hard-core reporting. A voice – although an exuberantly polyphonic one – had been established. More startlingly, there was an authority, a perspective of passionate radicalism and a compassion extraordinary in such a young man: ‘such sights will make your heart ache,’ he wrote of what he had seen in the slums at St Giles’s, ‘always supposing that you are not a philosopher or a political economist’.
With the Sketches and now Pickwick, Boz, whose identity was still known only to his inner circle, was the toast of the town; speculation was rife as to who he might be. ‘We do not know the author,’ said a sharp anonymous review of Sketches in the Metropolitan Magazine, ‘but we should apprehend that he has, from the peculiar turn of his genius, been already a successful dramatist; if he has not, we can safely opine that he may be if he will.’ The review strongly recommends ‘this facetious work to the Americans … as it is a perfect picture of the morals, manners, habits of a great portion of English society … it would be needless for us to particularise any one of these admirable sketches, very many of which would form an admirable groundwork for light comedies and farces.’
He made another pseudonymous appearance early in 1836, this time in the guise of Timothy Sparks, in a pamphlet entitled ‘Sunday Under Three Heads’, in which he articulated his championship of people’s right to pleasure. There was a move afoot in Parliament to ban games on Sundays: Dickens came forth blazingly against it.
The wise and beneficent Creator who places men upon earth, requires that they shall perform the duties of that station of life to which they are called, and he can never intend that the more a man strives to discharge those duties, the more he shall be debarred from happiness and enjoyment. Let those who have six days in the week for all the world’s pleasures, appropriate the seventh to fasting and to gloom, either for their own sins or for those of other people, if they like to bewail them; but let those who employ their six days in a worthier manner, devote their seventh to a different purpose. Let divines set the example of true morality: preach it to their flocks in the morning, and dismiss them to enjoy true rest in the afternoon; and let them select for their text, and let Sunday legislators take for their motto, the words that fell from the lips of that Master whose precepts they misconstrue, and whose lessons they pervert – The Sabbath was made for man, and not man for the Sabbath.’
Dickens’s lack of enthusiasm for organized religion is bluntly expressed.
Look into your churches – diminished congregations and scanty attendance. People have grown sullen and obstinate, and are becoming disgusted with the faith which condemns them to such a day as this, once in every seven. And as you cannot make people religious by Act of Parliament, or force them to church by constables, they display their feeling by staying away. Turn into the streets [on a Sunday] and mark the rigid gloom that reigns over everything around … all is as melancholy and quiet as if a pestilence had fallen upon the city …
Dickens was increasingly becoming the Voice of the People.
Sales for Sketches by Boz continued brisk, and at last confident that he could support and maintain a family, he formally asked George Hogarth for Catherine’s hand and was warmly accepted; no Beadnell-like hesitations here. He was writing round the clock to complete the 12,000 words per instalment for Pickwick, plus doing other journalistic bits and pieces, which, to Catherine’s continuing dismay, kept him writing till two in the morning. By getting ahead of himself, he had managed to clear the decks for a week’s honeymoon, and lived only for the great day. ‘Here’s another day off the fortnight. Hurrah!’ he wrote to Kate.
In the event, the wedding, which took place just before Bozmania had fully got under way, was a subdued affair – surprisingly so, given the general level of excitement in his life at the time, and that nobody loved a party more than Charles Dickens, or more eagerly welcomed an opportunity to dress up. But the wedding, which took place on a Saturday morning at St Luke’s Church in Chelsea, the biggest – and tallest – parish church in London, with a nave that was then higher than that of any other London church apart from St Paul’s, was strikingly plain: only his family and Catherine’s were present (whether this was a first meeting for the two families is unclear). His friend and fellow reporter Thomas Beard was his best man; he had asked John Macrone, the publisher of Sketches by Boz, to do the job, but Macrone was married, which disqualified him; he came to the service nonetheless. A significant absentee was Elizabeth Dickens’s book-loving brother, Thomas, of whom Dickens was inordinately fond. He had written to this favourite uncle apologizing for not inviting him: it would be impossible, Dickens said, for him to do as a married man what he had been unable to do as a single one, that is, enter a house from which his father was banned. Obviously some drama, now submerged, lay behind this apology: John Dickens was no doubt held responsible for all the disasters and humiliations that had fallen on the family’s head. Perhaps it was complications of this sort that encouraged Dickens to dispatch the nuptial business as rapidly as possible. A small shadow, a certain complexity, seems to have fallen over what was supposed to be a day of joyous celebration. After the ceremony, they all repaired to the Hogarths’ just up the road, where, according to Fanny’s husband Henry, ‘a few common, pleasant things were said’ at the wedding breakfast, ‘healths were drunk with a very few words’ – how unDickensian it all is! – ‘and all seemed happy, not least Dickens and his young girlish wife’. The carriage took them to Chalk, in Kent, where their married life began, and then, a week later, they took up residence in Dickens’s rooms in Furnival’s Inn, which he had thoughtfully and thoroughly equipped for his new circumstances.
With them in the flat from the beginning was Catherine’s now sixteen-year-old sister Mary, who remained with them for a month after their return from Chalk. This is a little odd. Dickens’s 1950s biographer Edgar Johnson was of the opinion that the presence of Mary in their lives right at the very beginning got the marriage off to the worst possible start: the young couple never had time to get to know each other alone. G. K. Chesterton rather more forthrightly suggested that Dickens simply married the wrong sister. Mary adored her clever brother-in-law and was excited by his growing renown (‘his literary career gets more and more prosperous every day and he is courted and flattered on every side by the great folks of this great City – his time is so completely taken up that it is quite a favour for the Literary Gentlemen to get him to write for them’). Dickens was equally enchanted by her.
For all her starry-eyed admiration of her new brother-in-law, Mary was scarcely exaggerating the ever-increasing demands on his time; most of his day must have been spent at his desk toiling away. In July he had a read-through of The Village Coquettes, the operetta he had written with Hullah; meanwhile he was busy cultivating outlets for future novels, accepting commissions that there was little chance of his having the time to write; he even accepted a commission for a play, The Strange Gentleman, a little two-act farce adapted from one of the Boz sketches, which he knocked up more or less overnight. It opened to tepid notices; by the savage standards of the time, though, they were not unkind.
More impressively, he was approached by Richard Bentley to write not one but two novels. Bentley was the successful publisher of Harrison Ainsworth’s Rookwood and Edward Lytton’s The Last Days of Pompeii, both runaway bestsellers; after protracted negotiations, he and Dickens struck a deal. In addition, Dickens was contracted as editor of a new magazine, Bentley’s Miscellany. This was something he was very excited by. He was determined to acquire greater control over his work, and being the editor of a magazine seemed like a good way to do so. Indeed, it would have been, had he had absolute authority over one; but this was not Bentley’s intention at all, as Dickens very soon discovered. The young author had no experience whatever as an editor, and, to no one’s surprise but Dickens’s, Bentley meddled. This was not a good thing to do with Charles Dickens, even at the age of twenty-four; trouble was in the air from early on. As for the contract for the novels, that too proved problematic. One word lay at the heart of the increasingly bitter dissension between Dickens and Bentley: copyright. In the 1830s, publishers owned the copyright in the books on their lists. Writers had no continuing reward from their own work: once they had been paid, that was it. This was, naturally, enshrined
