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- Herausgeber: Clink Street Publishing
- Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2020
When Charles Dickens died prematurely on the 9th June 1870 aged only 58, he left behind a legacy unsurpassed in English fictional literature. But he also wanted to write his true life story and this remained undone. 150 years on from his death, I have found that sufficient material has now been uncovered to enable that narrative of his life story to be produced for the first time. Research amongst 15,000 of his letters, journalistic articles, documents and other relevant material connected to him have all combined to make it possible for me to piece together that evidence and, guided by the way he wrote his two travel books, has resulted in the production of this personal story in his own words that he so desired to tell. It shows exactly how, from difficult beginnings, he descended into acute humiliation and abject poverty, before then emerging due to his talent and incredible resolve, into one of the most famous men and popular authors the world has ever known. It chronicles his enormous public triumphs and his profound private turmoils, as well as the secret life he led when, on his own admission, he became "seized with lunacy". It includes his two momentous visits to America, and his withering and radical opinions of institutions and situations he found there, as well as those he encountered at home – all expressed in his own inimitable style. This is his compelling and personal narrative, put together for the first time in a way that he wished his legacy to be told. It is the real and true story of his life.
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CONTENTS
1Charles Dickens: My Life
Introduction
I have always been fascinated by the story of people’s lives. My career path took me into law, joining Middle Temple as my Inn of Court (I discovered later that Dickens had done the same) and qualifying as a Barrister. Many years later I became a Judge, so almost every day of my working life I was dealing with people’s life stories – usually those that had taken a wrong turn. In what little spare-time I had I read biographies; the reality of people’s lives became all-encompassing.
I came to Dickens comparatively late in life, and it was not until my appointment as a Judge in Portsmouth, the city of his birth, that my interest became centred upon him. I read modern biographies about him, and then turned the clock back to read the 3 volumes of “The Life of Charles Dickens” produced shortly after his death by his great friend and adviser, John Forster. I visited the humble house of his birth, now kept as a museum by the city, and as I stood in the bedroom where he was born, the question went through my mind: “How did he get from here to the life of fame he went on to lead, and how much of this did he explain in his own words?”
I began my research, focussing only on things that Dickens himself had said about his life. He had written to Forster in the 1840’s about his experiences in the blacking factory when he was a child, but the memories of it had been so powerful and painful that he and Forster had kept it secret and it was only revealed by Forster (in Volume I, Chapter II of The Life) after Dickens had died. I found also that Dickens had written sporadically in his later journalism about happier periods and events in his younger life, and I now also had available to me the extraordinary collection of approximately 15,000 letters he had written that had been produced by Oxford University Press and published in 12 volumes as “The Pilgrim Edition.” I was aware that Dickens had burnt all the letters he had received and had urged all those to whom he had written to do the same. Fortunately, they had not complied with his wishes.
What soon became apparent from reading Dickens’s own words 2was just how revealing they are. He would write many letters a day and to a huge variety of correspondents, many showing himself to the full: complex, ambitious, struggling against his upbringing and the profoundest adversity, trying to make a success of his life. Furthermore, in a good number of these letters, he told not only the details of his life but also his innermost thoughts, all set out in the frankest fashion, to such an extent that from this written record it is possible to gain an insight into his life that is so all-encompassing that very few can have documented their lives in this way quite so comprehensively.
As he grew older, he himself considered on a number of occasions writing his own life story, wanting to leave this legacy for his children, but he died suddenly at the age of 58 in 1870 without doing so. Given that I had found these letters and journalism providing effectively a detailed running commentary on his life, I decided to see if I could now “tell his own story” through these writings, and other personal material (e.g. his remarkable diary of 1867 that is now housed in the New York City Library), or personal matters that he spoke about in his public speeches, and where occasionally there were gaps in his commentary, I found these could be filled by reliable witnesses who reported events and what they had seen of him and his reaction at the relevant time. I was guided throughout by the way in which he had written and produced his own personal experiences in his travel books “American Notes” and “Pictures from Italy” in order to produce now his personal life story.
I was determined that I wanted his story to be told in his own frank way with no interference from me. My simple criteria throughout as to selection of content has been: “What do I think he would have included if he was doing this exercise himself?” I only saw myself as putting together this gigantic jigsaw puzzle of material into his story so that it could now be told for the first time as a continuous narrative. I have sought to be as faithful as I can be to him and leave the reader to form their own judgement about how he addressed the circumstances and events that arose in his life. The end product reveals his life story that he wanted to tell and the result is as extraordinary as any of the marvellous fictional tales he created.
DERWIN HOPE
CHAPTER I
My Early Life
Friday the 7th of February 1812 and I was born at Portsmouth, an English seaport town, principally remarkable for mud, Jews, and sailors. Thereafter in my life a Friday has always been a special day for me; whatever projects I may have determined on otherwise, I have never begun a book or begun anything of importance to me, save it has been on a Friday. I arrived in this world in a small, first floor bedroom of a rented terraced house at Mile End, Landport, but a short distance from Portsmouth Dockyard. At the time this provided home for my father and mother and my sister, Fanny, who had been born some 18 months before. Three weeks after my birth, we all attended at the nearby church of St. Mary’s, Kingston, where I was christened Charles John Huffam Dickens – Charles from my mother’s father, John from my father and Huffam the surname of my godfather, Christopher Huffam, a good friend of my father.
