The Charles Dickens Miscellany E-Book

Jeremy Clarke

• Herausgeber: The History Press
• Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 152

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2014

Beschreibung

This miscellany explores the staggeringly busy and diverse life of Charles Dickens, giving readers the chance to get to know the man through his work and its major themes. With carefully chosen quotations from the novels, but also from his sketches and journalism, discover what Dickens had to say about the big issues like crime, the family, education and money. Meet here, too, those wonderful characters that have been handed down to us like the real figures of history – Mr Micawber, Fagin, Miss Havisham, David Copperfield and many more. So what is it that made Dickens special? This miscellany offers an insight into all the mad humour, passionate indignation, moral conviction, plain good sense and sheer unstoppable energy that made up one of the very greatest of English writers.

Leseprobe

• CONTENTS •

Title

Introduction

PART 1: LIVING

1

Growing Up

2

Taking Off

3

Settling Down

4

Abroad

5

Security & Secrets

PART 2: WRITING

6

A Guide to the Novels

7

Shorter Fiction

8

Journalism

9

Subjects & Themes

PART 3: READING

10

The Storyteller

11

A Reader’s Work

12

Dickens the Reader

13

Not an End

Places to Visit

Further Reading

Copyright

• INTRODUCTION •

DICKENS’ REPUTATIONASA great novelist has gone up and down, and currently seems to stand very high. It might help to bear a few things in mind.

Dickens was active (and successful) before Queen Victoria came to the throne. He was in at the very beginning of a number of developments that were to shape the culture of the nineteenth century including the growth of literacy that led to larger audiences; the development of technology that produced cheaper publications; the invention of a mass transit system (the railway) that made far-flung places (and people) startlingly accessible; and the advent of successful photography that began to distribute the faces of the famous throughout the world. All of these changed the status of the writer forever. Dickens was a pioneer.

Dickens, and his work, has been extraordinarily popular for a very long time. He is, perhaps even more than Shakespeare, the supreme anti-elitist artist; someone who consciously and energetically set out to build a mass audience. The numbers were important to him, but so was the range. For a start, he outsold many of his ‘rivals’ by a considerable margin. When Thackeray (by any standards a major novelist) published Vanity Fair (by any standards a major novel), he saw himself as ‘having a great fight … with Dickens’ for the public’s favour. He was no doubt pleased with selling 5,000 copies a month of each instalment. Dombey and Son sold 34,000 per month at the same time. When Dickens’ first novel, The Pickwick Papers, appeared as illustrated monthly parts in the late 1830s, a contemporary noted:

needy admirers flattened their noses against the booksellers’ windows eager to secure a good look at the etching and to peruse every line of the letterpress that might be exposed to view, frequently reading it aloud to applauding bystanders.

People either clubbed together to buy a copy or they hired each part from a circulating library; those who could not read, listened. R. Altick’s book The English Common Reader (1957), about the history of reading, uses, as an example, ‘the [illiterate] old charwoman who never missed a subscription tea … at a snuff shop over which she lodged when the landlord read the newest number of Dombey and Son to his assembled guests’. The critic Theodore Watts-Dunton used to tell a famous story of a Covent Garden barrow girl, who, when told that the great author had died, exclaimed in dismay, ‘Dickens dead? Then will Father Christmas die too?’

The odd thing, then, is that Dickens is so odd. We tend to think of him as the representative great Victorian novelist, but really he made his own mainstream of one. Later writers followed his publishing innovations where they did not, or could not, follow his art. Forget for a moment that Dickens is setting some kind of standard, and he seems wonderfully strange. Miss Havisham (Great Expectations) lives her wedding day, every day, in a state of ghastly corruption; Krook (Bleak House) drinks so much gin he bursts into flames and covers the area with greasy flakes of soot; young Bailey (Martin Chuzzlewit) goes for a shave though he has not a trace of a beard; Good Mrs Brown (Dombey and Son) steals the young heroine’s clothes and sends her out in rags; the starving runaway David (David Copperfield) sells his jacket to a man who grabs him by the hair, pays him in instalments of a halfpenny at a time (in between which he lies on his bed singing the Death of Nelson) and assaults him with the terrifying exclamation ‘Oh, my lungs and liver … Oh, goroo, goroo!’; Jenny Wren (Our Mutual Friend) sits on the roof. ‘Come up and be dead!’ she says. ‘Come up and be dead!’

But Dickens knew what he was doing. A driven man, certainly, and animated by a furious energy at times, but he kept a pretty cool eye on his audience, his money and his art. The books are how they are because Dickens wanted them that way. Sometimes it is tempting to ascribe those aspects of Dickens’ work less to our taste today either to some force within him that he couldn’t resist or to some spectacular naivety that prevented him from seeing the world as it was. But rarely has any artist been so ready to engage with life as it was lived in his time. The dying children, the desperate orphans, the ‘fallen’ women, the pantomime villains, the pure heroines and the cardboard heroes that we meet in some of his novels (along with the abundant evidence of genius) are not inescapable aberrations erupted from the author’s subconscious – they are elements Dickens found vital to the whole shape of his work. This only makes him more interesting.

