Читать книгу Charles Dickens and the Great Theatre of the World - Simon Callow - Страница 11

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 a banker and somewhat underwhelmed by the flashy, talkative, manically exuberant young man who was clearly not out of the top drawer; the Beadnells deeply doubted Dickens’s suitability as a prospective husband for their precious little girl. Whether to relieve the situation or not, they sent her off to France. ‘My existence was entirely uprooted, moreover, and my whole being blighted, by the Angel of my soul being sent to Paris to finish her education!’ he wrote to Maria when she made contact with him some twenty years later, effortlessly slipping back into the language of adolescent infatuation. At the time, the inevitable crisis in their relationship came when he found out that Maria’s best friend, Marianne Leigh, who had purportedly been liaising between them, had been imparting to Maria confidences never meant for her to hear, and he realized that he was being played with by the two girls. He wrote Maria an overwrought good-bye letter.

Our meetings of late have been little more than so many displays of heartless indifference on the one hand, while on the other they have never failed to provide a fertile source of wretchedness and misery; and seeing, as I cannot fail to do, that I have engaged in a pursuit which has long since been worse than hopeless, and a further pursuit of which can only expose me to deserved ridicule, I have made up my mind to return the little present I received from you some time since (which I have always prized, as I still do, beyond anything I ever possessed) and the other enclosed mementoes of our past correspondence which I am sure it must be gratifying to you to receive, as after our recent situations they are certainly better adapted for your custody than mine.

He develops a lightly sarcastic manner:

my feelings upon any subject, more especially upon this, must be a matter to you of very little moment; still I have feelings in common with other people – perhaps so far as they relate to you they have been as strong and as good as ever warmed the human heart – and I do feel that it is mean and contemptible of me to keep by me one gift of yours or to preserve one single line or word of remembrance or affection from you. I therefore return them, and I can only wish that I could as easily forget that I ever received them.

He ends: ‘A wish for your happiness, though it comes from me may not be the worse for being sincere and heartfelt. Accept it as it is meant, and believe that nothing will ever afford me more real delight than to hear that you, the object of my first and last love, are happy.’ The most striking thing about this letter is not how deeply felt it is (and there is no doubt that it is) but how conventional the expression is. It could have come from any frustrated young man of the period, or from the pages of any unremarkable contemporary epistolary novel. That is what Maria had done to him. Her conventionally capricious behaviour had forced him to play her game; he was humiliated and toyed with, but worse than that, he was diminished, less than himself. He would never allow that to happen again, with anyone.

But balm was to hand: he was working on a show. He had been writing, directing and acting in plays in his family circle ever since he started work (a little later he wrote a play for them called O’Thello, featuring his father in the role of The Great Unpaid), and during all these anguished months of amorous frustration, he had been directing a triple bill consisting of Clari, the Maid of Milan, The Married Bachelor and Amateurs and Actors. The company and cast were all friends, but there was nothing amateur about his work on the show. He was in supreme command, casting it, staging it, stage-managing it, starring in it, seeing to the music, arranging the set, checking the props. A couple of weeks after his passionate valedictory to Maria, he was writing to his chum Kolle, who was engaged to Maria’s sister Anne, ‘you are, or at any rate will be, what I can never be, that is, happy and contented’, briskly adding that ‘the corps dramatic are all anxiety. The scenery is all completing rapidly, the machinery is finished, the curtain hemmed, the orchestra complete and the manager grimy.’ He was, in short, in his element, and in his letter, the moment he writes about the theatre, he is instantly, unmistakably, Charles Dickens. Lovelorn or not, he had no intention of hiding this particular light under a bushel: he had invited a large audience (including ‘many judges’). It was a triumph. Maria and her family came, too, but she sulked. A month later, he sent her one final, final affirmation of his love, and she was coldly reproachful in return. It was finally over.

He was shaken by the affair, nonetheless. He had given her everything of himself. He had lowered his guard, bared his heart. And she had just toyed with him. ‘It excluded every other idea from my mind for four years, at a time of life when four years are equal to four times four,’ he wrote a quarter of a century later. That the experience of the relationship burned itself into his heart and mind is beyond question, but the contention that it excluded every other idea from his mind will not bear examination. On the contrary. Perhaps the pain was greater precisely because the whole affair dragged itself out over a time when Dickens was first beginning to feel his power in the world, and was exploding in every direction. At the time he met Maria, he was still a shorthand reporter plodding away at Doctors’ Commons; by the time their relationship was over, in 1833, he was a star reporter, trembling on the brink of authorship.

