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  Suddenly his sister Fanny, who had shown talent as a pianist and vocalist, was given an unusual educational opportunity. That she was two years older and her musical ability had professional potential, whereas his did not, may have influenced their parents to make use of the good offices of Thomas Barrow’s neighbor, “the eminment pianoforte maker, Thomas Tomkison,” to nominate her to be a student at the newly founded Royal Academy of Music in Hanover Square. The total fee, including living costs, amounted to thirty-eight guineas. In light of the £350 a year John Dickens earned, it was a modest expense—if there had been no debts. In April 1823, she passed her entrance examination and began her professional training, studying under a fine faculty, including Ignaz Moscheles, who had been a friend and student of Beethoven’s.5 Whatever Charles’s feelings then, whatever his love for his sister, his situation soon took a grim, pervasively damaging turn that keenly attacked his sense of his own worth and stirred feelings of sibling resentment.

  The cultural situation was one in which his parents were victims also. Neither of them had the resources or discipline to plan for prosperity. Each had developed a psychology of entitlement. John had acquired the manners and habits of minor affluence, of a gentleman with an income. Elizabeth snobbishly assumed her social superiority, accepting her comfortable view of herself as a young woman of beauty and high culture. Neither was especially intelligent or hardworking. Without religious or vocational vision, neither had an anchor for their values outside the limitations of their personalities. Insufficiently afraid of ill fortune, they were sufficiently easygoing to be able to live with debt and muddle. They needed capital to invest in themselves and their children. They needed the profits of capital to purchase the pleasures of life. Without self-denial or enterprise, John Dickens’ employment as a pay clerk could not supply any excess capital at all. In March 1820, he had attempted to supplement his income by publishing a report of a major local fire in the Times, probably through Elizabeth’s brother, John Henry Barrow, a reporter on the newspaper.6 But whatever he was paid, his extravagant donation of two guineas to the survivors of the fire was more than he could afford. Unable to increase his income or decrease his expenditures, he borrowed regularly in a society in which capital was scarce.

  When the costs of Fanny’s education were added, what had been serious financial difficulty reached the threshold of crisis. Tradespeople began to decline any further credit. So John Dickens delayed paying his first quarter’s householder tax. The authorities issued a summons. He did the same for the next quarter’s, and did not pay local maintenance rates.7 Soon the family’s penchant for the wastefully unrealistic expenditure asserted itself. Elizabeth Dickens determined that she would open a school to be called “MRS DICKENS’S ESTABLISHMENT.” Christopher Huffam, she imagined, had East Indian connections that would provide her with pupils. Advertisements would bring others. John Dickens, having failed to provide alternatives, and perhaps taken with the idea, was in no position to oppose the plan. Elizabeth either did not seek or did not take advice. A large, expensive, newly built house on Gower Street North was rented for the family, the students, and the school. Charles was sent around the neighborhood to distribute advertisements. On the day after Christmas 1823, they moved into the new house. Elizabeth Dickens did not get the opportunity to demonstrate that she was unsuited to fulfill her professional aspirations. Not one student enrolled.

  Without capital, the family had only its labor to offer. John Dickens was fully engaged at the pay office. Elizabeth had tried and failed. Alfred, at two, Frederick, at four, and Letitia, at eight, were too young to help. At almost twelve, Charles was employable in a society in which child labor provided an opportunity for additional income for hard-pressed families and capital advantage for eager employers. Children were cheaper to use than the few machines available in industries in which repetitive tasks needed to be performed. The same James Lamert who had made him the toy theatre now became the agent of his imprisonment. Thinking to help the family, he offered employment for the boy in a shoe-polish factory and warehouse that he managed and his cousin George Lamert owned. Certainly, given the family situation, some other employment would have been found for Charles if Lamert had not made the offer. The salary was six shillings a week. His parents accepted on their son’s behalf. Soon after his twelfth birthday, probably by mid-February, 1824, he began the daily grind at Warren’s Blacking, 30 Hungerford Stairs, the Strand.8

