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 it might equally suggest a desperation to create a little excitement in the somewhat placid Hogarth domestic environment. No doubt to Dickens it was the most normal thing in the world to do: dressing up and disguising himself was as natural to him as breathing.
However much her father might approve of the dazzling young wordsmith, Kate was not best pleased to find out quite how much of his time Charles gave over to his work, and she let him know it. She had no sympathy whatsoever for his pleas of ‘furteeg’. She was not mercurial or scornful, like Maria; instead she was prone to long sulks and being – as she spelled it in her letters – ‘coss’ with him. But Dickens was having none of it. He had been Maria’s slave: he would, in the kindest, nicest possible, way, be Kate’s master. ‘If a feeling of you know not what – a capricious restlessness of you can’t tell what, and a desire to tease, you don’t know why, give rise to it – overcome it; it will never make you more amiable, I more fond, or either of us more happy.’ Dickens was just four years older than Kate, but already he was writing to her as if he were her father. Kate wrote back asking him to ‘love her once more’ – and he replies briskly, if unromantically, ‘I have never ceased to love you for one moment since I knew you; nor shall I.’ When she persists, he uses the ultimate threat: if she doesn’t like things the way they are, or him the way he is, ‘I will not miss you lightly, but I shall need no second warning.’ This masterful tone of his might have seemed quite sexy to Kate: there seems no doubt that he desired her. When he isn’t disciplining her, his letters are filled with endearments: Dearest Katie, Dearest Love, Dearest Darling Pig, My Dearest Life, as often as not signed off with the lavish addition of 990,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 kisses.
It is impossible to believe that a young man of Dickens’s intense vitality was not highly charged sexually. We know virtually nothing of his amorous activity outside of his fertile marriage and the liaison with Ellen Ternan during his final decade (and, in truth, we know very little about that), but he must, by now, at the age of twenty-three, have been in a sexually explosive state. Moreover, he wanted a family, to give to children of his own the things he felt he had lacked: stability, continuity, a sense of nurture. But whether he actually saw Catherine for herself, as she was, is doubtful. He was very turned on by her, and greatly enjoyed his involvement in the Hogarth family – a much better, stabler model than his own – and their nice house in leafy Fulham. But had he worked out what he wanted from a woman, apart from hearth and home and abundant sex? Did he ever?
Alongside his marital aspirations, the rest of his life was whirling along, professionally and socially. He was now mixing with the young bloods of his day. In particular, he had become friendly with William Harrison Ainsworth, wildly successful author of the highwayman novel Rookwood and contributor to the politically provocative Fraser’s Magazine. Ainsworth was some seven years Dickens’s elder, and a brilliant and influential figure on the social scene, witty, elegant, tastefully dandyish. After scandalously leaving his wife and three children, he established a bachelor salon at his rooms at Kensal Lodge, Harrow Road, in North West London, which became the meeting-place of a wide circle of young bloods – Daniel Maclise, the brilliant young Irish painter with a fascination for the theatre, on the brink of becoming a very young Royal Academician; the novelist and political amateur Benjamin Disraeli (his dandyism a rival to Ainsworth’s); the best-selling novelist and Member of Parliament, Edward Bulwer-Lytton; and, considerably the oldest of them all, the political satirist, cartoonist and wild man, George Cruikshank. This was Dickens’s first exposure to his leading contemporaries. His presence there was something of a coup for Ainsworth as a social impresario. Everyone wanted to meet Boz. He barely had his foot on the bottom rung of the literary ladder, but Ainsworth’s brilliant guests welcomed him, exhilarated by his energy and entertained by his mimicry. Apart from Disraeli, with whom he was ill at ease both personally and politically, these men all became his friends and collaborators; and it was here that he met his first publisher.
Being Dickens’s publisher, as many people were to discover over the years, was not a restful experience, but the twenty-six-year-old John Macrone, about to reissue Ainsworth’s bestseller Rookwood, foresaw no complications when he suggested to Boz that his Sketches might make a nice book, and that perhaps his friend Mr Cruikshank sitting over there on the other side of the table might be just the man to provide some illustrations for it; perhaps, too, Dickens might like to consider writing a three-volume novel? Well, of course he might, and in short order contracts were signed, one assigning to Macrone the copyright in Sketches by Boz, which appeared soon after, and swept all before it, and the other commissioning a novel, Gabriel Vardon, the Locksmith of London, which took a very long time indeed to see the light of day, and pleased almost no one when it finally did.
Things were now happening for Dickens with extraordinary rapidity. More sketches, under a different pseudonym (Tibbs), were appearing weekly in Bell’s Life in London; he continued reporting up and down the country for the Morning Chronicle; and he was working on the libretto
