Dickens Read online

  THE NEXT TWO AND A HALF YEARS WERE THE CALM AFTER THE emotional firestorm. Typically, John Dickens sent his son to inquire about the cost of becoming a day student at a local school, Wellington House Academy. Apparently no effort was made to determine what might be the best school for him. This one was there; it had turned up, so to speak. The pretentious name may have appealed to his father. Sometime in the summer or fall of 1824, he was introduced to the tyrannical headmaster, William Jones, to the flute-playing lame head usher, who was responsible for most of the teaching, and to the Latin master.17 Each day he walked from Johnson Street to Hampstead Road, just below Mornington Crescent, delighted to be at school again, delighted to be a boy again. In emotional intensity, the years at crowded Wellington House Academy were like days; the months he had spent at Warren’s Blacking were like years.

  The school provided the usual assortment of subjects and personalities. The headmaster specialized in corporal punishment, a minor sadist of the rod and cane. The Latin master seemed burned out by years of drilling declensions into the minds of indifferent students. The dancing master was fat, the French master brisk. Aspects of these teachers appear in various dismembered and composite ways in his fiction, in the vicious Squeers of Nicholas Nickleby, the fuming Creakle, the gentle Mell, and the absent-minded Dr. Strong of David Copperfield, the murderous M’Choakumchild of Hard Times, and the explosively repressed Bradley Headstone of Our Mutual Friend. Teaching was not a profession that he especially admired. Frequently he depicts teachers as self-serving instruments of false values and a repressive society. After railroad construction had destroyed Wellington House Academy, he remarked that the world had “little reason to be proud of Our School.” His years there, though, seem to have left few scars. Despite Jones’s sadism, perhaps an early contribution to the boast of Pip’s sister in Great Expectations that she had brought him up “by hand,” the experience was a benign one, partly because he was there by choice, partly because some of his needs were being well served. Studying Virgil, he added to the Latin he had learned in Chatham, winning a prize for Latin proficiency and the good humor of his classmates for his punning.’18 He had practice in composition, penmanship, history, arithmetic, geography, French. The most important subject, though, was money. “A profound respect for money pervaded Our School, which was, of course, derived from its Chief.” The school was a business, its values materialistic.

  The controlled rough-and-tumble of street and schoolroom provided his most sustained pleasures. He seized the opportunity to have the ordinary experiences of his age and situation. The boredom of bad teaching, the low level of intellectual challenge, the threat of physical punishment, were infinitely preferable to the blacking factory. And they were easily outweighed by the opportunity to observe and learn, by the high spirits of games and hobbies, by the delight of having sympathetic classmates. For the first time in years he had friends of his own age. They lent one another books, traded valuables and favors, played street games. They created a scrap-paper Our Newspaper, lending it to read on payment of marbles and pieces of slate pencil. Some of the boys were exotic and romantic, mysterious pupils from foreign countries, or older boys who were rumored to be wealthy or vicious or both. Many of them had pets, particularly white mice and canaries, kept in their desks and pockets. Elaborate houses were built for the mice, early lessons in Victorian engineering. “One white mouse, living in the cover of a Latin dictionary,” was trained to run up ladders, draw Roman chariots, shoulder muskets, turn wheels, and even make “a very creditable appearance on the stage as the Dog of Montargis.” Later, he “fell into a deep inkstand, and was dyed black and drowned.” At least once he entertained his friends at home, singing “The Cat’s Meat Man,” a comic song that for years had been a staple part of his repertoire. He wrote a small tragedy in blank verse based on the association of one of the mysterious students with “the sea, and with storms, and sharks, and Coral Reefs,” and he participated in school theatricals, performances of lifelong favorites such as the melodramatic Miller and His Men.19