  What was a future scholar and gentleman doing in a dingy factory repetitively pasting labels onto pots of black shoe polish? He should have been at school, he believed, like his sister, neatly and appropriately dressed, with the opportunity for suitable companionship instead of in this “crazy, tumble-down old house … on the river … literally overrun with rats.” Sitting at a table, in a recess on the first floor overlooking the coal-barges, he spent his days covering “pots of paste-blacking, first with a piece of oil-paper, and then with a piece of blue paper,” then tying them with a string, clipping the paper edges, and pasting on a label. At first, James Lamert spent the hour from noon to one teaching him “something,” and at first he was kept apart from the other boys doing similar work downstairs, one of whom, Bob Fagin, showed him the trick of using the string and tying the knot. Soon the noontime lessons stopped. Then he was moved downstairs. His companions were lower class and ignorant. Though they provided fellowship, he felt keenly the humiliation, the humbling of middle-class self-identity and self-worth. He was also personally wounded. His snobbish facade became a cover for “the secret agony of [his] soul” as he felt his “early hopes of growing up to be a learned and distinguished man, crushed in [his] breast.”9

  Suddenly his father’s fragile house of debt collapsed. Arrested on February 20, 1824, for failure to pay 40 pounds to his neighborhood baker, a large amount to owe unless the sum involved cash loans, three days later he was moved from a temporary jail to the Marshalsea prison on the south side of the Thames.10 Fortunately, the navy continued to pay his salary, probably a local decision prompted by sympathetic awareness of the family’s situation. Most likely his colleagues at Somerset House knew about his imprisonment, even if his absence from work was justified officially as sick or personal leave. His salary went to keep creditors at bay and to pay the necessary expenses for the family at Gower Street and his own in prison. Appeals to friends and relations to discharge the forty-pound debt were not successful. If he appealed to his mother, she also declined. His legacy would have to await her death. Many of the family possessions, including the small library, were pawned or sold. Only one solution was available. John Dickens decided to declare himself an “insolvent debtor,” even at the cost of submitting his family to the humiliation of the Insolvent Debtor’s Act’s provision that the possessions of the family not be valued at more than twenty pounds. Initiated in early March, the slow legal proceeding followed its deliberate calendar. The family’s possessions, even the clothes Charles wore to work, were assessed. John Dickens was released from prison “per Insolvency Act” on May 28, 1824.

  A month before his release his mother died. Her youngest son could not attend the funeral. None of the £450 left to him would be available until the will had gone through probate, a lengthy procedure. As welcome as the money would be, it could not help in his present situation. Stressing that she had already lent him money years before, his mother made painfully clear in the will how low had been her opinion of him. She had so little confidence in him that she had stipulated that in the event of the death of her eldest son, her sole executor, his wife rather than her youngest son was to succeed him. On the same day that John was released from prison, his brother William was sworn as his mother’s executor. The will was proved on June 4, 1824. Part of the legacy, available in the autumn, was used to pay outstanding debts and current expenses, particularly desirable since, under the terms of the Insolvency Act, his salary could be and was partly attached by his creditors. The legacy was not used, though, to pay Fanny’s outstanding bills
from the Royal Academy, which threatened to expel her for nonpayment. Her father sent them an IOU with his promise to redeem it, “for a circumstance of great moment to me will be decided in the ensuing term which I confidently hope will place me in comparative affluence, and by which I shall be enabled to redeem the order before the period of Christmas day.”11

