Charles Dickens and the Great Theatre of the World

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What had happened was this: James Lamert, Charles’s theatre-going friend from Chatham, who had stayed with them for a while at Bayham Street (and indeed, tried to cheer the boy up there by making him a toy theatre), had – ‘in an evil hour for me, as I often bitterly thought,’ Dickens wrote in the letter he sent Forster – entered into business with a cousin who had set up a shoe-polish factory called Warren’s at 30 Hungerford Stairs on the Charing Cross Embankment. Lamert was made general manager of the factory, and in that capacity told the Dickenses, whom he knew to be in desperate straits, that he could offer Charles a reasonably paid job (six shillings – or was it seven? Dickens couldn’t quite remember) which would help relieve the pressure on the family finances. What did the job consist of?

Covering the pots of paste-blacking; first with a piece of oil-paper, and then with a piece of blue paper; to tie them round with string; and then to clip the paper close and neat, all round, until it looked as smart as a pot of ointment from an apothecary’s shop. When a certain number of grosses had attained this pitch of perfection, I was to paste on each a printed label; and then go on again with more pots.

He was to do this ten hours a day, six days a week.

The bright, imaginative eleven-year-old listened dumb-founded as his parents accepted the offer with alacrity. ‘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.’ He was, of course, writing after twenty-five years of anguished brooding; but why would he not have felt all those things at the time: the young prince thrown into a dungeon with the smiling co-operation of those on whose protection he should most have been able to rely? It is every child’s darkest nightmare. ‘It is wonderful to me,’ he wrote to Forster,

that 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 – a child of singular abilities, quick, eager, delicate, and soon hurt, bodily or mentally – to suggest that something might have been spared, as it certainly might have been, to place me at any common school.

The sense of the injustice of things – of life – was born in him, and it would only grow and grow.

He reported for work on 9 February, two days after his twelfth birthday. The blacking warehouse was the last house on the left at old Hungerford Stairs, more or less where Embankment tube station is today.

It was a crazy tumble-down old house, abutting of course on the river, and literally overrun with rats. Its wainscoted 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.

James Lamert was a decent man; all this had been done out of kindness. He must have had some sense of the outrage to the sensibilities of the boy – whose imaginative intensity he knew first-hand, at the theatre, in the rehearsal room, poring over the toy theatre he had built for him with his own hands – so he arranged for Charles to do his wretched repetitive work in the counting house, near his own desk, with a view of the coal-barges and the river. One of the lads from downstairs came up to show him the ropes; his name was Bob Fagin.

James Lamert had promised to give Charles school lessons during the lunch-hour, but inevitably this plan proved impractical; equally inevitably, little by little, Charles found himself working downstairs with his fellow labourers – Fagin, and an aggressive lad called Paul Green, who was assumed by everyone, including himself, to have been christened Poll. Charles got on perfectly well with the other boys, but his conduct and manners, he said, ‘put a space between us’. Thanks to his connection with James, and the deference of the adult workforce (who, heartbreakingly, he tried to entertain with ‘the results of some of the old readings which were fast perishing out of my mind’), he was generally referred to as ‘the young gentleman’; on one occasion, Poll rebelled against this usage, but was speedily put in his place by Bob Fagin. ‘No words can express the secret agony of my soul as I sunk into this companionship; compared these everyday 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.’ He felt, he said, buried alive. He told Forster all those years later that he found it almost impossible to write about

the sense I had of being utterly neglected and hopeless – of the shame I felt in my position – of the misery it was to my young heart to believe that, day by day, what I had learned and thought and delighted in, and raised my fancy and emulation up by, was passing away from me, never to be brought back any more.

His whole nature, he said, ‘was so penetrated with the grief and humiliation of such considerations that, even now – famous and caressed and happy – I often forget in my dreams that I have a dear wife and children – even that I am a man – and wander desolately back to that time of my life.’

He quickly understood that to show any of what he felt would be fatal. ‘I never said to man or boy how it was that I came to be there, or gave the least indication of being sorry that I was there.’ Instead, he did his work, soon becoming ‘at least as expeditious and as skilful with my hands as either of the other boys’. The child of singular abilities – quick, eager, delicate, and soon hurt, bodily or mentally – adapted brilliantly, rapidly learning the skills to survive this onslaught on his identity. He was learning to wear a mask, to conceal his inner life, to rise above his circumstances. He had always found acting fun; now he had to learn to do it in deadly earnest. This was character-building, in the most literal sense of the phrase. He was quite unsupported; he knew that he would have to do it all on his own. ‘No advice, no counsel, no encouragement, no consolation, no support, from anyone that I can call to mind, so help me God.’

