singers of the day, and all the leading actors – Cooke, Charles Kean, Macready – and ‘he could give us Shakespeare by the ten minutes’. Clerks from other offices came in to be entertained; even officers of the Court couldn’t resist. He and one of his fellow clerks, Potter, used to go to the theatre together; according to Blackmore, they appeared in the minor theatres, like Goodwin’s in the Strand, and any number of others in Vauxhall, paying to play parts. This interesting activity – a sort of Thespian karaoke – was perhaps a step towards some sort of professional involvement in the theatre, always a temptation. He certainly wanted to find a way of making a living other than the law. Later he described the Inns of Court, and Gray’s Inn, where Ellis and Blackmore had their offices, specifically, as
generally … one of the most depressing institutions in brick and mortar known to the children of men. Can anything be more dreary than its arid Square, Sahara Desert of the law … when my travels tend nowadays to this dismal spot, my comfort is its rickety state. Imagination gloats over the fullness of time when the staircases shall have quite tumbled down.
For the time being he was stuck with the law, but an example from an expected quarter suggested a different possibility.
While he was still in the Marshalsea, his father had, very sensibly in a pre-emptive strike, tendered his resignation to the Navy Pay Office on medical grounds before they could sack him, thus protecting his pension. He had subsequently found employment as a journalist, an activity in which he had lightly dabbled back in Chatham. In order to facilitate his career as a reporter, he had mastered what David Copperfield calls ‘the savage stenographic mysteries’ of Brachygraphy, Gurney’s tortuously arcane shorthand system. John’s dedication in learning it is initially somewhat surprising, revealing an aspect of his character his son always affirmed: his capacity for hard work. His essential failing was a sense of financial unreality; one which his son did not share. Indeed, Charles had learned in the hardest possible way how incompatible such a sense was to a tolerable existence, and he fixed his mind beadily against it from an early age. Now, after eighteen months at Ellis and Blackmore’s on subsistence wages, he determined to try to get a job as a Parliamentary reporter, for which he needed to be able to write shorthand. Charles had certainly inherited John’s capacity for work, in overplus, and he mastered the Byzantine complexities of Gurney in a cool ten weeks, which, in November 1828, got him, if not the job he wanted, then at least the right to work as a freelance shorthand reporter for the proctors of Doctors’ Commons, one of the arcane byways of the English legal system, a part of the Consistory Court, the diocesan court of the Bishop of London, ‘where they grant marriage-licences to love-sick couples, and divorces to unfaithful ones; register the wills of people who have property to leave; and punish hasty gentlemen who call ladies by unpleasant names.’ Its days were numbered; thirty years later it was gone. The sixteen-year-old Charles worked in the death-like hush of the Prerogative Office of Doctors’ Commons, and was very bored, not realizing, perhaps, how perfect a training ground it was for a satirist.
He was not very well paid, and the work was intermittent. which made him start to think of the theatre as a possible career ‘in quite a business-like way’. He prepared himself for it with every bit as much intensity as he had applied himself to mastering Gurney. He was fanatical in his attendance at performances, studying the form, assiduously tracking down the best acting, always seeing Mathews ‘wherever he played’. He practised on his own ‘immensely’ (such tricky but critical matters as how to walk in and out of a room, and how to sit on a chair); he often did this for four, five, or six hours a day, shut up in his own room or walking about in a field. He worked out a system for learning parts, a large number of which he committed to memory. And then, when he finally judged himself ready, towards the end of 1831, when he was nineteen, he sat down in his little office at Doctors’ Commons and wrote a letter to George Bartley, Charles Kemble’s manager at the Covent Garden Theatre. He told him how old he was, and exactly what he thought he could do: he had, he said, ‘a strong perception of character and oddity, and a natural power of reproducing in my own person what I observed in others’. A very sensible letter, from someone who clearly has no idiotic ideas about the theatre, who knows his own worth but makes no exaggerated claims for himself. And, once Covent Garden had got their forthcoming sensation, The Hunchback, up and running, Bartley wrote back offering him an audition to perform anything of Mathews’s he liked (presumably he’d mentioned his admiration for the monopolylogues). He planned to sing as well, and lined up his sister Fanny to play for him. But on the day of the audition, he went down with a bad cold and inflammation of the face (the beginning of a persistent earache), and asked if they could re-arrange the audition for the following season. And then, while the old season was still running its course, his uncle William Barrow, another of his mother’s brothers, offered him a job as a reporter on The Mirror of Parliament, a would-be rival to Hansard that Barrow had established. Charles accepted with alacrity, working side by side with his father, a brace of Bracygraphers, toiling away together. He took his place in the House of Commons for the first time early in 1832, just around the time of his twentieth birthday, and – for the time being – his dreams of working in the theatre melted away.
Going to work for The Mirror of Parliament was when he really ‘began the world’, when his course was set, and after which his career proceeded like an arrow shot from a strong-bow. Whether being a writer, or a novelist, was his ambition, we simply don’t know. He never spoke of it. It simply followed as day follows night. He had been in training for it, whether he knew it or not, cultivating the ‘patient and continuous energy which then began to be matured in me’. This patient energy, he knew, was the source of his subsequent success. David Copperfield put it very well many years later:
I do not hold one natural gift, I dare say, that I have not abused. My meaning simply is, that whatever I have tried to do in life, I have tried with all my heart to do well; that whatever I have devoted myself to, I have devoted myself to completely; that in great aims and in small, I have always been thoroughly in earnest.
His long walks through the city, his nights at the theatre, his painstaking mastery of shorthand, his hours in the British Museum Reading Room, for which he had got a ticket as soon as he was eligible, just two days after his eighteenth birthday, devouring Shakespeare and the historians and the philosophers, his months in the blacking warehouse, his sense of abandonment, of exile from Eden, his hunger, his loneliness, his humiliation, his despair. Everything that had happened to him conspired to make him what he became; every last detail of it fed into his work. The ‘strong perception of character and oddity, and a natural power of reproducing in my own person what I observed in others’ he had told the Covent Garden Theatre about was as well suited to writing as it was to acting. Recounting the story of his abandoned audition, he told Forster that he had never thought of going on the stage as anything but a way of getting money. After he broke into journalism, he said, and had a success in it, he quickly left off turning his thoughts that way, and never resumed the idea. ‘I never told you this, did I?’ he asked his friend. ‘See how near I may have been to another life?’ Another secret, but one that he could talk about, fifteen years after the event.
FOUR
The Birth of Boz
Dickens’s passionate appetite for every aspect of life did not by any means exclude the opposite sex. From his earliest years in Portsea and Chatham, he seems to have been drawn to pretty little girls; indeed, many of his co-conspirators in pranks and putting on plays seem to have been girls rather than boys. He writes sweetly in the memory pieces that flowed so prolifically from him in his last decades of a succession of flawless little charmers with names like Olympia Squires, all of whom he idolized. Perhaps he writes a little too sweetly either for our taste in the early twenty-first century or indeed for credibility. Radical in so many of his attitudes, he seems entirely to have subscribed, as a fully grown author of major novels of fathomless complexity, to the Victorian belief that children were adorable, innocent little adults in disguise; nothing amuses him more, for example, than
