The Life and Lies of Charles Dickens E-Book

Helena Kelly

• Herausgeber: Icon Books
• Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023

Seitenzahl: 504

Beschreibung

Think you already know the story of Charles Dickens' life? Think again. Almost everything you're familiar with was first mentioned in an authorised biography written by Dickens' close friend John Forster 150 years ago. It's the version of events that Dickens himself chose to make public, and newly accessible archives reveal that it's crammed with gaps, inconsistencies, and outright lies. There's the sister whose existence Dickens kept secret and the Jewish relations whose faith he strove to conceal. There's plagiarism, fraud, and suicide. And that's only for starters. Helena Kelly, author of the acclaimed Jane Austen, the Secret Radical, retells Dickens' story from his childhood to his deathbed, uncovers the truths he tried to keep hidden, and offers a fresh - and deeply troubling - perspective on the man who remains one of Britain's best-known novelists. You won't be able to look at him - or his work - in the same way again.

Leseprobe

 

To my mother and father

 

 

Published in the UK and USA in 2023 byIcon Books Ltd, Omnibus Business Centre,39–41 North Road, London N7 9DPemail: [email protected]

ISBN: 978-183773-104-6ebook: 978-183773-113-8

Text copyright © 2023 Helena Kelly

The author has asserted her moral rights.

No part of this book may be reproduced in any form, or by any means, without prior permission in writing from the publisher.

Typesetting by SJmagic DESIGN SERVICES, India

Printed and bound in the UK

‘I have never seen anything about myself in Print, which has much correctness in it – any biographical account of myself, I mean.’

Letter from Charles Dickens to Wilkie Collins, 6 June 1856

CONTENTS

Acknowledgements

Prologue: The conjurer and the conjurer’s assistant (1843)

1Mud (1812–22)

2Boot-polish (1824)

3Watch where he settles (1827–35)

4The summerhouse (1836–41)

5Running away (1842–3)

6Breathing space (1844–7)

7Home truths (1848–54)

8Enter rumour (1855–62)

9Greatest hits (1863–9)

10Final days (1870)

Epilogue: In memoriam

Bibliography

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Second albums are notoriously difficult to make and producing this, my second book, has been a difficult process too. It’s taken a long time and a lot of hard work, partly because Charles Dickens led a full, busy and very productive life, but partly also, inevitably, because of the pandemic. I’m grateful to both my agents, George Lucas and Sally Holloway, and to Sally in particular. She has read so many drafts and suggested so many improvements that were this in fact an album rather than a book she would certainly have earned herself a writing credit. Thank you, I couldn’t have done it without you.

Thank you, too, to my publishers. To everyone at Icon – Duncan Heath, Sophie Lazar, Emily Cary-Elwes, Rhiannon Morris and especially Connor Stait, who has gone above and beyond – and to the team at Pegasus Books – Claiborne Hancock, Jessica Case and Nicole Maher: thank you. Thank you also to my eagle-eyed proof-reader, Alison Foskett, and to Anna Morrison and Faceout Studio for, respectively, the UK and US cover designs.

In writing a biography you inevitably incur debts – to scholars, to the biographers who have preceded you, to librarians, archivists, editors, curators, and everyone else who has helped to make the body of knowledge and material that you draw on. I hope that I have paid due credit where possible but there are many unsung heroes, including the staff at the National Archives, the London Metropolitan Archives, and the National Maritime Museum at Greenwich, who are without equal. More particularly, I’m grateful to Dominic Rainsford, editor of Dickens Quarterly, and Emily Bell, editor of the Dickensian, and to their reviewers, all of whom have shared their expertise when critiquing work I’ve published with them. Any mistakes that remain are mine.

Writing can be a lonely and sometimes rather joyless task, so thanks for cheering me up and cheering me on are due to Matthew and Catherine Bottomley, Cat Given, Karen Wigley, my nieces Anna, Sophie, Emilie, and Lily, my god-daughter Pippa, my next-door neighbour Pauline, all my lovely in-laws, and my sister, Vanessa. Thank you too to my parents, who have listened patiently to many lengthy lectures on Dickens.

And thank you, finally, but most importantly, to Dave and Rory, my best boys.

PROLOGUE: THE CONJURER AND THE CONJURER’S ASSISTANT (1843)

The weather has been exceptionally mild of late but in this Christmas season every party demands a good blaze and good cheer. What with the fire and the punch bowl and mounting excitement, they are all already too warm; the children pink-cheeked, the ladies, both young and older, hectically flushed. Mrs Dickens, so near her time that none of the married women think it altogether wise for her to have come, sits breathless and smiling, dabbing at her brow. As for the gentlemen, one or two of them are growing so very boisterous, so shiningly rubicund, that it seems not impossible they might drop dead of an apoplexy and ruin poor Nina’s thirteenth birthday party – and almost certain that not all the glassware will survive the evening intact.

The hostess, Mrs Macready, whose actor husband is away on tour in America, grows fretful. The gentlemen are her husband’s friends, for the most part, and kindly meaning to fill her husband’s place, but how is she to control them? All these sticky-fingered children, her pretty rosewood tables, everyone growing impatient. How long are they to be kept waiting?

But there are promising signs at last – a head peers around the door, conversations fade, noisy masculine voices demand quiet, a wine glass is rung, a bawled cry of Order! and their evening’s entertainment bounds into the room.

Dickens is brilliant, of course. He pulls coins from behind the ears of the birthday girl and magics up sweets. He burns a handkerchief and then draws it out from a wine bottle, unsinged. Will anyone lend him a pocket-watch? In a flash it vanishes, only to be discovered inside a locked tea caddy. He conjures a guinea pig, which gets loose and scurries about the floor, squeaking furiously, fur on end. He kindles a fire in a hat, sets a saucepan over it and – in no more than a minute – has turned raw eggs and flour into a hot plum pudding and shows off the inside of the hat, good as new. Everyone is amazed, astonished. The room rocks with laughter. There is a storm of applause.

Dickens bows, delighted.

His friend John Forster fetches and carries and holds the props.1

You may think that you know all there is to know about Charles Dickens – and there have been so many biographies and biopics devoted to him, so many newspaper stories, that you can be forgiven for thinking so. John Forster may not be a name you’re very familiar with, though, but if you’re interested in Dickens you really should be.

