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Charles Dickens Michael Slater Published by Yale University Press Extract Publication date: Aug 2009 ISBN 978 0300 112078

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CH A R L E S DI C K E N S

M I C H A E L S L A T E R

Y A L E U N I V E R S I T Y P R E S SN E W H A V E N A N D L O N D O N

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C H A P T E R 1

Early yearsF R O M P O R T S M O U T H T O C H A T H A M ,

1812–1822

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Do you care to know that I was a great writer at 8 years old or so – was an actorand a speaker from a baby – worked many childish experiences and many youngstruggles into Copperfield?

Dickens to Mary Howitt, 7 September 1859

THE EARLIEST specimens of any writing by Charles Dickens of which we havea record consist of a formal note of invitation and a facetious schoolboy

letter. The first was written when he was ‘between eight and nine years of age’(that is, 1820 or 1821) and his family was living in Chatham where his father,John, was an Assistant Clerk in the Navy Pay Office. The letter was writtensome five years later, when Dickens was ‘between thirteen and fourteen’, thusthree or four years after the family had moved to London and just after Johnhad retired from the Pay Office on health grounds and was embarking on anew career in journalism to supplement his pension. From the time betweenthe dates of these two items no scrap of Dickens’s writing seems to havesurvived, though three notable samples of it that did once exist are mentionedby his great friend John Forster in his Life of Charles Dickens. While theDickens family were still in Chatham, Forster tells us, the young boy wrote atragedy called Misnar, the Sultan of India based on a favourite story of his.Then later, after the family had moved to London, he wrote a couple ofcharacter-sketches, one of an eccentric old barber obsessed with Napoleon,and the other of a deaf old woman who cooked for the family in BayhamStreet. According to Dickens himself, writing in 1850 in the preface to a newedition of his first book, Sketches by Boz, Misnar had had its predecessorsand/or successors in the form of ‘certain tragedies achieved at the mature ageof eight or ten, and represented with great applause to overflowing nurseries’.As to the schoolboy letter, by the time Dickens wrote this he had perhapsalready taken to the writing of ‘small tales’ for the amusement of his schoolfel-lows, one of whom later recalled that they had had ‘a sort of club for lendingand circulating them’. It seems likely, then, that there was a fair amount ofDickens juvenilia which has not come down to us.1

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The note of invitation reads as follows: ‘Master and Miss Dickens will bepleased to have the company of Master and Miss Tribe to spend the eveningon . . . [date, etc.]’. It is redolent of genteel middle-class life as it was lived inthe early nineteenth-century with its little social ceremonies and mutualcourtesies – just such a composition, in fact, as one would expect the childrenof Mr John Dickens of the Navy Pay Office and his lady to send to the childrenof Mr Tribe, owner and landlord of the handsome old Mitre Tavern inChatham High Street, and a good friend of the highly convivial John. It was atthe Mitre that the Dickens children, Charles and his beloved little sister Fanny,one year older than he, used sometimes to sing, ‘mounted on a dining table fora stage’, while their impresario-father looked proudly on.2

Five years later, in London, Dickens sent the following letter to a schoolfellowcalled Owen Peregrine Thomas:

TomI am quite ashamed I have not returned your Leg but you shall have it byHarry to morrow. If you would like to purchase my Clavis you shall have it ata very reduced price. Cheaper in comparison than a Leg.

Yours &cC. Dickens

PS. I suppose all this time you have had a wooden leg. I have weighed yoursevery Saturday night.

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When he wrote this Dickens was a pupil at Wellington House, William Jones’s‘Classical and Commercial Academy’ in the Hampstead Road, and the ‘Leg’ and‘Clavis’ to which he refers would have been standard Latin school-books. Theletter is very much the work of the lively, fun-loving schoolboy so vividly recalledby Thomas and others who gave Forster their reminiscences of WellingtonHouse Academy for his biography. Forster comments that there is ‘some under-lying whim or fun in the “Leg” allusions’. He does not, however, point out thatthis is, in the language of nineteenth-century playbills, ‘positively the firstappearance’ in all Dickens’s writings of a wooden leg, the subject of numerouscomic allusions throughout his work, culminating in Silas Wegg’s versatileappendage in Our Mutual Friend. It goes to the heart, in fact, of that fascinationwith the borderline between the animate and inanimate that is central to somuch Dickensian comic writing. Forster, who reproduces the letter in facsimile,as I do here, does, however, note that ‘in the signature the reader will be amusedto see the first faint beginning of a flourish afterwards famous’.3

