by coming to work at Warren’s factory, a light job, covering and labelling the pots of blacking. He would be paid six shillings a week, and Lamert promised that he personally would give him lessons during his lunch hour to keep up his education. When Dickens came to write his account of this, twenty-five years later, he dwelt with horror and indignation on such a proposal being made for a young, sensitive and promising child, and on his parents’ indifference to what it meant for him: ‘No one made any sign. My father and mother were quite satisfied. They could hardly have been more so, if I had been twenty years of age, distinguished at a grammar-school, and going to Cambridge.’
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The contrast between the blacking-factory job and the idea of Cambridge University is startling, because it suggests how strong his hopes and self-belief had been, even though no one in his family had attended a university, or would do so for another forty years.

He was small for his age, and still subject to the attacks of pain in his side that had stopped him joining in boys’ games in Kent; and he wore a child’s pale suit of trousers and jacket to go to work. On the first day Lamert must have walked with him to Charing Cross, through the Hungerford Market and on to the Hungerford Stairs, where the dirty, tidal Thames rose and fell dramatically each day. The Embankment was not yet made, and the river bank was broken ground and ditches, with working boats and barges constantly passing. The warehouse was set up in a half-ruined building above the river, and Dickens particularly remembered that there were rats in the basement, so many of them that you could hear their squeaking when you were in the rooms upstairs. A small staff worked there, of men and boys. Of the boys he got to know, an older one, Bob Fagin, was an orphan living with his brother-in-law, a waterman; and Poll Green was the son of a fireman with a Drury Lane connection – and his sister ‘did imps in pantomimes’, a detail that interested Charles enough to fix itself in his mind. At first he was put to work apart from them in the counting house, but soon it was found easier for them to work together and he moved downstairs. The lunchtime lessons lapsed. He was known to them all as ‘the young gentleman’, and they were kind to him, Bob Fagin in particular, who looked after him with much tenderness when he was taken ill with the sharp pain in his side one day. All the same, ‘No words can express the secret agony of my soul as I sank into this companionship … the sense I had of being utterly neglected and hopeless; of the shame I felt in my position … My whole nature was penetrated with grief and humiliation.’
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