The two men seem to have met towards the end of 1836, introduced by a mutual acquaintance, the novelist William Harrison Ainsworth.2 They hit it off. Invitations and gifts of magazines quickly followed their first meeting.3 By June 1837, Forster was helping Dickens in a contractual dispute.4 From then on, for almost the entirety of Dickens’s career, John Forster was there in the background, dealing with the practicalities, prompting and advising. Nowadays we might call him Dickens’s literary agent. It was to Forster that Dickens usually confided new ideas and complained when his writing wasn’t going well; Forster who read his first drafts and negotiated on his behalf with publishers. They socialised and holidayed together. Few other relationships in Dickens’s life proved so enduring. While friends and business associates and even close family members were left rejected by the wayside, Forster remained within the circle of trust. Dickens may have taken up with other intimates, such as fellow novelist Wilkie Collins, but when he separated from his wife Catherine in the late 1850s, it was Forster he chose to negotiate terms for him. And Forster was the person Dickens selected to safeguard his manuscripts after his death.

The two men were close in age. Both, after toying with legal careers, turned their energies to literature, though with markedly different success. Forster was chiefly a bread-and-butter writer – a journalist, a critic, occasionally a biographer. In later life he also worked for the Lunacy Commission and acquired – most unexpectedly – a rich wife. He had a remarkable talent for getting close to other, more celebrated literary figures. While still a young man he befriended Charles Lamb (of Tales from Shakespeare fame), the poet Robert Browning, and Edward Bulwer-Lytton, who was a best-selling author in the late 1820s and 1830s.5 He also became engaged to a then wildly famous poetess called Letitia Elizabeth Landon, known by her initials L.E.L. A decade his senior, with a spotty reputation, she eventually broke off the relationship and married another man.6 Nor was Dickens the only author he represented.

Unlike modern literary agents, Forster didn’t get a contractually agreed cut of any profits made by his writer friends. What motivated him, then, if it wasn’t money? What hunger made him pursue, for decades, the role of unpaid helper and occasional conjurer’s assistant?

Perhaps what those who befriend celebrities so often want: proximity, access, inside knowledge.

That, anyhow, is what everyone assumed Forster had managed to get. The first volume of his The Life of Charles Dickens appeared in 1871, eighteen months after the novelist’s death, and the third and last volume in 1874. People might have joked at the time that the book ought more properly to have been called ‘The Life of John Forster, with reminiscences of Charles Dickens’, but they read it and believed it.7 He was, after all, effectively Dickens’s authorised biographer; he was in a position to know things. His biography remains one of the most influential ever to be written. You’ll almost certainly be familiar with parts of what he wrote, even if you don’t know where they originated from. A substantial proportion of what everyone knows about Dickens comes from Forster.

For instance, it was Forster who announced to the world that sections of Dickens’s 1849–50 novel David Copperfield were pretty much straight memoir, revealing that the celebrated author had, like David, been forced into menial work as a child, taken out of school and made to labour in a boot-polish factory when his father was sent to debtors’ prison. Forster is our only source for this story, as he is for a lot of other supposed facts about Dickens’s life.

These days, though, locating and accessing archival material has become a great deal easier than it used to be. And the archives show that quite a number of Forster’s facts are incorrect, or inaccurate. He gets dates wrong, and sometimes names, too. He makes no reference to events that we now know took place. Details seem to be ignored or invented; there are people missing from the story who really ought to be there.

Is it simply that Forster wasn’t a very good biographer, or was he, instead, continuing to facilitate Dickens in the same way he’d been doing for years? While claiming to reveal the truth about his famous friend, was he actually helping to maintain Dickens’s lies, keeping Dickens’s secrets?

At the end of 1843, when Dickens performed his conjuring tricks at Nina Macready’s birthday party, he was still in his very early thirties. But since he had been hurtled to fame with The Pickwick Papers in 1836, he’d already completed four other novels, among them such runaway successes as Oliver Twist, Nicholas Nickleby and that great early Victorian favourite, The Old Curiosity Shop. A Christmas Carol had just come out. He’d spent six months of the previous year touring the United States and Canada, fêted wherever he went. His name had appeared in the newspapers thousands of times. Even those who hadn’t read any of his writing knew who he was.

But no one knew very much about him.

Take, for example, A New Spirit of the Age. This was a book of biographical essays about eminent early Victorians which was published in 1844. An essay on Dickens opened the book and the picture of him which accompanied it served almost as a frontispiece. The flattering suggestion is that he was the poster boy for the new Victorian age. The essay itself discusses his successes, to date, and his failures. It contains some sophisticated analysis of his writing. There’s one thing missing, though. The other essays in A New Spirit of the Age mention where their subjects were born, who their family were, where they went to school: this one doesn’t do any of that. We’re told that, ‘if ever it were well said of an author that his “life” was in his books, (and a very full life, too,) this might be said of Mr. Dickens’.8 Actually it’s clear that – after seven years of being a household name – Dickens’s origins and background remained, as far as the public was concerned, almost a total blank.

And despite intense, continued press interest, this state of affairs more or less persisted. Dickens’s stories were clearly often inspired by his early life – in fact, several quite unexpected aspects of his work turn out to be partly autobiographical – but he almost never wrote of his childhood without a protective veneer of fictionality, even when he wasn’t writing fiction.

In the last decade of his life, Dickens produced a number of magazine essays which look like memoirs, and have sometimes been treated so. They aren’t. There’s the ostensibly confiding piece, ‘Dullborough Town’, in which he recalls his ‘boyhood’s home’, offering details of his days there, games and small friends, and strange, dreamlike memories. It’s wholly unreliable. He describes a made-up place, an amalgam of two neighbouring towns, Chatham and Rochester, and gives it the made-up name ‘Dullborough’. Readers are led to understand that he had not revisited the haunts of his boyhood until just ‘the other day’, when in fact he visited frequently through his twenties and thirties, and in his forties had bought a large house only a couple of miles up the road, at Gads Hill. Dickens even brings a dead childhood friend back to life, and describes having dinner with her and her family.9

Parts of these essays probably are rooted in genuine recollections, but how, in the circumstances, can we trust anything that he says in them? They’re about as truthful as an interview with Hello! magazine or an influencer’s social media feeds, and Dickens was in some ways much more like a celebrity or a big-name influencer than an ordinary author. He was astonishingly, globally famous. He was a product, a brand: available for so many shillings and pence in whatever format the public preferred. Illustrations of his characters were available to purchase. Unscrupulous individuals took advantage of lax copyright laws to publish abridgements and continuations of his work, and stage unauthorised adaptations. More loyal readers could choose to consume his work by monthly or weekly instalment or in book form. They could buy his magazines, Household Words and All the Year Round. There was special Christmas-edition Dickens, which proved very popular. Eventually people could pay to go and hear him perform his stories aloud in dramatic readings. He went on tour. Even his burial ended up turning into a public event.