These earliest specimens of Dickens’s writing belong to two very importantphases of his early life. The first is a product of what he came to think of as thegolden period of his Chatham childhood, when he was aged between fiveand ten years. The second comes from what we might call his rally, that tookplace between the ages of thirteen and fifteen, when his interrupted schoolingwas at last resumed, and he could once more publicly enjoy the status ofa middle-class young gentleman after the humiliation of drudging in ablacking factory. Considered together, therefore, the two items derive consid-erable poignancy from our knowledge of the decidedly grim – albeit highlystimulating imaginatively – time that intervened between the writing of thechildhood note and of the schoolboy letter. Some twenty-five years later thisperiod was to inspire in Dickens some very passionate writing indeed, theso-called ‘autobiographical fragment’, which, as will become apparent in thenext chapter, is our primary source of knowledge about what happened to himduring that dark time. Now, however, we must go back to his very earliest yearsand the date when, long before he himself could write a word, he was a causeof writing for his father.

On Monday 10 February 1812 readers of The Hampshire Telegraph and TheHampshire Courier found this advertisement in their respective journals:‘BIRTHS – on Friday, at Mile-end Terrace, the Lady of John Dickens, Esq., ason’. It is a self-consciously genteel announcement placed by a man who, in1785, had been born as the second son of upper servants in the household ofJohn Crewe of Crewe Hall in Cheshire. He had apparently received a goodeducation, probably thanks to Crewe, and since 1805 had been pursuing asuccessful career, with a steadily rising income, in the Navy Pay Office, hisinitial appointment there being also most likely owing to Crewe’s patronage.He worked first at Somerset House in London and while there wooed and won

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the petite and pretty nineteen-year-old Elizabeth Barrow, daughter of CharlesBarrow and sister of his friend and fellow-clerk Thomas Barrow, who held theimportant post of Chief Conductor of Money in Towns. John had been postedto Portsmouth, thereby qualifying for an ‘outport allowance’ of five shillings aday in addition to his regular salary. His total income for 1808 had been nearly£200, quite enough on which to marry respectably. On 13 June 1809 he madea flying visit to London to marry Elizabeth, returning with her to the brand-new Portsea house he had taken at annual rental of £35. On 28 October 1810their first child, Frances, always known as Fanny, was born there, her birthbeing announced in the local press in similar fashion to Charles’s.4

Born on 7 February, Charles was baptised Charles John Huffham Dickens inthe local parish church on 4 March. He was named after his maternal grand-father even though, two years before, that distinguished relative had beenobliged to flee the country in disgrace, having been detected in systematicallydefrauding the Pay Office of the huge sum of £5,689, over several years.Happily, his exposure seems to have had no adverse effect whatever on thecareers of either his son or his son-in-law. Charles’s third given name,Huffham (a baptismal-register misspelling for Huffam), complimented hisgodfather, a prosperous rigger to the Royal Navy who lived in Limehouse. Hisbusiness must often have required Huffam to visit Portsmouth Dockyardwhere he would have met John, who was doubtless happy to cultivate thefriendship of so flourishing and well-connected a man.

During the first six years of Dickens’s life his parents moved house no lessthan five times and it seems likely that this restlessness affected Dickens in hislater life when he seemed to have some sort of need for constant changes ofenvironment. Within four months of his birth John and Elizabeth moved to alodging-house in Hawke Street, Portsea, ‘a most respectable locality’. Fromthere they soon after moved to more spacious premises in Wish Street,Southsea, where Elizabeth’s recently-widowed sister, the twenty-six-year-oldMary Allen, came to join them, her annual £50 pension as the widow of a navalofficer being doubtless a welcome addition to the household income. Dickens’searliest memory as told to Forster probably belongs to Wish Street thoughDickens himself specified Portsea.

He has often told me that he remembered the small front garden to the houseat Portsea, from where he was taken away when he was two years old, andwhere, watched by a nurse through a low kitchen-window almost level withthe gravel walk, he trotted about with something to eat, and his little eldersister with him.