If truth be told, I remember now very little about the home of my birth and indeed, when I returned to Portsmouth on a reading tour much later in life, I had difficulty in fixing its location. I had been told it was a little house with a small front garden and I know that we all lived there with a servant. I confess however that I did not feel any strong sentimental attachment to the place, but that was my beginning.
I also have very little recollection of my grandparents, save for my father’s mother who died when I was 12 years old. She was a housekeeper in the family of Lord Crewe, and I particularly remember she loved to have children around her and to beguile them with stories from the pages of history as well as fairy tales and reminiscences of her own. I can fully understand the joy this must have given her as it is reflected in the way my own life has unfolded. Before she died she gave me a large, old silver watch, a treasured possession that belonged to her husband, a grandfather I never knew.
My father, John Dickens, was brought up by my grandmother within the Crewe household, at Crewe Hall in Cheshire and at their London 4home, 18 Grosvenor Street. He had an elder brother, William, who, through hard work and sound business sense, came to be the keeper of a London coffee house in Oxford Street; but sadly, my father had a tendency not to exhibit these qualities and it is painful for me to recall that my grandmother was constantly inveighing against his idleness, general incapacity, and his apparent inability to live within his means. I know she proposed to leave him nothing in her Will, saying that he had already received from her many sums on differing occasions. It was a trait of his that I was to come to know only too well. His requirement that he be treated as a gentleman and the need to dress and entertain according to such fashion added only to his financial straits, but throughout his life he remained constantly of the belief that when penury struck, something would turn up – and it usually did, often in the form of my good self. I have heard him liken himself to a cork which, when submerged, bobs up to the surface again, none the worse for the dip; he regarded optimism as the finest of all arts.
Through the good auspices of Lord Crewe, he was fortunate to get a job at Somerset House in the Strand, London, as a clerk to the Navy Treasurer’s Office. This not only provided him with a job and income but, just as important as he saw it, status – a “responsible situation under Government” as he called it. It also brought him into contact with another newcomer to the office, Thomas Barrow, who introduced him to his sister, Elizabeth.
In due course, my father was moved to the Naval Pay Office and then transferred to Portsmouth, a town renowned for its hard-living sailor folk who would oft times resort to fighting, even during the course of being paid. Despite these circumstances that befell him, all reports I have heard from his workplace describe him as the jolliest of men, a fellow of infinite humour, chatty, lively and agreeable – a true bobbing cork. He was also still drawn to Elizabeth Barrow in London and in June 1809, they married at the Church of St. Mary-le-Strand opposite Somerset House before travelling back to Portsmouth and their new home in the terrace at Landport.
My mother was 23 years of age when I was born. It is said that I inherited from her bright hazel eyes and a curiosity that knows no bounds. I am aware that on entering a room, she would, almost unconsciously, 5take an inventory of all its contents and if anything happened to strike her as out of place or ridiculous, she would later describe it in the quaintest manner. She had an uncanny power of imitating others and highlighting the ludicrous, but was also able to bring tears to the eyes of her listeners if narrating some sad event. I discovered later, however, that her father Charles Barrow had systematically falsified the accounts and thereby embezzled almost £6,000 from the Naval Pay Office whilst he worked as Chief Conductor of Moneys (a position superior to my father), and had absconded out of the jurisdiction and eventually to the Isle of Man when his disreputable activities had been uncovered. Her mother, Mary Barrow, took to living in Liverpool with another daughter and this worthy grandmother never cared twopence about us – until that is I grew famous, and then sent me “an affectionate request for five pounds or so”. I cannot but say that, long before, I had become utterly indifferent to the fact of her existence.
I only lived for five months in the Landport terrace before we moved to 16 Hawke Street in Portsea, closer to the Dockyard. We stayed there for some 18 months before moving to accommodation at 39 Wish Street (now Kings Road) in the new area of Southsea. There we were joined by Mary Allen, my mother’s sister whose husband, Thomas Allen, had drowned at sea off Rio de Janeiro shortly before her arrival with us. For reasons that I cannot now remember, she came to be known as ‘Aunt Fanny’ in our family.
My youngest childhood recollections surround Christmas time, with a richly decorated Christmas tree in the centre of the room and looking upward into the dreamy brightness of its branches and top. I can also clearly remember the celebrations that brought in the New Year of 1814. I still have a vivid remembrance of the sensation of being carried downstairs in a woman’s arms and holding tight to her in the terror of seeing the steep perspective below. Once down, I remember timidly peeping into a room and seeing a very long row of ladies and gentlemen sitting against a wall, all drinking at once out of little glass cups with handles, like custard cups. It was very like my first idea of the good people in Heaven, as derived from a picture in a prayer book I had, with their heads a little thrown back and all drinking at once. Toys came to play a large part in my life. One was a tumbler with his hands in his 6pockets, who wouldn’t lie down, but whenever he was put upon the floor, persisted in rolling his fat body about, until he rolled himself still, and brought those lobster eyes of his to bear upon me – when I affected to laugh very much, but in my heart of hearts was extremely doubtful of him. Close beside him was an infernal snuff-box, out of which there sprang a demoniacal counsellor in a black gown, with an obnoxious head of hair, and a red cloth mouth, wide open, who was not to be endured on any terms, but could not be put away either; for he used suddenly, in a highly magnified state, to fly out of mammoth snuff-boxes in dreams, when least expected. A mask, too, that gave me nightmares – but happier times were had with a great black horse with rounded red spots all over him that I could even climb upon by myself.
