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  The reporting genre demanded transcription rather than narration or interpretation, objective dryness rather than local color. Developing his eye for the humorous, he included in his account of the dinner in Edinburgh a description of one of the guests, who, having grown tired of waiting for Lord Grey, began the dinner by himself, “one of the few instances on record of a dinner having been virtually concluded before it began.” The scenes were colorful, the hotels and inns bustling, the roads filled with interesting human detail. Some of the elections were rowdy, most of them corrupt, some both. At the Northamptonshire by-election a virulent confrontation stopped just “short of murder and riot.” His growing detestation of the Tories, “a ruthless set of bloody-minded villains,” spilled over into his report of the Tory horsemen purposely “bearing down all before them with … ruffianly barbarity, and brutal violence,” for which no Tory expressed the least regret.4 Developing a critical pen, he reported the rhetoric of deceit and false claims, of promise and prevarication, increasingly convinced that political life was essentially corrupt. What he experienced and observed, much of which could not go into his newspaper reporting, became part of his memory and imagination.

  Eager to earn more money, he was dissatisfied with being only a parliamentary reporter. The articles that he had began to write in December 1833, soon to be called “sketches,” focused his imagination in ways that newspaper reporting could not. He had a commitment to reporting. He felt “the genuine fascination of that old pursuit,” and he enjoyed his comradeship with his professional brothers. Still, he had begun his first efforts at authorship with an expectant heart.5 Fearing rejection, he had dropped his first sketch into “a dark letter box, in a dark office, up a dark court in Fleet Street … with fear and trembling.” When “A Dinner at Poplar Walk” appeared in “all the glory of print,” his eyes had overflowed with joy and pride. The pleasures of authorship clearly exceeded those of newspaper work. The distinction was discreet and personal. Authorship resonated with the expectations of childhood, of his walks with his father, of Gad’s Hill Place. It made him feel in control in a way that he had never felt before. His success as a reporter brought him to a threshold that he eagerly crossed. Satisfying work, travel, new friendships, finding a better, more compatible Maria—all of these things were possible.

  Immediately responsive to his first sketches, the Monthly Magazine had soon received more amusing stories, for which they paid nothing. Dickens liked doing them. They attracted attention and praise. It was in his interest to be printed and reprinted, to become a visible author, whose terms in the future might be different from those in the present. In January 1834, he had published “Mrs. Joseph Porter,” in February “Horatio Sparkins,” in April “The Bloomsbury Christening,” reprinted the next month in another small magazine, The Albion. These and the two sketches that followed, “The Boarding-House—No. I” (May 1834), and “Original Papers,” in Bell’s Weekly Magazine in June, were unsigned. He needed a signature, something to identify the articles as his. He decided on a pseudonym, a nasal corruption of the nickname Moses, with which he had christened one of his younger brothers, taken from one of his favorite characters in Goldsmith’s Vicar of Wakefield. Boses became Boz. By August 1834, when his first signed article, “The Boarding-House—No. II,” appeared in the Monthly Magazine, the previous stories had been sufficiently successful to make anonymity as self-protection unnecessary. Many of his friends and colleagues already knew that he was Boz. Now John Black, the editor of the Morning Chronicle, his “first out-and-out appreciator,” admiring what seemed to him Dickens’ “original genius,” encouraged him to do less general reporting and more original writing. Black thought that this “fresh, handsome, genial young man, with a profusion of brown hair, a bright eye, and a hearty manner,” had unusual literary talent, even the possibility of brilliance.6 Beginning in September, the Chronicle published his series of “Street Sketches,” five in all appearing in the autumn and winter of 1834.