When it comes to that kind of fame, having a public persona is both good business sense and a psychological shield. It isn’t surprising that Dickens should have worked so hard during his lifetime to control what people knew and thought about him – sending out press releases, briefing against former business associates and family members, concealing information that his public might not react well to.

But the gaps and elisions in Forster’s biography suggest that Dickens also put considerable effort into controlling what people would think of him after his death.

For years we’ve been under the impression that we’d carefully ferreted out most of Dickens’s secrets – his infamous involvement with the young actress Ellen Ternan, his father’s imprisonment for debt, his childhood employment in the boot-polish factory – but that’s not what happened. We didn’t have to find these things out. Dickens told us. He choseto make them public. In his will, Ellen Ternan is the first beneficiary listed. The story about the debt and the boot-polish factory appears in a book written by the man Dickens himself had selected to write it; it’s the story Dickens gave him.

In spite of the revelations it offered,Forster’s The Life of Charles Dickens is less a biography than an exercise in posthumous brand management. Indeed, Dickens’s influence over the book was such that there’s some argument for viewing it as a collaborative venture between him and Forster. Maybe this is why it’s proved so enduring, so influential. The problem is, though, that it doesn’t get us much closer to the truth than Dickens’s other purported excursions into memoir. It’s not just that Forster’s biography isn’t the whole story – it was designed to distract and deceive.

Dickens the conjurer and his faithful assistant have been playing tricks on us all this time. They’ve been feeding us lies, directing our gaze away from what they wanted to keep hidden.

The story of Charles Dickens’s life isn’t the one we think we know.

Notes

1.Details drawn for the most part from Charles Dickens’s letter to Angela Burdett Coutts, 27 December 1843, and Jane Carlyle’s description of the same party. I have also included one or two other tricks with which Dickens is known to have been familiar. The guinea pig sadly died not long afterwards (Letter to Mrs Carlyle, 27 January 1844).

2.Best known nowadays as the author of Rookwood (1834), an immensely popular gothic-style novel featuring the highwayman Dick Turpin.

3.Letter to John Forster, probably March 1837; letter to the same, probably May 1837.

4.Letter to John Forster, date conjectured to be 9 June 1837. Unusually, both this and the above survive in manuscript.

5.Now largely – and largely deservedly – forgotten.

6.For more information on the fascinating Letitia, see Lucasta Miller’s L.E.L.: The Lost Life and Scandalous Death of Letitia Elizabeth Landon, the Celebrated ‘Female Byron’ (Jonathan Cape, 2019).

7.See, for example, Sheffield Independent, 13 January 1872, page 8. All newspaper articles accessed 12–15 June 2023, via The British Newspaper Archive or, in the case of The Times of London, The Times Digital Archive (https://www.britishnewspaperarchive.co.uk and https://www.gale.com/intl/c/the-times-digital-archive). Transcriptions author’s own.

8.R.H. Horne (ed.), A New Spirit of the Age (1844). Essay on ‘Charles Dickens’.

9.As remarked in William F. Long, ‘What happened to Lucy Stroughill’, Dickens Quarterly, Vol. 29, No. 4 (December 2012), page 313 ff.

MUD (1812–22)

1

Chatham, Kent, engraved by William Miller after J.M.W. Turner (1832). (Royal Academy of Arts)

‘Mudbank, mist, swamp’, says a convict in Great Expectations, describing the estuary landscape that Dickens was familiar with for almost the whole of his life, ‘swamp, mist, and mudbank’. To find one’s way safely through such treacherous territory is always going to be a challenge.

Charles Dickens was born in Portsmouth, on 7 February 1812, and passed much of his childhood in Chatham, one of a string of towns clustered close together along the muddy estuary of the River Medway in Kent. As an adult he returned to Kent, buying a house overlooking the Thames, where the river glides wide and unhurried past the marshes on either side out into the North Sea. Salt air, ebb and flood, these feature in story after story. Often the water looms threateningly. There are a surprising number of drowned bodies.

But it’s clear that there must be something lying hidden in the murky waters of Charles Dickens’s childhood – something more than or different from what we’ve been told. The information we can gather from Forster’s biography and from Dickens’s own letters and scraps of memoir is inconsistent, contradictory. Inconvenient facts keep looming out of the fog. There’s little ground that will bear any weight. Things don’t join up.

For example, Dickens often used to claim that he had spent his boyhood in the cathedral city of Rochester, rather than where he had actually lived, in the neighbouring and notably rougher dockyard town of Chatham.10 The claim seems, on the surface, rather pointless, but he must have had a motive.

He exhibits, on multiple occasions in his writing, a peculiar evasiveness about Chatham. The Pickwick Papers traces its way carefully around the outskirts of the town, coming right up to the edge of it in one episode dealing with an abortive duel, and in another moving to the military exercise ground on its further side but never entering its streets. In writing A Child’s History of England, published between 1851 and 1853, Dickens manages to mention Rochester a dozen times, and Chatham not at all, not even when dealing with the famous Dutch raid of the late 1660s, in which the English fleet was attacked while anchoring there. Chatham must be the ‘garrison-and-dockyard town’ on the London–Dover road central to an allegation put during an important court case in A Tale of Two Cities (1859) – there is no other – but the name is omitted. The Mystery of Edwin Drood (1870) describes the area around Rochester Cathedral, and the journey from Rochester to the capital, with near forensic accuracy, but Chatham is snipped neatly out of the picture.

This is far from the only subject on which Dickens’s accounts of his childhood turn out to be less than wholly reliable. He told Forster that he retained detailed memories of his time in Portsmouth: the ‘exact shape’ of a military parade ground, the garden of the house he had lived in and the fact it was snowing on the day they left the town.11

Yet according to the letter Dickens wrote as an adult to his German translator, he lived in London between the ages of two and six. Can these memories of Portsmouth possibly be those of a child of two, or even younger, one who soon after moved away? It seems very unlikely. At any rate, according to the letter, Charles returned to live in the capital again when he was twelve, or perhaps even thirteen. But according to Forster he was already working in a factory in central London by his twelfth birthday, and before that he had been living for some time in Camden, then just outside London. The letter itself doesn’t survive and the transcript may not be entirely correct, but there appear to be quite considerable discrepancies.12 Dickens definitely did go to a day school in London, Wellington House Academy, but how long for – whether it was for as much as two years, beginning quite early in 1824, or whether he was still there as late as the first months of 1827 – is a moot point, his school contemporaries recalling different dates which don’t necessarily agree with his own versions.13 Even the most famous part of the story, the debtor’s prison and the boot-polish factory, doesn’t really hold together – or at least not the way he and Forster tell it. So what did happen in Charles’s childhood?