I recall as well from these times being carried in someone’s arms to witness soldiers drilling on a nearby parade ground, a place I later found again as an adult. I can also remember a small front garden at our house and trotting about with my sister Fanny with something to eat, whilst being overseen by a nurse through a low kitchen window almost level with the gravel walk. And I do have an impression on my mind which I cannot distinguish from actual remembrance, of the touch of my nurse’s forefinger as she used to hold it out to me, and of it being roughened by needlework, like a pocket nutmeg-grater.
Perhaps that nurse was there to assist my mother because on the 28th March 1814 a brother, Alfred Allen (named in remembrance of Thomas Allen), was born. This new arrival and competitor for my mother’s affections, however, turned out to be a sickly child who only lived for some six months and died from what was said to be water on the brain. My tumbled emotions left me wondering if I had in some way been responsible for what had happened and a strange intangible feeling of guilt still lingers with me.
In early 1815, my father was recalled to Somerset House and I remember the snow falling as we left for London. We went into lodgings above a greengrocer’s shop run by Mr. John Dodd at 10 Norfolk Street (now 22 Cleveland Street) on the corner of Tottenham Street, and I became introduced to the ways of London at the tender age of three. Open fields gave way to streets and I felt imprisoned, yet strangely fascinated by the myriad activities of the city. A year later, on the 26th April 1816, my 7sister Laetitia was born, so my father had another mouth to feed and I know now that he began to run seriously into debt at this time, failing to pay our landlord the rent that was owed.
After two years in London, it was a relief to me that my father received another posting, this time to Sheerness at the mouth of the River Medway. I enjoyed this enormously, particularly because he had rented a small house next door to the local theatre and in the evenings we took great delight in sitting listening to performances taking place on the stage next door, as well as joining in with gusto in the singing of “Britannia Rules the Waves”, “God Save the King” and the like. This lasted some four months before my father was moved upstream to Chatham, the main port standing alongside the cathedral town of Rochester. I didn’t know it then but was later to discover that Chatham in that muddy river had come to be known as “the wickedest place in the world”.
At the start, I was protected from this by the location of our new accommodation. It was on the brow of a hill with a most airy and pleasant aspect looking out over fields to the harbour and dockyard below. It was a newly constructed house (Number 2) in a row called “Ordnance Terrace” and comprised a narrow hallway (illuminated by a fan light over the door) leading, I remember, to a dining room and small living room, whilst upstairs was a parlour room and my parents’ bedroom on the first floor, with a further staircase up to two attic rooms, one for the servants and one for the children. There was a kitchen, cellar and small living area in the basement. As my parents, Aunt Fanny and we three children had now been joined by two nurses (Mary Weller and the older Jane Bonney), we were somewhat crowded in that compacted terraced house, but I do remember it being comfortable as well as noisy and my attic window allowed me to look out to the world outside and wonder what part I would play in it.
We lived at Ordnance Terrace for some four years from the spring of 1817. Looking back on it now, I was between the ages of five and nine years and in a childhood paradise of my own. The field in front of the house where I used to play with my sister and my nurse came to be filled with golden sheaves of corn, which gave me a wonderful feeling of peace and abundance. I met George Stroughill (nicknamed “Struggles”) from next door at Number 1 who had, I remember, a marvellous magic lantern 8for us to play with, and Lucy, his sister, whose golden hair flowed in the wind as she ran. Also in the terrace (at Number 5) lived a dear old lady Mrs. Newnham and next door to her a retired “half-pay” captain who smoked cigars, drank ale and raised marigolds, but seemed to be always quarrelling with the parish authorities. He also took to breeding silk-worms, which he would frequently bring, in little paper boxes, to show the old lady, generally dropping a worm or two at every visit. I later found out that Mrs. Newnham’s kindness and generosity extended to leaving us some money and possessions when she died. My memories of living at Ordnance Terrace have nothing but happiness to fill them, but life can be a cruel handmaiden and when I returned some years later to relive some of this happiness, I found that the field opposite that was part of my life had been taken for the London to Chatham railway line.
It was gone. The two beautiful hawthorn-trees, the hedge, the turf and all those buttercups and daisies, had given place to the stoniest of jolting roads whilst, beyond the station, an ugly dark monster of a tunnel kept its jaws open, as if it had swallowed them and was ravenous for more destruction. The locomotive engine that had brought me back spat ashes and hot water over the now-blighted ground. I looked in again over the low wall, at the scene of departed glories. Could it be that, after all this and much more, my playing‑field was now a station, and locomotive number 97 expectorating boiling water and red-hot cinders on it, the whole belonging by Act of Parliament to the South Eastern Railway? It could be and was and my heart is heavy with the remembrance of those happy times and the desolation now caused to it.