  Though the theatre provided a stage for his dreams and hopes, he still had to return each day to the muddle of his father’s world. The time at Wellington House Academy provided rest and renewal, the replenishment of his diminished emotional resources, the possibility that he could once again feel in control of his life. Against this as counterpoint was his family’s continuing financial instability. As an insolvent debtor, his father was subject to the law’s provisions, administered by the court. Though he could no longer be held in lieu of payment, his pension and other possessions could. His friend Richard Newnham, who had been appointed trustee to deal with creditors, refused to act. In October 1825, a new trustee was appointed. Some of the creditors gradually received satisfaction. Pursued by debts, evicted for nonpayment of rent, the family moved between 1825 and 1831 to the Polygon, to Norfolk Street, to George Street, to North End, Hampstead, and then to Belle Vue, Hampstead.20 The views may have changed but the situation did not. In December 1831, the court intervened again. John Dickens’ pension was attached to satisfy a creditor. The “circumstance of great moment” that would place him “in comparative affluence” was an expression of unchanging personality rather than of realistic expectation. And it was a personality with which his son had to come to terms. Charles did so by responding to the second termination of his schooling in a noticeably different way.

  His mother was the agent of his expulsion. In early 1827, at a time when the family was feeling the pinch of unpaid bills, including Fanny’s at the Royal Academy, she met a young solicitor, Edward Blackmore. The junior partner in the firm of Ellis and Blackmore, at Holborn Court, Gray’s Inn, lodged nearby at the home of her aunt, Elizabeth Charlton. Blackmore thought the fifteen-year-old boy “exceedingly good looking and clever.” She prevailed upon him to take Charles on as a law clerk. Dressed in “a Russian jacket and a soldierly young cap,” he took his seat in Blackmore’s office probably in May 1827, perhaps as early as March.21 He left Wellington House without regret. He probably also left with unpaid bills. He seems not to have resented his mother’s initiative, aware that, among other things, whatever future he had would not be served by remaining at school. Visions of Oxbridge, if he had had them, had evaporated into airy fantasy. Boys from Wellington House Academy did not go there. In fact, his father could not support him anyplace. So he began the process of showing himself and the world that he could do things in a different and better way than John Dickens. That his clerkship was in a solicitor’s office was happenstance. But it contributed to an ambition, sustained for some years, to become a barrister, though not for the purpose of practicing law.

  The world of the law extended the world of Wellington House Academy. It was a more fluid, varied world, though, in which he could move from his clerk’s stool into the streets, into legal chambers, into the law courts, into administrative offices. It provided colorfully dramatic variations, with their rules and players, on the serious games that society plays and that ultimately are society itself. It was a grown-up world in a way that Wellington House was not. He took his turn with the office tasks, such as keeping the petty-cash book. He ushered people in and out. He impressed the partners with his eagerness, his amiability, his malleability, his intelligence. He spent much of his time prowling the halls of various “circumlocution” offices, delivering documents and messages, running errands for the firm, which specialized in representing provincial solicitors. “His knowledge of London was wonderful, for he could describe the position of every shop in any of the West End streets.” An excellent mimic, he entertained his fellow clerks with imitations of “the low population of the streets of London in all their varieties” and “the popular singers … whether comic or patriotic.… He could give us Shakespeare by the ten minutes, and imitate all the leading actors of that time.”22

  During his year and a half with Ellis and Blackmore the question of vocation became a problem. In November 1828, he moved to the firm of Charles M
olloy, at 8 New Square, Lincoln’s Inn. His motive may have been an increase in salary. It may have been some disagreement or dissatisfaction or restlessness. Perhaps he was attracted by the idea of working in the same office in which his friend Thomas Mitton was serving his apprenticeship as a solicitor. Mitton and Dickens had met through their families, who had been neighbors. Born in the same year, they each had their ways to make in the world. Eager conversationalists, they were youthful allies in a world in which companionship helped to alleviate some of the anxieties of work, family, and future. An overweight, lumbering man, unselfconscious about his appearance, Mitton was a warmly loyal companion. His possessive affection was transformed into the desire to be a helpful friend. Intelligent, successful, and ultimately noticeably eccentric, he later acted as Dickens’ solicitor. It was the first of many sustained friendships that helped him establish a community of support and security.23