We tend not to think of Charles Dickens as a forces child, but he was one. He grew up in dockyard towns, and moved from one to another at the will of his father’s superiors. Without the navy, he might not even have existed.

John Dickens, Charles’s father, was the second son of an elderly butler and a by-no-means youthful housekeeper, upper servants in the household of John Crewe, one of the MPs for Cheshire. The butler was so elderly, indeed, that it doesn’t seem to have surprised anyone that he died just a couple of months after John was born. Though the pair had worked and married in London, and their children were christened there, Mrs Dickens’s job was based, at least part of the time, at the Cheshire estate, Crewe Hall.14 It must have made for a strange upbringing for John and his elder brother William.

Charles’s mother, Elizabeth Barrow, came from a family which had its roots in the West Country. Her relations were both musical and mechanically minded, with one holding a patent on a piano design.15

What brought together the son of a Cheshire housekeeper and the daughter of a London piano-manufacturer was the navy. And the navy influenced their lives in other respects, too.

Full-scale conflict between Britain and France had begun in 1793 and didn’t finally end until more than two decades later, in 1815. The urgent need to maintain and increase British naval power meant that the government poured money into the Royal Navy, into ships, dockyards and men. They also recruited an army of additional clerks to try to make sure the money ended up where it was meant to. Among these clerks were Elizabeth’s father, Charles Barrow, her brother Thomas and her husband-to-be John Dickens.16 Thomas Barrow and John Dickens appear to have been office mates from at least as early as 1806.17 We don’t know precisely when John met his new colleague’s family, but Elizabeth, born at the end of 1789, might have been no more than sixteen when she was first introduced to him. She was still only eighteen when they married. One wonders how many other young men she got the chance to meet, how much mature consideration she can have been able to give to her choice of husband. And one wonders, too, whether John would have married her if he’d known the perilous basis on which her family’s apparent ease and security really rested.

The two Barrows, father and son, and John Dickens worked in the Navy Pay Office at Somerset House on the Strand. The clerks employed there managed the sailors’ wages, pensions and dealings with creditors. They also inspected, and in many cases executed, sailors’ wills. Enormous sums of cash and forests’ worth of paperwork passed through their hands.18 It was a highly responsible job and was viewed by the Barrow family as giving them status, becoming part and parcel of their identities.

When Charles Dickens’s parents got married in June 1809, the ceremony took place in the church of St Mary le Strand, which sits marooned on a sliver of land in the middle of the road just opposite the main entrance of Somerset House. And when Grandfather Barrow died in 1826, his obituary noted that he was ‘late of the Navy Pay Office’, despite the fact that he left under something of a cloud. The pride his family so evidently felt was not passed on to Dickens, however. And there are a couple of possible reasons why.

We know that John Dickens worked in the ‘Wages’ branch for the majority of the time that he was employed by the Pay Office; we also know that sometimes he was based in London and sometimes at ‘outports’ – the dockyard towns of Portsmouth, where Charles was born, and Chatham, and possibly others as well. Finding out exactly when he moved from place to place is difficult to ascertain, however.19 The recordkeeping was haphazard.

Fortunately for us, though, John and Elizabeth Dickens quickly developed some spendthrift habits. They rented a house which had ‘a good kitchen and cellar’, ‘two excellent parlours’, ‘two good bedchambers’ and ‘two garrets in the attic’ – pretty luxurious for a young family just starting out.20 Another luxury Charles’s parents chose to spend their money on was taking out birth announcements in the newspapers. This means we know not only that their first two children, Fanny and Charles, were born in Portsmouth, but that their next son, Alfred, died there late in 1814, aged five months, of ‘water on the brain’ – hydrocephalus.21 By April 1816, at least some of the family were in the capital – the birth announcement for the fourth of the Dickens children, another daughter, Letitia, locates the family in ‘Norfolk Street’ in London.22 There is a plaque on the wall of what was once 10 Norfolk Street (now 22 Cleveland Street) which states that ‘Young Charles Dickens twice lived in this house 1815–16 and 1828–31’ (that is, when he was aged three to four, and again when he would have been in his late teens). Actually, the proof isn’t totally solid for his having lived there during either of these two time periods.23 All we can say with any certainty is that Charles spent his earliest years in Portsmouth, and may have lived in London for a period as a small child, around the year 1816. By this point he would have been four, or thereabouts.

How long he remained in London we don’t know.

Hostilities had finally ended in 1815, leading, in the navy, to several rounds of lay-offs and reductions in personnel. John Dickens was lucky to keep his job at all and may well have had to accept several short postings, one of which could have been in Sheerness, a dockyard on the Isle of Sheppey, off the Kent coast.24 At any rate, he was in Chatham at some point before autumn 1817, employed in the Pay Office in the dockyard there.25

Chatham dockyard was in its glory days when John Dickens arrived, money still flooding in even though the war was over. The town was essentially an armed camp. It was intensely militarised, circled by forts: Elizabethan Upnor Castle across the river from the dockyard and Fort Amherst, Fort Clarence and Fort Pitt studded along the ridges of high ground behind it. A plan of Chatham, dated June 1816, shows one long high street and a few cross roads pinched in between a ‘gun wharf’ and the foot of the hill on which Fort Pitt is perched.26 Another plan, of April 1821, marks parcels of land claimed by the navy, the army and the ‘ordnance’ (artillery), and a great swathe designated ‘exercising ground’, reserved for drills, training and displays.27 There were soldiers everywhere – marching, on manoeuvres, lounging around in the streets. Convicted prisoners were brought from all over the country to the prison hulks moored in the Medway estuary – decommissioned ships, stripped of sails and masts, notorious for their harsh conditions, used either as temporary holding places for those sentenced to transportation or to house men used as forced labour. Travellers on the road between London and Dover were constantly passing through. Ships were arriving and leaving.