  Whether or not he could continue in his position at the navy pay office had become a pressing concern as soon as he was imprisoned. If he stayed in jail, he was sure to be discharged. If he gained his release by claiming insolvency, his employer might consider him compromised beyond forgiveness and deny him his pension. A minor urinary problem that had made desk work and regular hours uncomfortable suddenly appeared to him in a new light. What if his kidney difficulties could serve as a means to resolve his dilemma? Disguising the fact of his imprisonment, he wrote to the Treasurer of the Navy, two weeks after being jailed, requesting early retirement. He enclosed a medical certificate, signed by a surgeon, stating that his “infirmity of body, arising from a chronic infection of the Urinary Organs, incapacitated [him] from attending to any possible duty.” His request was forwarded to a higher administrative level with a recommendation for approval that stated he had discharged his duty satisfactorily for over nineteen years and the navy would stand to gain financially. His pension would be half his salary, £145 per year. His replacement would cost only £90. The procedure was a slow one. The application lapsed and was renewed. In the meantime, he returned to work at Somerset House. The admiralty, though, raised questions about whether the retirement was requested because of medical reasons or because of his taking the Insolvent Debtor’s Act. Would granting the request set a precedent? William Huskisson, who had approved the petition, humanely responded in December that “I am equally unwilling that he should remain in office, or be entirely dismissed without provision, for he can plead a service of nearly 20 Years, and a Wife & Family of 6 children totally dependent on his Income for life.… I shall immediately make a regulation … that hereafter Clerks attempting to take the benefit of the Insolvent Act shall be discharged from their situation.” On March 9, 1825, his retirement became official. At the age of forty, John Dickens was unemployed.12

  While his father was in prison, Charles had been earning his own living, trudging each day through much of February and March the five miles from Gower Street to the Strand and back. Unready to be an adult, he was forced into trying to think and perform like one. Bewildered at being deprived of his father, he did errands and carried messages. In the Marshalsea, father and son cried together in a frightening reversal of roles. Since John Dickens could not leave the prison, his family, as was not unusual, came to stay with him at a considerable savings after selling the possessions at the Gower Street house. His mother, Letitia, Frederick, and Alfred moved into the Marshalsea, keeping one servant, who was lodged nearby. Fanny remained at the Royal Academy. Charles was sent to lodge on Little College Street in Camden Town with an old friend of the family, Mrs. Elizabeth Roylance, with whom his maternal grandfather had lodged temporarily years ago before fleeing to the Continent. Perhaps his father paid Mrs. Roylance for Charles’s share of the room he occupied with two other children. He never knew. He knew only that he had to make his six shillings cover all other expenses for the week. On Sundays, he and Fanny visited the family. From “Monday morning until Saturday night” the twelve-year-old boy had “no advice, no counsel, no encouragement, no support, from any one.…” Deeply lonely, he eventually persuaded his father to allow him to move to lodgings close to the prison, on Lant Street, in a run-down neighborhood.13 He then spent many evenings in the Marshalsea. Intensely curious about the prisoners and prison life, keenly observant of its social structure, he encouraged his garrulous father to tell stories about it. As soon as he had been imprisoned, John Dickens had begun to impose his fantasies on his surroundings, to distinguish himself from his fellow prisoners by assumptions of superiority.

  Constantly underfed, Charles sniffed hungrily at the food in the London stores and streets. He played mental games about whether to buy one type of pudding or another or to buy attractive food now and have no money later or to buy attractive food later and have no food now, or to act like a grown-up and plan sensibly. Occasionally he regaled himself with a culinary treat, like coffee and bread and butter in a coffee room, where the letters read backward impressed themselves on his memory as a searing reminder of his loneliness and degradation. He could not buy parental attention and the security of a home. His schoolboy’s few clothes became increasingly shabby and he detested the difficult-to-remove and defiling polish that grimed his hands and fingernails. As an adult, he would be obsessive about cleanliness. He would also be fetishistic about his clothes, from the dandy splendor of his twenties and thirties to the elegant seriousness of his later dress. At twelve he was still short and noticeably slight in build and he sometimes experienced attacks of severe pain in his left side. During one severe spasm, his fellow workers compassionately attended to him. Still, he had the sense of being frighteningly alone. Through much of his life, at times of emotional stress, the attacks would return.

