The Victorian City: Everyday Life in Dickens' London (63 page)

This was the refrain of Dickens’ novels and journalism for thirty years. It was only with his very last work that there is any indication of a different view, perhaps a hint of how worn-out this dynamo of a man had become. In his twenties, Dickens had found happiness – as well as his career, and fame, and fortune – in the streets. By the mid-1860s, when Dickens was in his fifties, in
Our Mutual Friend
the ‘great black river’ is now seen to be ‘stretching away to the great ocean, Death’; in the penultimate chapter of
Edwin Drood
, left on his desk unfinished at his demise in 1870, it comes even closer. Mr Tartar takes pretty Rosa Bud for a day out on the Thames: ‘The tide bore them on in the gayest and most sparkling manner, until they stopped to dine in some everlastingly green garden.’ Then, ‘all too soon’, they must head back, and once more ‘the great black city cast its shadow on the waters, and its dark bridges spanned them as death spans life’. The river had been at the heart of London and the heart of Dickens’ work. As early as
Oliver Twist
his writing had been compared to ‘The surface of the stream [that] seems bright, and cheerfully bubbling as it rushes on – but in its windings you come ever and anon upon some place of death’. In his final novel, only the river represents life, while London – that never-equalled city, the city that was the motivating force behind one of the greatest novelists of all time – is shadowy and dark with death.

It is not possible, however, to leave Dickens there. He himself would not have done so voluntarily. Instead, let us leave him with Arthur Clennam and Little Dorrit, when they marry in the old church beside the Marshalsea,
the scene of the Dickens family’s terrible humiliation. After the ceremony the couple stand together on the church steps, looking down at the busy street below them. Then: ‘They went quietly down in to the roaring streets, inseparable and blessed; and as they passed along in sunshine and shade, the noisy and the eager, and the arrogant and the froward, and the vain, fretted, and chafed, and made their usual uproar.’

DICKENS’ PUBLICATIONS

NOTES

INTRODUCTION

‘merely life’: Dickens,
The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club
, ed. Mark Wormald (first published 1836–7; Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1999), p. 752; early citations of use of the term ‘Dickensian’:
Glasgow Herald
, 20 December 1859,
Hampshire Advertiser
, 31 December 1870,
Liverpool Mercury
, 23 November 1888.

‘on Dickens himself’: ‘packed, like game’: Dickens, ‘Dullborough Town’, in
All the Year Round
, 30 June 1860,
The Dent Uniform Edition of Dickens’ Journalism
, vol. 4,
The Uncommercial Traveller and Other Papers
, ed. Michael Slater and John Drew (London, J. M. Dent, 2000), p. 140; John Forster,
The Life of Charles Dickens
, 3 vols (London, Chapman and Hall, 1872–4), vol. 1, p. 16; rent: Peter Ackroyd,
Dickens
(London, Vintage, 1999), p. 61.

‘and kitchen ranges’: Dickens,
David Copperfield
, ed. Jeremy Tambling (first published 1849–50; Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1996), p. 170.

‘labouring hind’:
David Copperfield
, p. 150; the chronology for Dickens’ time in the blacking factory is uncertain. Dickens’ friend and biographer John Forster says Dickens started work there around December 1823, while other writers believe that it was more likely to be January or February 1824. The date he left is equally uncertain, with one scholar, Michael Allen,
Charles Dickens and the Blacking Factory
(St Leonards, Oxford-Stockley Publications, 2011), pp. 92–4, suggesting it was as much as a year later. Most biographers think six months is more likely. It was certainly early 1825 before the boy returned to school. In his single known comment on the episode, Dickens himself claimed not to be able to remember; ‘labouring hind’: my thanks to Leslie Katz, Suzanne Daly, Susan Dean, Charles Hatten and Karla Waters for their help in tracking down the use of this phrase in the nineteenth century.

‘far he had come’: Forster,
Life
, vol. 1, pp. 47–8.

‘shortened it to Boz’: ‘I walked down’, Forster,
Life
, vol. 1, p. 76.

‘find himself famous’: sales figures for
Pickwick
are variously cited, ranging from 400–500 copies at the start, to 40,000–50,000 or even 60,000 by the end; I have followed the middle course of Michael Slater,
Charles Dickens
(New Haven, CT, Yale University Press, 2009), p. 215. For the chronology of Dickens’ childhood and adolescence in the previous paragraphs, I have followed Michael Allen,
Charles Dickens’ Childhood
(Basingstoke, Macmillan, 1988), passim, and Duane DeVries,
Dickens’s Apprentice Years: The Making of a Novelist
(Hassocks, Sussex, Harvester Press, 1976), passim.

‘Vauxhall-bridge-road’: ‘Gone Astray’, in
Household Words
, 13 August 1853,
The Dent Uniform Edition of Dickens’ Journalism
, vol. 3:
‘Gone Astray’ and Other Papers
, ed. Michael Slater (London, J. M. Dent, 1998), pp. 155–65; Sala, cited in Forster,
Life
, vol. 3, p. 476; footnote on Dickens’ walking pace: George Dolby,
Charles Dickens as I Knew Him: The Story of the Reading Tours in Great Britain and America, 1866–1870
(London, T. Fisher Unwin, 1885), p. 255.

‘his final years’: all but one of these descriptions of Dickens were compiled by Frederic G. Kitton,
Charles Dickens by Pen and Pencil
, and
A Supplement
(London, Frank T. Sabin, 1890); Sala’s contribution appears on p. 93; the ‘whipper-snapper’ and the ‘pretty-boy’ are Thomas Trollope, p. 53; the light step and jaunty air, Arthur Locker, p. 173; the ‘man of sanguine complexion’ is from Derek Hudson, ed.,
Munby
,
Man of Two Worlds: The Life and Diaries of Arthur J. Munby
, 1828–1910 (London, John Murray, 1972), p. 191.