The hill that Ordnance Terrace stood upon led to a fortification called “Fort Pitt”, one of the many military constructions that abounded in the area. There was a system called the “Chatham Lines” that I explored when curiosity struck. Holes in innocent grass knolls would lead to labyrinths of underground passages, rooms and dark vaults that would seep with an odour that lives with me still. Chatham itself was filled with sailors and soldiers, many suffering ghastly mutilations from the bloody wars with the French tyrant. It was a squalid and lawless place where brothels and drinking quarters of the lowest repute held sway, but it had a vigour to it that I could not help but find enthralling. In the dockyard where my father worked, I would never tire of watching the 9rope-makers, the anchor-smiths (nine of them at once, like the “muses in a ring”) and the block-makers at their work. “The Yard” resounded with the noise of hammers beating upon the iron, and the slips or great sheds where the mighty Men-of-War were built loomed business-like when contemplated from the opposite side of the river – all resounding to the stupendous uproar of twelve hundred men to each ship being worked upon. And yet for all that and the five thousand souls working there, the Yard made no display, but kept itself snug under hill-sides of corn fields, hop-gardens and orchards; its great chimneys smoking with a quiet – almost a lazy – air, like giants smoking tobacco; and the great shears moored off it, looking meekly and inoffensively out of proportion, like giraffes of the machinery erection. The streets of the town itself were always lively and animated, filled with shops and stalls of every kind; I would particularly seek out the old clothes shops whose wares on display would spell out to me stories about their past occupants. And then a drunk would stagger past, filled to overflow and affording a source of innocent fun as the boy population followed him down the street.
Rochester, although close by, was of a different ilk. It set itself with an air of perceived respectability that spread around the cathedral, guildhall and castle like a dusty old cloak. The narrow high street and the streets around seem to cling to the past, afraid to let it go. Countless pilgrims had worn away the steps to the cathedral before evaporating into the decaying alleyways, leaving only mystery and silence behind them. As a child, I found it an eerie sort of place, one that was naturally at odds with my youthful high spirits. But it must be acknowledged that there are few things in this beautiful country of England more picturesque to the eye and agreeable to the fancy than an old cathedral town. Seen in the distance, rising from among corn-fields, pastures, orchards, gardens, woods, the river, the bridge, the roofs of ancient houses, and haply the ruins of a castle or abbey, the venerable cathedral spires, opposed for many hundred years to the winter wind and summer sun, tower, like a solemn historical presence above the city, conveying to the rudest mind associations of interest with the dusky past. On a nearer approach this interest is heightened, within the cathedral building, by long perspectives of pillars and arches; by the earthy smell, preaching more eloquently than deans and chapters of the common doom; by the 10praying figures of knights and ladies on the tombs, with little headless generations of sons and daughters kneeling around them; by the stained glass windows, softening and mellowing the light; by the oaken carvings of the stalls where the shorn monks told their beads; by the battered effigies of archbishops and bishops, found built up in the walls, when all the world has been unconscious, for centuries, of their blunt stone noses; by the mouldering chapter-room; by the crypt, with its barred loopholes, letting in long gleams of slanting light from the cloisters where the dead lie, and where the ivy, bred among the broken arches, twines about their graves; by the sound of the bells, high up in the massive tower; by the universal gravity, mystery, decay and silence.
My father subscribed to the publication “The History of Rochester”, whilst living in the area, but at the time I did not feel the need for such stimulation. My real delight came from “the splash and flop” of the tide and the enthralling sights of the river. My greatest excitement was to venture out into the Medway with my father on the old navy pay yacht “The Chatham” and travel the length of the river to Sheerness and back. The river was filled with vessels of every variety; ships, barges, schooners and yachts, prison and hospital ships, and boats of all sizes. The dockyard was this hive of noisy activity, together with the smell of clean timber shavings and turpentine that pervaded everywhere; the sea birds would go squawking overhead, free to travel as they please but happy to cling to the magic and mystery of the sea and marshes. Impressions I find indelibly cast in my mind are of the sun, away at sea, just breaking through the heavy mist and showing us the ships, like their own shadows; of convicts guarded by soldiers and with great numbers on their backs as if they were street doors, returning every night after labour in the dockyard to ship-hulks moored in the river and roofed like Noah’s Arks set across the marshes; and of other ships sailing away into the golden air bound for ports unknown on the other side of the horizon.
