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

unpleasant names.’ Its days were numbered; thirty years later it was gone. The sixteen-year-old Charles worked in the death-like hush of the Prerogative Office of Doctors’ Commons, and was very bored, not realizing, perhaps, how perfect a training ground it was for a satirist.

      He was not very well paid, and the work was intermittent. which made him start to think of the theatre as a possible career ‘in quite a business-like way’. He prepared himself for it with every bit as much intensity as he had applied himself to mastering Gurney. He was fanatical in his attendance at performances, studying the form, assiduously tracking down the best acting, always seeing Mathews ‘wherever he played’. He practised on his own ‘immensely’ (such tricky but critical matters as how to walk in and out of a room, and how to sit on a chair); he often did this for four, five, or six hours a day, shut up in his own room or walking about in a field. He worked out a system for learning parts, a large number of which he committed to memory. And then, when he finally judged himself ready, towards the end of 1831, when he was nineteen, he sat down in his little office at Doctors’ Commons and wrote a letter to George Bartley, Charles Kemble’s manager at the Covent Garden Theatre. He told him how old he was, and exactly what he thought he could do: he had, he said, ‘a strong perception of character and oddity, and a natural power of reproducing in my own person what I observed in others’. A very sensible letter, from someone who clearly has no idiotic ideas about the theatre, who knows his own worth but makes no exaggerated claims for himself. And, once Covent Garden had got their forthcoming sensation, The Hunchback, up and running, Bartley wrote back offering him an audition to perform anything of Mathews’s he liked (presumably he’d mentioned his admiration for the monopolylogues). He planned to sing as well, and lined up his sister Fanny to play for him. But on the day of the audition, he went down with a bad cold and inflammation of the face (the beginning of a persistent earache), and asked if they could re-arrange the audition for the following season. And then, while the old season was still running its course, his uncle William Barrow, another of his mother’s brothers, offered him a job as a reporter on The Mirror of Parliament, a would-be rival to Hansard that Barrow had established. Charles accepted with alacrity, working side by side with his father, a brace of Bracygraphers, toiling away together. He took his place in the House of Commons for the first time early in 1832, just around the time of his twentieth birthday, and – for the time being – his dreams of working in the theatre melted away.

      Going to work for The Mirror of Parliament was when he really ‘began the world’, when his course was set, and after which his career proceeded like an arrow shot from a strong-bow. Whether being a writer, or a novelist, was his ambition, we simply don’t know. He never spoke of it. It simply followed as day follows night. He had been in training for it, whether he knew it or not, cultivating the ‘patient and continuous energy which then began to be matured in me’. This patient energy, he knew, was the source of his subsequent success. David Copperfield put it very well many years later:

      I do not hold one natural gift, I dare say, that I have not abused. My meaning simply is, that whatever I have tried to do in life, I have tried with all my heart to do well; that whatever I have devoted myself to, I have devoted myself to completely; that in great aims and in small, I have always been thoroughly in earnest.

      His long walks through the city, his nights at the theatre, his painstaking mastery of shorthand, his hours in the British Museum Reading Room, for which he had got a ticket as soon as he was eligible, just two days after his eighteenth birthday, devouring Shakespeare and the historians and the philosophers, his months in the blacking warehouse, his sense of abandonment, of exile from Eden, his hunger, his loneliness, his humiliation, his despair. Everything that had happened to him conspired to make him what he became; every last detail of it fed into his work. The ‘strong perception of character and oddity, and a natural power of reproducing in my own person what I observed in others’ he had told the Covent Garden Theatre about was as well suited to writing as it was to acting. Recounting the story of his abandoned audition, he told Forster that he had never thought of going on the stage as anything but a way of getting money. After he broke into journalism, he said, and had a success in it, he quickly left off turning his thoughts that way, and never resumed the idea. ‘I never told you this, did I?’ he asked his friend. ‘See how near I may have been to another life?’ Another secret, but one that he could talk about, fifteen years after the event.

      FOUR

      The Birth of Boz

      Dickens’s passionate appetite for every aspect of life did not by any means exclude the opposite sex. From his earliest years in Portsea and Chatham, he seems to have been drawn to pretty little girls; indeed, many of his co-conspirators in pranks and putting on plays seem to have been girls rather than boys. He writes sweetly in the memory pieces that flowed so prolifically from him in his last decades of a succession of flawless little charmers with names like Olympia Squires, all of whom he idolized. Perhaps he writes a little too sweetly either for our taste in the early twenty-first century or indeed for credibility. Radical in so many of his attitudes, he seems entirely to have subscribed, as a fully grown author of major novels of fathomless complexity, to the Victorian belief that children were adorable, innocent little adults in disguise; nothing amuses him more, for example, than to write a story – ‘Boots at the Holly-Tree Inn’ – in which two eight-year-olds elope.

      It does seem, however, that even as a youth and a young man, he maintained an uncommonly idealizing attitude to young women. His sense of abandonment and isolation during the blacking warehouse years, the lack of warmth he received from Mrs Roylance in the lodgings at Little College Street, and the shattering betrayal (as he saw it) inflicted on him by his mother, may have impelled him to create a countervailing image of an ideal female presence, instinct with kindness, affection, approval and nurture, not maternal but celestial: beautiful, radiant, the sort of vision that illuminates the blackest night of the soul and heals the wounded heart. The word Angel expresses many of these things, or did in the nineteenth century, and it is a word that he used frequently to describe the women he admired, whether of his own invention, or in life itself.

      On his own admission, he was rarely out of love in his early days, and, Dickens being Dickens, it was an overwhelming, an obsessional, a cataclysmic experience. The very phrase ‘Dickens in Love’ conjures up alarming images, his energies so extreme, his need so great, his resources of charm, of eloquence, of comedy, so inexhaustible that it must have been startling to find oneself on the receiving end. There had been several objects of his affection before he met the twenty-year-old Maria Beadnell, but on none of them did he lavish the same degree of passion, nor indeed did he ever lavish as much again on anyone else. The year was 1830; he was eighteen, and still languishing in Doctors’ Commons, only sporadically employed. We have no photograph of the young Maria Beadnell, but there is a charming watercolour of her in the unlikely guise of Dido, Queen of Carthage. In it she is depicted as possessing the huge, limpid, heavy-lidded, almost somnolent eyes that would later feature in so many Victorian depictions of women: deeply passive, unsmiling eyes, surmounting a neat, shapely nose and a tiny red mouth. It is entirely possible that such a woman would stir the loins of a slightly younger man: there is somehow the promise of deep sensual embrace, although the expression on the face itself is oddly inert, which is perhaps part of the charm. It’s an amateur daub, and one should perhaps not read into it too closely, but whatever the precise nature of her appeal, Dickens was certainly enslaved by her.

      Maria was no doubt confounded by the ardour of her boyish suitor: for his first forty years, Dickens looked absurdly young, and at eighteen (as we see from a charming watercolour of him by his aunt, Janet Ross) he looks almost girlish, big-eyed and bashful, but his passion was torrential. She tried to control the situation, following the time-honoured policy of blowing alternately hot and cold, in rapid succession. This had the entirely planned effect of whipping him up to even greater heights of desperation and desire, utterly at a loss to know how to please. He must have realized almost immediately that she was not offering the luminous celestial balm he had been looking for; she was a fairly average young woman, not an angel. But it was too late; he was hooked.

      Then there was the question of the parents: George Beadnell was