  Black’s admiration and Dickens’ own initiative were about to make him a professional author. Dickens was also assisted by a new friend, a colleague who asked him in January 1835 to write a sketch for the first issue of a new paper of which he had been put in charge, the Evening Chronicle, published by the owners of the Morning Chronicle. A fifty-one-year-old reporter and editor, George Hogarth was a Scotsman by birth and inclination. Having given up law for journalism, he had bounced from London to Exeter to Halifax and then back to London again, where he joined the staff of the Morning Chronicle in the summer of 1834. Dickens readily agreed to write the sketch, assuring his colleague that he would do so even without being paid for it. But would his employers be willing to add “some additional remuneration” to his salary if he were to agree to do a series of sketches for the Evening Chronicle? That would be only “fair and reasonable … I should receive something for the papers beyond my ordinary Salary as a Reporter.”7 Surely this must have been on his mind since September, when his first Chronicle sketch had appeared. With Hogarth’s support and with Black’s prediction of “future greatness,” the owners agreed to raise his salary from five to seven guineas a week. It was the first money he ever earned as an author. He never again wrote without being paid. In the sixty sketches that he published between December 1833 and December 1836, he created, with the most tentative and belated of overall planning, a comic city with dark corners and threatening relationships that introduced some of the major colors, styles, and tensions of the fiction that he was to write for the next thirty-five years.

  The sketches were a testing ground for an apprentice author whose talent enabled him to progress precociously. With a keen eye for social observation, he began to portray satirically, though affectionately, the variety and comic oddity of human nature in the social guises of early Victorian life. Many of the characters are stock representations of conventional eighteenthand early nineteenth-century literature. The plots are often minimal or nonexistent, a visit to an uncle or a friend, the staging of amateur theatricals, an attempt to tangle or untangle oneself from an amorous relationship. When they are more fully developed, they are stereotypical exercises in the machinery of plot development, as in “The Great Winglebury Duel” and “A Passage in the Life of Mr. Watkins Tottle.” Often the tone ranges between humor and irony in a slightly stiff style that echoes the distancing effects of the eighteenth-century essay and contemporary humorists. Some of the sketches, such as “The Streets—Night,” reveal elements of his mature style. The tone, the diction, the surreal elements, the rhetorical devices, and the sentence rhythms combine to create a sketch that could have been written two or more years later, stylistic preludes to Oliver Twist. In “Gin-Shops,” a sympathetic but outraged social consciousness dominates, his first identification of poverty, filth, and pollution as social crimes. “The Misplaced Attachment of Mr. John Dounce” and “Sentiment” transform his painful romantic misadventure with Maria Beadnell into comedy while at the same time lightly touching the exposed nerve of courtship, sex, and sexuality. They are sketches of repression and frustration in search of appropriate language. In “The Pawnbroker’s Shop,” his fascination with prostitutes makes its first dramatic appearance. The ameliorative, optimistic Christmas totem that would reach its culmination in the Christmas tales of the 1840s makes its thematic debut in “A Christmas Dinner.”

  Aspects of his personal experience flow through the porous filter of the partly fictional, partly observational genre. “The First of May” invokes sanitized images of a golden childhood in Kent. “Astley’s” invokes his recollection of learning the alphabet from his mother. “Seven Dials” reflects his fascination as a child with the slums of London. “The Broker’s Man” and “The Pawnbroker’s Shop” contain memories of early family life, and the main character of “A Passage in the Life of Mr. Watkins Tottle,” like John Dickens, is jailed for debt in a prison like the Marshalsea. “Mrs Joseph Porter” satirically describes an example of the mania for private theatricals similar t
o the performances that he directed and in which he performed. “The Steam Excursion” is based on a trip taken by Dickens and his friends, and “Early Coaches” draws on his traveling experiences as a reporter. But the more dramatic, less obvious currents of his life flow with surprising power through those sketches whose subject matter forced him into contact with his own deepest concerns and began his lifelong pattern of being attracted to fictions of displaced autobiographical exploration. In “Our Next-Door Neighbour,” he presents the fantasy of the dead boy and the grieving mother, an echo of the childhood fantasy in which his self-worth and worthiness to be loved become clear to his mother only after his death. In “The Pawnbroker’s Shop,” his family’s insecurity, the origin of his obsessiveness about money, is dramatized in the description of the visitors to the shop: A small boy is beaten, a man and a woman fight bitterly, a prostitute, “the lowest of the low; dirty, unbonneted, flaunting, and slovenly,” has a moment of human sympathy in response to another woman who may have to travel the same road she is on, which has “but two more stages, the hospital and the grave.” In “The Hospital Patient,” a brutally abused dying wife is idealized as the ever-forgiving female whose father had said five years before that “he wished [she] had died a child.”