It was an idyllic memory that, over forty years later, and two years after Fanny’ssadly early death from consumption, was to inspire Dickens to write a

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brother/sister fantasy-piece called ‘A Child’s Dream of a Star’ for his journalHousehold Words (6 April 1850). His earliest experience of a sibling death tookplace, in fact, in Wish Street when his little brother, Alfred Allen Dickens, bornin March 1814, died (of ‘water on the brain’ according to a notice in the localpress) at the age of six months.5

Other memories of Dickens’s earliest years in Portsea and Southsea may befound in his journalism though we must always keep in mind that his essaysare brilliantly composed pieces, the work of a master of language seeking toachieve particular effects – comic, humorous, pathetic, indignation-rousing,and so on. It is always risky, therefore, for biographers to take them as straight-forwardly autobiographical, even though Dickens himself may have beenhappy for his readers so to interpret them. The purported memories of hisearliest Christmases, which would have been in Portsea and Southsea, do seemvery authentic, however, especially the description of his reaction to certaindisturbing toys detailed in ‘A Christmas Tree’ (HW, 21 Dec.1850) – like thestartling jack-in-the-box, ‘a demoniacal Counsellor in a black gown, with anobnoxious head of hair and a red cloth mouth, wide open, who was not to beendured on any terms’. So also does the incident described in his essay ‘NewYear’s Day’ (HW, 1 May 1859) describing how he was carried downstairs in awoman’s arms on New Year’s Eve to be shown ‘a very long row of ladies andgentlemen sitting against a wall, all drinking at once out of little glass cupswith handles, like custard cups’ and looking like his first idea of ‘the goodpeople in Heaven, as I derived it from a wretched picture in a Prayer-book’.6

In January 1815 John Dickens was recalled to London and Dickens alwaysremembered the family coming away from Portsmouth in the snow. The loss ofthe outport allowance meant a drop in John’s income but this was partly offsetby a rise in his basic salary in respect of his ten years’ service. The family wentinto lodgings in Norfolk Street (now Cleveland Street), Marylebone, where afourth child, Letitia Mary, was born in April 1816, John describing himself onthe baptismal register not as a Government clerk but as ‘Gentleman’. Thus it wasin his fifth and sixth years that Dickens had his first experience of the city thatwas to become the main setting for – and in a sense the main character in –most of his writings. His only published remembrance of this period, however,if it is indeed a genuine memory and not an invented comic set-piece, occurs inthe already-cited essay ‘New Year’s Day’. There he describes how ‘a grim andunsympathetic old personage of the female gender’ frog-marched him to ahuge toy bazaar in Soho Square and ordered him to choose a present costingnot more than half-a-crown.7

At the end of 1816 John was posted to Chatham Dockyard and, after a briefstay in Sheerness, the family, which still included Mary Allen, moved into No. 2Ordnance Terrace, a newly-built house advertised for sale as ‘commandingbeautiful views’ and ‘fit for the residence of a genteel family’. Here they were to

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live for four years, waited on by two live-in servants, a young nursemaid calledMary Weller and an older woman called Jane Bonny. These four years, plus afurther one in a smaller house in St Mary’s Place, Chatham, seem to have beenextremely happy ones for the young Dickens, and richly nourishing to the lifeof his imagination. Vividly detailed memories of places, people and incidentsbelonging to this time were to feed into his writings from his ‘Our Parish’sketches in Sketches by Boz in the 1830s right up to the ‘Uncommercial Traveller’essays he wrote for his second weekly journal, All The Year Round, in the lastdecade of his life. Particularly notable in this respect are ‘Dullborough Town’(AYR, 30 June 1860) and ‘Nurse’s Stories’ (AYR, 8 Sept. 1860). These were thetitles Dickens gave the essays when he collected them in volume form but in themagazine itself they are indexed under the joint title ‘Childhood Associations’.In ‘Dullborough Town’ he feigns to be returning for the first time since child-hood to the town in which he had passed his ‘earliest days’. He depictsDullborough as an amalgam of the three Medway towns of Chatham, Stroodand Rochester, and serio-comically evokes the glamour and excitement theyhad held for him as a child when they were, in Forster’s phrase, ‘the birthplaceof his fancy’. In ‘Nurse’s Stories’ he remembers another, and more sensational,source of imaginative stimulation in his childhood. From an amused but stillresponsive adult perspective he retells some of the comic/horrific bed-time

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2 Ordnance Terrace, Chatham. The Dickens family lived in the second house from the left