The instant he joined The Mirror of Parliament, in 1832, the uncommon accuracy of transcription made possible by his phenomenal shorthand skills was admiringly recognized, and his self-confidence soared. At about the same time, he started writing for another new paper, the True Sun, and again, his skills were immediately hailed. But he quickly made his mark there in another way, too. When he had joined the staff, the Sun was already in trouble. The journalists were at war with the proprietor, and had called a strike. And Dickens, a twenty-year-old tyro reporter, was their chief negotiator. ‘I well remember noticing at this dread time, standing on the staircase of the magnificent mansion we were lodged in,’ wrote another young Sun contributor, John Forster, who had been invited to a meeting of the disaffected workforce, ‘a young man of my own age whose keen animation of look would have arrested attention anywhere, and whose name, upon enquiry, I then for the first time heard.’ ‘Young Dickens’, he discovered, had conducted the recalcitrant reporters’ case ‘triumphantly’.

It is worth briefly freezing the frame at this moment, because it changed both men’s lives. Though it would be some years before they finally sat down at a table together, they sensed, at occasional accidental meetings over that time, that there was a profound sympathy between them; when they did sit down together, Forster immediately became Dickens’s most intimate associate, which he remained for some decades, his advice sought and taken on matters personal, professional and artistic. Many of Dickens’s books and much of his life would have been quite different without Forster’s influence. And Forster, despite his ingrained cussedness a natural hero-worshipper, found the great task of his life. The vision of Dickens on the staircase during the Sun strike was for him a coup de foudre, of which the final and greatest outcrop was the biography, which, flawed and partial though it sometimes is, gave the world Charles Dickens the man as we know him.

Dickens, meanwhile, once the strike was (temporarily) resolved, plunged back into the life of a newsman, c. 1833. It was a world without technology: neither telephones, telegrams, tape recorders, television, nor indeed trains. ‘I pursued the calling of a reporter under circumstances of which subsequent generations can form no adequate conception,’ he told a gathering of newsmen in the 1850s. ‘There never was anybody connected with newspapers, who in the same space of time had so much express and post-chaise experience as I.’ He was reporting on political life in Parliament, often in marathon sittings requiring relays of up to half a dozen reporters to cover them – ‘I have borne the House of Commons like a man and have yielded to no weakness except slumber in the House of Lords’ – and up and down the country on the hustings. He and his fellow reporter Thomas Beard were conveyed to these far-flung places in the bone-breaking, heart-stopping, life-threatening species of fast coach known as Tallyhos, Taglionis and Wonders: they leapt in and out of a variety of these vehicles, in a multitude of weather conditions, on their way to remote destinations across the British Isles, in order to record for posterity the deathless words of a class of human being for whom he increasingly found he had nothing but contempt. ‘Night after night,’ he wrote ventriloquially through the mouth of David Copperfield, ‘I recorded predictions that never came to pass, professions that were never fulfilled, explanations that were only meant to mystify.’ His allergy to Parliamentary democracy in action was quickly established, seeing it as a debased form of theatre: ‘I have been behind the scenes to know the worth of political life.’ He thought this disposition of his might be due to ‘some imperfect development of my organ of veneration’. He had seen elections, he said, and never once been impelled, no matter which party won, ‘to damage my hat by throwing it up in the air’. Perhaps, he concluded, he was ‘of a cold and insensible temperament, amounting to iciness, in such matters’.

His travels, nevertheless, had a profound effect on him, giving him a detailed insight into the state of the nation, affording him hilarious encounters with innkeepers and fellow travellers and helping to form his political views, which he found, on examination, to be uncompromisingly radical. He was recruited, in 1835, to the Morning Chronicle, the great liberal newspaper of the day, under the inspiring editorship of the trenchant Scot, John Black, who had formed a shrewdly favourable opinion of Dickens’s qualities. ‘Dear old Black!’ Dickens wrote of him, ‘My first out-and-out appreciator.’ As well as inculcating in him the principles of Reformism – these were the politically despairing days after the passage of the wretchedly inadequate Reform Bill of 1832 – Black, sensing Dickens’s potential, relieved him of the obligation of filling the dog days of the recess with the book reviewing or theatre criticism or attendance at public meetings with which other reporters were burdened, and encouraged him to write about what interested him – which turned out, of course, to be pretty well everything, though with a marked preference for the London he had obsessively scrutinized since being so rudely de-rusticated there, some ten years earlier.

Thus appeared, in 1834, only a month after he had started work as a reporter for the Chronicle, the first piece under the heading of Street Sketches, signed with the sparkish byline of Boz. He had already put the name (borrowed from his youngest brother, Moses, whose nickname it was) to some sketches written for the Monthly Magazine, which had a year before published his very first literary effort, ‘A Dinner at Poplar Walk’.