  “A Visit to Newgate” starkly synthesizes the social and psychological themes that ran through these sketches. In November 1835, he visited the prison, beginning his lifelong practice of visiting social institutions to help him with impressions for his writing. He also went to the Coldbath Fields prison the same month but did not write about it because the “gallows” is more dramatic than the “Tread-Mill.” The prose of “A Visit to Newgate” is incisive, evocatory. Some of the characters anticipate Oliver Twist. The emphasis on dream states as both escape from reality and imprisonment, on guilt, betrayal, murderousness, and altered states of consciousness, takes him back to his childhood and forward to his future novels. The powerful sketch “The Black Veil” combines Gothic horror, imprisonment, madness, and death with a self-preserving reversal of his sense of himself as the good son with the bad mother. In the story, the boy’s mother is perfectly good, “a widow … who had denied herself necessaries to bestow them on her orphan boy.” She expressively loves her son, no matter what his faults. With a dead father, a selfless mother, the boy has no one but himself to blame for his “career of dissipation and crime.” That was one way out of the blacking factory, one way to go back even further into childhood and into the myth of the blameless mother, whom he would have much preferred to the mother he had.

  IN LATE 1834 OR EARLY 1835, GEORGE HOGARTH INVITED HIM TO HIS home in York Place, Chelsea, “standing opposite orchards and gardens extending as far as the eye could reach.” There he found a moderately prosperous middle-class family, with interesting and cultured Scottish connections, who welcomed him warmly and whose warmth he returned.8 Hogarth played the role of paterfamilias with a combination of amiability and competence. He had had professional though not financial success as a lawyer in Edinburgh, a writer to the Signet, and as the trusted adviser of Sir Walter Scott. But he had moved more in literary and musical than legal circles. Having recently begun his career as a journalist, he soon became a distinguished music critic, feature writer, and author. In 1814 he had married Georgina Thomson, whose grandfather one year later organized the first Edinburgh music festival. Among his many distinctions, he had engaged Scott, Robert Burns, and Beethoven to write words and music for a collection of Scottish songs. Georgina Hogarth bore the burden of her family of ten children and tight budget with a strong sense of maternal propriety. Forty years old when Dickens met her, she had recently given birth to another daughter to add to a moderately pretty, mildly cultivated, and charmingly domestic threesome. Catherine had just had her nineteenth birthday. Mary was a pretty fifteen-year-old, Georgina a gamineish seven. The dominant Hogarth complexion was creamy pale, with touches of natural pink, the eyes bright blue, the chin recessive, the hair blond, the spirit light, the accent Scottish.

  The young writer became a regular visitor, whose promise the Hogarths appreciated and to whom their eldest daughter responded. With heavy-lidded eyes and turned-up nose, Catherine had a becoming tendency to carry her shortness into full-figured plumpness. Though not quick of wit or foot, she was warm, engaging, eager to please and to be pleased, and clearly on the marriageable side of adolescence. Unlike Maria, she was not flirtatious or fickle.9 Shaped by his mother’s aloofness, conditioned by Maria’s rejection, Charles wanted a woman whose world he would be the center of, whose feelings and actions would revolve around his needs. He also wanted a family he could identify with, who would provide the intimacy and stability that his own lacked. He courted her deliberately, self-confidently, having chosen someone not likely to refuse him. Since May 1833 he had elevated himself to a respectable position with a rising annual income. He had also become a promising writer for whom some people, like his prospective father-in-law, were predicting great things. Unlike the prosaic Beadnell household, the Hogarth home, whose patriarch was a talented musician and a competent writer, valued culture and appreciated the arts. Dickens radiated the intensity of his work ethic and his ambition. His talent and its demands were clear, at least to George Hogarth. Early in May, Charles proposed marriage. There seem to have been no rivals. Catherine quickly accepted.

