on a salary of £80 a year, and stationed for the time being at Portsmouth, had married in 1809 Elizabeth, daughter of Thomas Barrow, and she bore him a family of eight children, Charles being the second. In the winter of 1814 the family moved from Portsea in the snow, as he remembered, to London, and lodged for a time near the Middlesex hospital. The country of the novelist’s childhood, however, was the kingdom of Kent, where the family was established in proximity to the dockyard at Chatham from 1816 to 1821. He looked upon himself in later years as a man of Kent, and his capital abode as that in Ordnance Terrace, or 18 St Mary’s Place, Chatham, amid surroundings classified in Mr Pickwick’s notes as “appearing” to be soldiers, sailors, Jews, chalk, shrimps, officers and dockyard men. He fell into a family the general tendency of which was to go down in the world, during one of its easier periods (John Dickens was now fifth clerk on £250 a year), and he always regarded himself as belonging by right to a comfortable, genteel, lower middle-class stratum of society. His mother taught him to read; to his father he appeared very early in the light of a young prodigy, and by him Charles was made to sit on a tall chair and warble popular ballads, or even to tell stories and anecdotes for the benefit of fellow-clerks in the office. John Dickens, however, had a small collection of books which were kept in a little room upstairs that led out of Charles’s own, and in this attic the boy found his true literary instructors in Roderick Random, Peregrine Pickle, Humphry Clinker, Tom Jones, The Vicar of Wakefield, Don Quixote, Gil Blas and Robinson Crusoe. The story of how he played at the characters in these books and sustained his idea of Roderick Random for a month at a stretch is picturesquely told in David Copperfield. Here as well as in his first and last books and in what many regard as his best, Great Expectations, Dickens returns with unabated fondness and mastery to the surroundings of his childhood. From seven to nine years he was at a school kept in Clover Lane, Chatham, by a Baptist minister named William Giles, who gave him Goldsmith’s Bee as a keepsake when the call to Somerset House necessitated the removal of the family from Rochester to a shabby house in Bayham Street, Camden Town. At the very moment when a consciousness of capacity was beginning to plump his youthful ambitions, the whole flattering dream vanished and left not a rack behind. Happiness and Chatham had been left behind together, and Charles was about to enter a school far sterner and also far more instructive than that in Clover Lane. The family income had been first decreased and then mortgaged; the creditors of the “prodigal father” would not give him time; John Dickens was consigned to the Marshalsea; Mrs Dickens started an “Educational Establishment” as a forlorn hope in Upper Gower Street; and Charles, who had helped his mother with the children, blacked the boots, carried things to the pawnshop and done other menial work, was now sent out to earn his own living as a young hand in a blacking warehouse, at Old Hungerford Stairs, on a salary of six shillings a week. He tied, trimmed and labelled blacking pots for over a year, dining off a saveloy and a slice of pudding, consorting with two very rough boys, Bob Fagin and Pol Green, and sleeping in an attic in Little College Street, Camden Town, in the house of Mrs Roylance (Pipchin), while on Sunday he spent the day with his parents in their comfortable prison, where they had the services of a “marchioness” imported from the Chatham workhouse.
Already consumed by ambition, proud, sensitive and on his dignity to an extent not uncommon among boys of talent, he felt his position keenly, and in later years worked himself up into a passion of self-pity in connexion with the “degradation” and “humiliation” of this episode. The two years of childish hardship which ate like iron into his soul were obviously of supreme importance in the growth of the novelist. Recollections of the streets and the prison and its purlieus supplied him with a store of literary material upon which he drew through all the years of his best activity. And the bitterness of such an experience was not prolonged sufficiently to become sour. From 1824 to 1826, having been rescued by a family quarrel and by a windfall in the shape of a legacy to his father, from the warehouse, he spent two years at an academy known as Wellington House, at the corner of Granby Street and the Hampstead Road (the lighter traits of which are reproduced in Salem House), and was there known as a merry and rather mischievous boy. Fortunately he learned nothing there to compromise the results of previous instruction. His father had now emerged from the Marshalsea and was seeking employment as a parliamentary reporter. A Gray’s Inn solicitor with whom he had had dealings was attracted by the bright, clever look of Charles, and took him into his office as a boy at a salary of thirteen and sixpence (rising to fifteen shillings) a week. He remained in Mr Blackmore’s office from May 1827 to November 1828, but he had lost none of his eager thirst for distinction, and spent all his spare time mastering Gurney’s shorthand and reading early and late at the British Museum. A more industrious apprentice in the lower grades of the literary profession has never been known, and the consciousness of opportunities used to the most splendid advantage can hardly have been absent from the man who was shortly to take his place at the head of it as if to the manner born. Lowten and Guppy, and Swiveller had been observed from this office lad’s stool; he was now greatly to widen his area of study as a reporter in Doctors’ Commons and various police courts, including Bow Street, working all day at law and much of the night at shorthand. Some one asked John Dickens, during the first eager period of curiosity as to the man behind “Pickwick,” where his son Charles was educated. “Well really,” said the prodigal father, “he may be said—haw—haw—to have educated himself.” He was one of the most rapid and accurate reporters in London when, at nineteen years of age, in 1831, he realized his immediate ambition and “entered the gallery” as parliamentary reporter to the True Sun. Later he was reporter to the Mirror of Parliament and then to the Morning Chronicle. Several of his earliest letters are concerned with his exploits as a reporter, and allude to the experiences he had, travelling fifteen miles an hour and being upset in almost every description of known vehicle in various parts of Britain between 1831 and 1836. The family was now living in Bentwick Street, Manchester Square, but John Dickens was still no infrequent inmate of the sponging-houses. With all the accessories of these places of entertainment his son had grown to be excessively familiar. Writing about 1832 to his school friend Tom Mitton, Dickens tells him that his father has been arrested at the suit of a wine firm, and begs him go over to Cursitor Street and see what can be done. On another occasion of a paternal disappearance he observes: “I own that his absence does not give me any great uneasiness, knowing how apt he is to get out of the way when anything goes wrong.” In yet another letter he asks for a loan of four shillings.
In the meanwhile, however, he had commenced author in a more creative sense by penning some sketches of contemporary London life, such as he had attempted in his school days in imitation of the sketches published in the London and other magazines of that day. The first of these appeared in the December number of the Old Monthly Magazine for 1833. By the following August, when the signature “Boz” was first given, five of these sketches had appeared. By the end of 1834 we find him settled in rooms in Furnival’s Inn, and a little later his salary on the Morning Chronicle was raised, owing to the intervention of one of its chiefs, George Hogarth, the father of (in addition to six sons) eight charming daughters, to one of whom, Catherine, Charles was engaged to be married before the year was out. Clearly as his career now seemed designated, he was at this time or a little before it coquetting very seriously with the stage: but circumstances were rapidly to determine another stage in his career. A year before Queen Victoria’s accession appeared in two volumes Sketches by Boz, Illustrative of Everyday Life and Everyday People. The book came from a prentice hand, but like the little tract on the Puritan abuse of the Sabbath entitled “Sunday under three Heads” which appeared a few months later, it contains in germ all, or almost all, the future Dickens. Glance at the headings of the pages. Here we have the Beadle and all connected with him, London streets, theatres, shows, the pawnshop, Doctors’ Commons, Christmas, Newgate, coaching, the