I had taken with fear and trembling, to authorship. I wrote a little story in secret, entitled ‘A Sunday out of Town’, which I dropped stealthily one evening at twilight into a dark letter box, in a dark office, up a dark court in Fleet Street. It appeared in all the glory of print in the December 1833 issue of The Monthly Magazine, its name transmogrified to ‘A Dinner at Poplar Walk’, on which occasion – how well I remember it! – I walked down to Westminster Hall, and turned into it for half-an-hour, because my eyes were so dimmed with joy and pride, that they could not bear the street, and were not fit to be seen there.

This pleasant, if perhaps overlong, sketch features the first dog in Dickens (Dickens does love a dog), the first eating scene (the food, alas, not described), and a little in-joke (the central figure works at Somerset House, where both Dickens’s father and disgraced grandfather Barrow had worked). It also appears to contain a mildly malicious portrait of a household that may bear some resemblance to that of the Beadnells, the in-laws that never were. Renamed ‘Mr Minns and His Cousin’, the piece re-appeared in book form in Sketches by Boz; but the pieces for the Chronicle speak in an altogether different voice, the immediately recognizable voice of Charles Dickens, playful, fiery, fantastical, witty, suddenly grave – verbal Hogarth, with more than a touch of Rowlandson. Piercing observation is joined to a rising and irrepressible hilarity; the mood is one of benevolence and affection for the foibles of the city, a tenderness towards ordinary life that could perhaps only have come from one who had once feared that he would be deprived of one. Even Parliament gets off the hook lightly. Everything is informed with the geniality and ease of the twenty-two-year-old writer rejoicing in his powers, communicating with apparently effortless conversational directness with his readers. Read as a collection, the enjoyment is immense, but the individual articles, as they came out, were as eagerly anticipated as letters from a delightful friend.

Their author was in understandably expansive mood. He rejoiced in the admiration of his peers, having earned the reputation, he playfully boasted, of being ‘the best and most rapid reporter ever known, it being generally acknowledged that I could do anything in that way under any sort of circumstances, and often did. (I daresay I am at this present writing the best shorthand writer in the world.)’ It had been done with exceptional hard work: he had gone at it with a determination ‘to overcome all the difficulties which fairly lifted me up into that newspaper life, and floated me away over a hundred men’s heads’. He had done it as if in preparation for his work as a creative writer: he had mastered the technical aspect of writing, strengthening his verbal muscle, so that when he started to use his imagination, he knew exactly how to express himself. And now he was beginning to be known by the general public, and to make decent money.

One of the first uses he put his money to was clothes. He favoured flashy waistcoats, jewellery on his fingers, a florid new hat and a rather handsome blue cloak with black velvet facings, which he threw over his shoulder à l’Espagnol. His theatricality was unfavourably animadverted on in some quarters; the phrase ‘not quite a gentleman’ was murmured in the clubs and the salons, as it would be for the rest of his life. But he wanted to celebrate his achievements – to celebrate himself. At the height of the session, working preposterous hours, he had been able to rake in up to an astonishing twenty-five guineas a week.

It was just as well that he was in funds, because in November 1834, John Dickens, for all his diligent work in the press gallery, had again lost touch with the facts of financial life, and found himself back in the sponging house. There he was visited by Charles. For Dickens, there was no heartbreak, as at the Marshalsea, no sense that the sun had set on his life. It was simply a question of how to clear up the mess: for all practical purposes, his father was now, already, his child. Dickens found out how much was owed, paid it off, located a new, cheaper flat for them (they had been living in genteel grandeur in Bentinck Street at the posher end of Marylebone), and rooms for himself and his brother Fred. It was not easily done – he had to borrow a little, and mortgaged his salary for two weeks – but it was done swiftly and effectively. ‘We have much more cause for cheerfulness than despondency, after all,’ he told his friend Beard, which might have been the motto for the first half of his career. There seems to have been no sentimentality about it, no reproaches; he just got on with it, as he had just got on with the rest of his life. He had taken them in hand, as he had taken his own life in hand. The disadvantage of being proved so effective was that he was now expected to provide the same service whenever the need arose, and not only for his feckless father but for all the rest of the family who, with the exception of Fanny, seem to have inherited the financially incompetent genes that nature had happily withheld from Dickens himself.