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stories purportedly told to him by his nurse, the ironically named Mercy (whomay or may not have been based on Mary Weller), which he finds still lurkingin the ‘dark corners’ of his mind.8

Chatham itself with its busy dockyard and bustling streets crowded withsoldiers and sailors, ‘the gay bright regiments always coming and going’, and thequiet old adjoining city of Rochester with its ruined castle, ancient cathedraland picturesque old High Street, ‘full of gables, with old beams and timberscarved into strange faces’, were places that might have fired any child’s imagina-tion, let alone a child so richly endowed in this respect as the young Dickens.Then, because of his father’s job, he had privileged access to the Dockyardwhere he ‘never tired of watching the rope-makers, the anchor-smiths (nine ofthem at once, like “the muses in a ring”), and the block-makers at their work’.He would have seen, too, the convict labourers in the Yard, lined up eachevening under guard for return to the sinister-looking ‘hulks’ or prison-shipsmoored off the coast. He would have had a ringside seat on St Clement’s Day,23 November, to see the blacksmiths processing in honour of their patron saintand singing their chorus ‘Beat it out, beat it out – old Clem!’ that, long after-wards, he was to describe the child Pip and Miss Havisham singing together inGreat Expectations. Other special treats were trips on the River Medway aboardthe Navy Pay Office yacht with his father and Fanny when John had business totransact in Sheerness, or being taken to see the spectacular military exercisesand reviews, sham sieges and sham defences held on the ‘Chatham lines’ nearFort Pitt, a setting he was to use later for one of Mr Pickwick’s earliest misad-ventures. It is in Pickwick Papers, too, that he evokes, in comic mode, the pictur-esque appeal of old Rochester and its ruined castle. Mr Jingle the strollingplayer celebrates it in his own staccato style in Pickwick, chapter 2:

glorious pile – frowning walls – tottering arches – dark nooks – crumblingstaircases – Old cathedral too – earthy smell – pilgrims’ feet worn away theold steps – little Saxon doors – confessionals like money-takers’ boxes attheatres – queer customers those monks . . . old legends too – strange stories:capital.9

John Dickens’s subscription to the publication by a local bookseller of TheHistory and Antiquities of Rochester and its Environs in 1817 might suggest thathe too responded to the old city’s picturesque appeal. But his subscriptionprobably primarily reflected his desire to present himself as a cultivatedmember of society, a leading citizen and a patron of the arts. He owned a smallcollection of cheap reprints of eighteenth-century literary classics and otherbooks, a cut-price version of a gentleman’s library, which, as we shall see, washugely important to little Charles. John was also praised as ‘an active andconspicuous member’ of a local relief committee formed after a major fire in

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Chatham High Street had gutted thirty-eight houses. He subscribed twoguineas to the fund set up to relieve the victims. And, together with hisadmiring family, he had the pleasure of seeing published, albeit anonymously,in The Times on 4 March 1820 his lengthy account of what he called ‘thismelancholy accident’ with its elegant references to ‘the devouring element’ and‘the active exertions of the military’. John favoured a richly orotund style inspeech and writing on which Dickens later modelled Mr Micawber’s idiolect,and Forster states that no one could know John ‘without secretly liking him thebetter for these flourishes of speech, which adapted themselves so readily to hisgloom as well as to his cheerfulness’. He was a father to be proud of and hisencouragement and approbation must have meant a great deal to Charles,whom he coached to perform comic poems and songs before admiring audi-ences at the above-mentioned Mitre Tavern and also at his school’s ‘show day’(Mary Gibson, née Weller, told Langton how vividly she remembered Charles’srendering of Isaac Watts’s poem ‘The Voice of the Sluggard’, given with ‘suchaction and such attitudes’). John also made a companion of his little son,taking him for walks, telling him stories about the neighbourhood, andencouraging him to aim high in life. He noticed that the boy particularlyadmired a handsome country house situated at the top of Gad’s Hill justoutside Rochester and, according to Dickens’s later testimony, would often tellhim, ‘If you were to be very persevering and were to work hard, you mightsome day come to live in it’. It was presumably John, also, who organised familytrips to London in 1819 and 1820 to see the greatest of all clowns JoeyGrimaldi performing in pantomime at Sadler’s Wells. Little Charles, who waslater to edit Grimaldi’s Memoirs, clapped his hands with what he later called‘great precocity’.10

