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

Sojer’, he punched him in the face, and was punched back in return. The would-be wit learned what many people in future years would learn, to their cost: don’t mess with Charles Dickens.

      Mostly, though, he made people laugh, with wicked impersonations of everyone around him: clients, lawyers, clerks, even the cleaning woman. When Pickwick Papers came out, his former colleagues realized that half of them had turned up in its pages. His eyes – eyes that everyone who ever met him, to the day he died, remarked on – beautiful, animated, warm, dreamy, flashing, sparkling – though no two people ever agreed on their colour – were they grey, green, blue, brown? – those eyes missed nothing, any more than did his ears. He could imitate anyone. Brimming over with an all but uncontainable energy, which the twenty-first century might suspiciously describe as manic, he discharged his superplus of vitality by incessantly walking the streets, learning London as he went, mastering it, memorizing the names of the roads, the local accents, noting the characteristic topographies of the many villages of which the city still consisted. And when he wasn’t pounding the streets, he was at a show. He claimed that for at least three years he went to the theatre every single day of his life.

      The theatre of the late 1820s was pitched somewhere between Las Vegas and weekly rep, highly physical, spectacular, comic, sentimental and from time to time sublime. Great roaring actors roamed the boards, accompanied by sometimes as many as a hundred extras, in bastardized versions of the classics, clowns of genius purveyed surreal scenarios of mind-boggling illogic, raddled old actresses pretending to be seventeen-year-olds wrung the audience’s withers in scenes of heart-breaking pathos. Punters would theatre-hop, catching an act here, a song there, a curtain call somewhere else. They gave instant verdicts on the performances, shrieking their disapprobation, howling their praise. It was an entirely interactive experience, with actors giving quite as good as they got, though sometimes, in the face of overwhelming rejection, they made heartfelt apologies for their performances from the stage. All the great writers wrote for the theatre – Byron, Shelley, Walter Scott – and on the whole what they wrote for it was fundamentally untheatrical. It was an age of huge personalities, of stupendous scenic effects, of patriotic sentiment and radical satire, supposedly tightly censored but slipping rapidly out of control. And Dickens loved every second of it. It was mother’s milk to him. He offered an explanation some years later for the popularity of the theatre he grew up on: he was writing of pantomime, but he might as well have been writing about the whole experience:

      that jocund world … where there is no affliction or calamity that leaves the least impression, where a man may tumble into the broken ice, or dive into the kitchen fire, and only be the droller for the accident; where babies may be knocked about and sat upon, or choked with gravy spoons, in the process of feeding, and yet no Coroner be wanted, nor anybody made uncomfortable; where the workmen may fall from the top of a house to the bottom, or even from the bottom of a house to the top, and sustain no injury to the brain, need no hospital, leave no young children; where everyone, in short, is so superior to the accidents of life … that I suspect this to be the secret … of the general enjoyment which an audience of vulnerable spectators, liable to pain and sorrow, find in this class of entertainment.

      As a particularly vulnerable spectator himself, one liable to pain and sorrow, his joy in escaping from the realities of life was intense. He also relished melodrama, the dominant form of the age, with its schematic opposition of good and evil and its ruthlessly plotted outcomes, in which the characters’ destinies are manipulated by the puppet-master dramatist. All this he rejoiced in. But there was one form of theatre, and one particular performer, he prized above all others. Charles Mathews – in his fifties when Dickens first saw him – was an absolute original, both as writer and as performer. His monopolylogues, farces in which he played all the characters, were fixtures of the season; he invariably took the town by storm with them. ‘As good as half a dozen plays distilled,’ said the dandyish critic Leigh Hunt. They sit somewhere between Sheridan and the Goon Show. In Youthful Days, Mathews played, in rapid succession, changing costume at dazzling speed as each character came and went, a servant, a French organist, a knight from the shires, an outrageous dandy, a stout Welshman, and then, finally, a skinny snooker player and his wife. They had names like Sir Shiveraine Scrivener, Monsieur Zephyr, ap Llewellyn-ap Lloyd, and Mark and Amelrose Moomin. Major Longbow was a great favourite:

      ‘How do, Major?’ ‘How do I do? How should I do, eh? Better than any man living – there’s muscle! – strongest man living – How do I do? – pho! – no man so well as I am. I am reckoned the finest piece of anatomy that was ever sent upon the face of the earth. Upon my life, it’s true. What will you lay me it’s a lie? Hit me with a sledge-hammer if you like – can’t hurt me – there’s muscle!’ ‘Are you inclined to go up, Major?’ said I. ‘Up what, in that thingummy, a balloon? Why, I can walk up higher than you’ll go in that thing. When I was in India, I walked up an inaccessible mountain; walked for five days running, for four hours every day; took me seven days coming down, run the whole of the last day, and danced at the Governor’s Ball at night. Upon my life it’s true. What will you lay it’s a lie?’

      It could so easily have been a generalized blur of stereotypes, but surprisingly the quality for which his contemporaries most admired Mathews was his verisimilitude. He more or less invented character acting; and his repertoire of dialects, especially London dialects, was astonishing. Dickens loved him, attending his shows again and again, learning the monopolylogues by heart and practising them over and over at home.

      In the offices of Ellis and Blackmore, he would lay on impromptu performances for his fellow clerks, unerringly imitating not just Mathews but all the great popular 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