‘in the daylight’: Forster,
Life
, vol. 2, p. 256; Dickens,
The Old Curiosity Shop
, ed. Angus Easson (first published 1840–41; Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1985), p. 43.

‘accuracy of a cabman’: ‘Whenever we have an hour’: this was the original opening for ‘The Prisoner’s Van’, as printed in the newspaper
Bell’s Life
, 29 November 1835, but it was replaced when it was collected into
Sketches by Boz
. Cited in John Butt and Kathleen Tillotson,
Dickens at Work
(London, Methuen, 1957), p. 44; the solicitor’s clerk: Kitton,
Charles Dickens, by Pen and Pencil
, pp. 130–31; ‘accuracy of a cabman’:
Fraser’s Magazine
, 21 (April 1840), p. 400.

‘may interest others’: ‘lounging one evening’: Dickens, ‘The Parlour Orator’,
Sketches by Boz
, ed. Dennis Walder (first published 1836–9; Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1995), p. 272; ‘Suggest to him’: Dickens to W. H. Wills, 27 September 1851,
The Letters of Charles Dickens: The Pilgrim Edition
, ed. Madeline House, Graham Storey, Kathleen Tillotson (Oxford, Clarendon, 1965– ), vol. 6, p. 497; ‘The Uncommercial Traveller: His General Line of Business’,
All the Year Round
, 28 January 1860,
Dickens’ Journalism
, vol. 4, p. 28.

‘on the London streets’: the charity children appear in
Illustrated London News
(hereafter cited as
ILN
), 28 May 1842, pp. 44–5;
Our Mutual Friend
, originals in Mayhew, noted in Harland S. Nelson, ‘Dickens’s
Our Mutual Friend
and Henry Mayhew’s
London Labour and the London Poor
’,
Nineteenth-Century Fiction
, 20: 3 (December 1965), pp. 207–22; Harvey Peter Sucksmith, ‘Dickens and Mayhew: A Further Note’,
Nineteenth-Century Fiction
, 24: 3 (December 1969), pp. 345–9, and Richard J. Dunn, ‘Dickens and Mayhew Once More’,
Nineteenth-Century Fiction
, 25: 3 (December 1970), pp. 348–53; the woman in white: Dickens, ‘Where We Stopped Growing’,
Household Words
, 1 January 1853,
Dickens’ Journalism
, vol. 3, p. 111.

‘been in 1800’: size of London, numbers of inhabitants and houses: Jeremy Tambling,
Going Astray: Dickens and London
(Harlow, Pearson Longman, 2009), p. 18, and Jerry White,
London in the Nineteenth Century: ‘A Human Awful Wonder of God’
(London, Jonathan Cape, 2007), p. 77.

‘impression so nicely’: Walter Bagehot, ‘Charles Dickens’, in
The Works and Life of Walter Bagehot
, ed. Mrs Russell Barrington (London, Longmans, Green, and Co., 1915),
vol. 3, pp. 84–5; ‘fanciful photograph’: Dickens to W. H. Wills, 24 September 1858,
Letters
, vol. 8, p. 669; footnote: I owe this idea to Tambling,
Going Astray
, pp. 21–2.

‘he marvelled’: Henry James, ‘The Art of Fiction’, 1884, cited in F. O. Matthiesson,
The James Family
(New York, Knopf, 1947), p. 360; ‘English Traits’, in Emerson,
The Prose Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson
(Boston, Fields, Osgood & Co., 1870), vol. 2, p. 278; Parkman,
The Journals of Francis Parkman
, ed. Mason Wade (London, Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1949), vol. 1, p. 221.

‘created Dickens’: J.-K. Huysmans,
Against Nature
, trans. Robert Baldick (Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1959), p. 138; Walter Benjamin citing G. K. Chesterton,
Dickens
, in
The Arcades Project
, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge, MA, Belknap, Harvard University Press, 1999), p. 438.

‘the nearest way’:
David Copperfield
, p. 153.

1810:
THE BERNERS STREET HOAX

‘aged family retainer’: ‘piano-fortes by dozens’: [Theodore Hook],
Gilbert Gurney
(London, Whittaker & Co., 1836), vol. 1, pp. 298–9.

‘left in peace’: verse: ‘The Hoax: An Epistle from Solomon Sappy, Esquire, in London, to his brother Simon at Liverpool’,
Satirist, or, Monthly Meteor
, 1 January 1811, pp. 59–61.

‘the fun in comfort’: the details of the episode are given by Hook’s biographer, Bill Newton Dunn,
The Man Who Was John Bull: The Biography of Theodore Edward Hook, 1778–1841
(London, Allendale, 1996), p. 12, citing an article from the
Morning Post
, which he does not date and I have been unable to trace. However, the
Examiner
, 2 December 1810, p. 768, ‘Principal Occurrences in the Year 1810’, in the
New Annual Register
[January 1811?] and ‘Principal Occurrences in the Year 1810’, in the
Edinburgh Annual Register
[January 1811?], all seem to be reprints, with some additional information.

‘of Bedford Street’: this and the next two paragraphs: Mrs [Nancy] Mathews,
Tea-Table Talk, Ennobled Actresses, and Other Miscellanies
(London, Thomas Cautley Newby, 1857), pp. 158–62.

‘those in the street’: epilogue to
Lost and Found
: cited in
Literary Panorama
, February 1811, pp. 379–90; the
European Magazine, and London Review
, January 1811, p. 46, names the play and authors.

1.
EARLY TO RISE

‘are rapidly filling’: [William Moy Thomas], ‘Covent Garden Market’,
Household Words
, 175, 30 July 1853, pp. 505–11.