Dickens

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Ward Adolphus William. Dickens

PREFACE

CHAPTER I

CHAPTER II

CHAPTER III

CHAPTER IV

CHAPTER V

CHAPTER VI

CHAPTER VII

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But these pleasant early days came to a sudden end. In the year 1821 his family returned to London, and soon his experiences of trouble began. Misfortune pursued the elder Dickens to town, his salary having been decreased already at Chatham in consequence of one of the early efforts at economical reform. He found a shabby home for his family in Bayham Street, Camden Town; and here, what with the pecuniary embarrassments in which he was perennially involved, and what with the easy disposition with which he was blessed by way of compensation, he allowed his son’s education to take care of itself. John Dickens appears to have been an honourable as well as a kindly man. His son always entertained an affectionate regard for him, and carefully arranged for the comfort of his latter years; nor would it be fair, because of a similarity in their experiences, and in the grandeur of their habitual phraseology, to identify him absolutely with the immortal Mr. Micawber. Still less, except in certain details of manner and incident, can the character of the elder Dickens be thought to have suggested that of the pitiful “Father of the Marshalsea,” to which prison, almost as famous in English fiction as it is in English history, the unlucky navy-clerk was consigned a year after his return to London.

Every effort had been made to stave off the evil day; and little Charles, whose eyes were always wide open, and who had begun to write descriptive sketches of odd personages among his acquaintance, had become familiar with the inside of a pawnbroker’s shop, and had sold the paternal “library” piecemeal to the original of the drunken second-hand bookseller, with whom David Copperfield dealt as Mr. Micawber’s representative. But neither these sacrifices nor Mrs. Dickens’s abortive efforts at setting up an educational establishment had been of avail. Her husband’s creditors would not give him time; and a dark period began for the family, and more especially for the little eldest son, now ten years old, in which, as he afterwards wrote, in bitter anguish of remembrance, “but for the mercy of God, he might easily have become, for any care that was taken of him, a little robber or a little vagabond.”

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Meanwhile, very tentatively and with a very imperfect consciousness of the significance for himself of his first steps on a slippery path, Dickens had begun the real career of his life. It has been seen how he had been a writer as a “baby,” as a school-boy, and as a lawyer’s clerk, and the time had come when, like all writers, he wished to see himself in print. In December, 1833, the Monthly Magazine published a paper which he had dropped into its letter-box, and with eyes “dimmed with joy and pride” the young author beheld his first-born in print. The paper, called A Dinner at Poplar Walk, was afterwards reprinted in the Sketches by Boz under the title of Mr. Minns and his Cousin, and is laughable enough. His success emboldened him to send further papers of a similar character to the same magazine, which published ten contributions of his by February, 1835. That which appeared in August, 1834, was the first signed “Boz,” a nickname given by him in his boyhood to a favourite brother. Since Dickens used this signature not only as the author of the Sketches and a few other minor productions, but also as “editor” of the Pickwick Papers, it is not surprising that, especially among his admirers on the Continent and in America, the name should have clung to him so tenaciously. It was on a steamboat near Niagara that he heard from his state-room a gentleman complaining to his wife: “Boz keeps himself very close.”

But the Monthly Magazine, though warmly welcoming its young contributor’s lively sketches, could not afford to pay for them. He was therefore glad to conclude an arrangement with Mr. George Hogarth, the conductor of the Evening Chronicle, a paper in connexion with the great morning journal on the reporting staff of which he was engaged. He had gratuitously contributed a sketch to the evening paper as a personal favour to Mr. Hogarth, and the latter readily proposed to the proprietors of the Morning Chronicle that Dickens should be duly remunerated for this addition to his regular labours. With a salary of seven instead of, as heretofore, five guineas a week, and settled in chambers in Furnival’s Inn—one of those old legal inns which he loved so well—he might already in this year, 1835, consider himself on the high-road to prosperity. By the beginning of 1836 the Sketches by Boz printed in the Evening Chronicle were already numerous enough, and their success was sufficiently established to allow of his arranging for their republication. They appeared in two volumes, with etchings by Cruikshank, and the sum of a hundred and fifty pounds was paid to him for the copyright. The stepping-stones had been found and passed, and on the last day of March, which saw the publication of the first number of the Pickwick Papers, he stood in the field of fame and fortune. Three days afterwards Dickens married Catherine Hogarth, the eldest daughter of the friend who had so efficiently aided him in his early literary ventures. Mr. George Hogarth’s name thus links together the names of two masters of English fiction; for Lockhart speaks of him when a writer to the signet in Edinburgh as one of the intimate friends of Scott. Dickens’s apprenticeship as an author was over almost as soon as it was begun; and he had found the way short from obscurity to the dazzling light of popularity. As for the Sketches by Boz, their author soon repurchased the copyright for more than thirteen times the sum which had been paid to him for it.

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