Dickens was about 5ft 9in and slightly built. He was fond of loud clothes and flashy accessories. When he first travelled to America, the President’s daughter herself observed of him: ‘he wears entirely too much jewellery, very English in his appearance and not the best English.’

PART 1

LIVING

• 1 •

GROWING UP

• CHATHAM •

‘HERETHEMOSTDURABLE of his early impressions were received,’ wrote John Forster, Dickens’ first biographer. How did the young Charles end up in Chatham? His father, John, was a clerk who worked for the navy and had set up home in Portsmouth with his wife Elizabeth. Here, three children were born: Fanny, Charles and Alfred, although Alfred died when he was just 6 months old.

In 1817 John Dickens was posted to the dockyard in Chatham and he took a house in Ordnance Terrace to accommodate his growing family: Letitia had been born during a brief stay in London in 1816, and Harriet (who died in childhood) and Frederick followed. Elizabeth’s widowed sister Mary Allen was also part of the household. There was one move within Chatham: to St Mary’s Place in 1821, where another Alfred was born.

John and his family took a full part in the life of the community. They were friendly with neighbours and with the family of a local landlord, Mr Tribe; Charles and Fanny were frequently set up by their father on a table in the Mitre Inn to entertain the company with songs and ballads of the day. And it was in Chatham that Dickens began his education. He tells us through John Forster that he was taught to read by his mother, but he probably also attended a dame school with Fanny. It was not until 1821 and the move to St Mary’s Place that the children were educated more formally. The new school was in Clover Lane, now Clover Street, and run by William Giles, son of the minister of the Baptist chapel next door to the family home.

• THE THEATRE •

Mary Allen married for a second time while the Dickens family were in Chatham. This was to a widowed doctor, Matthew Lamert, at St Mary’s church in 1821. Matthew had a son, James, who was a little older than the young Charles, and who became a great influence upon this early part of Charles’ life. Most importantly, he accompanied Dickens to his first visits to the theatre. This was the beginning of a life-long passion. ‘I tried to recollect,’ he said in 1846, ‘whether I had ever been in any theatre in my life from which I had not brought away some pleasant association, however poor the theatre, and I protest … I could not remember even one.’

John Dickens in about 1820. (The Percy Fitzgerald collection, with the permission of the Guildhall Museum)

In fact, Dickens always had a great relish for bad theatre, and revisits Rochester in ‘Dullborough Town’, in The Uncommercial Traveller, to enjoy again the somewhat shaky productions he saw there. He does not spare the company, which is hard pressed to cover a long cast list:

Many wondrous secrets of Nature had I come to the knowledge of in that sanctuary: of which not the least terrific were, that the witches in Macbeth bore an awful resemblance to the Thanes and other proper inhabitants of Scotland; and that the good King Duncan couldn’t rest in his grave, but was constantly coming out of it and calling himself somebody else.

• MONEY •

John Dickens’ job entitled him and his family to regard themselves as middle class. The law, the armed forces, finance, medicine and the machinery of government had all spawned huge bureaucracies and new professions that were filled by an ever-growing army of clerks and administrators. They strove, like John, to educate their boys to equip them for office life and sometimes their girls to make homes and ornament them with their accomplishments. But the new middle classes had little money behind them if they went wrong or couldn’t support their large families in seizing the opportunities they had anticipated. Things could unravel very quickly.

John drew a good salary at the dockyard and he appears to have been without expensive vices. He certainly got through his money, though. And more. He borrowed £200 in 1819 and could not keep up the repayments. The debt had to be covered by his brother-in-law, Thomas Barrow. It is possible that an attempt to save money was behind the move to St Mary’s Place in 1821.

By the time John was recalled to London in 1822 the debts were considerable. And the new post meant a drop in salary. His reaction to these difficulties (and perhaps this was characteristic) was to send Fanny to school to study music – quite an investment. Twice, in 1823, there were summonses for the non-payment of rates. Rent no doubt was also in arrears, and there must have been numerous outstanding tradesmen’s accounts. Elizabeth Dickens attempted to set up a genteel school herself and even went as far as obtaining a suitable property. No pupils ever came.

This precarious existence must have shaped the adult Charles’ attitude to money. Part of his appetite for work certainly derived from the promise of monetary reward and, conversely, an anxiety about security. But he remained his father’s son in terms of his spending, throwing money at his houses, his clothes, travel and parties. Such were his outgoings, and the complicated nature of his obligations to his publishers, that, despite his huge success, it was not until his seventh novel emerged that he could declare himself secure and free of financial embarrassments. And his childhood family – John, Elizabeth and his surviving brothers and sisters – continued to be something of a worry long after Charles had grown up. John borrowed money in his son’s name; he started to sell samples of his writing and his signature; he wrote begging letters to publishers, bankers and friends. Charles became so exasperated that he eventually banished both parents to Devon, where they lived for more than three years before returning to London in 1842.

