Oliver Twist Investigates (5 page)

‘In reality my troubles were only just beginning because far worse lay ahead of me. A friend of my father had become the manager of a boot blacking company and he suggested to my impoverished parents I should start working there at a salary of six or seven shillings a week. To my horror they rapidly assented and, just two days after my twelfth birthday, I set off for a three-mile walk from Camden Town to the Strand to commence my new career. The company was based in a warehouse in an impoverished area, which was an unwholesome maze of squalid corners and filthy alleys. “Warren's Blacking”, as it was called, operated in a crazy, tumbledown old house on the left hand side of the way at old Hungerford Stairs, abutting the river and overrun with rats. I just have to shut my eyes and I can still see its wainscoted rooms and worm-eaten, damp, and rotten floors and staircase. I can still hear the sound of the grey rats as they swarmed down below in the cellars and scuffled and squeaked their way up the staircase into the place where we worked. I can still smell the stinking river water that lapped around this God-forsaken manufactory, carrying, amid its unending filth and flotsam, the occasional bloated corpse, the tragic outcome of some suicide or accident or maybe the decomposing evidence of yet another of this city's unsolved crimes.

‘My task in this stinking hellhole was to take bottles of blacking and prepare them for sale by covering the pots with a piece of oilpaper and then a piece of blue paper. I would tie each bottle with string and paste on a printed label. And I did that for ten hours a day, my whole being racked with the humiliation of it. My meagre earnings did not prevent my father being declared an insolvent. He was incarcerated in the Marshalsea Prison. My heart felt it would break when
I visited him there for the first time and he told me the sun had set upon him for ever and that he would spend the rest of his life in that dank, malodorous, soul-destroying place, where the very stones exuded despair. His eyes awash with tears, he told me to remember that if a man had twenty pounds a year and spent nineteen pounds, nineteen shillings, and sixpence of it, the result would be happiness, but, if he spent a shilling more, he would be doomed to wretchedness. It was good advice but I regret to say he never heeded it himself. Almost everything, by degrees, was sold or pawned and my mother and the rest of my family had soon to join him there.

‘Can you imagine what it is like to see your parents pent up in a narrow prison cell and watch their faces gradually assume that squalid and sickly hue which marks every person deprived of light and freedom? Whenever I visited I was forced to listen to the screams and cries of those around them till I wept for the sheer futility of their existence. And my life outside was not much better. It seemed just a larger prison in which the walls of massed humanity threatened to squeeze the very life out of me. I lived in horrible lodgings, surrounded by the equally impoverished. All around me were signs of want and destitution: emaciated faces, stick-like limbs, threadbare coats and trousers, moth-eaten gowns and damp shawls. In this harsh world, I might just be twelve but I had to win my own food. I kept a small loaf of bread and a quarter of pound of cheese on a shelf in my squalid garret room and this was my main meal each night when I returned from my labours in the warehouse. For month after month I had no advice, no counsel, no encouragement, no consolation, no support, from anyone that I can call to mind.

‘I prayed to be lifted out of the humiliation and neglect in
which I was abandoned, but no one heard my prayers. When I heard that my sister, who was still at the Academy, had been awarded a silver medal for her studies, the tears ran down my face. I felt as if my heart was rent. I could not bear to think of myself being beyond the reach of all such honourable ambition and success. In my desperation I turned increasingly for companionship to the two boys who worked alongside me, Bob Fagin and Paul Green. Bob was an orphan and Paul the son of a fireman employed at Drury Lane Theatre. Both were very different from me in terms of their birth and attitude and they were old beyond their years, using language that was coarse and vulgar. They regarded me as “the young gentleman” and laughed at my inexperience and naïvety. Since my arrival I had been careful not to tell them how I came to be there or how much I hated it. Instead I had won their interest by regaling them with some of the stories I had read and, if there was no one watching us, occasionally acting them out. Even if your heart is breaking, playing the clown can sometimes be the only means of self-preservation.

‘Bob and Paul invited me to “experience life”. In my desperate desire for friendship, I responded, accompanying them to those low quarters of the city I had hitherto avoided. There I freely observed every vice you care to name and many I would not wish to mouth. I saw prodigies of wickedness, want, and beggary. I saw every kind of theft. I saw gangs reduce their victims to bloody pulp. I saw whores giving their bodies to drunks in the street for all to watch. I learnt just how much poverty can corrupt and destitution distort and I was deeply ashamed of my newly acquired knowledge, even if I knew myself to be not only the son of an insolvent but also the grandson of an embezzler.

