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CHARLES DICKENS 10 1 2Text 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 20 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 30 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 40 41 42R 2890 FM.Qxp 7/29/09 3:10 AM Page Ii 2890_FM.qxp 7/29/09 3:10 AM Page i 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 CHARLES DICKENS 10 1 2Text 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 20 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 30 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 40 41 42R 2890_FM.qxp 7/29/09 3:10 AM Page ii 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 1 2 Text 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 20 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 30 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 40 41 42R 2890_FM.qxp 7/29/09 3:10 AM Page iii 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 CHARLES DICKENS 8 9 10 1 2Text 3 4 5 MICHAEL SLATER 6 7 8 9 20 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 30 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 40 YALE UNIVERSITY PRESS 41 NEW HAVEN AND LONDON 42R 2890_CH01.qxp 7/29/09 2:42 AM Page 1 1 CHAPTER 1 2 3 4 5 6 Early years 7 FROM PORTSMOUTH TO CHATHAM, 8 1812–1822 9 10 1 Do you care to know that I was a great writer at 8 years old or so – was an actor 2Text and a speaker from a baby – worked many childish experiences and many young 3 struggles into Copperfield? 4 Dickens to Mary Howitt, 7 September 1859 5 6 HE EARLIEST specimens of any writing by Charles Dickens of which we have 7 Ta record consist of a formal note of invitation and a facetious schoolboy 8 letter. The first was written when he was ‘between eight and nine years of age’ 9 (that is, 1820 or 1821) and his family was living in Chatham where his father, 20 John, was an Assistant Clerk in the Navy Pay Office. The letter was written 1 some five years later, when Dickens was ‘between thirteen and fourteen’, thus 2 three or four years after the family had moved to London and just after John 3 had retired from the Pay Office on health grounds and was embarking on a 4 new career in journalism to supplement his pension. From the time between 5 the dates of these two items no scrap of Dickens’s writing seems to have 6 survived, though three notable samples of it that did once exist are mentioned 7 by his great friend John Forster in his Life of Charles Dickens. While the 8 Dickens family were still in Chatham, Forster tells us, the young boy wrote a 9 tragedy called Misnar, the Sultan of India based on a favourite story of his. 30 Then later, after the family had moved to London, he wrote a couple of 1 character-sketches, one of an eccentric old barber obsessed with Napoleon, 2 and the other of a deaf old woman who cooked for the family in Bayham 3 Street. According to Dickens himself, writing in 1850 in the preface to a new 4 edition of his first book, Sketches by Boz, Misnar had had its predecessors 5 and/or successors in the form of ‘certain tragedies achieved at the mature age 6 of eight or ten, and represented with great applause to overflowing nurseries’. 7 As to the schoolboy letter, by the time Dickens wrote this he had perhaps 8 already taken to the writing of ‘small tales’ for the amusement of his schoolfel- 9 lows, one of whom later recalled that they had had ‘a sort of club for lending 40 and circulating them’. It seems likely, then, that there was a fair amount of 41 Dickens juvenilia which has not come down to us.1 42R 2890_CH01.qxp 7/29/09 2:42 AM Page 2 2 CHARLES DICKENS 1 The note of invitation reads as follows: ‘Master and Miss Dickens will be 2 pleased to have the company of Master and Miss Tribe to spend the evening 3 on . [date, etc.]’. It is redolent of genteel middle-class life as it was lived in 4 the early nineteenth-century with its little social ceremonies and mutual 5 courtesies – just such a composition, in fact, as one would expect the children 6 of Mr John Dickens of the Navy Pay Office and his lady to send to the children 7 of Mr Tribe, owner and landlord of the handsome old Mitre Tavern in 8 Chatham High Street, and a good friend of the highly convivial John. It was at 9 the Mitre that the Dickens children, Charles and his beloved little sister Fanny, 10 one year older than he, used sometimes to sing,‘mounted on a dining table for 1 a stage’, while their impresario-father looked proudly on.2 2 Text Five years later, in London, Dickens sent the following letter to a schoolfellow 3 called Owen Peregrine Thomas: 4 5 Tom 6 I am quite ashamed I have not returned your Leg but you shall have it by 7 Harry to morrow. If you would like to purchase my Clavis you shall have it at 8 a very reduced price. Cheaper in comparison than a Leg. 9 Yours &c 20 C. Dickens 1 PS. I suppose all this time you have had a wooden leg. I have weighed yours 2 every Saturday night. 