  He stayed with Molloy, though, only a few months. The legal tedium seemed insufferable, “a very little world, and a very dull one.” It was frustratingly slow, if not creaky, in its rewards. Starting at ten shillings a week, he ended at fifteen or a little more. Though his salary did meet his small expenses, the law by itself would not bring him, or bring him quickly enough, to the possession of Gad’s Hill, at least the law as embodied in a clerkship. He considered alternatives: finding some business opportunity abroad, perhaps in the West Indies, finding some business opportunity at home, some substantial firm for whom his skills, his intelligence, and his suitability for the position of manager or heir would be irresistible, studying for the bar, becoming a reporter, going on the stage. Unfortunately, there was no sound business opportunity for him anyplace. He decided, though, not to go back to a law office.

  Since he had some small savings, and he still lived with his parents on Norfolk Street, Charles did not feel pressured to find new employment right away. In February 1830, immediately after his eighteenth birthday, he obtained an admission ticket to the British Museum, where he became a regular for the next year. He was still as avid a reader as he had been when Mary Weller observed him concentrating on his books as a child in Chatham. He now devoted himself for some time “to the acquirement of such general literature as I could pick up in the Library of the British Museum,” reading widely from Shakespeare to Goldsmith to Holbein to Lights and Shadows of Scottish Life.24

  The important aim was not to be like his father. The obvious way of doing that was to avoid debt, to transform his labor into capital, to earn adequate money through initiative, assiduousness, and achievement. In 1829, the bar seemed a possibility. After he left Molloy, he kept open that alternative until the early 1850s, in the event that being a barrister would make it more likely that he would be appointed to a civil-service position. Another attractive profession, with less status but with fewer qualifying hurdles, was journalism. It had become his father’s. As with everything John Dickens did, he practiced it in a desultory way. Beginning in late 1825, with only his half-salary pension, he had looked to put to profit his writing skills, his sociability, and his contacts. In 1828, his brother-in-law, a shorthand writer and successful reporter who had helped him before and who was the founder and editor of the Mirror of Parliament, employed him. In the autumn of 1826, John Dickens had written a series of articles on a controversy about marine insurance, which was published, probably with the help of Barrow, in the British Press. Charles may have done some legwork for his father and perhaps contributed small newsworthy items. When the newspaper failed, John Dickens wrote to Lloyd’s, the company whose interests his articles had supported, stating “that the failure of the Newspaper had caused him serious pecuniary inconvenience and he trusted [Lloyd’s] would not permit any effort on behalf of the subscribers to go uncompensated.” Whether or not there had been a previous arrangement, Lloyd’s sent him a check for £10.10.25

  Tutored by his uncle, Charles had no difficulty adding to his reading at the British Museum the challenge of learning the well-established Gurney system of shorthand writing, “with a view to trying what I could do as a reporter—not for the Newspapers, but legal authorities—in our Ecclesiastical Courts.” Having “tamed the savage stenographic mystery,” he soon had regular work as a free-lance court stenographer. By early 1831, in time to help with the task of recording the first of the Reform Bill debates, his cooperative uncle elevated his nephew to the staff of the Mirror of Parliament. Charles began to take his turn in the galleries, often working through the night. Fortunately, not only did one not need a degree to practice journalism but, as a profession, it had the flexibility, fluidity, and openness to reward talent and hard work. Grub Street teemed with talented reporters and editors attracted to the glamour of opinion-making, the hope of political and literary influence, the attraction of making a living by becoming an articulate part of London and national life. Being a parliamentary reporter meant stenography more than creativity, but Charles did not mind. Suddenly, he had more than a job. He had a vocation.26

  JOURNALISM WAS NOT A PROFESSION THAT WOULD SERVE HIM WELL in the love affair that began when he met Maria Beadnell in May 1830. His preoccupation with her over the next four years “excluded every other idea.”27 With an obsessiveness unprepared for by any other experience, he fell in love. His notion of an appropriate object reflected his lower-middle-class Anglican upbringing, his image of feminine sexuality the blond, curly-haired ideal, embodying both the pure sister and the innocent wife, on the golden wings of whose spirit, education, and social position he would ascend to bliss. His need was for a woman who, unlike his mother, would nurture and support him, who would be the good, beautiful, and morally elevated genius of his aspirations. In the case of Maria, his judgment was significantly off-target. She was too much like his mother, self-involved and emotionally frivolous. That he fell in love at the age of eighteen, with a seriousness so deep that he desired to marry, dramatizes the extent of his unfulfilled need and the emotional poverty of his experiences as a son.

