no support, from anyone that I can call to mind, so help me God.’
As if to confirm this, his father – who had been so very little use to him since they had come to London – was now finally arrested for debt and taken to the sponging house, a sort of clearing house, prior to being formally committed to the Marshalsea Prison. During the hours when he was not tying pieces of string round pots of polish and sticking printed labels onto the jars, he ran errands for his father, delivered, as Forster says, ‘with swollen eyes and through shining tears’, until at last John Dickens, unable to raise a single penny of collateral, was committed to debtors’ jail, breaking his son’s heart, Dickens reports, with the words that later emerged immortally from Wilkins Micawber’s mouth: ‘The sun has set upon me forever.’ Elizabeth and the rest of the family prepared to join him in the Marshalsea. The household furniture was sold for the family benefit. A sale was held at Gower Street North. ‘My own little bed was so superciliously looked upon by a Power unknown to me, hazily called “the Trade”, that a brass coal-scuttle, a roasting jack, and a birdcage, were obliged to be put into it to make a Lot of it,’ he wrote thirty years later, ‘and then it went for a song. So I heard mentioned, and I wondered what song, and I thought what a dismal song it must have been to sing!’
Charles visited John at the Marshalsea, where he received some memorably expressed economic wisdom that also later emerged from the mouth of Micawber; soon enough, the family went to live with him there. Charles, the only breadwinner, did not. The boy – and one has to keep reminding oneself that he had only just turned twelve – was, for a small consideration, put into the care of Mrs Roylance, a not especially good-natured old lady in Little College Street in Camden Town, just round the corner from the Dickenses’ old residence in Bayham Street; two other children in similar circumstances were likewise accommodated. Charles thus walked to work every day from North London – about an hour – to the blacking warehouse, and then at the end of the day, he would walk another hour back to Camden Town. On Sundays he would fetch Fanny from the Royal Academy of Music in Hanover Square, and they would go to the prison together and spend the day there.
He was always hungry. He had to feed himself out of his six shillings a week: a pennyworth of milk and a cottage loaf for breakfast before he left Little College Street, and a small loaf and a quarter of a pound of cheese when he got back at night. The autobiographical fragment is filled with descriptions of meals dreamed of and food yearned after, with the occasional rash indulgence that left him short for the rest of the week, despite his hopeless attempts to divide his six shillings up, one for each day. He lounged about the streets, insufficiently and unsatisfactorily fed, he said. He bitterly missed family life, once so abundant, and loathed going home every night to what he called ‘a miserable blank’. He decided not to take it lying down, and confronted his father with it the following Sunday night, ‘so pathetically and with so many tears’ that, as Dickens, with or without irony, says, ‘his kind nature gave way’. Astonishingly, it seems never to have crossed John Dickens’s mind that Charles might be unhappy. It was the first time the boy had ever made any complaint about his situation, ‘and perhaps it opened up a little more than I intended’, he says. The lessons that he learned from this confrontation with John must have been deep: he saw that it was necessary to get his father to think about his child’s situation, to face up to it, to try to imagine what he was feeling. He was powerless, he knew, to act on his own behalf, but it was possible, he discovered, to shame his father into behaving like a parent.
A back-attic was quickly found for him in Lant Street in Southwark, round the corner from the Marshalsea, and from then on Charles had breakfast with the family every morning, and supper every night, in the prison. He notes that they seemed perfectly comfortable there, with their little orphan servant from the warehouse looking after them; indeed, he told his friend and future biographer Forster, they seemed rather more comfortable in prison than they had done for a long time out of it, and greatly enjoyed the society of John’s fellow prisoners. His mother had winkled their stories out of them, and entertained Charles and the rest of the family with recounting them, no doubt with her famously vivid mimicry. But the damage done to Charles was not so easily made good: his childhood nervous ailments returned in full force, causing him excruciating pain down one side; one night he had to be looked after all night by the manager of his lodgings in Lant Street. It happened again one day at the warehouse, and there it was Bob Fagin who tended him, easing the savage pain by slipping empty blacking-jars filled with hot water under him, as he rested on an improvised straw pallet. When Charles was well enough to go home, Bob insisted on accompanying him, but Dickens, unable to bear the shame of him knowing about the prison, walked up to the door of a rather posh house as Bob went his way and knocked on it, asking whether a Mr Robert Fagin was in.
His great consolation was to go down the Blackfriars Road of a Saturday night to seek out the travelling show-van, and ‘with a very motley assemblage’ marvel at the Fat-Pig, the Wild-Man and the Little-Lady; this carnival world of oddities and rejects now became part of his mental landscape. The little boy wandered all over the West End, buying himself a glass of ale, keenly studying life around him. ‘But for the mercy of God, I might easily have been, for any care that was taken of me, a little robber or a little vagabond.’ And then, quite suddenly, thanks to an unexpected legacy, John was released from the Marshalsea, and the family were reunited, all of them moving in to Mrs Roylance’s in Little College Street, where Charles had stayed before moving to Lant Street. A rare family outing took them all to the Royal Academy, to watch Fanny getting a prize. Charles must have had the afternoon off from the blacking warehouse, and the contrast between his situation and his sister’s overwhelmed him: ‘I could not bear to think of myself – beyond the reach of all such honourable emulation and success.’ He wept. ‘I prayed, when I went to bed that night, to be lifted out of the humiliation and neglect into which I had fallen.’ He notes that ‘there was no envy in this’; it simply sharpened the pain of his daily existence.
A new refinement had been added to his misery at Warren’s: the warehouse was moved from the dingy, dank obscurity of the Hungerford Stairs to Chandos Street in smart, bustling Covent Garden, just on the other side of the Strand; the boys were required ‘for the light’s sake’, to do their work in a room in which the window gave onto the street. The boys were very nimble at their task, and soon they found that a little audience would gather every day to watch them, like monkeys in a cage. One day, John Dickens happened to pass by and saw Charles on display. John said nothing at the time, but a short while later, he gave Charles a letter to deliver to James Lamert, who opened it in Charles’s presence, erupting so angrily when he read it that Charles cried ‘very much’ – partly because of the suddenness of the outburst, but mostly because Lamert was ‘violent’ about John. He told the boy, not unkindly, that he could no longer work there. The foreman said he was sure it was all for the best, and Charles went home, ‘with a relief so strange that it was like oppression’, no doubt because, just as he had not been able to understand why he had been sent to the blacking warehouse, he was scarcely more able to comprehend why he had been removed from it.
It was an extraordinary little piece of theatre that John Dickens had staged: instead of seeking Lamert out himself and airing his grievances with him, he sent the letter via Charles, knowing that Lamert would open it in front of the boy, become furious, and send him home. Perhaps the explanation lies in what happened next: Elizabeth went to Lamert the following day and asked him to take Charles back; this he agreed to do. No doubt John knew that Elizabeth would never approve of him going directly to Lamert and withdrawing Charles, so he had engineered a situation from which there could be no honourable retreat. And indeed, he dismissed Lamert’s placatory offer, loftily declaring that it was time for the boy to resume his schooling. The nightmare had come to an end, but Charles Dickens was changed utterly. As Forster magisterially remarks, though Dickens was deprived of teachers when he arrived in London ‘he was at another school already, not knowing it. The self-education forced upon him was teaching, all unconsciously as yet, what, for the future that awaited him, it most behooved him to know.’ It was indeed the perfect training to become the greatest novelist of his time. But at what price?
He had learned the lessons of solitude and self-dependency. He had known hunger, neglect, fear, loneliness, humiliation. He knew what it was to be powerless, and that to be free, he must acquire power. In the blacking warehouse he conceived, said Forster,