DICKENS
Thackeray’s London was practically bounded on the east by the Temple, or perhaps by the Fleet Prison, which lay a little beyond the Punch office; it took in the Strand, Pall Mall, Piccadilly, and stretched out westward round Belgravia, Mayfair, Chiswick, and such selecter quarters of the town. But Dickens made the whole of London his province; you cannot go into any part of it but he has been there before you; if he did not at one time live there himself, some of his characters did. Go north through Somers Town and Camden Town: the homes of his boyhood were there in Bayham Street, in Little College Street, in the house that still stands at 13 Johnson Street, from which he walked daily to school at the Wellington House Academy in Hampstead Road. He lived in Cleveland Street, Fitzroy Square, and in Fitzroy Street, and whilst his father was a prisoner in the Marshalsea for debt and he himself was labelling bottles at the blacking factory in Hungerford Market, he had lodgings south of London Bridge in Lant Street, which were the originals of the lodgings he gave to Bob Sawyer in later years when he came to write Pickwick. When he was turned twenty, and working as a Parliamentary reporter in the House of Commons, and beginning to contribute his Sketches by Boz to the Monthly Magazine, he lived at 18 Bentinck Street, Cavendish Square. For a time he had lodgings in Buckingham Street, Strand, and afterwards lodged David Copperfield in the same rooms; he put up for a short time at Fulham before his marriage at St. Luke’s Church, Chelsea, in April 1836, and after a brief honeymoon returned with his wife to the chambers in Furnival’s Inn that he had rented since the previous year. He had three other London houses during his more prosperous days; then he quitted the town and went to live at Gad’s Hill Place, where he died in 1870. But even after he was thus settled in Kent, he was continually up and down to the office of Household Words, in Wellington Street, Strand, and for some part of almost every year he occupied a succession of furnished houses round about Hyde Park.
DICKENS. JOHNSON STREET. CAMDEN TOWN.
A few months before his marriage he had started to write Pickwick, the first monthly part of which appeared in March 1836. Before the end of next month, Seymour, the artist who was illustrating that serial, having committed suicide, Thackeray went up to the Furnival’s Inn chambers with specimens of his drawings in the hope of becoming his successor, but Dickens rejected him in favour of Hablot K. Browne (“Phiz”), who also illustrated most of his subsequent books. He had published the Sketches by Boz in two volumes, illustrated by Cruikshank, had written two dramatic pieces that were very successfully produced at the St. James’s Theatre, had begun to edit Bentley’s Miscellany, and was writing Oliver Twist for it, before he left Furnival’s Inn and established his small household of his wife and their first son and his wife’s sister, Mary Hogarth, at 48 Doughty Street, Mecklenburgh Square.
In later years Sala, who became one of Dickens’s principal contributors to Household Words, used to live in Mecklenburgh Square, and at different times Sidney Smith, Shirley Brooks, and Edmund Yates all lived in Doughty Street (Shirley Brooks was born there, at No. 52), but Doughty Street’s chief glory is that for the greater part of three years Dickens was the tenant of No. 48. George Henry Lewes called to see him there, and was perturbed to find that he had nothing on his bookshelves but three-volume novels and presentation copies of books of travel; clearly he was not much of a reader, and had never been a haunter of old bookstalls. But presently Dickens came in, says Lewes, “and his sunny presence quickly dispelled all misgivings. He was then, as to the last, a delightful companion, full of sagacity as well as animal spirits; but I came away more impressed with the fulness of life and energy than with any sense of distinction.”
Mrs. Cowden Clarke, who saw him in his Doughty Street days, speaks of him as “genial, bright, lively-spirited, pleasant-toned,” and says he “entered into conversation with a grace and charm that made it feel perfectly natural to be chatting and laughing as if we had known each other from childhood.” His eyes she describes as “large, dark blue, exquisitely shaped, fringed with magnificently long and thick lashes—they now swam in liquid, limpid suffusion, when tears started into them from a sense of humour or a sense of pathos, and now darted quick flashes of fire when some generous indignation at injustice, or some high-wrought feeling of admiration at magnanimity, or some sudden emotion of interest and excitement touched him. Swift-glancing, appreciative, rapidly observant, truly superb orbits they were, worthy of the other features in his manly, handsome face. The mouth was singularly mobile, full-lipped, well-shaped, and expressive; sensitive, nay restless, in its susceptibility to impressions that swayed him, or sentiment that moved him.” Which tallies sufficiently with Carlyle’s well-known description of him a few months later: “A fine little fellow, Boz, I think. Clear, blue, intelligent eyes, eyebrows that he arches amazingly; large, protrusive, rather loose mouth, a face of most extreme mobility which he shuttles about—eyebrows, eyes, mouth and all—in a very singular manner while speaking. Surmount this with a loose coil of common-coloured hair, and set it on a small, compact figure, very small, and dressed â la D’Orsay rather than well—this is Pickwick. For the rest, a quiet, shrewd-looking little fellow, who seems to guess pretty well what he is and what others are.” Forster sketches his face at this same period with “the quickness, keenness, and practical power, the eager, restless, energetic outlook on each several feature, that seemed to tell so little of a student and writer of books, and so much of a man of action and business in the world. Light and motion flashed from every part of it.” “It was as if made of steel,” said Mrs. Carlyle; and “What a face is his to meet in a drawing-room,” wrote Leigh Hunt. “It has the life and soul in it of fifty human beings.”
Dickens’s weakness, then and all his life through, was for something too dazzling and ornate in the way of personal adornment. We hear of a green overcoat with red cuffs. “His dress was florid,” says one who met him: “a satin cravat of the deepest blue relieved by embroideries, a green waistcoat with gold flowers, a dress coat with a velvet collar and satin facings, opulence of white cuff, rings in excess, made up a rather striking whole.” And there is a story of how, when an artist friend of both was presented by somebody with a too gaudy length of material, Wilkie Collins advised him to “Give it to Dickens—he’ll make a waistcoat out of it!”