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 30 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 40 41 42R 1 Dickens’s schoolboy letter as reproduced by Forster 2890_CH01.qxp 7/29/09 2:42 AM Page 3 EARLY YEARS: FROM PORTSMOUTH TO CHATHAM, 1812–1822 3 When he wrote this Dickens was a pupil at Wellington House, William Jones’s 1 ‘Classical and Commercial Academy’ in the Hampstead Road, and the ‘Leg’ and 2 ‘Clavis’ to which he refers would have been standard Latin school-books. The 3 letter is very much the work of the lively, fun-loving schoolboy so vividly recalled 4 by Thomas and others who gave Forster their reminiscences of Wellington 5 House Academy for his biography. Forster comments that there is ‘some under- 6 lying whim or fun in the “Leg” allusions’. He does not, however, point out that 7 this is, in the language of nineteenth-century playbills, ‘positively the first 8 appearance’ in all Dickens’s writings of a wooden leg, the subject of numerous 9 comic allusions throughout his work, culminating in Silas Wegg’s versatile 10 appendage in Our Mutual Friend. It goes to the heart, in fact, of that fascination 1 with the borderline between the animate and inanimate that is central to so 2Text much Dickensian comic writing. Forster, who reproduces the letter in facsimile, 3 as I do here, does, however, note that ‘in the signature the reader will be amused 4 to see the first faint beginning of a flourish afterwards famous’.3 5 These earliest specimens of Dickens’s writing belong to two very important 6 phases of his early life. The first is a product of what he came to think of as the 7 golden period of his Chatham childhood, when he was aged between five 8 and ten years. The second comes from what we might call his rally, that took 9 place between the ages of thirteen and fifteen, when his interrupted schooling 20 was at last resumed, and he could once more publicly enjoy the status of 1 a middle-class young gentleman after the humiliation of drudging in a 2 blacking factory. Considered together, therefore, the two items derive consid- 3 erable poignancy from our knowledge of the decidedly grim – albeit highly 4 stimulating imaginatively – time that intervened between the writing of the 5 childhood note and of the schoolboy letter. Some twenty-five years later this 6 period was to inspire in Dickens some very passionate writing indeed, the 7 so-called ‘autobiographical fragment’, which, as will become apparent in the 8 next chapter, is our primary source of knowledge about what happened to him 9 during that dark time. Now, however, we must go back to his very earliest years 30 and the date when, long before he himself could write a word, he was a cause 1 of writing for his father. 2 On Monday 10 February 1812 readers of The Hampshire Telegraph and The 3 Hampshire Courier found this advertisement in their respective journals: 4 ‘BIRTHS – on Friday, at Mile-end Terrace, the Lady of John Dickens, Esq., a 5 son’. It is a self-consciously genteel announcement placed by a man who, in 6 1785, had been born as the second son of upper servants in the household of 7 John Crewe of Crewe Hall in Cheshire. He had apparently received a good 8 education, probably thanks to Crewe, and since 1805 had been pursuing a 9 successful career, with a steadily rising income, in the Navy Pay Office, his 40 initial appointment there being also most likely owing to Crewe’s patronage. 41 He worked first at Somerset House in London and while there wooed and won 42R 2890_CH01.qxp 7/29/09 2:42 AM Page 4 4 CHARLES DICKENS 1 the petite and pretty nineteen-year-old Elizabeth Barrow, daughter of Charles 2 Barrow and sister of his friend and fellow-clerk Thomas Barrow, who held the 3 important post of Chief Conductor of Money in Towns. John had been posted 4 to Portsmouth, thereby qualifying for an ‘outport allowance’ of five shillings a 5 day in addition to his regular salary.
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