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

engulfing sense of worthlessness and failure, and to put on a brave face. He had suffered terrible injustice, he knew that. He had learned how to survive, by working hard, by not complaining, by making people laugh. He felt that he had been snatched from Eden, that what had seemed a natural state – his birthright, indeed – was a temporary benison that could not be depended upon. He was in mourning for this paradise he had lost, which as he turned it over and over in his mind became more and more important to him; it sustained him, but the memory of its loss was also a source of piercing anguish to him. To counter it, he had learned, at an astonishingly early age, how to nourish his inner life, by observing and responding to the world around him.

      More than anything else, his twelve months’ hard labour at Warren’s Blacking Warehouse taught him that he could rely on no one but himself, not kindly, theatre-loving cousins, not father, not mother. James Lamert, though a well-intentioned fellow, filled with fantasy and fun, had so little understood Charles that he had proposed him for this brain-killing, soul-destroying labour. His father – though ‘as kind-hearted and generous a man as has ever lived in the world’ – had proved deeply unreliable in every important crisis Charles had faced. But with his mother, it was worse. ‘I never afterwards forgot, I never shall forget, I never can forget,’ he wrote to Forster, ‘that my mother was warm for my being sent back.’ That when he had at long last been reprieved, when the malign spell had finally been lifted from him, she should seek to cast him back into the scene of his misery, was incomprehensible to him. This betrayal – this utter inability to understand anything at all about him – permanently skewed his relationship with her, and rendered his attitude to women in general peculiarly complex. The relationship between him and his parents had lost its innocence, because now there was something unspeakable between them: ‘From that hour, until this, my father and my mother have been stricken dumb upon it. I have never heard the least allusion to it, however far off and remote, from either of them.’ But then, neither did he ever allude to it. He knew that to survive he must banish from his consciousness the period of pain and despair he had lived through, and that he must never mention it to anyone. The strength of mind, the self-control! – to batten down the hatches and forever lock off the sharp pain. ‘I have never, until I now impart it to this paper,’ he told Forster in a resoundingly theatrical image, ‘raised the curtain I then dropped.’ The denial came, of course, at a price. ‘All the danger he ran in bearing down and over-mastering the feeling, he did not know,’ said Forster. ‘A too great confidence in himself, a sense that everything was possible to the will that would make it so, laid occasionally upon him self-imposed burdens greater than might be borne by anyone with safety.’

      He had dramatized his experience, establishing a dynamic that would thereafter underpin everything he ever wrote or did. ‘I do not write resentfully or angrily,’ he remarked, whether entirely honestly or not, of the autobiographical fragment he gave Forster, ‘for I know how these things have worked together to make me what I am.’ He was fourteen but he was already what he was. The spring was wound up, and it unwound with ever-increasing velocity over the next forty years.

      THREE

      Beginning the World

      School, so longed for, the summum bonum of his youthful dreams, turned out not to be all it was cracked up to be. Perhaps it was the particular school: certainly the Wellington House Academy for Boys on the Hampstead Road in Camden Town was not Eton or Westminster. Indeed, Dickens claimed that the headmaster, William Jones, a Welshman, was ‘the most ignorant man I have ever had the pleasure to encounter and one of the worst-tempered men perhaps that ever lived.’ He was obsessed with ruling ciphering books with a bloated mahogany ruler, ‘smiting the palms of offenders with the same diabolical instrument, or viciously drawing a pair of pantaloons tight with one of his large hands and caning the wearer with the other’. (Dickens, as a day-boy, was spared the rod, which was specially reserved for boarders.)

      Despite Jones’s barbarity, Wellington House Academy was generally considered a rather good school, one of the very best in the area. Perhaps Dickens had already decided that, as with everything else in life, if he wanted to be educated, he would have to do it for himself. He said of himself that he won prizes at school for Latin, and that he was the First Boy; Forster says that his contemporaries pooh-poohed these claims, though, apart from his occasional anarchistic inclinations, one would have thought that Dickens was very much head-boy material. His schoolfellows recollected him with affection, noting that he was small but well-built, curly-haired and handsome, with ‘a more than usual flow of high spirits’. No doubt after his year in limbo, simply being around boys of his own age with time on their hands must have been a joyful release. Almost to the end of his life, he played games with manic exuberance, sometimes becoming quite rough, even with – especially with – young women.

      He held his head more erect, it was noted, than boys are wont to do, and was generally rather smart, choosing to wear instead of the usual frill a turn-down collar, ‘which made him look less youthful in consequence’. No one would ever accuse him of being a ‘poor little drudge’ now; he was acquiring a peacock quality that would become more pronounced with time. He started writing small tales that circulated among the boys (‘though,’ sniffed one of his contemporaries, ‘I cannot recollect anything that then indicated that he would hereafter become a literary celebrity’) and he made up an imaginary language – ‘the lingo’ – which his fellows learned and joined in with. Needless to say, he participated passionately in school plays. These were evidently done in some style: that quintessential Gothic melodrama, The Miller and His Men, which Dickens directed, was designed by little William Beverley, later to become one of the most famous scene painters of the age, and the explosion of the mill at the end was achieved with a thrilling outburst of firecrackers.

      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