THE LIFE OF DICKENS.

Evening Star, Issue 2814, 24 February 1872, Page 2

THE LIFE OF DICKENS.

“Charles Dickens, the most popular novelist of the century, and one of the greatest humorists that England has over produced, was horn at Landport, in Portsea, on Friday, the 7th of February, 1812.” Such is the modest commencement of “Forster’s life of Dickens ”—a hook, which at the time of the departure of the last mail was the rage, having run through a first edition. As the ork has not reached the Colony, wc have thought of a resume of the not ce which appeared in the Times will not prove uninteres'ing. Dickens’s father was a clerk in the Navy Pay Office, and at the time of his son’s birth was stall ned at Portsmouth Dockyard. From Portsea his parents removed, when their son Charles was only two years old, to London, where they went into lodgings; yet even at that early age the child remembered—or fancicl in after-life that he remembered —many of the incidents of his early childhood. While at Chatham it was that as a “ queer small boy,” as he calls himself in one of his essays, he once passed Gad’s Hill-place—-the house, as is well known, in which he died—in company with his father, who told the hoy, when he admired it, “If yon were to he very pe’ severing and were to work hard, you might some day come to live in it.” How the man worked and did live there, are matters known to every one. Dickens as “ a queer small boy,” was “very sickly sudden attacks of spasm disabled him from active exertion ; and thus it was that he never participated in any of the outdoor games so pleasant to youth. In one respect his weakness was a blessing; it drove him to reading, and in a little room in the house at Chatham he made the acquaintance of “ Roderick Random,” “ Peregrine Pickle,” “ Humphrey Clinker,” “Tom Jones,” “The Vicar of Wakefield,” “ Don Quixote,” “ Gil Bias,” and “ Robinson Crusoe.” “ Out of that little room they came,” he says of himself in “ David Copderfield,” “ a glorious host to keep me company,” and then he most truly adds, “ they and the 4 Arabian Nights’ ami the 4 Tales of the Genii,’ did me no harm, for whatever harm was in some of them was not there for me ; I knew nothing of it.” And so it is ip very truth ; the innocent mind of a child reads on and takes no harm, nor does it stumble at things which shock older and mare wicked people. It does not appear that Dickens owed much to his parents ; on the contrary, he was, as he described himself in bis first letter to Washington Irving, 44 a very sipaU-and-not-oveF-particnlarly-taken-care-of boy.” His mother, indeed, a< most mothers do, taught him to read, and later on instructed him in the rudiments of Latin, As for his father, he paints his character in one of those heartreading outpourings as to his early history, which make this first volume so deeply interesting. Long treasured up as a bitter spring in the heart and now seeing the light of day for the first time, they gush fo th like the waters of affliction, and reveal the hidden source of so many of those pathetic experiences of what it is now the fashion to cill 44 Bohemian” life with which the works of Dickens are full. We pass over hurriedly many years of the family’s sojourn in London. They were remarkable only for the increasing distress of the family. Their situation became so bad as to render necessary their removal to Camden Town, then 4 f about the poorest of the London suburbs,” where Dickens’s only companion was his cousin Lamert—a youth waiting for a commission to turn up who showed him Covent Garden and the attractions (?) of St. Giles. This latter locality he hated profoundly, and in after life, when speaking of the Seven Dials, used to exclaim, 44 Good heavens ! What wild visions of prodigies of wickedness, want, and beggary arise in my mind out of that place. ” An I so with time his father's affairs got worse. Mrs Dickens tried to stave off the long-dreaded day by setting up a school, which did not succeed ; it came at last, and the father was arrested and carried off to the Marshalsea. Now the elder Dickens had a theatrical mode of expression, and was great too at moralising after a fact had occurred. On entering the Marshalsea, his last words to his son were 44 that the sun had set on him for ever.” 44 I really believed at the time,” said Dickens to his friend, 44 that they had broken my heart ” ; but he took ample revenge on his relatives after' wards for the false alarm, by making all the world laugh at them in 44 David Copperfield.” Dickens tells of his first visit to the Marshalsea, when they were all crying except his father, 44 who tdd me, I remember, to take warning by the Marshalsea, and to observe that if a man had L2O a year and spent Ll9 19s GJ, he w add be happy ; but that a shilling spent the other way would make him wretched. ” It would have been better had he made such moral reflections before he was iuca-ce: q.ted as would have prevented the nepessity pf big ever entering a debtors’ prison. While the father was in prison the family sufficed great privations. Nearly all the 4 ' household gods ” went to the pawnshops—little Charles beiug the principal agent in these sorrowful transactions —and with a few chairs, a kitchen table, and some beds, the Dickens family “ encamped, as it were,|in the two parlois of the emptied hen.e, and lived there night and day. ” Charles Dickens was to drain the cup of misery to the dregs, and to drain it young. It seems that it was not until 1847 that he ever mentioned the ensuing portion of his personal history to bis friend,-who in* troduces the narrative io these words

“He was silent for several minutes. I felt that I had evidently touched a painful place in his memory. Very shortly afterwards f learnt in all th-ir details the inciilcuts that had been so painful to him. The idea of David Copperfield, which was to take all the world into his confidence, had not at this time occurred to him.” “| n au evil hour, ’ says Dickens, “James Lamert, a blocking manufacturer, proposed that I should go into the blacking warehouse, to be as useful as I could, at a salary of six shilling a week.” And into that business he went. Here comes a passage written in the very bitterness of his heart

“It is wonderful to me how I cmld have been so easily cast away at such an age. It is wonderful to me that even after my descent into the poor little drudge I had been since we came to London, no one had compassion enough on me—a child of singular abilities, quick, eager, delicate, and soon hurt, bodily or menially—to suggest that something might have been spare i, as ccitaiuly it hnight have been, to place me at any common school Our fries Is, I take it, were tired out. .No one male any sign. My father and mother were qnite sati fled They could hardly have been more so, if I had been 20 years of age, distinguished at a grammar school and going to Cambridge.”