The Dickens family set up home in a road called Ordnance Terrace, also known as ‘Ordnance-row’, which sits below Fort Pitt. An advertisement of 1814 describes one house in the terrace as ‘A commodious newly erected Dwelling-house, eligibly situate in Ordnance-row, Prices Dale, Chatham, and containing two chambers, two parlors, two kitchens, an inclosed garden 80 feet long […] amply supplied with water’.28 This sounds pleasant enough, though it’s noticeable that Ordnance Terrace can’t have been any bigger than their first family home in Portsmouth. With a growing brood of children and a couple of servants living there, as well as Mrs Dickens’s widowed sister Mary Allen (who apparently moved in with them), it can’t have been too roomy. Later the family moved to St Mary’s Place, in a slightly more central location but still well within sight of the surrounding fortifications. A noisy, crowded house, and outside, beyond the garden, barracks, drawbridges, sea-walls, ‘sally ports’ and sentry points – a place which, as the closest major naval dockyard to the French coast, had lived for years in expectation of attack and siege – this is where the young Dickens grew up.

In common with most dock towns, Chatham had an established Jewish population, while newspaper reports of 1820 mention the presence of a group of ‘Turks’ involved in an affray at Chatham’s Fountain Inn.29 Of the foreign prisoners of war who had passed through the town before the coming of the peace, some elected to remain. The Royal Navy was a famously colour-blind employer, at least of ordinary seamen, and a handful of people of colour appear in local newspaper reports in the 1810s and 1820s, their ethnicity being deemed worthy of note, but seldom of particular comment.30 Whatever the source of the shocking attitudes to race that can be found in some of Dickens’s later writing, they were not the result of a monocultural upbringing. The town teemed with people from all walks of life, religions and ethnicities from all over the globe.

It’s possible that the Dickens family flirted with Baptist ideas during their time in Chatham. Young Charles attended a school run by a young Baptist schoolteacher, William Giles, whose father presided at the chapel neighbouring their house in St Mary’s Place. Though the establishment was given the sonorous name of ‘the Classical, Mathematical, and Mercantile School’, there were other, far better-established schools in the neighbourhood – the cathedral school in Rochester, for instance, which took young choristers, and the Sir Joseph Williamson Mathematical School, at which the sons of many dockyard employees were educated for future jobs related to the yard, the sea or the river.31 Giles was exceedingly youthful for a headmaster, only just out of his teens, and he hadn’t attended university – indeed, he wouldn’t have been able to attend either Oxford or Cambridge, which both required students to be members of the Church of England.32 It’s hard to see why – if religion wasn’t a factor – the Dickens parents would have considered his school the best available option for their young son. Perhaps it was simply a matter of convenience or of cost.

John and Elizabeth Dickens continued to have their children baptised at the dockyard church and if they were drawn to Non-conformist worship, the effect on Charles seems not to have been a positive one. In an essay published in 1860, Dickens – or his journalistic alter ego – describes how, as a child, he was ‘violently scrubbed from the neck to the roots of the hair as a purification for the Temple’ before being ‘carried off […] to be steamed like a potato in the unventilated breath of the powerful Boanerges Boiler and his congregation’.33 As an adult, Dickens disliked religious show, whether in the Roman Catholic or the Protestant church. His fiction holds up to mockery a number of characters who are charismatic, low-church preachers, expressing disapproval of the influence they could come to exert, particularly over women.

There are other stories about this period in Chatham which indicate the Dickens parents in fact held rather relaxed attitudes towards their children’s moral education – for example, the suggestion that the two eldest, Charles and Fanny, were encouraged to sing publicly in the Mitre Tavern in Chatham.34 It’s true that a patriotic anthem or two at a semi-official dinner is a very different proposition to children prancing around singing saucy comic songs like real-life versions of Jane Eyre’s little Adele Varens, but neither is likely to have been universally approved by members of the Baptist communion.

Even if the young Charles wasn’t taken to sing at the Mitre, there were plenty of events in the local community which might have struck the imagination of a future novelist. The year before the Dickens family arrived, fourteen people, most of them young women, drowned in the River Medway when a jaunt turned into disaster.35 The majority of the victims were Baptists; the Dickenses would certainly have been made familiar with the story. A soldier was ‘found frozen to death on the Marshes near Upnor’, just across the river from Chatham – not far from the marshes where, in Great Expectations,we first meet Pip, on Christmas Eve, ‘a small bundle of shivers’.36 Convicts really did escape from the prison hulks.37 A servant accidentally set light to herself and, running panicked upstairs, spread the flames to her mistress and to a child.38 An elderly woman named Elisabeth Moore ‘threw herself into a well in Jenkins’s Dale, Chatham, and was killed’.39 A couple of days before Charles’s tenth birthday, an ‘unfortunate girl of the town’ (that is, a young woman involved in prostitution) was found dead just around the corner from their old house.40 The body of a heavily pregnant woman who had vanished from the Duke of York public house was discovered at the bottom of its well, her soldier husband later being brought back from overseas to be convicted for her murder and hanged.41

In March 1820, when a fire devastated the centre of Chatham, Dickens would have been eight. He might have slept through the alarm being given in the night, but the fire carried on well into the morning so he must have seen it: the ruined buildings, the soldiers, the inefficient fire engines, the faces of the adults grimy with soot, marked by the night’s work and terror.42 A contemporaneous report records that 38 houses were destroyed, including those of the baker, ‘Mr. Watson, a linen-draper’ and ‘Mr. Cohen, a pawnbroker’, and the town’s ‘principal inn’, the ‘Sun-tavern’, the roof of which ‘fell in with a tremendous crash’, leaving ‘only a very small part of the walls […] standing’. A burning cinder blew ‘150 yards’ from the High Street to land on a ‘large stack of hay’. For two hours, between four and six o’clock, ‘the confusion which reigned in the town was beyond description’; people were emptying their houses of furniture and valuables and the flames were only brought under control by pulling down buildings to create firebreaks.43 The inhabitants of Chatham were lucky that the damage wasn’t worse and that no lives were lost.

