Читать книгу Charles Dickens and the Great Theatre of the World - Simon Callow - Страница 10

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 a Russian sailor jacket and military-looking cap, but he was no fop, and when someone satirically hailed him with the words ‘Hello, 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 who have property to leave; and punish hasty gentlemen who call ladies by 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.