Charles Dickens and the Great Theatre of the World. Simon Callow
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matter which party won, ‘to damage my hat by throwing it up in the air’. Perhaps, he concluded, he was ‘of a cold and insensible temperament, amounting to iciness, in such matters’.
His travels, nevertheless, had a profound effect on him, giving him a detailed insight into the state of the nation, affording him hilarious encounters with innkeepers and fellow travellers and helping to form his political views, which he found, on examination, to be uncompromisingly radical. He was recruited, in 1835, to the Morning Chronicle, the great liberal newspaper of the day, under the inspiring editorship of the trenchant Scot, John Black, who had formed a shrewdly favourable opinion of Dickens’s qualities. ‘Dear old Black!’ Dickens wrote of him, ‘My first out-and-out appreciator.’ As well as inculcating in him the principles of Reformism – these were the politically despairing days after the passage of the wretchedly inadequate Reform Bill of 1832 – Black, sensing Dickens’s potential, relieved him of the obligation of filling the dog days of the recess with the book reviewing or theatre criticism or attendance at public meetings with which other reporters were burdened, and encouraged him to write about what interested him – which turned out, of course, to be pretty well everything, though with a marked preference for the London he had obsessively scrutinized since being so rudely de-rusticated there, some ten years earlier.
Thus appeared, in 1834, only a month after he had started work as a reporter for the Chronicle, the first piece under the heading of Street Sketches, signed with the sparkish byline of Boz. He had already put the name (borrowed from his youngest brother, Moses, whose nickname it was) to some sketches written for the Monthly Magazine, which had a year before published his very first literary effort, ‘A Dinner at Poplar Walk’.
I had taken with fear and trembling, to authorship. I wrote a little story in secret, entitled ‘A Sunday out of Town’, which I dropped stealthily one evening at twilight into a dark letter box, in a dark office, up a dark court in Fleet Street. It appeared in all the glory of print in the December 1833 issue of The Monthly Magazine, its name transmogrified to ‘A Dinner at Poplar Walk’, on which occasion – how well I remember it! – I walked down to Westminster Hall, and turned into it for half-an-hour, because my eyes were so dimmed with joy and pride, that they could not bear the street, and were not fit to be seen there.
This pleasant, if perhaps overlong, sketch features the first dog in Dickens (Dickens does love a dog), the first eating scene (the food, alas, not described), and a little in-joke (the central figure works at Somerset House, where both Dickens’s father and disgraced grandfather Barrow had worked). It also appears to contain a mildly malicious portrait of a household that may bear some resemblance to that of the Beadnells, the in-laws that never were. Renamed ‘Mr Minns and His Cousin’, the piece re-appeared in book form in Sketches by Boz; but the pieces for the Chronicle speak in an altogether different voice, the immediately recognizable voice of Charles Dickens, playful, fiery, fantastical, witty, suddenly grave – verbal Hogarth, with more than a touch of Rowlandson. Piercing observation is joined to a rising and irrepressible hilarity; the mood is one of benevolence and affection for the foibles of the city, a tenderness towards ordinary life that could perhaps only have come from one who had once feared that he would be deprived of one. Even Parliament gets off the hook lightly. Everything is informed with the geniality and ease of the twenty-two-year-old writer rejoicing in his powers, communicating with apparently effortless conversational directness with his readers. Read as a collection, the enjoyment is immense, but the individual articles, as they came out, were as eagerly anticipated as letters from a delightful friend.
Their author was in understandably expansive mood. He rejoiced in the admiration of his peers, having earned the reputation, he playfully boasted, of being ‘the best and most rapid reporter ever known, it being generally acknowledged that I could do anything in that way under any sort of circumstances, and often did. (I daresay I am at this present writing the best shorthand writer in the world.)’ It had been done with exceptional hard work: he had gone at it with a determination ‘to overcome all the difficulties which fairly lifted me up into that newspaper life, and floated me away over a hundred men’s heads’. He had done it as if in preparation for his work as a creative writer: he had mastered the technical aspect of writing, strengthening his verbal muscle, so that when he started to use his imagination, he knew exactly how to express himself. And now he was beginning to be known by the general public, and to make decent money.