In the preface to Nicholas Nickleby, Dicken happily relates how he’d heard about one of the book’s subjects, the cruelties of the infamous boarding schools in Yorkshire, when he was a little boy near Rochester Castle. But he never mentions any of these other events, not even in his ‘autobiographical’ essays. They offer obvious potential inspiration for the opening chapters of Great Expectations, and the smudgier outlines, perhaps, of the off-stage demise of the mother of Rosa Bud, the heroine of The Mystery of Edwin Drood, who we’re told drowned during a boating party; for the death of the prostituted Nancy in Oliver Twist; for the minor character who spontaneously combusts in Bleak House; for the virtuous factory worker Stephen Blackpool’s fatal plunge down a hole in Hard Times. Fire and collapsing buildings feature in a number of Dickens’s fictions, most notably in Little Dorrit (1855–7),where the hero’s childhood home creaks ominously throughout the novel, until it eventually falls in on itself.

In his biography, Forster makes all kinds of assertions about which people or experiences inspired Dickens’s writing. Mr Micawber, he tells us, is based on Charles’s father; Mrs Nickleby his mother. None of these stories from Chatham, despite being possible inspiration for a number of memorable incidents in Dickens’s novels, make it into Forster’s book.

Why?

I’ve already mentioned that the record keeping at the Navy Pay Office was haphazard. The accounts were an absolute mess. This wasn’t unusual. At the time, bookkeeping was an emerging art and checks were ad hoc. None of the branches of the British armed forces seem to have kept a very close eye on their finances. The various Pay Offices were filled with bags of coins, wads of banknotes and chests packed with cash, opening up hundreds of small cheats and ways to game the system. Unofficial ‘borrowing’ seems even to have been tolerated to some extent. In short, the temptations were vast and quite a few people succumbed.

One of them, as has been known for years, was Charles Dickens’s grandfather Charles Barrow, who in 1810, two years before the author’s birth, was discovered to have misappropriated between £5,000 and £6,000 (over £400,000 in today’s money).44 But he was small fry compared with some of the other offenders, in more powerful positions. When the accounts of the Paymaster of Marines could finally be made sense of, they showed a deficit of £280,000 (the equivalent of a good £18 million) – and that was just up to the year 1804. So though a Writ of Extent was issued against Barrow, permitting the state to seize what little of his property there was to seize, and a ‘criminal information’ was filed against him, proceedings of ‘outlawry’ were still being pursued two years later, in 1812.45 By then he seems to have put himself out of harm’s way; the report states he had ‘absconded’ and he wound up living in Douglas, on the Isle of Man, where he may have had relations, and where he was safe from the reach of the English criminal or civil courts.46 He died there in 1826.47 It’s uncertain whether he ever met his grandson and equally uncertain whether Charles knew what it was his grandfather had done or had any idea why he was in exile. The subject can hardly have been an easy one, however, nor one to which the family cared to allude very often.

In spite of Charles Barrow’s disgrace, both his son, Thomas Barrow, and his son-in-law, John Dickens, continued to be employed by the Navy Pay Office. Mud sticks, though. Neither man’s career exactly took off. And on New Year’s Day 1822, a few weeks before Charles turned ten, scandal reared its head again – and, for a second time, the Dickens family were touched by it.

Britain was six years into the peace but – as was despairingly discussed in parliament – the various dockyards were proving even more expensive to run than they had been at the height of the war in 1813.48 A wide-ranging audit was instituted to work out where the money was going.

One of the places the auditors visited was the Navy Pay Office at Chatham, where accounting shortfalls had been building up. John Dickens’s boss, an employee of many decades’ standing called John Slade, welcomed them in, ostensibly calm. He indicated that he had the money that was wanting, and that they should begin to count some of it out from the bags on his desk. While they were doing so he left the building and was soon discovered dead, having shot himself. It turned out that about £8,000 was missing.

On the surface it’s a juicy story – and, we might think, strikingly similar to the scene in Martin Chuzzlewit, written twenty years later, in which the vicious, thuggish Jonas Chuzzlewit, about to be arrested for murder, offers the arresting officer a bag of money for ‘only five minutes in the next room’, eventually committing suicide. Though the information about Slade was widely reported at the time, it has only recently attracted scholarly attention and discussion has so far been limited.49

We have a full account of both the death and the fraud, as not only was a Sheriff’s Court of Inquiry held locally in order to work out what property the dead man had left, but Slade’s sureties attempted to wriggle out of paying their bond, meaning that we have the records of the subsequent court case and, in the National Archives, the papers collected by a lawyer tasked with looking into the affair.50 Taken together, the picture they paint is one of temptation, thoroughgoing incompetence and perhaps also widespread corruption. Slade had previously lost money in a bank collapse, a financial vulnerability which seemed to have attracted neither attention nor concern. Reports suggest that a sum of £10,000 or more ‘cash in hand’ was regularly delivered to the building he was in charge of.51 Witnesses from other departments related how, on more than one occasion, they had discovered that packets of banknotes made up in the Chatham pay office were ‘light’ – a bundle of what was meant to be £10 notes, say, bulked out with lower denominations. The only person these irregularities were reported to was Slade himself; no record was made at the time, no concerns raised with superiors up in London.52

John Dickens was by all accounts, and in spite of his manifold failures as a father, a very affable man; popular, clubbable. If there were rumours circulating in the dockyard he was likely to have heard them. Given how small the Pay Office at Chatham was – Slade’s deputy described it as ‘a suite of 3 rooms’ opening into each other – it’s difficult to believe that neither John nor his colleagues noticed anything was amiss.53

Three more children had joined the Dickens family during their time in Chatham. Harriet, born in 1818, was followed by two more sons, Frederick in 1820 and another Alfred in 1822.54 Most biographers suggest Harriet died as a baby, not unreasonably since the silence surrounding her is almost total; however, she survived babyhood – indeed, survived the dangerous years of early childhood. Though her famous brother seems not to have mentioned the fact to his biographer, Harriet turns out to have lived on until August 1827, to the age of nearly nine, after the family had moved to London, after the debtors’ prison.55 I’ll talk more about her death later on. Here I want to try – perforce tentatively – to flesh out her life a little.

Forster knew Dickens for over three decades, and knew his parents and siblings too. If the subject of Harriet ever came up in a conversation that he was privy to, it looks like it was rapidly shut down again – or surely he would have signposted readers of his biography to the parallels between this loss and several which appear in Dickens’s fiction. At this point in time, by far the likeliest reason for people to avoid referring to a legitimate relation was that the individual in question had some form of additional need, a physical or mental impairment. It wouldn’t matter very much whether it was a serious developmental disorder or, say, deafness caused by childhood measles; the silence descended like a shutter either way.