As if to confirm this, his father – who had been so very little use to him since they had come to London – was now finally arrested for debt and taken to the sponging house, a sort of clearing house, prior to being formally committed to the Marshalsea Prison. During the hours when he was not tying pieces of string round pots of polish and sticking printed labels onto the jars, he ran errands for his father, delivered, as Forster says, ‘with swollen eyes and through shining tears’, until at last John Dickens, unable to raise a single penny of collateral, was committed to debtors’ jail, breaking his son’s heart, Dickens reports, with the words that later emerged immortally from Wilkins Micawber’s mouth: ‘The sun has set upon me forever.’ Elizabeth and the rest of the family prepared to join him in the Marshalsea. The household furniture was sold for the family benefit. A sale was held at Gower Street North. ‘My own little bed was so superciliously looked upon by a Power unknown to me, hazily called “the Trade”, that a brass coal-scuttle, a roasting jack, and a birdcage, were obliged to be put into it to make a Lot of it,’ he wrote thirty years later, ‘and then it went for a song. So I heard mentioned, and I wondered what song, and I thought what a dismal song it must have been to sing!’

Charles visited John at the Marshalsea, where he received some memorably expressed economic wisdom that also later emerged from the mouth of Micawber; soon enough, the family went to live with him there. Charles, the only breadwinner, did not. The boy – and one has to keep reminding oneself that he had only just turned twelve – was, for a small consideration, put into the care of Mrs Roylance, a not especially good-natured old lady in Little College Street in Camden Town, just round the corner from the Dickenses’ old residence in Bayham Street; two other children in similar circumstances were likewise accommodated. Charles thus walked to work every day from North London – about an hour – to the blacking warehouse, and then at the end of the day, he would walk another hour back to Camden Town. On Sundays he would fetch Fanny from the Royal Academy of Music in Hanover Square, and they would go to the prison together and spend the day there.

He was always hungry. He had to feed himself out of his six shillings a week: a pennyworth of milk and a cottage loaf for breakfast before he left Little College Street, and a small loaf and a quarter of a pound of cheese when he got back at night. The autobiographical fragment is filled with descriptions of meals dreamed of and food yearned after, with the occasional rash indulgence that left him short for the rest of the week, despite his hopeless attempts to divide his six shillings up, one for each day. He lounged about the streets, insufficiently and unsatisfactorily fed, he said. He bitterly missed family life, once so abundant, and loathed going home every night to what he called ‘a miserable blank’. He decided not to take it lying down, and confronted his father with it the following Sunday night, ‘so pathetically and with so many tears’ that, as Dickens, with or without irony, says, ‘his kind nature gave way’. Astonishingly, it seems never to have crossed John Dickens’s mind that Charles might be unhappy. It was the first time the boy had ever made any complaint about his situation, ‘and perhaps it opened up a little more than I intended’, he says. The lessons that he learned from this confrontation with John must have been deep: he saw that it was necessary to get his father to think about his child’s situation, to face up to it, to try to imagine what he was feeling. He was powerless, he knew, to act on his own behalf, but it was possible, he discovered, to shame his father into behaving like a parent.

A back-attic was quickly found for him in Lant Street in Southwark, round the corner from the Marshalsea, and from then on Charles had breakfast with the family every morning, and supper every night, in the prison. He notes that they seemed perfectly comfortable there, with their little orphan servant from the warehouse looking after them; indeed, he told his friend and future biographer Forster, they seemed rather more comfortable in prison than they had done for a long time out of it, and greatly enjoyed the society of John’s fellow prisoners. His mother had winkled their stories out of them, and entertained Charles and the rest of the family with recounting them, no doubt with her famously vivid mimicry. But the damage done to Charles was not so easily made good: his childhood nervous ailments returned in full force, causing him excruciating pain down one side; one night he had to be looked after all night by the manager of his lodgings in Lant Street. It happened again one day at the warehouse, and there it was Bob Fagin who tended him, easing the savage pain by slipping empty blacking-jars filled with hot water under him, as he rested on an improvised straw pallet. When Charles was well enough to go home, Bob insisted on accompanying him, but Dickens, unable to bear the shame of him knowing about the prison, walked up to the door of a rather posh house as Bob went his way and knocked on it, asking whether a Mr Robert Fagin was in.

His great consolation was to go down the Blackfriars Road of a Saturday night to seek out the travelling show-van, and ‘with a very motley assemblage’ marvel at the Fat-Pig, the Wild-Man and the Little-Lady; this carnival world of oddities and rejects now became part of his mental landscape. The little boy wandered all over the West End, buying himself a glass of ale, keenly studying life around him. ‘But for the mercy of God, I might easily have been, for any care that was taken of me, a little robber or a little vagabond.’ And then, quite suddenly, thanks to an unexpected legacy, John was released from the Marshalsea, and the family were reunited, all of them moving in to Mrs Roylance’s in Little College Street, where Charles had stayed before moving to Lant Street. A rare family outing took them all to the Royal Academy, to watch Fanny getting a prize. Charles must have had the afternoon off from the blacking warehouse, and the contrast between his situation and his sister’s overwhelmed him: ‘I could not bear to think of myself – beyond the reach of all such honourable emulation and success.’ He wept. ‘I prayed, when I went to bed that night, to be lifted out of the humiliation and neglect into which I had fallen.’ He notes that ‘there was no envy in this’; it simply sharpened the pain of his daily existence.