Meanwhile, his career as a writer took another step forward. In January of 1835, the Morning Chronicle launched an evening edition, under the editorship of the Chronicle’s music critic, George Hogarth, another Scot, who invited Dickens to contribute more of the Street Sketches to the new paper. Dickens proposed that they should be a series, which is what they became, twenty of them appearing over the following eight months, establishing him – or rather, Boz – ever more clearly in the public mind. The two men got on well, Dickens being particularly excited by Hogarth’s close friendship with his hero, Walter Scott, who had died only three years before, in circumstances that always haunted Dickens: desperately writing himself to an early grave to repay his debts, a fate Dickens determined at all costs to avoid. Hogarth had been Scott’s lawyer, helping him to recover from his financial crash, though he was not so successful in avoiding financial disaster for himself, suffering a total collapse of his affairs not once but twice. Once he moved out of the law and into journalism, he moved onto a more even keel. He invited Dickens to his house in semi-rural Fulham, and Charles soon became a familiar presence there, delighting in the company of Hogarth’s three daughters, little suspecting that the girls – Georgina, aged six, Mary, fourteen, and Catherine, nineteen – would between them and in very different ways become absolutely central to his life.

He found himself strongly attracted to Catherine, who had Maria’s large sleepy eyes, but was much less pert and altogether more straightforward in her response to him. Before long, she and Charles became engaged. There was no resistance whatever from Catherine’s parents: Dickens was hard-working, and a coming man, with admirable prospects, well able to provide for a family. Indeed, so hard was he working, he barely had time for his courtship. Half a century later, Georgina recollected that, during that period, when she was a very young girl, Dickens had once burst through the drawing-room doors in a sailor outfit, performed a vigorous hornpipe, swiftly disappeared, then immediately afterwards come in through the front door in his normal street clothes. The story suggests a certain hectic quality to his wooing, although it might equally suggest a desperation to create a little excitement in the somewhat placid Hogarth domestic environment. No doubt to Dickens it was the most normal thing in the world to do: dressing up and disguising himself was as natural to him as breathing.

However much her father might approve of the dazzling young wordsmith, Kate was not best pleased to find out quite how much of his time Charles gave over to his work, and she let him know it. She had no sympathy whatsoever for his pleas of ‘furteeg’. She was not mercurial or scornful, like Maria; instead she was prone to long sulks and being – as she spelled it in her letters – ‘coss’ with him. But Dickens was having none of it. He had been Maria’s slave: he would, in the kindest, nicest possible, way, be Kate’s master. ‘If a feeling of you know not what – a capricious restlessness of you can’t tell what, and a desire to tease, you don’t know why, give rise to it – overcome it; it will never make you more amiable, I more fond, or either of us more happy.’ Dickens was just four years older than Kate, but already he was writing to her as if he were her father. Kate wrote back asking him to ‘love her once more’ – and he replies briskly, if unromantically, ‘I have never ceased to love you for one moment since I knew you; nor shall I.’ When she persists, he uses the ultimate threat: if she doesn’t like things the way they are, or him the way he is, ‘I will not miss you lightly, but I shall need no second warning.’ This masterful tone of his might have seemed quite sexy to Kate: there seems no doubt that he desired her. When he isn’t disciplining her, his letters are filled with endearments: Dearest Katie, Dearest Love, Dearest Darling Pig, My Dearest Life, as often as not signed off with the lavish addition of 990,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 kisses.

It is impossible to believe that a young man of Dickens’s intense vitality was not highly charged sexually. We know virtually nothing of his amorous activity outside of his fertile marriage and the liaison with Ellen Ternan during his final decade (and, in truth, we know very little about that), but he must, by now, at the age of twenty-three, have been in a sexually explosive state. Moreover, he wanted a family, to give to children of his own the things he felt he had lacked: stability, continuity, a sense of nurture. But whether he actually saw Catherine for herself, as she was, is doubtful. He was very turned on by her, and greatly enjoyed his involvement in the Hogarth family – a much better, stabler model than his own – and their nice house in leafy Fulham. But had he worked out what he wanted from a woman, apart from hearth and home and abundant sex? Did he ever?

