Charles Dickens. Sidney Dark

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      II. BIOGRAPHY.

      Charles Dickens was born at Landport, outside Portsmouth, on the 7th of February 1812. He was the eldest son and the second child of John Dickens, a clerk in the Navy Pay Office and the original of Mr. Micawber, his mother appearing in his novels as Mrs. Nickleby. The family a year or two after his birth moved to London, and when Dickens was between four and five years old his father was given an appointment in Chatham Dockyard, and he and his family lived at Chatham until the novelist was nine. In after years he recalled himself as " a very small and not over particularly taken care of boy." He was too sickly to be much good at games, and long before he was in his teens he was a prodigious reader. John Forster says that the account of the early reading of David Copperfield is literally auto-biographical, and that Charles Dickens' boy's imagination was quickened by Roderick Random, Peregrine Pickle, Humphrey Clinker, Tom Jones, The Vicar of Wakefield, Don Quixote, Gil Bias, Robinson Crusoe, and The Arabian Nights. His reading enthused him with a desire to write, and when he was about eight he composed a tragedy called Miznar, the Sultan of India, which was acted by his brothers and sisters. Dickens always loved the theatre and he always had a tendency to " show off," and it is not surprising to know that as a small child he used to sing comic songs at all the family parties.

      When he was nine his father was moved to Somerset House, and the family went to live in a small mean house with a small mean back-garden in Bay ham Street, Camden Town. John Dickens had become involved in his Micawberesque money entanglements, and there was a great contrast between the comparative comfort of the life at Chatham and the unqualified poverty in Camden Town. The elder Dickens was kindly, affectionate, and conscientious, but he was essentially what is called " easy-going," and, as his son wrote, " he appeared to have utterly lost at this time the idea of educating me at all, and to have utterly put from him the notion that I had any claim upon him in that regard whatever. So I degenerated into cleaning his boots of a morning and my own; and making myself useful in the work of the little house; and looking after my younger brothers and sisters (we were now six in all); and going on such poor errands as arose out of our poor way of living." As a matter of fact it was at Bay ham Street, Camden Town, with a washerwoman next door and a Bow Street officer opposite, that Charles Dickens began his essential education. He began to learn the humour and the dignity that belong to the lives of the simple and the poor. He began the journey that was to end in Charles Dickens, the author of The Pickwick Papers, of David Copperfield, and of Bleak House. The circumstances of the family grew worse and worse. " I know," wrote Dickens, " we got on very badly with the butcher and baker, that very often we had not too much for dinner, and that at last my father was arrested." СКАЧАТЬ