• BLACKING •

Such was the family situation in 1823 that the young Charles had to go out to work, finding employment in a boot-blacking factory on the north bank of the Thames, near the site of the modern Charing Cross station. Great numbers of children in early nineteenth-century England would have done similar work – and many much, much worse. But for Dickens, it was a kind of oblivion, an end to all his hopes and dreams.

At the young age of 11, Dickens went to work at Warren’s Blacking Warehouse. He and his companions had to cover pots of boot polish (blacking) and paste on to them paper labels. He was paid 6Sa week.

He kept this secret from almost everyone except John Forster, who revealed it in his 1872 Dickens biography. Forster himself had learnt of it in 1847, when Dickens produced what is now known as ‘the autobiographical fragment’, apparently intended to be only the first part of Dickens’ own Life of Dickens – a plan abandoned when instead he put the substance of the fragment into David Copperfield. But, thanks to Forster’s care of the original source material, we have the blacking warehouse in Dickens’ own words:

It was a crazy, tumbledown old house, abutting of course on the river, and literally overrun with rats. Its wainscotted rooms and its rotten floors and staircase, and the old grey rats swarming down in the cellars, and the sound of their squeaking and scuffling coming up the stairs at all times, and the dirt and decay of the place, rise up visibly before me, as if I were there again. The counting-house was on the first floor, looking over the coal-barges and the river. There was a recess in it, in which I was to sit and work.

What was it about the episode that affected Dickens so profoundly? He thought his parents had given up on him (and bear in mind his elder sister had just been sent to a prestigious music school):

It is wonderful to me how I could have been so easily cast away at such an age. It is wonderful to me, that, even after my descent into the poor little drudge I had been since we came to London, no one had compassion enough on me … to suggest that something might have been spared, as certainly it might have been, to place me at any common school … No one made any sign. My father and mother were quite satisfied. They could hardly have been more so, if I had been twenty years of age, distinguished at a grammar-school, and going to Cambridge.

And he felt a kind of social extinction creeping upon him. In the fragment, he takes care to describe his working companions (especially their family connections and hence social status) before claiming:

No words can express the secret agony of my soul as I sunk into this companionship; compared these every day associates with those of my happier childhood; and felt my early hopes of growing up to be a learned and distinguished man, crushed in my breast.

• PRISON •

On 20 February 1824 John Dickens was arrested. This was a distinct possibility for all debtors in the early nineteenth century if they were unable to persuade those to whom they owed money that the sum (or an agreed part of it) would eventually be forthcoming. To begin with, John was taken to a ‘sponging house’: secure accommodation designed to give those arrested a final chance to settle things with their creditors. Charles was sent here and there with messages and promises, to no effect. His father was taken to the Marshalsea prison, in Southwark. Charles met him there later, in the gaoler’s lodge, and they both went up to his room, where, according to John Forster in his biography, they ‘cried very much’.

At first John was on his own, but it was not long before the rest of the family joined him. Except Charles, of course, who continued with Warren’s Blacking. A lodging was found for him at a children’s boarding house in Camden, and thus, except for his rent which was paid for him, Charles set up on his own account, living off the 6s a week.

He missed everyone dreadfully and said so. Eventually another lodging was found for him near the prison, which at least eased that pain, but he remained, even in company he despised, horribly ashamed of his family circumstances. Once when he was kindly accompanied home by one of the other boys after an attack of some illness, he had to part with his companion on the doorstep of a stranger’s house, pretending it was his own and not being able to get rid of him any other way.

In the end, a number of circumstances brought an opportunity for change. John Dickens declared himself insolvent, which led to his release from prison; he inherited some money, began receiving a pension from the navy and started working as a journalist. Although even these developments taken together fell some way short of relieving him of his money troubles, John felt able to dispense with the few shillings Charles was adding to the family income. It is possible that he had even become sensitive about his son’s position, since there was a quarrel that led to Charles’ departure. Charles himself never forgave his mother for patching up the family differences and arranging for him to go back. He never went back; he just carried the memory around with him always.

• 2 •

TAKING OFF

DICKENSGOTTOSCHOOL eventually. He spent two years going to a place called Wellington House – which he remembered with very little affection – but when he left, at 15, he was ready for work. This came through an acquaintance of the family who found Charles work as a lawyer’s clerk with the firm of Ellis and Blackmore. This lasted about eighteen months, and a short term at another solicitor’s office followed. But it was dull. Other careers were calling, and it seemed that the opportunities offered by journalism were the most pressing.

Charles Dickens at 18. (The Percy Fitzgerald collection, with the permission of the Guildhall Museum)

• REPORTING •

Dickens had family in the business, which helped. His father was writing occasional pieces, but he also had a maternal uncle making something of a name for himself in the field. This was John Henry Barrow, who in 1828 launched The Mirror of Parliament.

It was not long before Dickens was part of John Barrow’s parliamentary reporting team and he was soon striking out writing for other publications, including the radical newspaper The True Sun