The first Alfred Dickens had died of ‘water on the brain’ in Portsmouth in 1814, a condition which can be associated with neural tube defects (such as spina bifida, for example). With one child affected, there is a high chance of recurrence in subsequent offspring. We know that Charles’s nephew Henry Burnett, his sister Fanny’s son, had a disability. Born in 1839, Henry is sometimes considered to be the inspiration for the frail, lame Tiny Tim in A Christmas Carol (1843) and for Dickens’s other, subsequent portrayals of disabled characters. But memories of Harriet could be in the mix as well, and might have been influencing Dickens’s writing from even earlier in his career. Both Nicholas Nickleby (1838–9) and Barnaby Rudge (1841) give prominent roles to characters with additional needs, talking at some length about the challenges they face and their particular vulnerabilities – and the former was finished before Henry Burnett was even born.

There is a real possibility, then, that Harriet’s health may have been poor for years, and that she may have required extensive medical care. And it’s definite that, whether from extravagance or unavoidable expense, or both, the family’s finances started to become increasingly convoluted around this time. John Dickens was awarded a long-service pay increase while he was in Chatham. But he also started on the downward spiral which would lead, in 1824, to his being imprisoned for debt. He borrowed money left and right, including from a James Milbourne in London and from former neighbours in Chatham. He also seems, as Michael Allen has revealed, to have borrowed from his boss John Slade, the debt noted in a report connected to Slade’s death, dated 10 January 1822.56

This is the only place John Dickens’s name appears in the whole, well-documented set of events surrounding the fraud in the small office he’d been working in for years. He’s not mentioned as a witness at the court of inquiry, nor as an onlooker; nor were his evidence or his opinion, or his recollections, sought for the civil case against Slade’s sureties. The subject of his debt to Slade doesn’t seem to have been followed up either, though the money might have rightly been the government’s and recoverable.

Michael Allen is confident that John Dickens was recalled to the capital in June 1822.57 Certainly a reference book published at the end of 1822 puts him back in London, and in a different department of the Navy Pay Office, one which dealt with seamen’s wills rather than wages, and still as one of the ‘junior clerks’.58 The move looks like an effective demotion, though in the context of the restructuring that was going on, and John’s retirement a few years later on the grounds of ill health, it needn’t necessarily have been one. But some whitewashing of events in Chatham definitely did go on. For one thing, Slade was christened, or re-christened, after his death, enabling him to be given a Christian burial and, though attitudes to suicide had begun to soften, this was by no means standard practice.59

Given the apparent conspiracy of silence over Slade’s carelessness with the money entrusted to him over several years, and the coincidence of timing, one possible explanation for John Dickens’s move to London, and to a different department, is that he informed on Slade in the hope of avoiding repaying the money he’d borrowed. Another possibility we can’t discount is that he had been tempted himself. With a – probably – sick child, with such inadequate oversight, knowing how much his father-in-law had managed to get away with before he was found out, it is conceivable. In that case Slade might have discovered that someone else had their fingers in the till, and the so-called debt John Dickens owed might not have been a debt at all, but a repayment, or even a form of blackmail. Given the connection to the Crewe family, John Dickens’s superiors might just about have been willing to cut him some slack in any of these circumstances – while removing him from the easy temptations of the wages office, and barring him from any more senior roles.

This is, of course, speculation, but the sequence of events, when combined with Charles Dickens’s curious reluctance to mention his links to Chatham, is inescapably suspicious. And even if John Dickens hadn’t done anything wrong, there’s surely a chance that his son – an impressionable, fanciful little writer-in-waiting – may well have worried that he had, and carried that worry on into adulthood.

Dickens is, in his novels and stories, fascinated by fraud, yet he is also sympathetic to small-scale fraudsters in a way that he is not to more ambitious ones. In David Copperfield, the creeping, ‘’umble’ Uriah Heep ends up in prison for attempting to defraud the Bank of England; in Dombey and Son (1846–8), the corrupt manager Carker has an unfortunate encounter with a train after taking down the titular firm. But Carker’s brother, who previously defrauded the same firm, is treated with tenderness by the author, permitted, by means of an extended metaphor, to make his smaller but repeated embezzling sound not only almost accidental but something that happened to a poor unfortunate victim who ‘missed his footing […] slipped a little and a little lower […] and went on stumbling still, until he fell headlong and found himself below a shattered man’. The name of this small-scale fraudster is, incidentally – but perhaps not coincidentally – John.

I mentioned earlier that Chatham appears, unnamed but identifiable, in a court scene in A Tale of Two Cities. The evidence which relates to Chatham is given by a character going by the name of John Barsad, who, it’s suggested, is ‘in regular government pay and employment, to lay traps’.60 It emerges in cross-examination that Barsad has not only been ‘in a debtors’ prison’, but has ‘borrow[ed] money of the prisoner’ he accuses and not paid him back. We might think the surname, so close to ‘bastard’, indicates a strength of emotion that even the most passionate, imaginatively engaged writer doesn’t always feel about their characters. And then there’s the identical place, the same first name, the similarity of having been imprisoned for debt and of the fact of owing money to the accused; if this is nothing to do with John Dickens, then it is quite the coincidence.

Coincidences do happen. Dickens made full use of them in his fiction and in real life they happen all the time. Dickens’s suspicions of his father, if he nourished them, are, of course, not proof of anything.

But he may well have nourished them. At ten, going to a local school in a compact, highly interconnected town, he must have heard some garbled version of the Pay Office scandal from his schoolmates and it’s possible that he was left alone in Chatham to brood on it. Only possible, however. As usual with Dickens’s childhood, if we’re looking for certainty we have to fall back on archival records.

John Dickens was definitely in Chatham on 11 December 1821 – the day that he and his wife witnessed the marriage of her widowed sister, Mary Allen.61 Mary’s new husband was called Matthew Lamert, a forces surgeon who had children from a previous marriage and who was soon afterwards posted to Ireland.62 Mary went with him and was dead before they had celebrated their first wedding anniversary, ‘in child bed, of twins’.63 But that was far from the end of the connection between the Dickens and Lamert families.