Alongside his marital aspirations, the rest of his life was whirling along, professionally and socially. He was now mixing with the young bloods of his day. In particular, he had become friendly with William Harrison Ainsworth, wildly successful author of the highwayman novel Rookwood and contributor to the politically provocative Fraser’s Magazine. Ainsworth was some seven years Dickens’s elder, and a brilliant and influential figure on the social scene, witty, elegant, tastefully dandyish. After scandalously leaving his wife and three children, he established a bachelor salon at his rooms at Kensal Lodge, Harrow Road, in North West London, which became the meeting-place of a wide circle of young bloods – Daniel Maclise, the brilliant young Irish painter with a fascination for the theatre, on the brink of becoming a very young Royal Academician; the novelist and political amateur Benjamin Disraeli (his dandyism a rival to Ainsworth’s); the best-selling novelist and Member of Parliament, Edward Bulwer-Lytton; and, considerably the oldest of them all, the political satirist, cartoonist and wild man, George Cruikshank. This was Dickens’s first exposure to his leading contemporaries. His presence there was something of a coup for Ainsworth as a social impresario. Everyone wanted to meet Boz. He barely had his foot on the bottom rung of the literary ladder, but Ainsworth’s brilliant guests welcomed him, exhilarated by his energy and entertained by his mimicry. Apart from Disraeli, with whom he was ill at ease both personally and politically, these men all became his friends and collaborators; and it was here that he met his first publisher.

Being Dickens’s publisher, as many people were to discover over the years, was not a restful experience, but the twenty-six-year-old John Macrone, about to reissue Ainsworth’s bestseller Rookwood, foresaw no complications when he suggested to Boz that his Sketches might make a nice book, and that perhaps his friend Mr Cruikshank sitting over there on the other side of the table might be just the man to provide some illustrations for it; perhaps, too, Dickens might like to consider writing a three-volume novel? Well, of course he might, and in short order contracts were signed, one assigning to Macrone the copyright in Sketches by Boz, which appeared soon after, and swept all before it, and the other commissioning a novel, Gabriel Vardon, the Locksmith of London, which took a very long time indeed to see the light of day, and pleased almost no one when it finally did.

Things were now happening for Dickens with extraordinary rapidity. More sketches, under a different pseudonym (Tibbs), were appearing weekly in Bell’s Life in London; he continued reporting up and down the country for the Morning Chronicle; and he was working on the libretto for an operetta. He had been approached by his sister Fanny Dickens’s Royal Academy of Music contemporary John Hullah, who had an idea for a piece set in Venice called The Gondoliers. Delighted though he was at the prospect of writing something for the theatre, Dickens said he couldn’t write about gondoliers; he had to write about real people whom he knew and understood, and suggested instead an everyday story of country folk, their love affairs and comic misunderstandings. To this Hullah meekly agreed – an early example of the irresistible force of Dickens’s personality in action – and went away to write the music, while Dickens thrashed out the book and lyrics.

He had temporarily moved to Fulham to be nearer to Catherine, who was still pouting a great deal about the lack of time he spent with her, and receiving more callous reproofs from him.

If the representations I have so often made to you, about my working as a duty, and not as a pleasure, be not sufficient to keep you in the good humour which you, of all people in the world should preserve – why, then, my dear, you must be out of temper, and there is no help for it.

There is something inexpressibly depressing about Dickens’s relations with the women he loved – a lack of spontaneity, of parity, of freedom. He’s always somehow being trapped by them into these terrible patterns of behaviour. His exchanges with Catherine are of a very low grade; it’s paltry, piffling stuff. From time to time fun was had – they loved going to the theatre together, and he was always able to make her laugh. But, forgivably, she simply didn’t understand the sheer amount of work involved in keeping the Boz bubble going: ‘Is it my fault I cannot get out tonight?’ he cried. ‘I must work at the opera.’ Such were the communications between them, before they were married. No great passion, no torrential exchange of thoughts, no intimations of the sublime, as his ardent nature would seem to have demanded. No doubt that was the last thing he wanted; he had quite enough of that for two of them, and he could communicate with his male friends on that level. What he needed was stability, comfort, continuity. At least, that is what he thought he wanted.

Meanwhile, he received a visit that had momentous consequences. As often with Dickens, the encounter had a fated flavour to it, a sense of the inexorable march of destiny. His visitor was William Hall, one of the partners in Chapman and Hall, a newly established publishing firm. When Dickens opened the door of his new flat at Furnival’s Inn in Holborn, he gasped, because Hall, in his former incarnation as a bookseller, had sold Dickens the copy of the Monthly Magazine in which his very first story had appeared. Hall had come to Dickens with a modest proposal: his firm had just had a big success with their first publication, A Christmas Squib, by the noted illustrator Robert Seymour. Seymour had had an idea for a new book based on his pictures of the absurd exploits of some Cockney would-be sportsmen, they needed someone to provide the copy for the pictures, would he be interested? With extraordinary clarity of purpose, Dickens saw an opportunity for something much more ambitious: a story in monthly episodes based on the free-wheeling activities of an eclectic, not to say eccentric, group of friends whose central figure was to be a genial middle-aged man whom Dickens decided should be named Pickwick, borrowing the name of a well-known coach operator just outside Bath that he must have frequently passed on his journalistic hikes around the country. Dickens would not provide copy for the illustrator: he would deliver his copy, and the illustrator would take his cue from that.

