The fifteen-year-old Charles even made extracurricular appearances, at a small playhouse in Catherine Street, parallel to Drury Lane, right in the heart of the then theatre district. It was one of the so-called Minor Theatres, where amateurs would pay to be allowed to appear in the plays; child performers were presumably not charged. Perhaps they were even paid; that would have been welcome, since John Dickens, though out of the Marshalsea, was already in financial trouble again. Charles also seems to have been the moving spirit in a form of street theatre in which he and half a dozen of his school chums would disguise themselves as beggars, pestering passers-by for money, an odd parody of what he felt might so easily have been his actual destiny. It was all high-spirited, wholesome, boyish stuff, a thousand light years away from the rat-infested Hungerford Stairs, about which he must never speak to anybody, but the memory of which was boiling away quietly inside him. In one edition of the school paper, he wrote an amusing squib that might have contained a foundation of truth: ‘Lost – by a boy with a long red nose and grey eyes: a very bad temper. Whoever has found the same may keep it, as the owner is better off without it.’ Anger was an emotion he struggled to keep in check, but it was never very far from the surface.
He left Wellington House Academy a month after his fifteenth birthday, having been there for more or less two years, which brings the sum total of years that he spent in education to three. The school had served its purpose, though. ‘I won prizes at school, and great fame,’ he told a correspondent who had asked for details of his life in 1838, shortly after his first great writing triumphs, ‘and was positively assured that I was a very clever boy. I distinguished myself (as at other places) like a brick.’ He had left school ‘tolerably early’, he told the same correspondent, because his father was not a rich man ‘and I had to begin the world’.
The bit of the world he chose to begin was not at all congenial to him and came about thanks to an intervention by his mother, but it furnished him with a subject he would never tire of: the law. He was first very briefly employed by the solicitor Charles Molloy, in Chancery Lane, but he moved quickly on from there. His second boss was the solicitor Edward Blackmore. Writing about his youthful employee, Blackmore used a word many people reached for in describing Dickens: prepossessing. He was a bright, witty, well-turned-out lad – almost military in his bearing – and discharged his tasks so efficiently that another lawyer unsuccessfully tried to poach him from Blackmore. He was increasingly something of a peacock, and took to wearing a Russian sailor jacket and military-looking cap, but he was no fop, and when someone satirically hailed him with the words ‘Hello, Sojer’, he punched him in the face, and was punched back in return. The would-be wit learned what many people in future years would learn, to their cost: don’t mess with Charles Dickens.
Mostly, though, he made people laugh, with wicked impersonations of everyone around him: clients, lawyers, clerks, even the cleaning woman. When Pickwick Papers came out, his former colleagues realized that half of them had turned up in its pages. His eyes – eyes that everyone who ever met him, to the day he died, remarked on – beautiful, animated, warm, dreamy, flashing, sparkling – though no two people ever agreed on their colour – were they grey, green, blue, brown? – those eyes missed nothing, any more than did his ears. He could imitate anyone. Brimming over with an all but uncontainable energy, which the twenty-first century might suspiciously describe as manic, he discharged his superplus of vitality by incessantly walking the streets, learning London as he went, mastering it, memorizing the names of the roads, the local accents, noting the characteristic topographies of the many villages of which the city still consisted. And when he wasn’t pounding the streets, he was at a show. He claimed that for at least three years he went to the theatre every single day of his life.
The theatre of the late 1820s was pitched somewhere between Las Vegas and weekly rep, highly physical, spectacular, comic, sentimental and from time to time sublime. Great roaring actors roamed the boards, accompanied by sometimes as many as a hundred extras, in bastardized versions of the classics, clowns of genius purveyed surreal scenarios of mind-boggling illogic, raddled old actresses pretending to be seventeen-year-olds wrung the audience’s withers in scenes of heart-breaking pathos. Punters would theatre-hop, catching an act here, a song there, a curtain call somewhere else. They gave instant verdicts on the performances, shrieking their disapprobation, howling their praise. It was an entirely interactive experience, with actors giving quite as good as they got, though sometimes, in the face of overwhelming rejection, they made heartfelt apologies for their performances from the stage. All the great writers wrote for the theatre – Byron, Shelley, Walter Scott – and on the whole what they wrote for it was fundamentally untheatrical. It was an age of huge personalities, of stupendous scenic effects, of patriotic sentiment and radical satire, supposedly tightly censored but slipping rapidly out of control. And Dickens loved every second of it. It was mother’s milk to him. He offered an explanation some years later for the popularity of the theatre he grew up on: he was writing of pantomime, but he might as well have been writing about the whole experience:
that jocund world … where there is no affliction or calamity that leaves the least impression, where a man may tumble into the broken ice, or dive into the kitchen fire, and only be the droller for the accident; where babies may be knocked about and sat upon, or choked with gravy spoons, in the process of feeding, and yet no Coroner be wanted, nor anybody made uncomfortable; where the workmen may fall from the top of a house to the bottom, or even from the bottom of a house to the top, and sustain no injury to the brain, need no hospital, leave no young children; where everyone, in short, is so superior to the accidents of life … that I suspect this to be the secret … of the general enjoyment which an audience of vulnerable spectators, liable to pain and sorrow, find in this class of entertainment.
As a particularly vulnerable spectator himself, one liable to pain and sorrow, his joy in escaping from the realities of life was intense. He also relished melodrama, the dominant form of the age, with its schematic opposition of good and evil and its ruthlessly plotted outcomes, in which the characters’ destinies are manipulated by the puppet-master dramatist. All this he rejoiced in. But there was one form of theatre, and one particular performer, he prized above all others. Charles Mathews – in his fifties when Dickens first saw him – was an absolute original, both as writer and as performer. His monopolylogues, farces in which he played all the characters, were fixtures of the season; he invariably took the town by storm with them. ‘As good as half a dozen plays distilled,’ said the dandyish critic Leigh Hunt. They sit somewhere between Sheridan and the Goon Show. In Youthful Days, Mathews played, in rapid succession, changing costume at dazzling speed as each character came and went, a servant, a French organist, a knight from the shires, an outrageous dandy, a stout Welshman, and then, finally, a skinny snooker player and his wife. They had names like Sir Shiveraine Scrivener, Monsieur Zephyr, ap Llewellyn-ap Lloyd, and Mark and Amelrose Moomin. Major Longbow was a great favourite:
‘How do, Major?’ ‘How do I do? How should I do, eh? Better than any man living – there’s muscle! – strongest man living – How do I do? – pho! – no man so well as I am. I am reckoned the finest piece of anatomy that was ever sent upon the face of the earth. Upon my life, it’s true. What will you lay me it’s a lie? Hit me with a sledge-hammer if you like – can’t hurt me – there’s muscle!’ ‘Are you inclined to go up, Major?’ said I. ‘Up what, in that thingummy, a balloon? Why, I can walk up higher than you’ll go in that thing. When I was in India, I walked up an inaccessible mountain; walked for five days running, for four hours every day; took me seven days coming down, run the whole of the last day, and danced at the Governor’s Ball at night. Upon my life it’s true. What will you lay it’s a lie?’
It could so easily have been a generalized blur of stereotypes, but surprisingly the quality for which his contemporaries most admired Mathews was his verisimilitude. He more or less invented character acting; and his repertoire of dialects, especially London dialects, was astonishing. Dickens loved him, attending his shows again and again, learning the monopolylogues by heart and practising them over and over at home.
In the offices of Ellis and Blackmore, he would lay on impromptu