‘One dark night a few weeks after my thirteenth birthday, I became not just an observer but also an unwilling participant. Bob and Paul, recognizing those changes in me which marked that I was becoming a man, took me to the house of Bob's uncle. I suspect it had once been a house of some distinction but it was in terminal decline, a dirty den of a place. Its panelled walls were black with neglect and dust and most of its mouldering shutters were fast closed, the bars that held them screwed tight into the discoloured wood. This made the rat-infested rooms dark and gloomy, despite the efforts of their mostly drunken inmates to give the house an air of festivity. Plenty of alcohol and the services of a few hard-eyed but full-bosomed women were its only attractions. Bob and Paul encouraged me to drink more than I had ever done before and then handed me over to one of the youngest of the prostitutes present. I will not dwell on the sordid details, Mr Twist, but they and others far worse than them enjoyed watching as she took my final innocence away.

‘And that, believe it or not, was my introduction to Nancy. She was scarce older than me but she was a corrupt product of a system that no writer, however great, is allowed to fully expose. Our society likes even its moral crusaders to avoid certain topics. It prefers to pretend that this is a Christian society, turning a blind eye to the little creatures in petticoats that pursue men in the streets, plucking at their garments and seeking to entice them into sex by making lewd suggestions. The law may say it's illegal to have sex with a child under the age of twelve but you know as well as I do that it does nothing to prevent child prostitution. Nancy may have had the face of an angel, but her experiences of indiscriminate sexuality had given her the heart of a devil. I
guess her seduction of me – if you can call her rape of me that – was just a momentary diversion from the old men she was normally asked to favour with her lascivious attentions. It gave me no pleasure and I doubt if she thought much of my childish masculinity.

‘The next day the full implication of what had happened to me struck home. I cannot describe to you how common and dirty I felt. At work, when Bob and Paul began to taunt me with what had happened, I was taken with a seizure. They had to lay me down on the straw-strewn floor as the spasms shook me. Bob filled empty blacking bottles with hot water and tried to apply them to my icy body. I writhed on the floor in my anguish.'

Charles Dickens paused, his ashen face contorted with the pain of what he had just revealed to me. Even after so many years I could see that the depraved nature of the events he had recounted were an agony to recall. He moved across the room and poured himself a drink. His hand trembled as he brought the glass to his lips. He quickly poured himself another and speedily drank that also. I asked him if he felt able to continue. He turned and nodded, whispering through his gritted teeth, ‘The worst is yet to come.'

By a Herculean effort Dickens composed himself and, having collected his thoughts, resumed his story. My pen cannot describe the anguish that swept across his face at intervals. To me it was obvious that his was a tale written in his very blood:

‘They say every cloud has a silver lining and my illness gave me the excuse I needed to avoid further expeditions with Bob and Paul and, a few weeks later, my time at the factory ended. The company moved to new premises near Covent Garden and my father, who had secured release from prison, came to watch me at work through the new shop window. I think it was only then that the degradation of my situation struck home because he immediately quarrelled with my cousin and took me away, despite the protests of my uncaring mother that the family needed my earnings. I never shall forget or forgive that my mother was keen to keep me there. It may seem a harsh thing to say, but I still feel my entire family still looks upon me as something
to be plucked and torn to pieces for their advantage. I fear they have no idea of, and no care for, my existence in any other light. And, I'll be honest with you, Mr Twist, there are times when my soul sickens at the sight of them.

‘I foolishly thought that I could put my experiences with Bob and Paul and, above all, with Nancy, behind me. My father enrolled me at a school called Wellington House Academy and there I worked hard to educate myself, even though its respected proprietor was by far the most ignorant and worst-tempered man that it has ever been my misfortune to know. He saw the teaching profession not as a vocation but as a business in which the aim was to make as much as he could from us and to put into teaching us as little effort as possible. His main expertise lay in corporal punishment. He was always smiting the palms of offenders with some diabolical instrument, or viciously drawing a pair of pantaloons tight with one of his large hands, and caning the wearer with the other. I'm sure hitting us boys was the principal solace of his existence.

‘What we learnt largely came from the school's usher. He was our writing master, mathematical master, and English master, and he also made out the bills, mended the pens, and did all sorts of other things. Sometimes he was assisted by our Latin master, a colourless, doubled-up, near-sighted man with a crutch. He was always telling us he was cold and he used to disclose the ends of flannel under all his garments. He kept applying a ball of pocket-handkerchief to some part of his face with a screwing action round and round and he had the bizarre habit of putting onions into his ears in the mistaken belief that this helped to reduce his deafness. Nevertheless, this poor man was a good scholar and he took great pains when he saw (as he did in me)
intelligence and a desire to learn. There was also a French master, who used to come in the sunniest weather with a handleless umbrella, and a fat little dancing master who used to come in a gig, and teach hornpipes to the more advanced among us, though to what advantage I can scarce surmise.