This was my real education. My mother first taught me the alphabet and how to read and write, including a small amount of Latin, but when I was six I was sent to a dame school in Rome Lane with my sister Fanny. It was over a dyer’s shop and run by an old lady who seemed to delight in ruling the world with hard knuckles and the birch. Even now I can never 11see a row of large, black, fat staring Roman capitals without her hideous vision appearing before me. At this establishment, being instilled with the first principles of education for ninepence a week, I also encountered a puffy pug-dog, with a personal animosity towards me. The bark of that baleful pug and a certain radiating way he had of snapping at my undefended legs, the ghastly grinning of his moist black muzzle and white teeth, and the insolence of his crisp tail curled like a pastoral crook, all live and flourish. From an otherwise unaccountable association of him with a fiddle, I concluded that he was of french extraction, and his name Fidele. He belonged to some female, chiefly inhabiting a back-parlour, whose life appeared to me to have been consumed in sniffing, and in wearing a brown beaver bonnet. For her, he would sit up and balance cake upon his nose, and not eat it until twenty had been counted. To the best of my belief I was once called in to witness this performance; when, unable even in his milder moments to endure my presence, he instantly made at me, cake and all.
Why a something in mourning, called ‘Miss Frost’, should still connect itself with my preparatory school, I am unable to say. I retain no impression of the beauty of Miss Frost – if she were beautiful; or of the mental fascinations of Miss Frost – if she were accomplished; yet her name and her black dress hold an enduring place in my remembrance. An equally impersonal boy, whose name has long since shaped itself unalterably into ‘Master Mawls’, is not to be dislodged from my brain. Retaining no vindictive feelings towards Mawls – no feeling whatever, indeed – I infer that neither he nor I can have loved Miss Frost. My first impression of death and burial is associated with this formless pair. We all three nestled awfully in a corner one wintry day, when the wind was blowing shrill, with Miss Frost’s pinafore over our heads; and Miss Frost told us in a whisper about somebody being “screwed down”. It is the only distinct recollection I preserve of these impalpable creatures, except a suspicion that the manners of Master Mawls were susceptible of much improvement. Generally speaking, I may observe that whenever I see a child intently occupied with its nose, to the exclusion of all other subjects of interest, my mind reverts, in a flash, to Master Mawls.
Yet, despite these experiences, I managed with my own diligence to unlock the wonders of words and the power of communication that 12they could bring and, by the age of eight, I began dreaming my first dreams of authorship. I liked the feel of books with their deliciously smooth covers of bright red or green. My first favourites were picture books of “Little Red Riding Hood” (she was my first love; I felt that if I could have married her, I should have known perfect bliss) and “Jack the Giant Killer”, followed by tales of scimitars and slippers and turbans and dwarfs and giants and genii and fairies, Bluebeards and beanstalks and riches and caverns and forests – all tumbling out of the pages and into my inquisitive mind. This was the reality of my world, a wondrous fantasy but real to me nonetheless. And for the little reader of story-books, by the firelight, the most testing time of all came about twilight, in the dead winter time, when the shadows closed in and gathered like mustering swarms of ghosts. When they stood lowering, in corners of rooms, and frowning out from behind half-opened doors; when they had full possession of unoccupied apartments. When they danced upon the floors, and walls, and ceilings of inhabited chambers, while the fire was low, and withdrawing like ebbing waters when it sprang into a blaze. When they frantically mocked the shapes of household objects, making the nurse an ogress, the rocking-horse a monster, the wondering child half-scared and half-amused, a stranger to itself, and made the very tongs upon the hearth a straddling giant with his arms a-kimbo, evidently smelling the blood of Englishmen, and wanting to grind people’s bones to make his bread.
I also had, I remember, a nurse who used to tell me the most ghoulish of ghostly tales, tales of “Captain Murderer” whose speciality appeared to be the chopping up of a succession of brides into pies in the bloodiest of fashion – or tales of members of her family transformed into hideous zoological phenomenon. This young female bard had a fiendish enjoyment of my terrors and used to begin, as a sort of introductory overture, by clawing the air with both hands and suffering a long low hollow groan, before proceeding onward. I used to plead against it, maintaining that I was hardly strong enough and old enough to hear these tales, but she never spared me one word of them in her remorseless ghoulish pleasure, terrifying me to the utmost confines of my reason. She reappears in my memory as the daughter of a shipwright, a sallow woman with a fishy eye, an aquiline nose and wearing a green gown; her 13name was Mercy, though she had none on me.
Pictures from the books that I read at this time have stayed with me throughout my life – of a bull pulling the bell rope to sound the death knell of poor Cock Robin; a shaft of light transfixing Cain as he murdered his brother; a Russian peasant standing alone in the vast expanse of snow surrounding him. I recollect, in short, everything I read as a very small boy as perfectly as I forget everything I read now. I can still recite verses that I discovered when I was seven and that have never left me since that time.
I also discovered when I was seven that I was to have a new sister. What I did not know then was the severity of the family’s finances. My father, ever the optimist, bobbed along but at times he had fits of anger and when they came they were frightening to behold. These “passion bursts” as he called them were, I suppose, his way of releasing the tension that built up inside him but, like his asthma, he seemed to believe there was nothing he could do about it and that it was his cross to bear. I later found that, in the summer of 1819 and three weeks before the birth of a new sister, christened Harriet, he had cause to borrow the substantial sum of £200 from a businessman and lender, James Milbourne, that saddled him with an annual repayment of £26 for the rest of his life. The Deed of Loan had to be countersigned and he managed to persuade Thomas Barrow to affix his signature to it – an inscription that he was to sorely regret, for my father, despite an increase in salary, failed to keep up with the necessary repayments and the hapless man was eventually forced to repay the loan for him. This Deed and its consequences came to hang like a damnable leaden cloud over our family affairs and thereafter caused my father to be excluded from the Thomas Barrow household, due to him failing to ever settle it with them.
