Charles Dickens: The Life of the Author

The Young Dickens

When Charles Dickens was a small boy, perhaps eight or nine years old, he got lost in the City, the teeming financial and commercial center of the great metropolis of London. A friend of the family had taken him to look at the outside of St. Giles's Church with the hope of quenching a fantastical notion that had taken hold of him: young Dickens was convinced that on Sundays, the beggars of London, having cast off their weekday pretenses to blindness, lameness and other physical maladies, and freshly attired in their holiday best, were to be seen marching into the temple of their patron saint, where they would then partake of divine service.

St. Giles's was viewed "with sentiments of satisfaction" and, one infers, edification all around, but shortly afterwards, on the Strand (a well-known street in London), Dickens somehow became separated from his companion. At first, he was horrified; but he soon rallied and determined to set off to seek his fortune.

"Thus I wandered about the City, like a child in a dream," he reminisced in "Gone Astray," an elegiac essay written more than thirty years later, "staring at the British merchants, and inspired by a mighty faith in the marvellousness of everything."

Strange to think that a baron of finance, proceeding gravely through the City "in a procession of one" (to borrow a Dickensian turn of phrase), could inspire thoughts of "marvellousness" in a young boy. But then, as Dickens wryly observes in "Gone Astray," he was considered an "odd child"--and it was his eye, or rather his mind's eye, that set him apart.

Looking back on his own childhood, Dickens saw "a very small and not over-particularly-taken-care-of boy." That very boy grew into a young man who, through the sheer fertility of his creative genius and an astonishing amount of hard work, transformed himself into the most famous writer of his age. In April 1856, Dickens wrote to his friend and future biographer John Forster of how clear it was to him that "one is driven by irresistible might until the journey is worked out!"

His own mighty journey began in the English seaport of Portsmouth. On Friday, February 7, 1812, the second child and eldest son of Elizabeth and John Dickens was born, and was christened Charles John Huffam Dickens.

The Dickens family
A clerk in the Naval Pay Office, John Dickens was loquacious, feckless, grandly theatrical, and highly skilled at amassing debts. That six more children followed Charles did not help matters. In the words of his son, John Dickens was "an optimist--he was like a cork--if he was pushed under water in one place, he always 'bobbed up to time' cheerfully in another, and felt none the worse for the dip."

Much given to both the grand gesture and grandiloquent locutions, John Dickens would be immortalized by his son as the ridiculous and yet endearing Mr. Micawber in David Copperfield (1849-50; 1850), a character who, in the midst of a crisis, likens himself to "a shattered fragment of the Temple once called Man." Like the genial Mr. Micawber, he was able to forge his affection for the rhetorical flourish and his improvidence into a kind of art. Contemplating a long-lived relative, and presumably a little short in the pocket, he once said this: "And I must express my tendency to believe that his longevity is (to say the least of it) extremely problematical." Forster records Dickens's delight in this "celebrated sentence" of the well-intentioned but often exasperating father, whose industry, the son maintained with affectionate loyalty, was always "untiring." Dickens's feelings about his mother were much more ambivalent.

A woman gifted with "an extraordinary sense of the ludicrous," Elizabeth Dickens is said to have gone to a ball on the evening before she brought the future novelist into the world. She was admired as a cheerful soul, and it seems she was somewhat more practical than her husband. Like the hapless Mrs. Micawber, she would try to shore up the family's finances with a scheme to open a school, which of course failed. Elizabeth Dickens inspired her son to draw one of his most amusing portraits, the absurd Mrs. Nickleby in Nicholas Nickleby (1838-39; 1839), who prattles on with sublime inconsequentiality and to great comic effect. Dickens found it very droll that his mother asked him whether he "really believed there ever was such a woman!"

Dickens's childhood was a sorry mixture of the fondly remembered and the wholly detested. The Dickens family was both large and almost always hard-pressed. In the profoundly autobiographical David Copperfield, the ever-pinched Mr. Micawber gives David some shrewd advice: "Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen nineteen six, result happiness. Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty pounds ought and six, result misery." And yet, like Dickens's father, Mr. Micawber remains ever hopeful--"In case anything turned up" is indeed his favorite expression.