‘Most of my fellow students took comfort in possessing pets in the form of red-polls, linnets, canaries, and, the favourite of all, white mice. They trained their mice far better than the teachers trained us. I recall one white mouse, who lived in the covers of a Latin dictionary and who ran up ladders, drew Roman chariots, shouldered muskets, and turned wheels. He might have achieved greater things, but for having the misfortune to mistake his way in a triumphal procession, when he fell into a deep inkstand, was dyed black and drowned. Amid such scenes of boyish fun, I was very conscious of having passed through scenes of which my classmates could have no knowledge, and of having acquired experiences foreign to my age and appearance. There were times when I felt it was an imposture to go there as an ordinary schoolboy. Nevertheless, I won prizes and great fame and I was assured that I was a clever boy.

‘Two years later my father's continued inability to control the family's finances forced me to leave. I took up a post as a junior clerk in the office of Ellis and Blackmore in Holborn Court. There I worked for eighteen months, using every moment of my limited spare time to learn shorthand so that I could become a reporter both of court proceedings and parliamentary debates. I was determined to have a job in which I was my own master, even if it meant struggling to make ends meet. Whatever I have tried to do in life, I have tried to do well. Believe me, Mr Twist, there is no substitute
for thoroughgoing, ardent and sincere determination combined with hard work. I did not allow my resolution to cool. It was one of the irons I kept hot, and hammered at with a perseverance I may honestly admire.

‘I became a reporter for the
Mirror of Parliament
, a newspaper run by one of my uncles. Most of the time the debates I listened to in the Commons and Lords were excruciatingly boring, a mixture of noise and confusion and pointless point-scoring. I used to observe the Members of Parliament going out and coming in, all talking, laughing, lounging, coughing, questioning, or groaning. They presented a conglomeration of confusion and conflict to be met with nowhere else, not even excepting Smithfield on a market day, or a cockpit in its glory. Night after night I recorded predictions that never came to pass, professions of action that were never fulfilled, explanations that were only meant to mystify rather than to clarify. I wallowed in nothing but words, working incredibly long hours. I drank coffee by the gallon to keep myself awake. With all the determination and energy of an eighteen-year-old, I was determined to make this just the step to a better career.

‘It was at this demanding time of my budding career that I found the romance which my brief and humiliating sexual contact with Nancy had so patently lacked. I fell desperately in love with the dark-eyed daughter of a banker. Her name was Maria Beadnell. If I say she was a picture of sweet loveliness, I do a disservice to her manifold charms. I was swallowed up in an abyss of love for her. Though I often was exhausted from my reporting, I would still walk in the early hours of the morning from the House of Commons to Lombard Street just to look at the house in which she slept. Oh, what fools love makes of us! For three years I swore
every possible form of blind devotion and redoubled my efforts to achieve a career worthy of her. I loved her with the most extraordinary earnestness and I held volumes of imaginary conversations with her mother on the subject of our union. Believe me, you cannot overrate the strength of my feeling at that time. I would have died for her with the greatest alacrity! There never was such a poor and devoted fellow as I was.

‘Unfortunately her parents remained unimpressed by either my prospects or my efforts. Although I rose to become a reporter for the more prestigious
Morning Chronicle
, they ensured that the courtship ended in failure. Now that I am so successful, Mr Twist, I suspect they have lived to regret their actions. If so, I am pleased, because at the time no parents seemed crueller. My immediate response to their hostility and Maria's rejection of my suit was to seek oblivion in drink but that only made me more wretched. So I plunged myself into new challenges, writing not only reports for the
Morning Chronicle
but also stories and articles for an offshoot paper, the unimaginatively named
Evening Chronicle
. Thus I moved seamlessly from reporter to writer and I assumed in the latter role the pen name of “Boz”, which was the nickname of one of my younger brothers. Looking back, my early stories were crude and ill considered, and they bear obvious marks of haste and inexperience, but at the time I was delighted because they were very leniently and favourably received on their first appearance.

‘I soon found myself moving in new circles and, in particular, I became a regular visitor to the home of my newspaper boss, George Hogarth, who had been one of the most eminent among the literati of Edinburgh and an
intimate companion of Sir Walter Scott. I basked in the attention of his four pretty daughters, Catherine, Mary, Georgina, and Helen. The society of young girls is a very delightful thing and I gave myself freely to their entertainment and they to mine. I came to see in the eldest, Catherine, every quality that Maria had lacked. Although outwardly not as pretty as my former love, Catherine had every inward virtue that Maria had failed to possess. She was amiable and unassuming, generous and eager to please. She won my affection and I offered to marry her. She accepted and my writing proved as successful as my engagement. The public had taken
Sketches by Boz
to their hearts so I was asked to produce a more ambitious set of stories. At the very end of March in the year 1836 the first episode of my
Pickwick Papers
appeared in print. My powers of invention seemed to know no bounds. Do you know, Mr Twist, that, over the course of the next eighteen months or so, I created no less than eight hundred and sixty-five characters around Pickwick and set his adventures in almost one hundred and seventy different places?'

