The Final Recollections of Charles Dickens (2 page)

Book 1

CHAPTER 1

I am heavy company for myself some times, weary in spirit and weary in flesh. My skin has gone from smooth to wrinkled, my hair from brown to gray. There is a weakness on my left side, and I am insecure in my gait. One foot or the other is always lame. The numbness in my hands comes and goes, as does the fluttering of my heart.

It is the year of Our Lord one thousand eight hundred and seventy. I am in my fifty-ninth year and fear that I am ready for the final bed.

I am Dickens. I have been acclaimed as the most important literary figure of my time. My books have enjoyed immense popularity and are welcome in every home. People of all classes take me by the hand and thank me for the pleasure that my writing has given them. I have been celebrated and accorded recognition seldom given to any man until his tomb becomes his throne.

Common men and women see themselves in my writing. My creations have been objected to on the high moral ground that some of the characters of my mind—thieves, embezzlers, prostitutes—have been chosen from the most criminal and degraded of London's population. I take no heed of those who condemn me for that reason. Lessons of the purest good may be drawn from the vilest evil. The dregs of life can serve the purpose of a moral just as well as the cream. Reminders of the truth that lie festering in squalid streets are as instructive as the flaunting of morality in Saint James.

In moments of candor, I acknowledge that I have shortcomings. I am impatient. I have a tendency toward self-pity. I have been called selfish, self-righteous, and vain. I am all of those things.

Yet no man ever worked more passionately or gave more of himself to his craft than I have given to my writing.

Before my time, literature as a profession had no distinct status in England. I please myself with thinking that my success has opened the way for others and that I will leave the position of literary men better and more independent than I found it.

Now as I travel the circle of my life near to its completion, I remember a time when my faults were not yet confirmed, when I was young and more idealistic than I am today. When my step was lighter and my hair not so gray.

I write now of that time. For many of my days, I have been the most public of men. Yet I have kept the most important chapter of my life private and hidden from view.

I write now with the wisdom of a life fully lived and with the honesty of one who senses that the grave is near.

I write so that, when I pass from this world, the events and people that I am about to describe shall be remembered forever.

I was born in Portsea on 7 February 1812. England had yet to develop a social conscience. The rich lived in blessed isolation from the poor. A common language was their only bond.

My paternal grandparents were of the servant class. In 1805 their son, John Dickens, became a clerk in the Navy pay office. Four years later he married Elizabeth Barrow, whose father had been a lieutenant in the Navy. I was the second of eight children and first son born to John and Elizabeth Dickens.

My father was a genial man who spent beyond his means and was often in debt. He lived with a sense of entitlement unjustified by any measure. We changed residences frequently when I was a child to evade his creditors.

I was a shy boy and not at all robust, quickly run over in a crowd.

My early education and passion for books were gifts from my mother. She initiated me in the mysteries of the alphabet and taught me to read when I was young. As a child, I read in my bed every night until it grew too dark to see the letters. Nothing ordained that I should become a writer. It was simply in me.

When I was ten years old, reforms in the Admiralty necessitated that my father move the family to London.
The city has changed since then. It was far less ordered and secure when I was young than it is now. Worse, the science of sanitation was largely unknown. A deadly waterway that had once been a fine fresh river flowed through the heart of the city. Open sewers ran through the streets, their contents coming to rest in blockages or larger pools of vile-smelling filth. Many sewers poured directly into the Thames, from which the people of London took their water.

A cycle of disease pervaded the slums and emanated outward. The poor had yet to be taught to wash their bodies and clean their clothes. Lice were an accepted part of grooming. People lived so unwholesomely that rain water put into their crowded rooms on Saturday night would be corrupt on Sunday morning. Cholera, smallpox, scarlet fever, and typhus were common. Almost half of the deaths in London were of children under the age of ten.

Our home in London was a small tenement with a little back-garden. Yet even then, my father continued to live beyond his means, and debt became an even more pressing problem. The books I had treasured as a child were sold for a pittance to keep creditors at bay. The appearance at our door of merchants and other tradespeople demanding payment was constant in our lives.

My father borrowed two hundred pounds more, defaulted on that debt too, and failed to make required tax payments. In February 1824, he was arrested for defaulting on a forty-pound obligation owed to a local baker and was sent to Marshalsea prison.

Under the law of that time, my father could be released from prison once there was an adjudication
that our family possessions had a value of not more than twenty pounds. Meanwhile, as was the custom of those days, my mother and younger siblings went to live with him at Marshalsea.

