hours he managed to forget himself and his woes. Finally, when night had fallen, he admitted the truth to himself, and ran round crying out to whoever would listen, ‘O, I am lost! I am lost!’ until a watchman in a box took pity on him and somehow got a message to John Dickens, who retrieved the boy, now fast asleep.
As recounted by Dickens thirty years later in an essay he called ‘Gone Astray’, the story has a whimsical charm, but the reality of a particularly tiny, not especially healthy, eleven-year-old wandering alone and untrammelled across the dangerous, desperate city would have been at least as alarming in 1823 as it is in 2012; but the young Charles was rapidly discovering uncommon resources within himself. He had to. ‘I fell into a state of dire neglect, which I have never been able to look back upon without a kind of agony.’ His anguish was the least of his parents’ worries.
With financial ruin looming more threateningly each day, Elizabeth, determined to, as she said, ‘do something’, had an inspiration: they would open a school. Of course! They would be rich! Mrs Dickens’s Establishment, they would call it. They would need to find premises, of course, which they duly did in a brand new and rather splendid development at the top end of Gower Street, parallel to the Tottenham Court Road. Brushing the dust of Bayham Street off their feet, they moved into magnificent new accommodation at No. 4 Gower Street North at Christmas, 1823. They screwed the brass plate on the door and settled back for the queues of eager students to start forming. Charles was deputed to stuff circulars through the local letter boxes. Inexplicably, ‘nobody ever came to the school, nor do I recollect that anybody ever proposed to come, or that the least preparation was made to receive anybody.’ This insane last gamble delivered the final coup de grâce to the Dickenses’ fragile finances.
It was at this point that Charles’s life changed irrevocably. What followed was so painful for him to contemplate that he never spoke of it to anyone whatsoever, until in March of 1847 – when he was thirty-five and already a national figure, universally admired as the author of The Pickwick Papers, Oliver Twist, Nicholas Nickleby, The Old Curiosity Shop, Martin Chuzzlewit, and A Christmas Carol – his close friend John Forster casually recounted to Dickens a conversation he had had with a former acquaintance of Dickens’s father. The man had mentioned that Charles had been employed as a boy in a warehouse off the Strand. Was there anything in it, Forster wondered. Dickens fell very silent, and a few days later sent his astonished friend – swearing him to strictest secrecy – a lengthy letter in which he detailed, in language of meticulous precision and iron control, a chapter of events in his early life that had branded him for ever.
What had happened was this: James Lamert, Charles’s theatre-going friend from Chatham, who had stayed with them for a while at Bayham Street (and indeed, tried to cheer the boy up there by making him a toy theatre), had – ‘in an evil hour for me, as I often bitterly thought,’ Dickens wrote in the letter he sent Forster – entered into business with a cousin who had set up a shoe-polish factory called Warren’s at 30 Hungerford Stairs on the Charing Cross Embankment. Lamert was made general manager of the factory, and in that capacity told the Dickenses, whom he knew to be in desperate straits, that he could offer Charles a reasonably paid job (six shillings – or was it seven? Dickens couldn’t quite remember) which would help relieve the pressure on the family finances. What did the job consist of?
Covering the pots of paste-blacking; first with a piece of oil-paper, and then with a piece of blue paper; to tie them round with string; and then to clip the paper close and neat, all round, until it looked as smart as a pot of ointment from an apothecary’s shop. When a certain number of grosses had attained this pitch of perfection, I was to paste on each a printed label; and then go on again with more pots.
He was to do this ten hours a day, six days a week.
The bright, imaginative eleven-year-old listened dumb-founded as his parents accepted the offer with alacrity. ‘My father and mother were quite satisfied. They could hardly have been more so, if I had been twenty years of age, distinguished at a grammar school, and going to Cambridge.’ He was, of course, writing after twenty-five years of anguished brooding; but why would he not have felt all those things at the time: the young prince thrown into a dungeon with the smiling co-operation of those on whose protection he should most have been able to rely? It is every child’s darkest nightmare. ‘It is wonderful to me,’ he wrote to Forster,
that I could have been so easily cast away at such an age. It is wonderful to me, that even after my descent into the poor little drudge I had been since we came to London, no one had compassion enough on me – a child of singular abilities, quick, eager, delicate, and soon hurt, bodily or mentally – to suggest that something might have been spared, as it certainly might have been, to place me at any common school.
The sense of the injustice of things – of life – was born in him, and it would only grow and grow.
He reported for work on 9 February, two days after his twelfth birthday. The blacking warehouse was the last house on the left at old Hungerford Stairs, more or less where Embankment tube station is today.
It was a crazy tumble-down old house, abutting of course on the river, and literally overrun with rats. Its wainscoted rooms, and its rotten floors and staircase, and the old grey rats swarming down in the cellars, and the sound of their squeaking and scuffling coming up the stairs at all times, and the dirt and decay of the place, rise up visibly before me, as if I were there again.
James Lamert was a decent man; all this had been done out of kindness. He must have had some sense of the outrage to the sensibilities of the boy – whose imaginative intensity he knew first-hand, at the theatre, in the rehearsal room, poring over the toy theatre he had built for him with his own hands – so he arranged for Charles to do his wretched repetitive work in the counting house, near his own desk, with a view of the coal-barges and the river. One of the lads from downstairs came up to show him the ropes; his name was Bob Fagin.
James Lamert had promised to give Charles school lessons during the lunch-hour, but inevitably this plan proved impractical; equally inevitably, little by little, Charles found himself working downstairs with his fellow labourers – Fagin, and an aggressive lad called Paul Green, who was assumed by everyone, including himself, to have been christened Poll. Charles got on perfectly well with the other boys, but his conduct and manners, he said, ‘put a space between us’. Thanks to his connection with James, and the deference of the adult workforce (who, heartbreakingly, he tried to entertain with ‘the results of some of the old readings which were fast perishing out of my mind’), he was generally referred to as ‘the young gentleman’; on one occasion, Poll rebelled against this usage, but was speedily put in his place by Bob Fagin. ‘No words can express the secret agony of my soul as I sunk into this companionship; compared these everyday associates with those of my happier childhood; and felt my early hopes of growing up to be a learned and distinguished man crushed in my breast.’ He felt, he said, buried alive. He told Forster all those years later that he found it almost impossible to write about
the sense I had of being utterly neglected and hopeless – of the shame I felt in my position – of the misery it was to my young heart to believe that, day by day, what I had learned and thought and delighted in, and raised my fancy and emulation up by, was passing away from me, never to be brought back any more.
His whole nature, he said, ‘was so penetrated with the grief and humiliation of such considerations that, even now – famous and caressed and happy – I often forget in my dreams that I have a dear wife and children – even that I am a man – and wander desolately back to that time of my life.’
He quickly understood that to show any of what he felt would be fatal. ‘I never said to man or boy how it was that I came to be there, or gave the least indication of being sorry that I was there.’ Instead, he did his work, soon becoming ‘at least as expeditious and as skilful with my hands as either of the other boys’. The child of singular abilities – quick, eager, delicate, and soon hurt, bodily or mentally – adapted brilliantly, rapidly learning the skills to survive this onslaught on his identity. He was learning to wear a mask, to conceal his inner life, to rise above his circumstances. He had always found acting fun; now he had to learn to do it in deadly earnest. This was character-building, in the most literal sense of the phrase. He was quite