Charles Dickens and the Great Theatre of the World. Simon Callow

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      TWO

      Paradise Lost

      John Dickens was summoned back to Navy Pay Office headquarters at Somerset House in June 1822, not a moment too soon; despite the improvement in his salary, his alarmingly mounting debts were becoming difficult to deal with. He sold up the family’s effects at The Brook, such as they were, and they headed west, finding accommodation in Camden Town in the north of London, near King’s Cross. Charles was not with the family: his schoolmaster, William Giles, had asked for him to be allowed to stay behind to finish his final term of work; which he duly did, lodging with Giles. At some point in the autumn he made his own way to London. It was not an encouraging start:

      As I left Chatham in the days when there were no railroads in the land, I left it in a stage-coach. Through all the years that have since passed, have I ever lost the smell of the damp straw in which I was packed – like game – and forwarded, carriage paid, to the Cross Keys, Wood Street, Cheapside, London? There was no other inside passenger, and I consumed my sandwiches in solitude and dreariness … and I thought life sloppier than I had expected to find it.

      His arrival at Camden Town in the north of London only confirmed this perception. ‘A little back-garret’, he called his room. In fact, No. 16 Bayham Street was a relatively new dwelling, part of a development scheme completed ten years earlier, not unlike the houses they had occupied in Chatham; all the other houses were occupied by professionals of one sort or another – an engraver, a retired linen draper, a retired diamond merchant, and so on. There were fields behind the houses where in summer hay was still made. The area was semi-rustic, the houses having been built on part of the former gardens of the Mother Red Cap tavern, an old highwayman’s inn. It was, in fact, village-like.

      But to the boy, after populous, bustling Chatham, the street must have seemed bleak and woebegone: ‘as shabby, dingy, damp, and mean a neighbourhood as one would desire not to see,’ he wrote, thirty years later. ‘Its poverty was not of the demonstrative order. It shut the street doors, pulled down the blinds, screened the parlour windows with the wretchedest plants in pots, and made a desperate stand to keep up appearances.’ As with the council estates of the 1950s, the price of amenities was the loss of community. The easy openness of Chatham seemed far way: this was the heartless Metropolis. In his former existence, misfortune had been handled discreetly – he himself had known nothing about his father’s troubles – but here

      to be sold up was nothing particular. The whole neighbourhood felt itself liable, at any time, to that common casualty of life. A man used to come into the neighbourhood regularly, delivering the summonses for rates and taxes as if they were circulars. We never paid anything until the last extremity and Heaven knows how we paid it then.

      Any possible sense of gentility had disappeared. There were, he said, no visitors ‘but Stabber’s Band, the occasional conjuror and strong man; no costermongers.’ There were a few shabby shops – a tobacconist, a weekly paper shop. And at the corner, a pub. ‘We used to run to the doors and windows to look at a cab, it was such a rare sight.’

      This isolated little outpost was no more than thirty minutes’ walk from his old lodgings in bustling Norfolk Street in Marylebone, but to the ten-year-old boy, it evidently felt like some kind of abandoned urban village. London was in the process of expanding, and Camden was one of the points on the pioneer trail. It was not a slum; not at all. But it lacked roots, identity, humanity. No. 16 itself, with only four rooms, was horribly cramped. There were six children and their two parents, plus a servant girl they had brought with them from the workhouse in Chatham, and James Lamert. Charles had nowhere to go and nothing to do. There were no more agreeable visits to the Mitre to be held up for admiration; he knew no one of his own age with whom to dress up and put on a play; and above all, he had no schooling, which he missed bitterly. His appetite for learning had grown and grown in Chatham. His so obviously not attending school proclaimed the family’s poverty to the world; his pride was stung. John Dickens seemed, he said, ‘to have utterly lost at this time the idea of educating me’. For want of anything to do, he was reduced to cleaning his father’s boots and running ‘such poor errands as arose out of our poor way of living’. His only diversion was the toy theatre that his friend James had built for him: he spent hours and hours intensely absorbed in it. It was, Lamert said, ‘the only fanciful reality in his present life’. John Dickens was naturally distracted by his financial situation: with the loss of the Outpost Allowance, his salary had declined from £400 to £350; and new debts were mounting. He had not paid the rates, and had been running up bills with the local tradesmen. And yet somehow they managed to find the thirty-eight guineas a year for twelve-year-old Fanny, whose musical gifts had gained her a place at the Royal Academy of Music, СКАЧАТЬ