  Unexpectedly, his father’s liberation from the Marshalsea in late May 1824 made matters worse. First, they all temporarily lodged with the sympathetic Elizabeth Roylance. Then, in June, they moved to 29 Johnson Street, a shabby neighborhood between Somers Town and Camden Town. There was a touch of euphoria in the air. Not only was prison behind. There was also the expectation of the legacy as soon as John’s mother’s will was probated. Charles could not help but be confused by the gap between his daily drudgery at Warren’s and the new financial optimism, and there was no mention of his being freed from servitude. Whereas everyone else had been liberated, he was still imprisoned. John Dickens resumed his London life, with its companionability and bonhomie. Charles kept pasting labels on pots. When the factory moved from Hungerford Stairs to Chandos Street, in Covent Garden, he was placed, with the other boys, in a window alcove through which passersby could observe their dexterity. One day, his father came to Warren’s with a friend, Charles Wentworth Dilke, on business or amusement that had nothing to do with his son. Dilke saw the boy at work and gave him “a gift of a half-crown,” for which he received “a very low bow.” At the end of June, they all went to applaud Fanny receiving a silver medal for good conduct and a second for piano from the hands of the Princess Augusta before a fashionable audience at the Royal Academy. It was the stuff of which family dreams were made. The tears ran down Charles’s face. He may not have wished that his sister was in the blacking factory, but he certainly wished that he was on that stage receiving prizes. He could not bear to think of himself “beyond the reach of all such honourable emulation and success … I felt as if my heart were rent. I prayed, when I went to bed that night, to be lifted out of the humiliation and neglect in which I was. I never had suffered so much before.”14

  Charles’s deliverance from the blacking factory was unpredictable and bewildering. For reasons he never learned, his father quarreled with James Lamert. Perhaps his pride had been offended by his son working in the window to full public gaze. John Dickens seemed more concerned about himself than his son, and his anger, the substance of which was communicated in a letter that Charles was forced to deliver, conveniently expressed itself only after his release from prison and his awareness of the coming legacy. With characteristic self-indulgence, he could not have been thinking of his son’s situation when he made him the bearer of his letter to Lamert, since it was predictable that Charles would feel the force of Lamert’s anger even if it was not directed at him. Lamert told him that “he was very much insulted about me; and that it was impossible to keep me after that. I cried very much, partly because in his anger he was violent about my father, though gentle to me.” He felt the anger directed against his father as if it were directed against himself. Depressed, “with a relief so strange that it was like oppression,” he went home. But the atmosphere there was hardly one in which he
could recover or find the security and love he had been craving. “My mother set herself to accommodate the quarrel, and did so next day. She brought home a request for me to return next morning.… My father said I should go back no more, and should go to school.”15 Achieved at great cost, it was a redemption that his mother opposed. But it must have been additionally painful to him that his liberation resulted from his father triumphing over his mother in a conflict in which he could feel that he was both only a pawn and at the same time the cause of such a bitter quarrel.

  For a long time he had taken his father as his model, having identified closely with him from early childhood. But he had been in the process of separating from his mother since infancy. Regardless of its cause, Charles began to develop the sense at an early age that he hardly had a mother. Now that separation took a dramatic and overdetermined leap forward into anger at himself for being so badly treated and into increased feelings of worthlessness because his mother could treat him that way. Fortunately, he was able, in time, to turn his anger away from himself and toward her. “I do not write resentfully or angrily,” he claimed over twenty years later, “for I know how all these things have worked together to make me what I am: but I never afterwards forgot, I never shall forget, I never can forget, that my mother was warm for my being sent back.”16 His anger was the necessary, liberating culmination of that stage of the relationship. But it was a stage that his feelings and his imagination remained in close touch with throughout his life. He created many variations on this experience in his fiction, dividing his pain into the two women of his fantasy life, the oppressive, witchlike, or carelessly self-indulgent mother he felt he had, and the idealized, loving antimother of wish fulfillment.