In 1819, and again in 1820, I was taken up to town to behold the splendour of the Christmas Pantomime and the humour of the master Clown, Joseph Grimaldi. Even now I have betaken myself not infrequently to that jocund world of pantomime, where there is no affliction or calamity that leaves the least impression; where a man may tumble into the broken ice, or dive into the kitchen fire, and only be the droller for the accident; where everyone is so superior to the accidents of life, though encountering them at every turn, that I suspect this to 14be the secret (though many persons may not present it to themselves) of the general enjoyment which an audience of vulnerable spectators, liable to pain and sorrow, find in this class of entertainment. Many years later I was tasked to edit Grimaldi’s Memoirs for Richard Bentley, the publisher of “Bentley’s Miscellany”.
In March 1820, my father witnessed a calamitous fire in Chatham that started in a bakehouse in the High Street, but eventually involved the destruction of fifty-three houses and thirteen warehouses. A great many families were rendered homeless and he sent a report of the events, both to the local Kentish Gazette and also to “The Times” newspaper. Imagine our pride and delight when we saw it published in both and the importance we felt when he joined the committee that arranged the assistance needed for those devastated by the disaster. And then just over four months later, another addition to our family – my brother, Frederick, was born in August.
My memories of Chatham from this time are punctuated by clear visions of particular experiences – of a kite that once plucked at my own hand like an airy friend; of stealthily conducting a man with a wooden leg into the coal cellar and whilst getting him over the coals to hide him behind a partition, seeing his wooden leg bore itself in amongst the small coals and stick fast; of being cuffed around the ear for informing a lady visitor to the house that a certain ornamental object on the table, which was covered with marble paper, wasn’t marble at all; of attending wonderful performances at the Theatre Royal, Rochester, that sweet, dingy, shabby little country theatre at the foot of Star Hill, with the intoxicating odour within of sawdust, orange peel and lamp oil; of performing myself in song and entertainment on the dining table of the Tribe family at the Mitre Inn, High Street, Chatham, sometimes with my sister Fanny, who was learning to play the piano; of being lifted up by my mother and sitting on a wall in Chatham to wave my hat at the Prince Regent as he drove by; of watching a line of convicts bound together with manacles from an iron chain heading for Rochester jail in the shadow of the Medway gibbet.
I remember too that in my very young days I was taken to so many lyings-in that I wonder I escaped becoming a professional martyr to them in after-life. I suppose I had a very sympathetic nurse, with a large circle 15of married acquaintances. At one little greengrocer’s shop, down certain steps from the street, I remember to have waited on a lady who had four children (I am afraid to write five, though I fully believe it was five) at a birth. This meritorious woman held quite a reception in her room on the morning when I was introduced there, and a later sight of the house brought vividly to my mind how the four (five) deceased young people lay, side by side, on a clean cloth on a chest of drawers; reminding me by a homely association, which I suspect their complexion to have assisted, of pigs’ feet as they are usually displayed at a neat tripe-shop. A subscription was entered into among the company, which became extremely alarming to my consciousness of having pocket-money on my person. I was earnestly exhorted to contribute, but resolutely declined; therein disgusting the company, who gave me to understand that I must dismiss all expectations of going to Heaven.
I also remember well the first funeral I attended. It was a fair representative funeral after its kind, being that of the husband of a married servant, once my nurse. She married for money, Sally Flanders, but after a year or two of matrimony, became the relict of Flanders, a small master builder; and either she or Flanders had done me the honour to express a desire that I should ‘follow’. Consent being given by the heads of houses, I was jobbed up into what was pronounced at home ‘decent mourning’, and was admonished that if, when the funeral was in action, I put my hands in my pockets, or took my eyes out of my pocket‑handkerchief, I was personally lost, and my family disgraced. On that eventful day, having tried to get myself into a disastrous frame of mind, and having formed a very poor opinion of myself because I couldn’t cry, I repaired to Sally’s. Sally was an excellent creature, and had been a good wife to old Flanders, but the moment I saw her I knew that she was not in her own real natural state. She formed a sort of coat of arms, grouped with a smelling-bottle, a handkerchief, an orange, a bottle of vinegar, Flanders’s sister, her own sister, Flanders’s brother’s wife, and two neighbouring gossips – all in mourning, and all ready to hold her whenever she fainted. At sight of poor little me she became much agitated (agitating me much more), and having exclaimed “Oh, here’s dear Master Charles!” became hysterical, and swooned as if I had been the death of her. An affecting scene followed, during which I was 16handed about and poked at her by various people, as if I were the bottle of salts. Reviving a little, she embraced me, said, “You knew him well, dear Master Charles, and he knew you!” and fainted again: which, as the rest of the coat of arms soothingly said, “done her credit”.