A new refinement had been added to his misery at Warren’s: the warehouse was moved from the dingy, dank obscurity of the Hungerford Stairs to Chandos Street in smart, bustling Covent Garden, just on the other side of the Strand; the boys were required ‘for the light’s sake’, to do their work in a room in which the window gave onto the street. The boys were very nimble at their task, and soon they found that a little audience would gather every day to watch them, like monkeys in a cage. One day, John Dickens happened to pass by and saw Charles on display. John said nothing at the time, but a short while later, he gave Charles a letter to deliver to James Lamert, who opened it in Charles’s presence, erupting so angrily when he read it that Charles cried ‘very much’ – partly because of the suddenness of the outburst, but mostly because Lamert was ‘violent’ about John. He told the boy, not unkindly, that he could no longer work there. The foreman said he was sure it was all for the best, and Charles went home, ‘with a relief so strange that it was like oppression’, no doubt because, just as he had not been able to understand why he had been sent to the blacking warehouse, he was scarcely more able to comprehend why he had been removed from it.

It was an extraordinary little piece of theatre that John Dickens had staged: instead of seeking Lamert out himself and airing his grievances with him, he sent the letter via Charles, knowing that Lamert would open it in front of the boy, become furious, and send him home. Perhaps the explanation lies in what happened next: Elizabeth went to Lamert the following day and asked him to take Charles back; this he agreed to do. No doubt John knew that Elizabeth would never approve of him going directly to Lamert and withdrawing Charles, so he had engineered a situation from which there could be no honourable retreat. And indeed, he dismissed Lamert’s placatory offer, loftily declaring that it was time for the boy to resume his schooling. The nightmare had come to an end, but Charles Dickens was changed utterly. As Forster magisterially remarks, though Dickens was deprived of teachers when he arrived in London ‘he was at another school already, not knowing it. The self-education forced upon him was teaching, all unconsciously as yet, what, for the future that awaited him, it most behooved him to know.’ It was indeed the perfect training to become the greatest novelist of his time. But at what price?

He had learned the lessons of solitude and self-dependency. He had known hunger, neglect, fear, loneliness, humiliation. He knew what it was to be powerless, and that to be free, he must acquire power. In the blacking warehouse he conceived, said Forster, a passionate resolve ‘not to be what circumstances were conspiring to make him’. He had taught himself to overcome his engulfing sense of worthlessness and failure, and to put on a brave face. He had suffered terrible injustice, he knew that. He had learned how to survive, by working hard, by not complaining, by making people laugh. He felt that he had been snatched from Eden, that what had seemed a natural state – his birthright, indeed – was a temporary benison that could not be depended upon. He was in mourning for this paradise he had lost, which as he turned it over and over in his mind became more and more important to him; it sustained him, but the memory of its loss was also a source of piercing anguish to him. To counter it, he had learned, at an astonishingly early age, how to nourish his inner life, by observing and responding to the world around him.

More than anything else, his twelve months’ hard labour at Warren’s Blacking Warehouse taught him that he could rely on no one but himself, not kindly, theatre-loving cousins, not father, not mother. James Lamert, though a well-intentioned fellow, filled with fantasy and fun, had so little understood Charles that he had proposed him for this brain-killing, soul-destroying labour. His father – though ‘as kind-hearted and generous a man as has ever lived in the world’ – had proved deeply unreliable in every important crisis Charles had faced. But with his mother, it was worse. ‘I never afterwards forgot, I never shall forget, I never can forget,’ he wrote to Forster, ‘that my mother was warm for my being sent back.’ That when he had at long last been reprieved, when the malign spell had finally been lifted from him, she should seek to cast him back into the scene of his misery, was incomprehensible to him. This betrayal – this utter inability to understand anything at all about him – permanently skewed his relationship with her, and rendered his attitude to women in general peculiarly complex. The relationship between him and his parents had lost its innocence, because now there was something unspeakable between them: ‘From that hour, until this, my father and my mother have been stricken dumb upon it. I have never heard the least allusion to it, however far off and remote, from either of them.’ But then, neither did he ever allude to it. He knew that to survive he must banish from his consciousness the period of pain and despair he had lived through, and that he must never mention it to anyone. The strength of mind, the self-control! – to batten down the hatches and forever lock off the sharp pain. ‘I have never, until I now impart it to this paper,’ he told Forster in a resoundingly theatrical image, ‘raised the curtain I then dropped.’ The denial came, of course, at a price. ‘All the danger he ran in bearing down and over-mastering the feeling, he did not know,’ said Forster. ‘A too great confidence in himself, a sense that everything was possible to the will that would make it so, laid occasionally upon him self-imposed burdens greater than might be borne by anyone with safety.’

He had dramatized his experience, establishing a dynamic that would thereafter underpin everything he ever wrote or did. ‘I do not write resentfully or angrily,’ he remarked, whether entirely honestly or not, of the autobiographical fragment he gave Forster, ‘for I know how these things have worked together to make me what I am.’ He was fourteen but he was already what he was. The spring was wound up, and it unwound with ever-increasing velocity over the next forty years.