  That she had little sense of the life of the imagination did not matter to her suitor. At twenty-three, he needed to come into his patrimony. There was to be no financial inheritance. His emotional legacy was mainly an unhappy one. He needed to create his own good fortune, both material and emotional, to become father to himself. He wanted to match his emancipation with the full symbols of adult responsibility. With a strong sense of having been deprived of a familial hearth, he used the Hogarths’ as the threshold of his own. Marriage to an amiable, conventional, sweet-tempered, and domestic woman, who would cooperate with his desire to be master of his own home, to be in control of his life and work, to have compliant, contained, and unthreatening sexual relations, to have children with whom to express his own familial needs, was strongly attractive. To be closer to her, he took lodgings in June 1835 on Selwood Place, Chelsea, around the corner and a few hundred yards from the Hogarth home. Eager for domestic blandishments, he encouraged her to make it a practice to visit him, sometimes, for propriety’s sake, with her sister Mary, to prepare his breakfast after he had spent late nights at the House. Once he sent her a note at five in the morning, before going to sleep, to tell her that he would awaken at one. “You will lunch with me at that hour, of course—I shall not rise until you call me.” On another morning, having returned home just before dawn, he proclaimed with amiable bossiness, “I shall fully expect you and Mary to breakfast with me this morning … I take no denial on any pretence. “10 Catherine had no desire to deny him. She defined her engagement in conventional terms. Eager to be attended to and flattered as much as possible, she felt pleasure in her fiancé demonstrating his love through his demands on her.

  He had a surer sense of her nature than she of his. Those things about her that he did not like he did not hesitate to criticize. He did not like her narrowness of vision when it prevented her understanding him; he did not like her temperament when it rubbed against the grain of his emotional needs. Sometimes she seemed to him childishly self-involved and foolish. She frequently teased him in small ways. Though the battles were minor skirmishes that she quickly lost, she attempted initially to resist his total dominance, to reserve aspects of herself from his control. Aware that her power was limited and temporary, she tried stubbornly to assert some of her needs. She was better, though, at capitulation than at self-transformation, at suppression than at change. He gave absolute emotional sincerity. When he was there, he was involved totally, among other reasons because he had an immense desire to get the relationship right. So much depended on it. When, from his perspective, it was going wrong, he could be aggressively, even callously frank. If she could not be the way he
wanted her to be, he did not want her at all. When she expressed herself angrily, he labeled it “hasty temper.” When she withdrew her warmth, unaware of what deep resonances that would have for him, he responded to this “uncalled-for coldness” with the threat that she frankly confess that she had tired of him. He would not be used as a toy that “suits your humour for the moment … I shall not forget you lightly, but you will need no second warning.”11

  What he wanted was that she be infinitely responsive to his feelings, mainly through compliance, cheerful toleration, and nurturing supportiveness. When she was ill—both Catherine and her mother had scarlet fever in October 1835—he could be tenderly reckless. He visited them constantly, aware of the danger to himself and willing to suffer the illness for the sake of being there for her then. When, in a teasing mood, he played the game of pet names, he sometimes crossed the boundary between generosity and possessiveness, between respect and defamation. He needed her cooperation in feeling fully justified in loving her. He smugly reported to her Mitton’s supportive but possibly evasive comment, “whatever I do must be right; and that whoever I love, must be faultless.”12

  If there is any ironic self-awareness in the remark, there is also both wishful thinking and coercive pressure. He desired absolute loyalty from friend and lover. He was prepared to give it in return, filtered through his energy, his restlessness, and his ambition. As a reporter, he spent long hours traveling and at the House. He had a certain amount of business at the office. As an apprentice writer, he could practice his craft only in odd hours. When he made a commitment, he unswervingly kept it. The specter of his father’s irresponsibility hovered always in the background. What was for him a necessity of his personality and his life became for Catherine a marker of his priorities. He tried indirectly and unsuccessfully to tell her about his childhood, to help explain what drove him to work so hard, often to the point of exhaustion.13