One of the first uses he put his money to was clothes. He favoured flashy waistcoats, jewellery on his fingers, a florid new hat and a rather handsome blue cloak with black velvet facings, which he threw over his shoulder à l’Espagnol. His theatricality was unfavourably animadverted on in some quarters; the phrase ‘not quite a gentleman’ was murmured in the clubs and the salons, as it would be for the rest of his life. But he wanted to celebrate his achievements – to celebrate himself. At the height of the session, working preposterous hours, he had been able to rake in up to an astonishing twenty-five guineas a week.
It was just as well that he was in funds, because in November 1834, John Dickens, for all his diligent work in the press gallery, had again lost touch with the facts of financial life, and found himself back in the sponging house. There he was visited by Charles. For Dickens, there was no heartbreak, as at the Marshalsea, no sense that the sun had set on his life. It was simply a question of how to clear up the mess: for all practical purposes, his father was now, already, his child. Dickens found out how much was owed, paid it off, located a new, cheaper flat for them (they had been living in genteel grandeur in Bentinck Street at the posher end of Marylebone), and rooms for himself and his brother Fred. It was not easily done – he had to borrow a little, and mortgaged his salary for two weeks – but it was done swiftly and effectively. ‘We have much more cause for cheerfulness than despondency, after all,’ he told his friend Beard, which might have been the motto for the first half of his career. There seems to have been no sentimentality about it, no reproaches; he just got on with it, as he had just got on with the rest of his life. He had taken them in hand, as he had taken his own life in hand. The disadvantage of being proved so effective was that he was now expected to provide the same service whenever the need arose, and not only for his feckless father but for all the rest of the family who, with the exception of Fanny, seem to have inherited the financially incompetent genes that nature had happily withheld from Dickens himself.
Meanwhile, his career as a writer took another step forward. In January of 1835, the Morning Chronicle launched an evening edition, under the editorship of the Chronicle’s music critic, George Hogarth, another Scot, who invited Dickens to contribute more of the Street Sketches to the new paper. Dickens proposed that they should be a series, which is what they became, twenty of them appearing over the following eight months, establishing him – or rather, Boz – ever more clearly in the public mind. The two men got on well, Dickens being particularly excited by Hogarth’s close friendship with his hero, Walter Scott, who had died only three years before, in circumstances that always haunted Dickens: desperately writing himself to an early grave to repay his debts, a fate Dickens determined at all costs to avoid. Hogarth had been Scott’s lawyer, helping him to recover from his financial crash, though he was not so successful in avoiding financial disaster for himself, suffering a total collapse of his affairs not once but twice. Once he moved out of the law and into journalism, he moved onto a more even keel. He invited Dickens to his house in semi-rural Fulham, and Charles soon became a familiar presence there, delighting in the company of Hogarth’s three daughters, little suspecting that the girls – Georgina, aged six, Mary, fourteen, and Catherine, nineteen – would between them and in very different ways become absolutely central to his life.
He found himself strongly attracted to Catherine, who had Maria’s large sleepy eyes, but was much less pert and altogether more straightforward in her response to him. Before long, she and Charles became engaged. There was no resistance whatever from Catherine’s parents: Dickens was hard-working, and a coming man, with admirable prospects, well able to provide for a family. Indeed, so hard was he working, he barely had time for his courtship. Half a century later, Georgina recollected that, during that period, when she was a very young girl, Dickens had once burst through the drawing-room doors in a sailor outfit, performed a vigorous hornpipe, swiftly disappeared, then immediately afterwards come in through the front door in his normal street clothes. The story suggests a certain hectic quality to his wooing, although