IX
Moreover—and mind you this—you will never understand Charles Dickens until you realise how exquisitely, how indignantly the genius in this child of the blacking-warehouse felt the shame of its lot. Dickens was never a snob: but a prouder spirit never inhabited flesh. This shepherd boy was not one to sing in the Valley of Humiliation. For years after success came to him he kept his mouth closed like a steel trap upon past agonies. At length he confided something to Forster (Life, Volume 1, Chapter 2), and few sadder reflections have ever been implied by a grown man upon his parents:
It is wonderful to me how 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 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 certainly it might have been, to place me at any common school. Our friends, I take it, were tired out. No one made any sign. 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.
Terrible words those: the more terrible for being, after long repression, uttered so judicially.
And again:
I suppose my lodging was paid for by my father: I certainly did not pay it myself, and I certainly had no other assistance whatever—the making of my clothes, I think, excepted—from Monday morning until Saturday night. No advice, no counsel, no encouragement, no consolation, no support, from anyone that I can call to mind, so help me God!
Nor did his parents’ neglect end with starving his heart’s affection, his brain’s activity. It starved the weak little body into spasms through malnutrition. He had a boy friend in the warehouse, one Bob Fagin. Dickens writes of this time:
Bob Fagin was very good to me on the occasion of a bad attack of my old disorder. I suffered such excruciating pain that they made a temporary bed of straw in my old recess in the counting-house, and I rolled about on the floor, and Bob filled empty blacking-bottles with hot water, and applied relays of them to my side half the day. I got better and quite easy towards evening; but Bob (who was much bigger and older than I) did not like the idea of my going home alone, and took me under his protection. I was too proud to let him know about the prison; and after making several efforts to get rid of him, to all of which Bob Fagin in his goodness was deaf, shook hands with him on the steps of a house near Southwark Bridge on the Surrey side, making believe that I lived there. As a finishing piece of reality, in case of his looking back, I knocked at the door, I recollect, and asked, when the woman opened it, was that Mr. Robert Fagin’s house?
O caeca pectora! Dickens had hard streaks in him, and I confess to a curious wonderment how, afterwards, he could have used that name of Fagin—how he could have used it as he did—in Oliver Twist.
But I end by repeating my question—Is it any wonder that this street-boy of genius, coming to his own, invoked out of the theatre a new world, to redress the balance of his old?
Of that new world I propose to say something, Gentlemen, a fortnight hence.