This business establishment was at Old Hungerford stairs —a crazy, tumble down house, literally overrun with rats Neither his work nor the company into which he was thrown was tit for him. His relative—for Lamert be it recollected, was his cousin had protuised to teach him something during his dinner hour ; instead of which he was swept away down stairs 1 kc a small heap of human rubbish aud thrown among the other boys.. “No words,” he writes to Mr Foster, “can express the seertt aarony of my soul as I sank info this companionship, compared there every day associates with those of my happy chilt - hood, and felt my early hopes of growing 1o be a learned and distinguished man crushid in my breast.” When the “encampment” was broken up, Dickens was handed over ss a lodger to a mine d old 1 idy in little College street, Camden town, “who unconsciously began to sit for Mrs Pipchin, in ‘ Dombey,’ when she took me in.” Here he lived for some time, paying for his food out of his six or seven shillings a-week. “I suppose,” he says, “my lodging was paid, for I certainly did not pay for it myself, aud I ccr ain'y had no other assistance whatev; r —the making of my own clothes, I think, excepted—from Monday morning until Satu; • day night. No advice, uo counsel, no encouragement, no consolation, no support, from anyone that I can call to mind, so he'p me God.” His only holiday was Sunday, and that he passed with bis father in prison. Ho he went on for a couple of years, working from morning till night “ with common men and boys, and shabby boy,” lounging about the streets, often insufficiently fed—another Oliver Twist, in fact. “ 1 know,” be said, in his autobiography, “that, but for the mercy of God, 1 might easily have been, for any care that was taken of me, a little robber or a little vagabond.” Dickens’s confirmed protestations again, t his miserable existence were one day so ft r admitted by his father that he begged to be allowed to live nearer the prison ; and his wish being gratified, he took possession of a new abode in Lant street Borough, thinking it a Paralise. Strange to say, the elder Dickens found the income which was insufficient to support his family out of prison, was amply sufficient to maintain them in the Marsbalsea. They lived very comfortably there, and were waited on by a liitie maid «f all work, whom they had brought with tnem an orphan from the Chatham Work* who had been immortalised a§ the “Marchioness” in the “old Curiosity Shop.” The elder Dickens was about to be made a bankrupt; but to do that, it had to be shown that the family’s wearing apparel was nofc worth L2O. Little Charles’s clothes were submitted to the ordeal. “Certainly,” he says, “ the hardest creditor would not have been disposed to avail himself of my poor white hat, little jacket, or corduroy trousers.” He still went wandering about the streets ; and a good story he himself tells of going into a publichouse in Parliamentstreet and saying to the landlord, “ What is your very best, the very ale a glass ?” “Twopence.” “Then,” says I, “ just draw me a glass of that, if you please, with a good head to it.” The landlord smiled at the queer little customer, and cal.ed his wife, who came and asked the boy mauy questions, aud gave him a kiss at parting. Ibe publichouse is the Red Lion, at the corner of the short street leading into Cannon row, aud is known to all Londoners.

With his father’s release from prison, Dickons received his dismissal from the blacking warehouse, and be was sent to school. His mother tried hard to get him received back into employment ; but from the hour he left his place of torment, no word about it pissed his Jips till he made those confidences to his friend in 1847. “ I do not write resentfully or angrily,” he said, “ for I know how all things have worked together to make me what I am, but I never afterwards forgot, I never shall forget, I never can forget that my mother was warm f>rmy b ingseut back.” Even afterwards, all through life, Old Hungerford stairs were an abomination to him ; be could not bear to approach his house of bondage; and for years whe he got near to it he crossed over to the opposite side of the way. The sense of the humiliation he experienced there Mr Forster thinks c'ung to him through life. “ What it was that in society made him often uneasy, shrinking, and over-sens.tive, he knew; but all the danger he ran in mastering the feeling he did not know. There was m him at times something hard and aggressive ; in his determination something that had almost the depth of fierceness ; and it has then seemed to me as though bis habitual impulses for everything kind and gentle had sunk for a time under a sudden, hard, and inexorable sense of what fate had dealt to him in thosp early years.” To the credit of the forlorn boy, be it spoken that through his childish misery hp never lost his precious gift of aninitial spirits or his native capacity for hpr morous enjoyment. Out of those little early experiences the tirst’cxamples of his splendid genius sprang. Thrown among the poor and needy, and sympathising with all their sufferings, he handled their sorrows as one of themselves, and verified in his own person the profound sentiment of the great (Jerman poet, that he alone knows the Heavenly Powers who has moistened his bread with tears, and passed the night watches in care and sorrow.

With his escape from the dismal blacking warehouse, his horizon began to lighten. He was sent to school but made little progress there. “ Depend upon it,” gays Mr Foster,

he (Dickens) “was quite a self-made man, and his wonderful knowledge and command of the Engfish language, must have been acquired by long and patient study after leaving his last school.” It is impossible to give a truer notion of how completely Dickens was self-educated, than by quoting a reply of his fath°r to a friend whom he tried to interest on his behalf. Mr Foster had heard it from the son himself, who used whimsically, but good hum redly, to imitate it in after life “ Pray, Mr Dickens,” said this patronising friend, “where was your son educated ?” “ Why indeed, sr, ha ! ha ! he may bo said to have educated hims?lf.” We shall continue the subject on another occasion, glancing at Dickens’s career as a reporter, and his earlier successes as an author.