DICKENS’ HOUSE. DOUGHTY STREET.
That jest belongs to a later year, but here you have a sufficiently vivid presentment of the man as he was when he could be seen passing in and out of the house in Doughty Street. He may have been dandified in appearance, but in all his other habits he was a hard and severely methodical worker. “His hours and days were spent by rule,” we are told. “He rose at a certain time, he retired at another, and though no precisian, it was not often that his arrangements varied. His hours of writing were between breakfast and luncheon, and when there was any work to be done no temptation was sufficiently strong to cause it to be neglected. This order and regularity followed him through the day. His mind was essentially methodical, and in his long walks, in his recreations, in his labour, he was governed by rules laid down by himself, rules well studied beforehand and rarely departed from.”
CHARLES DICKENS
His rise out of poverty and obscurity into affluence and fame makes a more wonderful story than that of how Byron woke one morning and found himself famous. For Dickens had everything against him. He was indifferently educated, had no social advantages, and no influential friends behind him. In 1835 he was an unknown young author, writing miscellaneous stories and sketches for the papers; by the end of 1836 everybody was reading and raving of and laughing over Pickwick, and he was the most talked-of novelist of the hour. “It sprang into a popularity that each part carried higher and higher,” says Forster, “until people at this time talked of nothing else, tradesmen recommended their goods by using its name, and its sale, outstripping at a bound that of all the most famous books of the century, had reached an almost fabulous number.” Judges, street boys, old and young in every class of life, devoured each month’s number directly it appeared, and looked forward impatiently to the next one. Carlyle told Forster that “an archdeacon, with his own venerable lips, repeated to me the other night a strange, profane story of a solemn clergyman who had been administering ghostly consolation to a sick person; having finished, satisfactorily as he thought, and got out of the room, he heard the sick person ejaculate: ‘Well, thank God, Pickwick will be out in ten days, any way!’”
Dickens’s favourite recreation in those early years was riding, and frequently he would set out with Forster “at eleven in the morning for ‘a fifteen mile ride out, ditto in, and lunch on the road,’ with a wind-up of six o’clock dinner in Doughty Street.” Other times he would send a note round to Forster, who lived at 58 Lincoln’s Inn Fields, and if he could be persuaded to come, as generally he could, they would set out for a brisk walk to Hampstead and over the Heath, and have “a red-hot chop for dinner and a glass of good wine” at Jack Straw’s Castle.
His daughter Mamie was born in Doughty Street, and there the first great grief of his life completely overwhelmed him for a time, when his wife’s young sister, Mary Hogarth, died at the age of seventeen. There are several letters from that address in 1838 concerning his progress with Oliver Twist. In one, when he could not work, he says he is “sitting patiently at home waiting for Oliver Twist, who has not yet arrived.” In another he writes, “I worked pretty well last night—very well indeed; but although I did eleven close slips before half-past twelve I have four to write to close the chapter; and as I foolishly left them till this morning, have the steam to get up afresh.” “Hard at work still,” he writes to Forster in August 1838. “Nancy is no more. I showed what I had done to Kate last night, who is in an unspeakable ‘state’; from which and my own impression I augur well. When I have sent Sykes to the devil I must have yours.” And “No, no,” he wrote again to Forster next month, “don’t, don’t let us ride till to-morrow, not having yet disposed of the Jew, who is such an out-and-outer that I don’t know what to make of him.” Then one evening Forster went to Doughty Street and sat in Dickens’s study and talked over the last chapter of Oliver Twist with him, and remained reading there whilst he wrote it.
From Doughty Street Dickens and “Phiz” set out together on that journey into Yorkshire to see the notorious school that was to become famous as Squeers’s, and in due course there are letters from that street telling of the progress of Nicholas Nickleby. Early in 1839 the letters tell of how he is house-hunting, and in the intervals working “at racehorse speed” on Barnaby Rudge, and near the end of the year he moved to 1 Devonshire Terrace, at the corner of Marylebone Road.
The Doughty Street house remains as he left it, but 1 Devonshire Terrace has been rather considerably altered. The new residence was such a much more imposing one than the other that absurd rumours got about that he was lapsing into extravagance and living beyond his income, and “I perfectly remember,” writes Sala, “when he moved from his modest residence in Doughty Street to a much grander but still not very palatial house in Devonshire Terrace, an old gentleman calling one day upon my mother and telling her, with a grave countenance, that Dickens had pawned his plate, and had been waited upon for the last fortnight by bailiffs in livery.” It was about this time, too, that the Quarterly made its famous prediction that in the case of work such as Dickens was doing “an ephemeral popularity will be followed by an early oblivion.” But there was no ground for any of these fears. His life was a triumphal procession; he went forward from victory to victory. At Devonshire Terrace he wrote most of Barnaby Rudge: and the prototype of Grip, Barnaby’s raven, the special playmate of Dickens’s children, died there; from here he went on his first visit to America, and on his return, with intervals of holiday at Broadstairs, in Cornwall, and in Italy, wrote the American Notes, Martin Chuzzlewit, The Chimes, The Cricket on the Hearth, Pictures from Italy, Dombey and Son, and commenced the writing of David Copperfield. Whilst he was here, too, he was for a brief space the first editor of the Daily News, and in March 1850 opened his Wellington Street office and started Household Words. Incidentally, he was taking an active share in a dozen or more public movements; acting as chairman at meetings and dinners, managing and playing in private theatricals, writing miscellaneous articles for his new magazine, and attending closely to its business organisation. Never was a more strenuous literary worker, or one who brought more enthusiasm to whatever he undertook.