We know from the announcement of the birth of baby Alfred, in March 1822, and the record of his baptism at the dockyard church in the April that Mrs Dickens, at least, must have been in Chatham until then, but when she and the children moved to London we don’t know. In one essay Dickens relates leaving his boyhood home alone, ‘packed’ into the stagecoach in ‘damp straw’, and ‘forwarded, carriage paid, to the Cross Keys, Wood-street, Cheapside, London’. There was, he writes, ‘no other inside passenger’ and he was left to eat his ‘sandwiches in solitariness and dreariness, and it rained hard all the way’.64

This story supports another, which is that Charles boarded for a time with his Chatham schoolmaster, William Giles, the rest of the family having moved away without him. The source is Giles’s sister, who also lived in Chatham in the early 1820s and knew the Dickens family; there’s no reason to doubt her.65 Forster, though, relates an affecting vignette about Dickens’s head teacher the ‘night before we came away’ ‘flitting in among the packing-cases to give me […] a keepsake’, a book by the eighteenth-century writer Oliver Goldsmith. This sounds more as if Charles went at the same time as the rest of his family.66 We have letters in which Dickens refers to Giles with, seemingly, great fondness – though also one in which he appears rather offended with his old teacher.67 If he did board, it was probably during the second half of 1822, and perhaps on into 1823. This doesn’t exactly tally with the story that has him living in Chatham for six or seven years, which would take us into 1824, but then, as I’ve said before, none of the stories about Dickens’s early life tally exactly.

Let’s keep the mental picture of Charles as a lonely little boy in the coach. Even if it isn’t true, this has proved perennially popular with biographers. It’s attractive. It not only looks familiar, it fits into what we know is coming. It’s just like in the novels. David Copperfield travels alone by ‘stage-cutch’ from Suffolk to London, the journey taking a day and a night. In Bleak House,Esther Summerson is left to make her way to school all on her own, on the Reading stagecoach. Before leaving, she buries her doll in the garden of the house she grew up in, recognising that her childish days are over. Stagecoaches come to represent, in Dickens’s fiction, not just a separation from family and friends, but a breaking with the past which cannot be undone or reversed, the end of childhood innocence and the beginning of adulthood. From the point that they clamber up into the vehicle, Dickens’s characters are swept into the bewildering currents of the grown-up world.

So: a boy, certainly not a large one and no more than half-educated, one whose home had vanished, whose grandparents and aunt had disappeared overseas, who might have been aware of the existence of rumours and secrets and money trouble but was not yet able to comprehend any of them fully. A boy who, with an older sister and four younger siblings, one possibly with additional needs, was unlikely to have been the chief focus of his parents’ attention. A boy whose family had left scandal behind them and had financial disaster waiting not so far ahead.

Many people are lucky enough to have firm and fond memories of childhood. They don’t need to invent. Dickens did.

Notes

10.See, for example, the ‘Author’s Preface’ to Nicholas Nickleby, where Dickens talks of having been ‘a not very robust child, sitting in bye-places near Rochester Castle’; letter to Angela Burdett Coutts, 23 October 1850 (‘I have an idea of wandering somewhere for a day or two – to Rochester, I think, where I was a small boy –’).

11.John Forster, The Life of Charles Dickens, volume 1, page 3.

12.‘My father holding in those days a situation under Government in the Navy Pay Office, which called him in the discharge of his duty to different places, I came to London, a child of two years old, left it again at six, and then left it again for another Sea Port town – Chatham – where I remained some six or seven years, and then came back to London with my parents and half a dozen brothers and sisters, whereof I was second in seniority.’ Letter to J.H. Kuenzel, transcript, date conjectured to be 1838.

13.See, for example, Chapter 10 of Robert Langton, The Childhood and Youth of Charles Dickens (1883).

14.See marriage record for ‘William Dickens’ and ‘Elizabeth Ball’, St George’s Hanover Square, 1781 and burial record for William Dickens, also at St George’s, dated 18 October 1785. ‘Jno. Dickens’, son of ‘Wm.’ and ‘Elizth.’, was baptised on 20 November 1785 at St Marylebone alongside his older brother William. John’s birthdate is given as 21 August of the same year. This indicates John was not a posthumous child, which has sometimes been suggested. We can’t necessarily assign significance to the fact that the boys were baptised only after their father’s death. Accessed via Ancestry (https://www.ancestry.co.uk). All documents located through Ancestry accessed 12–15 June 2023, transcriptions author’s own.

15.Charles Barrow belonged to the firm of Culliford, Rolfe & Barrow, piano manufacturers. His wife, Charles Dickens’s maternal grandmother, was a Culliford by birth. Occasionally antique instruments made by the firm come up for sale.

16.It’s sometimes suggested that John got the job through the patronage of his mother’s employer, the MP John Crewe. For more information on the relationship between the families, see Michael Allen, ‘The Dickens/Crewe connection’, Dickens Quarterly, Vol. 5, No. 4 (December 1988), page 175 ff.

17.John Dickens and T.C. Barrow are both listed as ‘extra clerks’ in the Navy Pay Office on page 159 of The Royal Kalendar or Complete and Correct Annual Register for England, Scotland, Ireland, and America, for the Year 1807. The information in this would have been correct for the year 1806.

18.‘The Pay Branch, to pay seamen’s wages and the yards. The chief person emoyed [sic] in this branch, has a salary of 660l., and is called deputy-paymaster. The residue of the business is committed to the officers next mentioned, and with their places their salaries are specified … the one at Sheerness paid “330l”, the one at Chatham, “440l.” … In the office in London, the first clerk, who superintends the making up of accounts, has 495l; and there are several other clerks, with salaries from 275l. to 101l. … The Inspector’s Branch, to inspect and examine all wills and powers of attorney, and to see that they are duly executed, according to act of parliament, and to grant certificates as an authority for the payment of wages due to the parties’, John Adolphus, The Political State of the British empire, Vol. 2 (Cadell and Davies, 1818), page 249.

19.In the Royal Kalendar, for example, a directory of public employees published annually, the names of a large proportion of Navy Pay Office employees are listed, down to the housekeeper and messengers. Readers are told the sub-departments to which each person belongs, and, in the early years, what they are all paid, but not – for the more junior of the employees at least – where they are based.

20.See the sales particulars for ‘Mile-End Terrace’, given in the Hampshire Telegraph, 29 June 1812, page 3. It is stated that the house was ‘late in the occupation of Mr. John Dickins’.

21.Statesman, 1 November 1810, page 4 and Hampshire Telegraph, 5 November 1810, page 3; Morning Post, 10 February 1812, page 4 and Sun, 10 February 1812, page 4; London Courier and Evening Gazette, 9 September 1814, page 4.

22.Morning Chronicle, 25 April 1816, page 3.