Chapman and Hall were swept away by the boldness of Dickens’s plans, and made it clear to Seymour that he must fall in with the new thinking. Dickens immediately dashed off two instalments – ‘Pickwick is at length begun in all his might and glory!’ – and was full of courteous but firm suggestions as to how Seymour might go about his task; even Edward Chapman weighed in with strict notes to the illustrator on how to portray Pickwick, on the basis of the physical appearance of someone he once knew, ‘a fat old beau who, in spite of the ladies’ protests, would wear drab tights and black gaiters’. Seymour, utterly crushed, went away and did his work, but after a particularly trying night wrestling with some recalcitrant etching plates for the third episode, he blew his brains out.

Neither Dickens nor Chapman nor Hall seemed unduly fazed by this turn of events; they hired another designer, who suspended work on his entry for the Royal Academy, but his etching skills were inadequate, so they sacked him (just after the entry date for the Academy competition had passed); they briefly glanced at the portfolio of a young giant of an aspiring illustrator called William Makepeace Thackeray, and then they struck gold with Hablôt Knight Browne, who, under the pseudonym of Phiz, created some of the most memorable of all visual realizations of Dickens’s characters. Perhaps the most extraordinary aspect of this sequence of events is that, despite the splendid and expensive adverts in The Times and the Athenaeum, the first few episodes of The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club were far from successful and the publishers were reduced to halving the print run, but they kept faith. Their young author’s confidence carried all before it, and with the arrival in the fourth episode of the Cockney genius Sam Weller, which also happened to be Phiz’s first as illustrator, it took off in the words of a contemporary reviewer, ‘like a Skyrocket’. And suddenly everybody was reading it. As Forster exuberantly put it: ‘Judges on the bench and boys in the street, gravity and folly, the young and the old, those who were entering life and those who were quitting it, alike found it irresistible.’ It was that publisher’s dream, a book that had in it something for everyone.

For any young writer to have created in his first novel such a complete world, a world teeming with individuals who seem always to have existed, who seem to have come out of the very heart of England, at once real and archetypal, bowling through the contemporary landscape on a journey that might have started at the beginning of time, each strutting his stuff like so many brilliant turns on the stage of life, while blending perfectly into the ensemble, is astonishing enough; that that writer was the same Charles Dickens who only ten years before had thought that his life was over, that he was doomed to a life of humiliation and ordinariness, is simply astounding. The quality that beams out of the book with such golden force is one of optimism and benevolence. That it should do so is a triumph of Dickens’s spirit over his circumstances: but it had not been easily won, and in time to come he would struggle to maintain the faith that he so ineffably expresses in the book’s final pages:

And in the midst of all this, stood Mr Pickwick, his countenance lighted up with smiles, which the heart of no man, woman, or child, could resist: himself the happiest of the group: shaking hands, over and over again, with the same people, and when his own hands were not so employed, rubbing them with pleasure: turning round in a different direction at every fresh expression of gratification or curiosity, and inspiring everybody with his looks of gladness and delight.

Breakfast is announced. Mr Pickwick leads the old lady (who has been very eloquent on the subject of Lady Tollimglower), to the top of a long table; Wardle takes the bottom; the friends arrange themselves on either side; Sam takes his station behind his master’s chair; the laughter and talking cease; Mr Pickwick, having said grace, pauses for an instant, and looks round him. As he does so, the tears roll down his cheeks, in the fullness of his joy.

Let us leave our old friend in one of those moments of unmixed happiness, of which, if we seek them, there are ever some, to cheer our transitory existence here. There are dark shadows on the earth, but its lights are stronger in the contrast. Some men, like bats or owls, have better eyes for the darkness than for the light. We, who have no such optical powers, are better pleased to take our last parting look at the visionary companions of many solitary hours, when the brief sunshine of the world is blazing full upon them.

In between episodes two and three of Pickwick, Dickens got married. He had been emboldened to do so by the success of the recently published Sketches by Boz, a success he had done everything in his power to promote, sending copies to anyone of note whom he had encountered along his way – Lord Stanley, for instance, who had once dictated to him an epically long speech when he was still reporting in the gallery of the House of Commons, and Thomas Talfourd, the distinguished barrister, crusading MP and playwright, whom he had met at Ainsworth’s. The book had been greeted with a powerful review in the Chronicle (by his father-in-law-to-be, as it happens), and another in the Morning Post; it was admired not only for its view of the city, but for the range of the material and the variety of forms: stories, fantastical impressions, hard-core reporting. A voice – although an exuberantly polyphonic one – had been established. More startlingly, there was an authority, a perspective of passionate radicalism and a compassion extraordinary in such a young man: ‘such sights will make your heart ache,’ he wrote of what he had seen in the slums at St Giles’s, ‘always supposing that you are not a philosopher or a political economist’.

