there in another way, too. When he had joined the staff, the Sun was already in trouble. The journalists were at war with the proprietor, and had called a strike. And Dickens, a twenty-year-old tyro reporter, was their chief negotiator. ‘I well remember noticing at this dread time, standing on the staircase of the magnificent mansion we were lodged in,’ wrote another young Sun contributor, John Forster, who had been invited to a meeting of the disaffected workforce, ‘a young man of my own age whose keen animation of look would have arrested attention anywhere, and whose name, upon enquiry, I then for the first time heard.’ ‘Young Dickens’, he discovered, had conducted the recalcitrant reporters’ case ‘triumphantly’.
It is worth briefly freezing the frame at this moment, because it changed both men’s lives. Though it would be some years before they finally sat down at a table together, they sensed, at occasional accidental meetings over that time, that there was a profound sympathy between them; when they did sit down together, Forster immediately became Dickens’s most intimate associate, which he remained for some decades, his advice sought and taken on matters personal, professional and artistic. Many of Dickens’s books and much of his life would have been quite different without Forster’s influence. And Forster, despite his ingrained cussedness a natural hero-worshipper, found the great task of his life. The vision of Dickens on the staircase during the Sun strike was for him a coup de foudre, of which the final and greatest outcrop was the biography, which, flawed and partial though it sometimes is, gave the world Charles Dickens the man as we know him.
Dickens, meanwhile, once the strike was (temporarily) resolved, plunged back into the life of a newsman, c. 1833. It was a world without technology: neither telephones, telegrams, tape recorders, television, nor indeed trains. ‘I pursued the calling of a reporter under circumstances of which subsequent generations can form no adequate conception,’ he told a gathering of newsmen in the 1850s. ‘There never was anybody connected with newspapers, who in the same space of time had so much express and post-chaise experience as I.’ He was reporting on political life in Parliament, often in marathon sittings requiring relays of up to half a dozen reporters to cover them – ‘I have borne the House of Commons like a man and have yielded to no weakness except slumber in the House of Lords’ – and up and down the country on the hustings. He and his fellow reporter Thomas Beard were conveyed to these far-flung places in the bone-breaking, heart-stopping, life-threatening species of fast coach known as Tallyhos, Taglionis and Wonders: they leapt in and out of a variety of these vehicles, in a multitude of weather conditions, on their way to remote destinations across the British Isles, in order to record for posterity the deathless words of a class of human being for whom he increasingly found he had nothing but contempt. ‘Night after night,’ he wrote ventriloquially through the mouth of David Copperfield, ‘I recorded predictions that never came to pass, professions that were never fulfilled, explanations that were only meant to mystify.’ His allergy to Parliamentary democracy in action was quickly established, seeing it as a debased form of theatre: ‘I have been behind the scenes to know the worth of political life.’ He thought this disposition of his might be due to ‘some imperfect development of my organ of veneration’. He had seen elections, he said, and never once been impelled, no 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
