Charles Dickens by Jane Smiley Page A

Dickens began to write an autobiography. The fragment, amounting to some seven thousand words, was written, according to Forster, without any corrections, evidence of strong feeling and much previous thought. Its subject was a period he had not otherwise talked about, which has since become the most famous of his early life—at twelve, young Charles was removed from school and sent to work at a shoe polish factory, where he stood in a little window, pasting labels onto bottles, where passersby could watch him. Warren’s Blacking Factory was situated by the Thames in London, at Hungerford Stairs, near the Strand (next to Hungerford Market, which was torn down when Charing Cross Station was built upon the site). We now associate the area with tourism and shopping, but before the neighborhood was rebuilt and Trafalgar Square was created, it was ancient, damp. And frightening to young Charles, who later wrote, “My whole nature was so penetrated with the grief and humiliation of [the experience] that even now, famous and caressed and happy, I often forget inmy 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.” Not long after Charles went to work (living at the lodgings of Mrs. Roylance, who was the original of Mrs. Pipchin), John Dickens was taken into custody for nonpayment of debts, and the rest of the family moved into the Marshalsea Debtors’ Prison, on the south side of the river, across London Bridge.
    Every biographer of Dickens has noted the profound impact these events had upon the boy and the man and speculated about the reasons. Certainly the change was fairly sudden and amounted to a class humiliation for the boy. Dickens had been born in Portsmouth, where his father worked in the Navy Pay Office, a respectable and promising appointment. His sister Fanny was about fifteen months older; two years later, his brother Alfred was born but died as an infant, and, two years after that, his sister Letitia. The Dickenses were, in fact, a large family, and by all accounts Charles came legitimately by his sociability, energy, and lively spirits, since the parents enjoyed singing, dancing, celebrating, and performing and encouraged the children’s talents. The family lived briefly in London, and then the Navy Pay Office sent John Dickens to Chatham, a naval town on the Thames estuary, when Charles was five. Three more children were born by the time Charles was ten, making seven in all.
    The five years in Chatham constituted Charles Dickens’s happy childhood. He was, by his own account, very attached to his sister Fanny, and Chatham was an interesting place to grow up in—a naval town still resonating from the Napoleonic Wars, where much of the population was attached tothe military in some way. It was a rough town, but Dickens always spoke of it more fondly than he spoke of neighboring Rochester, a more respectable cathedral town that Dickens considered oppressive. He was taught to read by his mother and then sent off with his sister to a nearby school when he was about six. He reported over and over as an adult that the great resource and joy of his childhood had been books—eighteenth-century novels, like Peregrine Pickle and Tom Jones, but especially Tales from the Arabian Nights . Adults who knew him in childhood commented upon his devotion to reading, and it seems evident that his parents were eager to supply him with both education and books (his mother taught him some Latin). But John and Elizabeth Dickens’s good intentions were overwhelmed by their improvidence, and the fiscal life of the family got shakier and shakier.
    When John was sent to London in the summer of 1822, now the father of seven, he simply could not live on his pay, and even though he enrolled Fanny in the Royal Academy of Music, Charles’s schooling apparently came to an end. He had thought he was going to be educated for some profession,