With the Sketches and now Pickwick, Boz, whose identity was still known only to his inner circle, was the toast of the town; speculation was rife as to who he might be. ‘We do not know the author,’ said a sharp anonymous review of Sketches in the Metropolitan Magazine, ‘but we should apprehend that he has, from the peculiar turn of his genius, been already a successful dramatist; if he has not, we can safely opine that he may be if he will.’ The review strongly recommends ‘this facetious work to the Americans … as it is a perfect picture of the morals, manners, habits of a great portion of English society … it would be needless for us to particularise any one of these admirable sketches, very many of which would form an admirable groundwork for light comedies and farces.’

He made another pseudonymous appearance early in 1836, this time in the guise of Timothy Sparks, in a pamphlet entitled ‘Sunday Under Three Heads’, in which he articulated his championship of people’s right to pleasure. There was a move afoot in Parliament to ban games on Sundays: Dickens came forth blazingly against it.

The wise and beneficent Creator who places men upon earth, requires that they shall perform the duties of that station of life to which they are called, and he can never intend that the more a man strives to discharge those duties, the more he shall be debarred from happiness and enjoyment. Let those who have six days in the week for all the world’s pleasures, appropriate the seventh to fasting and to gloom, either for their own sins or for those of other people, if they like to bewail them; but let those who employ their six days in a worthier manner, devote their seventh to a different purpose. Let divines set the example of true morality: preach it to their flocks in the morning, and dismiss them to enjoy true rest in the afternoon; and let them select for their text, and let Sunday legislators take for their motto, the words that fell from the lips of that Master whose precepts they misconstrue, and whose lessons they pervert – The Sabbath was made for man, and not man for the Sabbath.’

Dickens’s lack of enthusiasm for organized religion is bluntly expressed.

Look into your churches – diminished congregations and scanty attendance. People have grown sullen and obstinate, and are becoming disgusted with the faith which condemns them to such a day as this, once in every seven. And as you cannot make people religious by Act of Parliament, or force them to church by constables, they display their feeling by staying away. Turn into the streets [on a Sunday] and mark the rigid gloom that reigns over everything around … all is as melancholy and quiet as if a pestilence had fallen upon the city …

Dickens was increasingly becoming the Voice of the People.

Sales for Sketches by Boz continued brisk, and at last confident that he could support and maintain a family, he formally asked George Hogarth for Catherine’s hand and was warmly accepted; no Beadnell-like hesitations here. He was writing round the clock to complete the 12,000 words per instalment for Pickwick, plus doing other journalistic bits and pieces, which, to Catherine’s continuing dismay, kept him writing till two in the morning. By getting ahead of himself, he had managed to clear the decks for a week’s honeymoon, and lived only for the great day. ‘Here’s another day off the fortnight. Hurrah!’ he wrote to Kate.

In the event, the wedding, which took place just before Bozmania had fully got under way, was a subdued affair – surprisingly so, given the general level of excitement in his life at the time, and that nobody loved a party more than Charles Dickens, or more eagerly welcomed an opportunity to dress up. But the wedding, which took place on a Saturday morning at St Luke’s Church in Chelsea, the biggest – and tallest – parish church in London, with a nave that was then higher than that of any other London church apart from St Paul’s, was strikingly plain: only his family and Catherine’s were present (whether this was a first meeting for the two families is unclear). His friend and fellow reporter Thomas Beard was his best man; he had asked John Macrone, the publisher of Sketches by Boz, to do the job, but Macrone was married, which disqualified him; he came to the service nonetheless. A significant absentee was Elizabeth Dickens’s book-loving brother, Thomas, of whom Dickens was inordinately fond. He had written to this favourite uncle apologizing for not inviting him: it would be impossible, Dickens said, for him to do as a married man what he had been unable to do as a single one, that is, enter a house from which his father was banned. Obviously some drama, now submerged, lay behind this apology: John Dickens was no doubt held responsible for all the disasters and humiliations that had fallen on the family’s head. Perhaps it was complications of this sort that encouraged Dickens to dispatch the nuptial business as rapidly as possible. A small shadow, a certain complexity, seems to have fallen over what was supposed to be a day of joyous celebration. After the ceremony, they all repaired to the Hogarths’ just up the road, where, according to Fanny’s husband Henry, ‘a few common, pleasant things were said’ at the wedding breakfast, ‘healths were drunk with a very few words’ – how unDickensian it all is! – ‘and all seemed happy, not least Dickens and his young girlish wife’. The carriage took them to Chalk, in Kent, where their married life began, and then, a week later, they took up residence in Dickens’s rooms in Furnival’s Inn, which he had thoughtfully and thoroughly equipped for his new circumstances.