  There was also a social difference. She belonged to a class to which he aspired. Two years older than he, she was the daughter of a moderately prosperous clerk in a banking firm that her uncle managed.28 A class-conscious, determined woman, Maria’s mother devoted herself to managing her household and the lives of her daughters. With three marriageable girls, the Beadnells entertained frequently, creating as favorable a setting as possible for the celebration of their attractions. Well educated for marriage in the ornamental fashion of the day, Maria, the youngest daughter, like her sisters, enjoyed the security of being admired and pursued within the rules and values of her parents’ world. Having just returned from finishing school in Paris, she was introduced to Dickens by Henry Kolle, a bank clerk of twenty-two who was about to become engaged to her sister Anne. Maria was blond, petite, and conventionally pretty. His first sight of her “in a sort of raspberry colored dress … with a little black trimming at the top … captured … his boyish heart” and brought him eagerly back to the Beadnell home on Lombard Street as often as he was permitted to visit.

  Quickly drawn into their circle, he played the role of entertaining suitor, charming both the daughters and the parents. At parties he sparkled with all the wit and performance he could muster, much of it in the style of elaborate compliment, gentle irony, and deep sentiment. He wrote strained acrostics, parodies, and poems in Maria’s album, eager to flatter her.29 He was more desirable, though, as a friend and a guest than as a member of the family. Despite her claim to the contrary twenty-five years later, there is no reason to believe that she ever took him seriously. He was an underaged suitor, with modest employment on the fringes of journalism, one among numbers with whom she delighted to flirt and from whom she accepted flattery. Her parents did not need to disapprove. Young women who thought of themselves as witty, well educated, and beautiful, with the security of a substantial middle-class home, rarely married economically insecure younger men who were less experienced, less well educated, and socially inferior. Maria appa
rently had no sense of her painfully persistent suitor as special as a human being or as a lover. She was “a blessing too great for us children of clay,” he wrote in a parody of one of his favorite Goldsmith poems, which he called “The Bill of Fare” and presented to the Beadnells sometime in the autumn or winter of 1831. He still hoped that his love would be returned.

  While she and her friends, with a firm grasp of the social reality, enjoyed the teasing badinage of flirtation, he was able to imitate the style infrequently. Too serious, too much in love, he created in his mind fantasies of marriage. Almost immediately confessing himself in love, he wore his heart on his sleeve. With the humiliation of the blacking warehouse fresh in his emotional memory, he was at pains to dress as handsomely as possible. His attractiveness, though, did not prevent his poses and confessions, widely made to friends, family, and intended, from becoming the subject of mild ridicule. “When I, turned of eighteen,” he later parodied himself, “went with my Angelica to a City Church on account of a shower … and when I said … ‘Let the blessed event, Angelica, occur at no alter but this!’… My Angelica consented that it should occur at no other—which it certainly never did, for it never occurred anywhere.” The Beadnells were hospitable to the boyish entertainer, not to the serious suitor. Though he got some help from his sister Fanny, who had become a member of the Beadnell circle, Maria’s parents soon encouraged both their daughter and her young suitor to limit or stop their communication. His family criticized his obsessiveness. With the collaboration of Mary Anne Leigh, a gossipy friend, he sent secret messages. Playing the role of confidante and intermediary, Mary Anne sometimes pleased herself in the game of hearts, flirting with him to tease Maria and to flatter her own vanity. He attempted to give Maria presents, to involve her in literary ideas, to make himself useful. She mostly discouraged him.30