It was an evil hour for me. A relative on my mother's side of the family who was familiar with our plight proposed that I go to work in a blacking warehouse, where black polish for boots was made from tallow, wax, soda ash, and oil and was put into pots for sale. The offer at a salary of six shillings a week was quickly accepted by my parents.

On a Monday morning, two days after my twelfth birthday, I went to the warehouse to begin my new life. It is a source of wonder to me that I was so easily cast into the cold hard world at such a young age by my mother and father.

The warehouse was a rotting large building that abutted the Thames. When I think of it now, the large gray rats swarming in the cellar and the dirt and decay of the place rise up before me as if I were there again.

Six days a week for ten hours each day, I sat at a table on the first floor. My work was to cover the pots filled with blacking, first with a piece of oil-paper and then with a piece of blue paper, then to tie them round with a string, and finally to clip the paper close and neat until it looked as smart as a pot of ointment from an apothecary's shop. When a certain number of pots had attained this perfection, I was to paste on each a printed label and then go on again with more pots.

As for lodging, I was handed over to an old lady who took children in to board. Two other boys and I slept in the same room. I provided for my own
breakfast of a penny loaf and a penny-worth of milk each morning. I kept another small loaf and cheese on a particular shelf in a particular cupboard to make my supper when I returned each night. I tried to make my money last the week by putting it in a drawer at the warehouse, wrapped into little parcels, each parcel containing the same amount and labeled with a different day of the week.

Some times, going to work in the morning, I could not resist the stale pastry put out at half-price on trays at the confectioners' doors. I would spend on pastry the money I should have kept for dinner and then go without dinner. When I had money enough, I would go to a coffee shop and have half a pint of coffee and a slice of bread and butter. When I had no money, I took a turn in Covent Garden market and stared at the pineapples.

I was both mother and father to myself. I received no advice, no encouragement, no consolation, no support from anyone. I kept my own counsel and did my work. I suffered in secret. I was miserably unhappy and considered my circumstances to be hopeless. My early dreams of growing up to be a learned distinguished man were crushed in my breast. My whole nature was penetrated with grief and humiliation and a feeling of vulnerability to the vagaries of chance. For all the care that was taken of me, I could easily have become a vagabond or robber. With a few more unfortunate twists, my fate would have been a never-ending downward spiral.

My father was released from Marshalsea after three months' imprisonment. At my mother's suggestion and with his consent, I remained at the blacking warehouse. Finally, after I had been there for more than a year, my
father decreed that I should return to school. It was not a matter of his caring about my condition so much as it was that his pride was wounded by my servitude.

I do not write in anger of that time in my life, for I know how all things worked together to make me what I am. But I can never forget, and shall never fully forgive, that my mother favoured my being sent back to the blacking warehouse. After I was freed, I could not endure to go near it. For many years, I would cross over to the opposite side of the road when passing by so as to avoid the smell of the cement they put upon the blacking corks, which reminded me of what I once was.

At age thirteen, with the blacking warehouse behind me, I enrolled in school at Wellington House Academy. But my father's financial condition remained precarious, and we moved frequently from one residence to another. Soon after my fifteenth birthday, he was unable to pay the cost of my lessons, and my formal schooling came to an end.

In 1827, I accepted a position as a writing clerk in the legal offices of Ellis and Blackmore. For the most part, I copied documents by hand and carried them to and from other attorneys' offices and various courts. It was tedious work for which I was paid ten shillings, six pence a week.

While at Ellis and Blackmore, I began learning shorthand with an eye toward becoming a stenographer. It was a difficult art. My waking hours, and also my sleep, were troubled by the changes in dots, which in one position meant one thing and in another position meant something entirely different. I was tormented by the vagaries played by circles and the unaccountable
consequences that resulted from marks like a fly's leg in a wrong place. Once I had groped my way through these difficulties, there appeared a procession of new horrors called arbitrary characters, which insisted that a scrawl like the beginning of a cobweb meant one thing and a sky-rocket stood for something else having nothing to do with the sky or a rocket.

I tamed the savage shorthand beast and left Ellis and Blackmore after eighteen months to work as a stenographer at Doctors' Commons. The name of the court was derived from the degree held by those who practiced there: doctors of civil law. It was a place where marriage licenses were given to lovesick couples and divorces were granted to husbands and wives who had grown sick of each other. It was also where wills were registered and certain small legal matters were adjudicated by trial.