With them in the flat from the beginning was Catherine’s now sixteen-year-old sister Mary, who remained with them for a month after their return from Chalk. This is a little odd. Dickens’s 1950s biographer Edgar Johnson was of the opinion that the presence of Mary in their lives right at the very beginning got the marriage off to the worst possible start: the young couple never had time to get to know each other alone. G. K. Chesterton rather more forthrightly suggested that Dickens simply married the wrong sister. Mary adored her clever brother-in-law and was excited by his growing renown (‘his literary career gets more and more prosperous every day and he is courted and flattered on every side by the great folks of this great City – his time is so completely taken up that it is quite a favour for the Literary Gentlemen to get him to write for them’). Dickens was equally enchanted by her.

For all her starry-eyed admiration of her new brother-in-law, Mary was scarcely exaggerating the ever-increasing demands on his time; most of his day must have been spent at his desk toiling away. In July he had a read-through of The Village Coquettes, the operetta he had written with Hullah; meanwhile he was busy cultivating outlets for future novels, accepting commissions that there was little chance of his having the time to write; he even accepted a commission for a play, The Strange Gentleman, a little two-act farce adapted from one of the Boz sketches, which he knocked up more or less overnight. It opened to tepid notices; by the savage standards of the time, though, they were not unkind.

More impressively, he was approached by Richard Bentley to write not one but two novels. Bentley was the successful publisher of Harrison Ainsworth’s Rookwood and Edward Lytton’s The Last Days of Pompeii, both runaway bestsellers; after protracted negotiations, he and Dickens struck a deal. In addition, Dickens was contracted as editor of a new magazine, Bentley’s Miscellany. This was something he was very excited by. He was determined to acquire greater control over his work, and being the editor of a magazine seemed like a good way to do so. Indeed, it would have been, had he had absolute authority over one; but this was not Bentley’s intention at all, as Dickens very soon discovered. The young author had no experience whatever as an editor, and, to no one’s surprise but Dickens’s, Bentley meddled. This was not a good thing to do with Charles Dickens, even at the age of twenty-four; trouble was in the air from early on. As for the contract for the novels, that too proved problematic. One word lay at the heart of the increasingly bitter dissension between Dickens and Bentley: copyright. In the 1830s, publishers owned the copyright in the books on their lists. Writers had no continuing reward from their own work: once they had been paid, that was it. This was, naturally, enshrined in the contract Dickens signed with Bentley, but the more he thought about it, the more it enraged him. In November 1836, however, everything seemed to be going splendidly, and he cheerfully handed in his notice on the Chronicle. It was churlishly, not to say sourly, received. Dickens responded tartly: ‘Depend upon it, Sir, if you would stimulate those about you to any exertions beyond their ordinary routine of duty … this is not the way to do it.’

The old year ended joyfully, with the production of The Village Coquettes, followed by The Strange Gentleman as an after-piece. The reviews were poor for the operetta – ‘all … blow their little trumpets against unhappy me, most lustily’ – but worse for the tenor, who was also the manager. In the packed theatre itself, though, they screamed and screamed for Boz on the night. He briefly trotted on and bowed and then trotted off again; he was excoriated for this, too (‘a disgusting new practice’). He couldn’t have cared less, and whenever he could get to the theatre during the short run, he was to be found backstage, adoring just being part of it all. Before long, Dickens was somewhat embarrassed by the operetta’s naivety: like virtually everything Dickens wrote for the stage, it suffered from his abject adoration of the theatre of his day, which he dutifully reproduced. It would be hard to find a sentence in any essay, novel, story or letter of Dickens’s that does not have some authentic flavour, but you will search the plays in vain for a single Dickensian turn of phrase. He was, surprisingly, the most uninspired of dramatists, though the most theatrically obsessed of men. Every episode of Pickwick introduced new editions of old stage characters; the spirit of Charles Mathews was everywhere in its pages. Dickens had put all of his love of the theatre, all of his ‘strong perception of character and oddity’, all of his pleasure in the stage devices of coincidence and contrivance, into it. Before long, other people would respond to the inherent theatrical potential in his fiction and start restoring them to the stage to which, in an important sense, they belonged.