When we got out into the streets, and I constantly disarranged the procession by tumbling on the people behind me because my cloak was so long, I felt that we were all making game. I was truly sorry for Flanders, but I knew that it was no reason why we should be trying (the women with their heads in hoods like coal-scuttles with the black side outward) to keep in step with a man in a scarf, carrying a thing like a mourning spy‑glass, which he was going to open presently and sweep the horizon with. Then, when we returned to Sally’s, it was all of a piece. The impossibility of getting on without plum-cake; the ceremonious apparition of a pair of decanters containing port and sherry and cork; Sally’s sister at the tea-table, clinking the best crockery and shaking her head mournfully every time she looked down into the teapot as if it were the tomb; the coat of arms again, and Sally as before; lastly, the words of consolation administered to Sally when it was considered right that she should “come round nicely”, which were, that the deceased had had “as com-for-ta-ble a fu-ne-ral as comfortable could be!”
My most abiding memory of all in these times, however, is walking with my father up the hill of Falstaff’s robbery on the outskirts of Rochester towards Gravesend that led to a house called “Gad’s Hill Place”. My father often remarked that if I were to be very persevering and work hard, I might some day come to live in this house when I became a man. It seemed to me then that this wonderful mansion, as I saw it, was so far beyond our existence at Ordnance Terrace that this was an impossible dream, and yet as I secretly returned time and again to admire the house from a distance, this very queer small boy, with the first faint shadows of authorship of books in his head, just began to feel that it might not be such an impossible dream after all.
Early 1821 brought some changes. I was sent to a school on the corner of Rhode Street and Best Street in Chatham and run by 23-year old William Giles, a dissenter and son of a Baptist minister. He had been banned from residence at Oxford University because of his nonconformity, but had previously taught at a school in that city before moving to Chatham and 17had gained a high reputation. Cultivated reading, good handwriting and elocution, as well as the proper use of grammar, were all instilled into an eager 9-year old by this noble teacher. It was at this school that I wrote my first little story called “Misnar the Sultan of India” and also faced my first examination. I had to learn and recite verses to the assembled throng from the “Humorist’s Miscellany”, and report that I was successful in receiving a double encore from my audience.
Soon after I began at my new school, however, I was dismayed to learn that we were to leave Ordnance Terrace, and my fields of play, that had turned from summer gold to Christmas white, were extinguished from me. We moved to the area in Chatham close to the dockyard (and my new school) known as “The Brook” which housed, in the main, dockyard officialdom. The house we took at 18 St. Mary’s Place was plain looking, with a whitewashed plaster front, attached to the Baptist chapel – “Providence Chapel” – where William Giles’s father and others breathing fire and brimstone held ministry. On summer evenings, when every flower and tree and bird might have better addressed my soft young heart, I would instead be caught in the palm of a female hand by the crown, violently scrubbed from the neck to the roots of the hair as purification for this temple next door, and then carried off highly charged with spontaneous electricity, to have my head steamed like a potato in the unventilated breath of a thunderous preacher and his congregation. I came to hate with an unwholesome hatred those two hours and often felt the fatal sleep stealing over me, so I have no curiosity these days to hear powerful preachers. Those who strew the Eternal Path with the greatest amount of brimstone, and who most ruthlessly tread down the flowers and leaves by the wayside now generate in me an unwholesome hatred for this most dismal and oppressive charade.
18 St. Mary’s Place, however, was where my voyage of discoveries really began. In the room next to my own, and where nobody else in our house ever troubled, I found that my father had set out his collection of books on shelves and from that blessed little room, Robinson Crusoe, Don Quixote, Arabian Nights and Tales of the Genii, Roderick Random, Peregrine Pickle, Humphrey Clinker, Gulliver’s Travels, Pilgrim’s Progress, Sinbad the Sailor, Tom Jones (the child’s Tom Jones, a harmless creature) and the Vicar of Wakefield all came tumbling out – a glorious 18host to keep me company. They kept alive my fancy and my hope of something beyond that place. In all these golden fables, there was never gold enough for me. I always wanted more. When I think of it, the picture always rises in my mind of a summer evening, the boys at play in the churchyard, and I sitting on my bed, reading as if for life.
As I chose not to participate in boyish games any more, a puny, weak youngster began to emerge and I was not a very robust child at all. I began to have spasmodic attacks, particularly on my left side, and this torment – perhaps from an inflamed left kidney – I took into later life with me. I also began to have bad dreams. They were frightful, though my more mature understanding has never made out why. I vividly recall an interminable sort of rope-making, with long minute filaments for strands which, when spun home together close to my eyes, occasioned screaming. Immense areas of shapeless things would slowly come close to my eyes and then recede to an immeasurable distance. Few people know what secrecy there is in the young under terror, but I was one who knew, and fear came to be a regular associate with me. On one occasion, just after dark, I came upon a figure chalked upon a door in a little back lane near a country church. It smoked a pipe and had a big hat with each of its ears sticking out in a horizontal line under the brim. The mouth stretched from ear to ear below a pair of staring goggle eyes; its hands appeared at its side like two bunches of carrots, five in each cluster, ready to grip at a passerby. I fled in horror, running to the sanctity of my home and room, looking behind me all the while to see if it was following with others risen from their graves. It is a memory that is still vaguely alarming to me to recall, as I have often done lying awake with my own private thoughts.
