house into which the Dickenses moved when they first went to Chatham was at 2 Ordnance Terrace; it was commodious – on three floors – but only just big enough to hold the now swarming family, to which over the next two years were added three more children, Letitia, Harriet and Frederick, joining Fanny and Charles, Elizabeth and John, as well as the two servants and Aunt Fanny. The house commanded ‘beautiful’ views across the surrounding countryside, promised the auction announcement, taking in the river, and, just beyond, the noble fourteenth-century spire of Rochester Cathedral; it had its own garden and yard. It was, the announcement proclaimed, ‘fit for a genteel family’, which is how Charles and the rest of the family never ceased to think of themselves, whatever adverse circumstances life might throw up.
Some of those circumstances – brought about by a combination of his father’s fecklessness and the peculiar salary structure of employees of the Naval Pay Office – caused them to move, in May 1821, when Charles was nine. The new house, at St Mary’s Place, was known as The Brook; it was a little smaller, and there was no beautiful view any more; but he was so utterly caught up with his imaginative life that the loss of a room here or a view there would scarcely have registered with him. Certainly he would have known nothing of his father’s inexorable accumulation of debt. Most often he was to be found in the room where his father’s books were kept, either reading them for the twentieth time, or acting out scenes from them; or else he was at school, eagerly absorbing whatever Mr Giles could tell him; or he was out playing with his friends. He was sturdier now, happily giving himself over to the games he had quickly mastered. The town offered constant diversions: he keenly watched ‘the gay bright regiments always going and coming, the continual paradings, the successions of sham-sieges and sham-defences.’ In Rochester, he was held up high by his mother to catch a glimpse of the Prince Regent on a tour of inspection; every St Clement’s Day he saw the saint’s pageant, with Old Clem chaired through the streets by local men in lurid masks. As a special privileged treat, he would go up and down the Medway in naval vessels with his father; together they took epic walks across the fields all the way over to Rochester and back. Near the village of Higham they came upon a house that fascinated little Charles. It was called Gad’s Hill Place. And he told his father that one day he would like to live there; and his father promised him that if he worked very very VERY hard, he would.
And so it came to pass. But not before our hero had undergone many, many trials, to the first of which he was about to submit.
It’s worth stopping for a moment to look at the ten-year-old Charles Dickens. He was vivacious, imaginative, amusing, dreamy, affectionate, at times a little over-emotional; he read a great deal, he loved the theatre and dressing up and playing games; as a pupil he was eager and apt; he was good-looking, polite and charming, confident in the love both of his parents and of his siblings, of his extended family and his many friends. He was the crown prince of his little kingdom. He can have had nothing but optimism for the future. In all of these things, he was like many, many children who go on to live perfectly ordinary lives. What happened to him next all but destroyed his life, but it turned him into Charles Dickens. Had he not been the ten-year-old that he was, with that strong base of love and confidence and approval, it would surely have finished him off.
TWO
Paradise Lost
John Dickens was summoned back to Navy Pay Office headquarters at Somerset House in June 1822, not a moment too soon; despite the improvement in his salary, his alarmingly mounting debts were becoming difficult to deal with. He sold up the family’s effects at The Brook, such as they were, and they headed west, finding accommodation in Camden Town in the north of London, near King’s Cross. Charles was not with the family: his schoolmaster, William Giles, had asked for him to be allowed to stay behind to finish his final term of work; which he duly did, lodging with Giles. At some point in the autumn he made his own way to London. It was not an encouraging start:
As I left Chatham in the days when there were no railroads in the land, I left it in a stage-coach. Through all the years that have since passed, have I ever lost the smell of the damp straw in which I was packed – like game – and forwarded, carriage paid, to the Cross Keys, Wood Street, Cheapside, London? There was no other inside passenger, and I consumed my sandwiches in solitude and dreariness … and I thought life sloppier than I had expected to find it.
His arrival at Camden Town in the north of London only confirmed this perception. ‘A little back-garret’, he called his room. In fact, No. 16 Bayham Street was a relatively new dwelling, part of a development scheme completed ten years earlier, not unlike the houses they had occupied in Chatham; all the other houses were occupied by professionals of one sort or another – an engraver, a retired linen draper, a retired diamond merchant, and so on. There were fields behind the houses where in summer hay was still made. The area was semi-rustic, the houses having been built on part of the former gardens of the Mother Red Cap tavern, an old highwayman’s inn. It was, in fact, village-like.
But to the boy, after populous, bustling Chatham, the street must have seemed bleak and woebegone: ‘as shabby, dingy, damp, and mean a neighbourhood as one would desire not to see,’ he wrote, thirty years later. ‘Its poverty was not of the demonstrative order. It shut the street doors, pulled down the blinds, screened the parlour windows with the wretchedest plants in pots, and made a desperate stand to keep up appearances.’ As with the council estates of the 1950s, the price of amenities was the loss of community. The easy openness of Chatham seemed far way: this was the heartless Metropolis. In his former existence, misfortune had been handled discreetly – he himself had known nothing about his father’s troubles – but here
to be sold up was nothing particular. The whole neighbourhood felt itself liable, at any time, to that common casualty of life. A man used to come into the neighbourhood regularly, delivering the summonses for rates and taxes as if they were circulars. We never paid anything until the last extremity and Heaven knows how we paid it then.
Any possible sense of gentility had disappeared. There were, he said, no visitors ‘but Stabber’s Band, the occasional conjuror and strong man; no costermongers.’ There were a few shabby shops – a tobacconist, a weekly paper shop. And at the corner, a pub. ‘We used to run to the doors and windows to look at a cab, it was such a rare sight.’
This isolated little outpost was no more than thirty minutes’ walk from his old lodgings in bustling Norfolk Street in Marylebone, but to the ten-year-old boy, it evidently felt like some kind of abandoned urban village. London was in the process of expanding, and Camden was one of the points on the pioneer trail. It was not a slum; not at all. But it lacked roots, identity, humanity. No. 16 itself, with only four rooms, was horribly cramped. There were six children and their two parents, plus a servant girl they had brought with them from the workhouse in Chatham, and James Lamert. Charles had nowhere to go and nothing to do. There were no more agreeable visits to the Mitre to be held up for admiration; he knew no one of his own age with whom to dress up and put on a play; and above all, he had no schooling, which he missed bitterly. His appetite for learning had grown and grown in Chatham. His so obviously not attending school proclaimed the family’s poverty to the world; his pride was stung. John Dickens seemed, he said, ‘to have utterly lost at this time the idea of educating me’. For want of anything to do, he was reduced to cleaning his father’s boots and running ‘such poor errands as arose out of our poor way of living’. His only diversion was the toy theatre that his friend James had built for him: he spent hours and hours intensely absorbed in it. It was, Lamert said, ‘the only fanciful reality in his present life’. John Dickens was naturally distracted by his financial situation: with the loss of the Outpost Allowance, his salary had declined from £400 to £350; and new debts were mounting. He had not paid the rates, and had been running up bills with the local tradesmen. And yet somehow they managed to find the thirty-eight guineas a year for twelve-year-old Fanny, whose musical gifts had gained her a place at the Royal Academy of Music,