During all this time at Chatham John was earning a good salary, rising to£441 in 1822, but was evidently living beyond his means so that in 1819 heneeded to borrow what was then the very considerable sum of £200. Heborrowed this from a certain James Milbourne of Kennington Green, Surrey,guaranteeing him an annuity of £26 as long as he, John, then only in his earlythirties, should live. Within two years he found himself unable to keep up thepayments whereupon his brother-in-law, Thomas Barrow, who had impru-dently underwritten the arrangement, had to refund Milbourne’s capital aswell as a half-year owing on the annuity. He never recovered this money fromJohn and barred him from his house, a ban still in force when Dickens marriedin 1836. John also borrowed money from his Ordnance Terrace neighbour,Richard Newnham, and at some point also from his widowed mother. Themove to a smaller house in St Mary’s Place, Chatham, in 1821 may have beenan economy measure, though the leading authority on Dickens’s childhoodhas described it as a ‘not inferior’ locality to Ordnance Terrace and commentsthat the saving on rent would have been very slight. Mary Gibson is reported

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by Langton, however, as ‘sorrowfully remembering the altered circumstancesunder which [the family] now lived’.11

It may be that in St Mary’s Place Dickens was no longer able to enjoy gamesof make-believe with the children who had been his neighbours at OrdnanceTerrace, notably George Stroughill from next door, ‘a frank, open, and some-what daring boy’. There had been outside games like the one described in‘Dullborough Town’, played in a hayfield with Dickens pretending to be aBritish captive in the dungeons of the Indian city of Seringapatam, conqueredby the British in 1799, and being rescued by his victorious countrymen in thepersons of George plus two cousins and his ‘affianced one’, probably George’sfair-haired little sister Lucy. Lucy may have been the ‘red-cheeked baby’mentioned by Forster with whom Dickens had been ‘wildly in love’ atChatham and who seems to have had a lasting effect upon his imagination.And then there had been the indoor games as described to Langton by MaryGibson. Dickens would come downstairs to her and say, ‘Now Mary, clear thekitchen, we are going to have such a game,’ after which George Stroughillwould bring in his magic lantern and ‘they would sing, recite, and performparts of plays’. Speaking of the house in St Mary’s Place, Gibson told Langton,‘There were no such juvenile entertainments at this house as I had seen at theTerrace’.12

The first record we have of little Charles going to school belongs to the timein St Mary’s Place, unless we are to take the Dame’s School mentioned in ‘OurSchool’ (HW, 11 Oct. 1851), with its fearsome pug-dog guardian, as factual –which it may well be (Forster locates it in Rome Lane, Chatham). According toDickens, it was from his mother that he received his earliest education. It wasfrom her that he acquired ‘his first desire for knowledge, and his earliestpassion for reading’, no doubt using those thin books ‘with deliciously smoothcovers of bright red and green’ that he was lovingly to recall in his already-mentioned Household Words essay ‘A Christmas Tree’. He remembered, he toldForster, that his mother ‘taught him regularly every day for a long time, andtaught him, he was convinced, thoroughly well’. She even guided him as far asthe rudiments of Latin. We should bear this in mind when we read Dickens’scontemptuously amused description in his autobiographical fragment of hismother’s unavailing efforts, a year or two later, to help the family’s dire finan-cial situation by starting a school. Elizabeth is a more difficult figure than herebullient husband, her beloved ‘D’ as she called him, to bring into focus butshe evidently had a lively curiosity about people, liked dancing and amateurdramatics, and enjoyed clothes (poignantly, almost the last glimpse we have ofher in Dickens’s surviving letters records a senile desire ‘to be got up in sableslike a female Hamlet’). The wife of the surgeon under whose care her dyinghusband was later placed described her as being ‘as thoroughly good-natured,easy-going, companionable a body as one would wish to meet with’. As for her

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teaching of Fanny and Charles, it seems likely that the arrival of Harriet Ellenborn in 1819 (and destined for an early death two years later) and FrederickWilliam born in 1820 (always known as Fred) would have made it difficultfor Elizabeth to continue her daily instruction of her two older children. Theywere therefore sent to a school a short walk away belonging to William Giles,a young Baptist minister, who had attended St Aldate’s School in Oxford.13