A troubled youth
For Dickens, the happiest years of his childhood (1817-22) were spent in Chatham, a bustling port on England's southeast coast. He was sent to school, and began to read voraciously--"as if for life." In Dickens's "own favourite child" of his novels, David Copperfield writes with wonder of his late father's small library,

	Mere natural genius
	[T]here can be no question of the importance of Dickens as a human event in history; a sort of conflagration and transfiguration in the very heart of what is called the conventional Victorian era; a naked flame of mere natural genius, breaking out in a man without culture, without tradition, without help from historic religions or philosophies or from the great foreign schools; and revealing a light that never was on sea or land, if only in the long fantastic shadows that it threw from common things. --G.K. Chesterton, "Charles Dickens: His Life" (from the 14th edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica, 1929)

out of which paraded a "glorious host" of imaginary creatures to keep him company as a child--Humphry Clinker, Tom Jones, Don Quixote, the Vicar of Wakefield, Gil Blas, Robinson Crusoe, and many more. "They kept alive my fancy," David recalls, "and my hope of something beyond that place and time." Indeed, the novels of Henry Fielding, Tobias Smollett, Daniel Defoe, Cervantes, and Oliver Goldsmith were to become lifelong passions for Dickens; and, in many ways, they would serve as the models for his own art. In fact, he has been called the last of the great 18th-century novelists, as exemplified by the picturesque (and picaresque) Pickwick, as well as one of the first of the novel's "modern" practitioners, as witness such densely textured and heavily symbolic later works as Bleak House (1852-53; 1853) and Our Mutual Friend (1864-65; 1865).

Rambling about the beautiful countryside one day, young Dickens and his father came upon a handsome country house, Gad's Hill Place, which stood on a high spot of ground on the main road between Rochester and Gravesend. This "wonderful mansion," which basked in a glorious Shakespearean glow (it is the very spot where Falstaff, in Henry IV, Part I, relieves the travelers of their treasure), became a sort of childhood dream for Dickens. His father told him: "If you were to be very persevering, and were to work hard, you might some day come to live in it." (For once, John Dickens proved prescient. In 1856, Charles Dickens would purchase the "stupendous property" that had so enchanted him as a child, and take possession of it early the next year; and in 1860, the wandering novelist, whom one observer described as the "veriest vagabond," would settle there permanently.)

The Chatham idyll ended abruptly when John Dickens was transferred to London in 1822, a move that in no way inspired him to remedy the ill management of his affairs, which continued to bring terrible strains upon the household and creditors to the door. By early 1824, the house of cards was about to collapse. In early February, only a few days after his twelfth birthday, young Charles was sent to work pasting labels on bottles at a tumbledown, rat-overrun shoe polish factory on the Thames. Pay was six shillings a week, hours 8 a.m. to 8 p.m. "It is wonderful to me," he would later write of this catastrophe, "how I could have been so easily cast away at such an age."

 

But worse was to come when, on February 20, John Dickens was arrested for debt, and soon after the entire family (except for Charles and his older sister Fanny, who was studying at the Royal Academy of Music) joined him in the Marshalsea debtor's prison. Each evening, young Charles returned alone to his lodgings in Camden Town, a three-mile walk from Warren's Blacking factory. These cruel turns of fate--his humiliating enslavement to menial labor and his father's imprisonment and disgrace--would haunt Dickens for the remainder of his life. Abandoned children and orphans like Pip--the hero of Great Expectations (1860-61; 1861)--are everywhere in his work, and abandonment of course need not be literal to wound deeply and permanently.

Declared insolvent in late May, John Dickens was released from prison; and eventually he removed his son from the blacking factory and placed him again in school.

But Elizabeth Dickens could not comprehend why he should be removed from a situation of gainful employment--and for her son, this was a bitter betrayal. "I never afterwards forgot," Dickens would write years later, in an autobiographical fragment that was not published until after his death, "I never can forget, that my mother was warm for sending me back."

By all accounts, Dickens was a remarkably sensitive child, and this awful period of "humiliation and neglect" marked him indelibly. Even at the height of his fame, he would forget himself in his dreams, and, as he said, "wander desolately back to that time of my life."

The Bostonian Annie Fields, the wife of Dickens's American publisher and one of the most perceptive admirers of both the public and the private man, frequently enjoyed the novelist's companionship during his second triumphant tour of North America (November 1867-April 1868). After one such evening she wrote in her diary, "Such charity! Poor man! He must have learned great need for that ... He is a man who has suffered, evidently ..."