I nodded. “It is, indeed, a vastly entertaining book, sir, and one I have read with pleasure more than once.”

Dickens acknowledged my praise with a smile. ‘Yes, indeed, I was convinced I had freed myself from the past and all its heartaches and that my good fortune was secured. I obtained a special marriage licence in order to marry Catherine, even though she was still a minor. We set up our first home in a small three-roomed flat at Furnival's Inn, and shortly afterwards Catherine announced I would become a father. My joy seemed complete. I shall never be so happy again as I was in those chambers. Though they were only three storeys high, I felt I had ascended to the entrance to
Heaven itself. However, I did not realize that a serpent had already entered my Garden of Eden. Unbeknown to me, Nancy had come back into my life and she was about to make her presence felt again.

‘The previous autumn I had been writing some stories on prison life and, as part of my research, I had gone to Newgate Prison. I detest this gloomy depository of the guilt and misery of London. Its rough heavy walls, small grated windows, and low massive doors look as if they were made for the express purpose of letting people in and never letting them out again. The throngs of wretched inmates, bound and helpless, know that within a few yards of their dismal cells the outside world passes them by, one perpetual stream of life and bustle. Those condemned to die are endlessly tortured by having to listen hour by hour and day by day to the light laugh and merry whistle of those who are free.

‘I delivered my credentials to the slovenly servant who answered my knock at the governor's house. I was ushered into a little office, which had two windows that both looked into the Old Bailey. It was fitted up like an ordinary attorney's office and contained a wainscoted partition, a shelf or two, an almanac, a clock, and a couple of stools on which perched a pair of clerks, dressed all in black. After a slight delay my guide arrived, a respectable looking man in his early fifties. He was also dressed entirely in black and he wore a broad-brimmed hat, which obscured much of his face. He led me through a couple of rooms to a door which opened on to a square, which itself led off into several paved yards. In these unhappy places the prisoners take such air and exercise as is permitted to them. After passing through what seemed an endless number of gates, each of which had to be unlocked and then relocked, we came to a door
composed of thick bars of wood, through which were discernible, passing to and fro in a narrow yard, some twenty women. Most, as soon as they were aware of my presence, retreated to their cells. I discovered that one side of the yard was railed off into a kind of iron cage, less than six feet high and roofed at the top. Only within its confines were female prisoners permitted to communicate with any visitor.

‘Two or three women were standing at different parts of the grating, conversing with family or friends, although a very large proportion of the prisoners appeared to have no one at all. Some inmates and visitors were prepared to speak about their lives to me. The others' stories I surmised. I particularly remember one visitor – a yellow, haggard, decrepit old woman, dressed in a tattered gown which had once been a wholesome red but was now terribly faded and begrimed with indescribable filth. She clutched in her hands the remains of an old straw bonnet, with the remnants of a red ribbon. The personification of misery and destitution, she pleaded with a good-looking, robust female inmate, whose most prominent feature was her profusion of golden hair, which shook gently in the wind. This daughter, for such I took her to be, was unmoved by her mother's entreaties. She appeared hardened beyond all hope of redemption and only showed interest when given the few halfpence, which her miserable parent had brought, ill though she could afford them.

‘Whilst I observed this scene and others I was, unbeknown to me, also being watched. I had been seen and recognized by Nancy, who happened to be visiting one of Newgate's inmates. Nancy never forgot a face and she quickly recognized in me the naïve boy whom she had seduced, though at first she could not remember my name.
She asked her associate if she knew who I was. She was told my name and that I was a respected writer and reporter for the press. However, she chose not to make herself known to me at the time and so I passed on to see more of the prison, including a similar yard for men, completely oblivious of what momentous events would stem from her having seen me. Looking back, I suspect she wanted time to investigate my career before speaking to me. I think it highly likely that she planned to try her hand at a little blackmail when the opportunity arose. If that was the case, your arrival at Fagin's a year later put other ideas into her head about the use she could make of me.

‘One night towards the end of November 1836 I was making my way to the Hogarth's house when Nancy approached me and begged for my assistance. I have to confess my immediate horror at seeing her again soon turned to fascination. She was, as you know, bewitchingly beautiful and her lively mind and infectious wit set her far above most of her peers. I was looking for a new idea for my next book because even my invention for fresh adventures about Pickwick was beginning to dry up. Nancy acted the role of Scheherazade to my need for a good story. She informed me she had a tale that would make people sit up and listen and she began to unfold the misadventures of a workhouse orphan called Oliver Twist and the terrible life he had led. I was immediately hooked. I sensed the potential in her account, and she knew it. The government had recently introduced significant changes in the Poor Law and the nature of life in the workhouse was a very topical issue.