Giles was, according to Langton, who was relying on the evidence of a veryelderly surviving sister of the schoolmaster, ‘an accomplished scholar, and avery conscientious, painstaking man’. He was much struck by the youngDickens’s ‘bright appearance and unusual intelligence’ and gave him ‘everyencouragement in his power, even to making a companion of him of anevening’. He was evidently a man who inspired his pupils with lasting gratitudeand a quarter century or so later a number of them gathered to honour hisfiftieth birthday. Dickens could not attend but sent a warmly-worded letterrecalling that he ‘was very young indeed’ when he lost the advantage of Giles’stuition. Already in 1838 he had told Giles that he retained a ‘vivid remem-brance of your old kindness and excellence’, and he happily adopted the nick-name of ‘The Inimitable’ after Giles had sent him, half-way through thepublication of Pickwick Papers, a silver snuff-box inscribed to ‘the inimitableBoz’. The boys attending Giles’s school wore distinctive white beaver hats andDickens hung on to his when he and his family moved to London and hisschooling was broken off. His ‘poor white hat’, as he calls it in the autobio-graphical fragment, must have then been a poignant reminder for him of hislost middle-class status and we may note that he makes ‘a much-worn littlewhite hat’ a feature of the young David Copperfield’s apparel when he is sentoff by the Murdstones to the bottling warehouse.14

Two of Giles’s younger brothers, John and Samuel, who were also pupils athis school, became great friends with Dickens who, speaking in Manchesterin 1843 when John Giles was present, vividly recalled how he and John had‘rambled together through the same Kentish fields and mingled in the samesports’. Among the places they rambled to was a stretch of waste ground justoutside Chatham known as ‘Tom-all-alone’s’, a haunting name that Dickensstored away in his memory and made powerful use of many years later whenwriting Bleak House. Giles’s aged sister remembered Dickens as ‘a very hand-some boy with long curly hair of a light colour’ who enjoyed parties and espe-cially ‘Fifth of November festivities round the bonfire’. It was here in Chatham,according to Langton, that Dickens invented the schoolboy lingo that his laterschoolfellows in London believed he did not devise until he was one of them.15

So far Dickens may sound like any normal lively schoolboy but he wasexceptional in his passion for reading stories, essays and travel literature (‘aterrible boy to read’, Mary Gibson famously called him) and fortunate in thathe had the run of his father’s little library. Here he could steep himself in the

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writings of Defoe, Fielding, Goldsmith, Smollett, Addison and Steele as well asThe Arabian Nights and Tales of the Genii (an eighteenth-century imitation ofThe Arabian Nights purporting to be of ancient origin), Don Quixote, Le Sage’sGil Blas and Elizabeth Inchbald’s collection of farces (1806–09). Defoe’sRobinson Crusoe, Goldsmith’s The Vicar of Wakefield and The Arabian Nightsand The Tales of the Genii seem especially to have seized his imaginationjudging by the way that specific allusions and generalised references to them,along with Shakespearean ones, pervade all his writings, both public andprivate. In addition, The Arabian Nights with its overarching framework storyand stories within stories was to have as profound an effect upon his laterstructuring of his own work as Addison and Steele’s Spectator and Tatler wereto have upon his journalism. During his thirties and forties, from the time ofwriting A Christmas Carol onwards, Dickens celebrated the wonder anddelight of all this childhood reading many times, always with an apparentlyeffortless total recall of details of plots, settings and characters. A much-quotedpassage in David Copperfield is the most famous example but we might alsoremember the description of the window display in a children’s bookshop inSalisbury that entrances Tom Pinch in Martin Chuzzlewit, chapter 5, and twoof Dickens’s finest Household Words essays, the already-cited ‘A Christmas Tree’and ‘Where We Stopped Growing’ (1 Jan. 1853).16

The Copperfield passage occurs in chapter 4 of the novel. David remembershow, as a child, he was consoled under the Murdstone tyranny by reading thebooks his dead father had left in a small room upstairs and how such charactersas Roderick Random, Tom Jones, Don Quixote and Robinson Crusoe hademerged from that room ‘a glorious host to keep me company’ and how they‘kept alive my fancy, and my hope of something beyond that time and place’.Forster tells us this is one of the many passages in the novel that are ‘literally true’and that, as far as Dickens’s biography is concerned, ‘its proper place is here’, thatis, in his first chapter describing Dickens’s early years in Chatham. At that time,however, as we have seen, the boy’s imagination was already being richly nour-ished by the place itself, his father’s stories and his books, his role-playing games,his visits to the theatre and so on. Years later, for good fictional purposes, heconflates in Copperfield memories of his ‘glorious’ Chatham reading with othersbelonging to the desolating months in Camden Town that followed the familymove to London, when in time he found himself sent on errands to sell piecemealthe little volumes that had meant so much to him. Forster, by inserting theCopperfield passage where he does (not even troubling to alter the local referencesto the novel’s Blunderstone) and presenting it as ‘literally’ autobiographical,distorts the biographical record, wittingly or unwittingly.17

