Charles Dickens and the Great Theatre of the World. Simon Callow

the sluggard; I heard him complain,

      ‘You have waked me too soon, I must slumber again.’

      As the door on its hinges, so he on his bed,

      Turns his sides, and his shoulders, and his heavy head.

      ‘A little more sleep, and a little more slumber;’

      Thus he wastes half his days, and his hours without number;

      And when he gets up, he sits folding his hands,

      Or walks about saunt’ring, or trifling he stands …

      I made him a visit, still hoping to find

      He had took better care for improving his mind:

      He told me his dreams, talk’d of eating and drinking;

      But he scarce reads his Bible, and never loves thinking.

      Said I then to my heart, ‘Here’s a lesson for me,’

      That man’s but a picture of what I might be:

      But thanks to my friends for their care in my breeding;

      Who taught me betimes to love working and reading.

      The rendition was a great success: ‘the little boy used to give it to great effect, and with such actions and such attitudes,’ said the family maid, Mary. It was a modest debut for the greatest literary entertainer of all time, but the seven-year-old Charles Dickens obviously took the moral of the poem to heart: no human being on the face of the earth ever filled his waking moments to better effect than he, cramming his fifty-eight years with an astonishing variety of performances in a multiplicity of arenas.

      ONE

      Paradise

      Dickens’s arrival in the world was announced with a flourish in the Portsmouth newspapers on Monday, 10 February 1812: ‘BIRTHS: On Friday, at Mile-End Terrace, the Lady of John Dickens, Esq. a son.’ The phrase has a certain gallantry about it, archaic even for the time, an almost chivalric floridity entirely characteristic of John Dickens. He was born, in 1785, in Crewe House in London and grew up in Crewe Hall, the stately Jacobean mansion in Cheshire in which his father William had been the butler. William died before John was born, but his widow Elizabeth remained housekeeper, a pivotal figure in the running of the Crewe family’s various splendid and extensive establishments. Crewe Hall was a very grand household, and a hotbed of Whiggish political activity; among the regular guests were the politicians Charles James Fox, George Canning and Edmund Burke, the playwright Richard Brinsley Sheridan and the painters Joshua Reynolds and Thomas Lawrence: some of the greatest men of the age. As a boy and a youth, John Dickens would inevitably have been involved in his mother’s work, becoming a player, if only in a bit part, in the highly theatrical enterprise of running a great house: a carefully staged performance, with sharply defined spheres of backstage and onstage, rigidly maintained roles and a script to be departed from only in exceptional circumstances.

      Certainly John Dickens emerged from that world with an orotundity, above all an elaborate sense of language, that his boy Charles relished and reproduced ever after, affectionately quoting him almost to the last – ‘as my poor father would say …’ John seems not to have had an official job till 1807, when, at the relatively late age of nineteen, he had gone to work as an ‘extra’ clerk in the Navy Pay Office in Somerset House, off the Strand in London. Patronage was the usual route to civil service appointments, and it seems very likely that John Dickens’s had been arranged by no less a figure than the high-flying Treasurer to the Navy, John Crewe’s political associate George Canning, soon to be Foreign Secretary and then, briefly, Prime Minister. At any rate, the following year the now twenty-year-old ‘extra’ clerk was thought presentable enough to be chosen to accompany Sheridan’s wife on a coach-ride from Portsmouth to London – the ever-versatile dramatist, his theatrical career long behind him, then being Receiver of the Duchy of Cornwall. The fact that John was from Crewe Hall would have naturally encouraged the Sheridans’ confidence in him: The School for Scandal is dedicated to Mrs Crewe, whose housekeeper, John’s mother, Elizabeth, would have been well known to Mrs Sheridan. She was a formidable figure, this Elizabeth Dickens, with a lifetime of service in great houses; before her marriage, she had been Lady Blandford’s maid at Grosvenor House. She was responsible for the destinies of her large staff, answerable directly to Mr and Mrs Crewe; but off-duty, she had a particular gift for storytelling, and her employers’ children would seek her out in the housekeeper’s room, sitting spellbound at her feet as she spun her yarns. ‘Inimitable’ was the word that Lady Houghton, one of those children, used of Elizabeth Dickens a lifetime later: an adjective that would immortally attach itself to her grandson.

      Meanwhile, her son John had fallen in love with Elizabeth Barrow, whose brother Thomas was his colleague; their father, Charles Barrow, was John’s superior in the Navy Pay Office, rejoicing in the magnificent title of Chief Conductor of Monies in Towns – or at least he did, until he was discovered conducting large sums of government monies into his own pocket, at which point he fled the country, later creeping back to the Isle of Man, where he ended his days. Dodgy money thus makes an appearance very early on in Dickens’s saga; money, in one form or another, always featured prominently and tiresomely in his life.

      Charles Barrow was caught with his hand in the till in 1810, a year after John and Elizabeth had got married, in some style, at the Church of St Mary-le-Strand, just up the road from Somerset House, John’s head office. John was transferred to Portsmouth, where he and Elizabeth set up house. John Dickens’s Lady, like his mother, was a renowned storyteller, famous for the sharpness of her observation and the unerring accuracy of her ear: ‘on entering a room, she almost unconsciously took stock of its contents’, said a friend, ‘and if anything struck her as out of place or ridiculous, she would afterwards describe it in the quaintest manner.’ Not necessarily someone you would want to come visiting every day. ‘She possessed,’ her friend remembered, ‘an extraordinary sense of the ludicrous.’ She equally commanded a sense of the pathetic, effortlessly reducing her listeners to tears. Above all, she was noted for her vivacity. She liked to say that she had been dancing all night the day before Charles was born; diligent research has shown that the ball took place four days earlier, which only goes to show what a spoilsport diligent research can be. Whatever the timing, dancing all night when you’re nine months gone suggests a certain commitment to fun.

      Charles was born in a small but pleasant newly built terraced house in Portsea, a suburban outgrowth of a wildly prosperous wartime Portsmouth that was bursting at the seams. In that famous year of 1812, the war with Napoleon was raging on land and at sea; just five years earlier the Battle of Trafalgar had triumphantly established that Britannia did, indeed, rule the waves, and there was a lot of work to be had building, equipping, and maintaining the Fleet. John’s job was solid and decently rewarded. Charles was the second child but the first boy, which may partly account for the exuberance of the newspaper announcement. The birth itself took place, as John Dickens’s proud announcement notes, on Friday, 7 February. Charles Dickens had occasion to observe that pretty well anything of importance that happened in his life thereafter, happened on that day of the week. The household into which he was born that particular Friday consisted of his mother and father, his two-year-old sister, Fanny, the sixteen-year-old housemaid, Mary Weller, whom we have already met as Charles’s first reviewer, and another, older, maid, Jane Bonny. Pleasant though the house and its surroundings were, there was no running water, which may have been what encouraged the family to move, four months after Charles was born, to a house in Hawke Street, which did have that precious commodity on tap, and was in a no less agreeable vicinity, with the added advantage of being minutes away from the Navy Pay Office.

      John’s salary had been steadily rising to a very comfortable £230 per annum, so their next move, eighteen months later, was to leafy Southsea, in a roomy house with a nice little front garden; it represented a distinct step up the social ladder for them. There they were joined by the latest and newest young Dickens, Alfred, and Elizabeth’s much-loved sister, Mary, nicknamed Aunt Fanny, whose husband had died in action