In March 1822, shortly after my 10th birthday, came another addition to our family, another brother christened Alfred Lamert. However, it was not long before we were witnessing the hand of death reaching out to our family again, for my little sister, Harriet, was struck down with smallpox and died. Then, in June, my father got the recall to London, to work once again at Somerset House and we had the task of packing up our household possessions, some for shipment nailed up in packing cases as big as houses, whilst disposing of others. Before the leaving, I managed to persuade my father to allow me to stay a while further 19with my schoolteacher, William Giles. This was agreed and, as I stood in the road at their departure looking wistfully at them, a mist cleared from my mother’s eyes and she beckoned me to climb up so that she might put her arm around my neck and give me a kiss. Having done so, I had barely time to get down again before the coach started, and I could hardly see the family for the handkerchiefs they waved as they set off to Camden Town and a new house at 16 Bayham Street.
Three months later, and it was then time for me to leave Chatham. On the night before departure, William Giles, my good master, came flitting into my room among the packing cases and gave me Goldsmith’s “Bee” as a keepsake. The next morning we headed for Simpson’s coach office in Chatham, where I noticed an oval window with a picture showing one of their coaches in the act of passing a milestone on the London road with great velocity, completely full inside and out, all the passengers dressed in the first style of fashion and enjoying themselves tremendously. Then a commodore coach, melodiously called “Simpson’s Blue-Eyed Maid”, drawn by four horses and driven by Old Chumley, pulled up and having embraced the Giles family and thanking them for their exceeding kindness to me, I climbed aboard. By the time the clock struck for the nine-thirty departure, I was still alone therein but now packed around with damp straw, like game to be forwarded to the Crosskeys, Wood Street, Cheapside, London. The smell of that lingers with me to this day, and as the coach moved off, I waved final goodbyes and left Chatham behind me. Turning out onto the London road, I pondered on how my fate differed from those so happily depicted on the office wall. I consumed my sandwiches in solitude and dreariness. It rained hard all the way and I did not believe that life could ever be so magical again. And now I was on my way to London, that Great City that I had sampled but briefly in the past. What, I wondered, would that place now hold in store for me? All beyond was so unknown and great that, in a moment and with a strong heave and a sob, I broke into tears.20
CHAPTER II
Growing Up in London
Bayham Street I found was located in one of the poorest parts of the suburbs; Camden Town was as quiet and dismal as any neighbourhood about London. Its crazily built houses – the largest, eight-roomed – were rarely shaken by any conveyance heavier than the spring van that came to carry off the goods of a ‘sold-up’ tenant. The whole neighbourhood felt itself liable, at any time, to that common casualty of life. A man used to come regularly, delivering the summonses for rates and taxes as if they were circulars. We never paid anything until the last extremity, and Heaven knows how we paid it then. The streets were positively hilly with the inequalities made in them by the man with the pickaxe who cut off the company’s supply of water to defaulters. It seemed as if nobody had any money except old Mrs. Frowze, who lived with her mother at 14 Little Twig Street, and who was rumoured to be immensely rich; though I didn’t see why, unless it was that she never went out of doors, and never wore a cap, and never brushed her hair, which was immensely dirty.
Number 16 was in a terrace surrounded by many houses. It was a mean, small tenement on two storeys, with a wretched little back garden abutting onto a squalid court. A washerwoman lived next door, a Bow Street officer over the way, but it had no boys near with whom I might hope to become familiar. At the top of the street were some alms houses and I used to go to this spot to look from it over the dust-heaps and dock-leaves and fields to the cupola of St. Paul’s looming through the smoke. I was put into a scantily furnished little back garret at the top of the house, which only served to make me acutely aware of all that I had lost in losing Chatham. Shoehorned into this building were my father and mother, five children, an orphaned servant girl we had brought from the workhouse in Chatham, and George Lamert. George was the son of Aunt Fanny’s new husband, Doctor Matthew Lamert (who was later to stand for Dr. Slammer in Pickwick) but, upon their marriage, the couple had moved away to Cork in Ireland; we then heard the terrible 21news that Aunt Fanny had died there in September 1822. George had lately completed his education at Sandhurst and was now lodging with us whilst waiting in hopes of a commission.
I knew my father to be as kind-hearted and generous a man as ever lived in the world; but, in the ease of his temper and the straitness of his means, he appeared at this time to have utterly lost the idea of educating me at all and to have utterly put from him the notion that I had any claim upon him, in that regard, whatever. And so I degenerated into cleaning his boots of a morning and my own, and making myself useful in the work of the little house and looking after my younger brothers and sisters and going on such poor errands as arose out of our poor way of living. I longed to have been sent to school, any school, to have been taught something, anywhere, but it was not to be. In April 1823 my sister, Fanny, had the singular good fortune to be elected as a pupil at the Royal Academy of Music which made my loss the harder to bear. My simple consolation was a little painted theatre that George Lamert made for me and for which I wrote some small sketches of my own in the feeble notion that it might allow me some form of escape from the miserable reality that now surrounded me.