As far as we know, there was only one thing that cast a shadow overDickens’s bright Chatham years and that was his propensity to what Forstercalls ‘attacks of violent spasm’ in his side, from which he continued to suffer to

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a greater or lesser degree for the rest of his life and which he attributed toinflammation of his left kidney. These agonising attacks left him for a timeweak and unable to join in games or rambles with other boys and it wouldhave been then that the pleasures of the imagination derived from all hisomnivorous reading would have been an especial resource for him. He wasthinking of such times, no doubt, when he pictured himself in his 1848 prefaceto Nickleby as having been a ‘not very robust child, sitting in bye-places nearRochester Castle, with a head full of Partridge, Strap, Tom Pipes, and SanchoPanza [characters from Fielding, Smollett and Cervantes]’.18

A few months after the Dickens family moved to St Mary’s Place, on11 December 1821, Mary Allen married again and left to join her new husbandDr Matthew Lamert, a surgeon attached to the Ordnance Hospital inChatham. He was a middle-aged widower with three sons and, according toForster, Dickens later based the character of the peremptory Dr Slammer inPickwick upon him. His oldest son James, born in 1802, came to lodge with theDickenses after his father’s remarriage and was kind to little Charles. JamesLamert was a keen theatre-goer and encouraged the boy’s strong attraction tothe delights of live theatre, first stimulated, presumably, by those trips toLondon to see the great Grimaldi. Lamert took him to shows in Rochester’sTheatre Royal and in ‘Dullborough Town’ Dickens, richly blending the comicand the nostalgic, as he does throughout this fine essay, celebrates his raptchildhood absorption in a milieu where the world of imaginative delight is sooften intertwined with the humours of the all-too-mundane in the shape ofmakeshift props and scenery, inadequate actors, and jocose interventions bythe audience.19

James Lamert was, it seems, no passive theatre-goer but would sometimesorganise private theatricals in the Ordnance Hospital, at that time ‘almostuninhabited’, and it was most likely he who encouraged his young protégé towrite a play himself. One of The Tales of the Genii, ‘The Enchanters, or, Misnarthe Sultan of India’, seems to have made a particularly strong impression onDickens – a lasting one, too, since there is a strikingly elaborate allusion to itat a climactic point in Great Expectations (end of ch. 38) – and, as noted at theoutset of this chapter, he precociously composed an entire tragedy based onthis long, wandering but also highly sensational story.20

By the time young Lamert took him up Dickens’s happy time at Chathamwas drawing to a close. Within the year John Dickens was posted back toLondon. With six children now to feed – a fourth son, Alfred Lamert Dickens,having been born on 11 March 1822 – and debts still owing, he and Elizabethhad also to cope with the drop in income this move inevitably entailed becauseof losing the outport allowance. John’s salary, £441 in 1822, fell to £350 in 1823.We do not know what their mood was on leaving Chatham but, given theirnatural buoyancy, it is hard to think that they were much engloomed. Whether

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Dickens left with them and the rest of the family, including an orphan fromChatham Workhouse who replaced Mary Weller – Jane Bonny had gone withDr and Mrs Lamert – is not clear. His later reference to William Giles’sappearing among the packing-cases ‘on the night before we came away’ to givehim a precious parting present, a copy of Goldsmith’s short-lived weekly TheBee, collected in volume form, suggests that he did. However, Giles’s elderlysister told Langton that Dickens was, ‘almost at the last minute’, left with herbrother and stayed with him ‘some little time longer’ before leaving to join hisfamily in London (possibly to finish the school term). In that case, theUncommercial Traveller’s moving rite-of-passage description of his forlornand solitary departure from Dullborough Town might be, as Forster asserts,truly autobiographical:

As I left Dullborough 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, haveI 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 sand-wiches in solitude and dreariness, and it rained hard all the way, andI thought life sloppier than I had expected to find it.21

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