immediately, in his battles with publishers. He currently had three: Macrone for Sketches by Boz, Bentley for Oliver Twist, and Chapman and Hall for Pickwick; each of them at one time or another had to be put in their place. Macrone was simply and rather brutally bought off; Chapman and Hall were behaving impeccably for the time being, throwing a party to celebrate the anniversary of the first number of Pickwick, giving Dickens an ex gratia payment of £500 and striking a dozen apostle spoons with characters from the novel in place of the saints; but Bentley, with his oppressive contract, had to be punished. And Forster was the man to do it.
The truth is that, despite his unparalleled success – and there had been nothing like it, since, after the publication of Childe Harold, Bryon had woken up one morning to find himself famous – Dickens was by no means well-off. When Mary Hogarth died, he had paid for the funeral, and he needed to borrow money to do so. His publishers, by contrast, were becoming very rich on his back, and this disparity deeply rankled with him: it was an injustice and a humiliation, and he had had enough of both in his life. Forster acted brilliantly and cannily for Dickens. But his contribution did not end there. He had considerable critical heft in his own right. He was, after all, the literary editor of The Examiner, one of the most valuable and influential of the bewildering plethora of magazines of the period, and Dickens invited him, to an altogether surprising degree, to give his opinion on work in progress; what is more, he often took it. Dickens was notably lacking in preciousness about his work, but no one had a greater influence on it – often for better, occasionally for worse – than John Forster, who was the first reader of everything he wrote from now on, advising and arbitrating; in time he even did Dickens’s proof-reading for him, making small changes as he saw fit, almost without exception endorsed by Dickens. And Forster introduced him to his own friends, who, as we have seen, were a formidable bunch.
For Dickens, the prize of all these introductions was not a painter, nor a philosopher, it was Macready, the great tragedian, in the mid-1830s at the very height of his powers as a performer, and widely acknowledged as the man who had restored dignity to the British stage. Dickens had seen everything he had done in the last decade and idolized him, making a determined and ultimately successful effort to bind the actor to him with hoops of steel, at first somewhat to the alarm of the famously formal and reserved Macready. Long after abandoning his dreams of becoming an actor, Dickens remained slavishly devoted to the theatre in all its forms, even putting the somewhat spurious Memoirs of Grimaldi into shape, and providing a loving introduction to them out of nostalgia for the sublime clown whom he had twice seen as a little boy; to his amazement, the book proved a bestseller (not that he saw any of the profit from that, either). The fascination with the stage was not all one way: the stage was very interested in Dickens, too. A mere six months after the first number of Pickwick appeared, the first pirate adaptation was up and running under the title of The Peregrinations of Pickwick; more followed. William Moncrieff’s Sam Weller, cashing in on the accession of young Princess Victoria to the throne, featured a loyal chorus, during the singing of which a procession of ‘Heralds, Beefeaters, Guards etc’ are seen passing through Temple Bar to acclaim her. Dickens despaired at the violence done to his work before he had even finished it; but his affection for the theatre stopped him from preventing his friends the actors from trying to earn a decent crust at his expense; in the absence of copyright laws, it was virtually impossible to stop them, anyway. The Pickwick Papers had come to a conclusion, and Oliver Twist was in its sensational stride, exposing the criminal underbelly of London which he had studied so closely in his endless wanderings in the city. Twist was immediately, and wretchedly, adapted to the stage, too. Within the pages of the novel, he had written, more or less en passant, an artistic manifesto that frankly acknowledged his dues to the theatre: ‘It is the custom on the stage, in all good murderous melodramas, to present the tragic and the comic scenes, in as regular alternation, as the layers of red and white in a side of streaky, well-cured bacon.’ The streaky bacon method was to serve Dickens exceptionally well, right to the end. The readers of Twist were much more conscious of the tragic scenes, which presented almost unacceptably horrifying images of contemporary life. They were particularly shocking as the next characters to come from the pen of the dashing young author who had just enchanted the world with the great comedians that comprise the cast of The Pickwick Papers; his sudden descent into the underworld seemed like a betrayal of his affirmation in the closing pages of Pickwick already quoted:
There are dark shadows on the earth, but its lights are stronger in the contrast. Some men, like bats or owls, have better eyes for the darkness than for the light. We, who have no such optical powers, are better pleased to take our last parting look at the visionary companions of many solitary hours, when the brief sunshine of the world is blazing full upon them.
Night came very suddenly. Dickens’s readers needed to fasten their safety belts: it proved to be a bumpy trip. He was intent on deromanticizing the criminal world of which he had such vivid first-hand experience. The all-important thing for Dickens in writing the book was that IT IS TRUE, as he wrote (his capitals) in the Preface. He was describing ‘the very scum and refuse of the land’, determined to show that there was nothing glamorous about a criminal life: ‘What charms has it for the young and ill-disposed, what allurements for the most jolter-headed of juveniles? Here are no canterings on moonlit heaths, no merry-makings in the snuggest of all possible caverns.’ This was the life of the urban underbelly: ‘the cold, wet, shelterless midnight streets of London; the foul and frowzy dens, where vice is closely packed and lacks the room to turn; the haunts of hunger and disease, the shabby rags that scarcely hold together.’ He had been perilously close to immersion in that underworld. Oliver’s experience was for Dickens an all-too-probable vision of the horror that his own life might have sunk into. ‘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.’ He put all his understanding of the danger of the world into his lowlife characters, explicitly identifying them in his Preface: ‘Sikes is a thief, and Fagin a receiver of stolen goods; the boys are pickpockets, and the girl is a prostitute.’ The blunt use of the last word stopped Dickens’s readers dead in their tracks – no wonder Lord Melbourne tried to dissuade the young Queen Victoria (who ascended the throne the year the book started to appear) from reading a book about ‘Workhouses and Coffinmakers and pickpockets … I don’t like that low debasing style.’
Meanwhile, even as he was exposing the brutality both of so-called charity and of organized child crime in Twist to the astounded fascination of the nation, he determined to expose the iniquities of the Yorkshire boarding schools. He had been deeply moved by stories he had read of children abandoned to the untender mercies of these primitive educationalists, so he and Phiz travelled to the North under pseudonyms – how Dickens must have loved that masquerade – and did hair-raising field research. The following month, the first instalment of Nicholas Nickleby appeared, fuelled by the furious energy of Dickens’s rage at what he had seen; it was read by an astonishing 50,000 readers, and confirmed Dickens as the most compelling literary voice of his time. But the novel did not confine itself to social criticism; like Pickwick, its form was loose enough to embrace many aspects of British life on which Dickens wished to comment. En route, for no particular reason, he takes a sizeable detour into the world of the theatre, an astonished Nicholas finding himself recruited into a company of moth-eaten thespians under the titanic leadership of Vincent Crummles (a fate that would have been something of a dream come true for Dickens himself). These sections of the book are Dickens’s love letter to the profession, and it is entirely fitting that the novel, when it appeared in hard covers, was dedicated to Macready, a very different actor indeed from Mr Crummles.
It is worth stopping for a moment to consider what the theatre meant to Dickens, since it occupied such a central role in his imagination. Nicholas finds a kindness, a warmth and an inclusiveness in the theatre that contrasts favourably with almost every other stratum of society he encounters. It has room for dwarves and giants and women with beards, for those with one tiny skill and for the preternaturally gifted. It is, as he rightly calls it, ‘a little world’, but his stress is on the noun, not the adjective: he sees the theatre as an entire world, consistent within itself. Every transaction within its boundaries, on or off stage, is somehow theatrical (even the pony’s mother was ‘in the business’): it is life lived
