Indeed, he was a child in whom it was difficult not to take an extraordinary interest. Small for his years, and attacked occasionally by a sort of spasm which was exceedingly painful, he was not fitted for much active exercise; but the aliveness which was apparent in him all his life distinguished him now. He was very fond of reading, and in David Copperfield he put into the mouth of his hero a description of his own delight in certain books. “My father had left a small collection of books in a little room upstairs, to which I had access (for it adjoined my own), and which nobody else in our house ever troubled. From that blessed little room, Roderick Random, Peregrine Pickle, Humphrey Clinker, Tom Jones, The Vicar of Wakefield, Don Quixote, Gil Blas and Robinson Crusoe came out, a glorious host, to keep me company. They kept alive my fancy, ... they, and the Arabian Nights and the Tales of the Genii—and did me no harm; for whatever harm was in some of them was not there for me; I knew nothing of it.... I have been Tom Jones (a child’s Tom Jones, a harmless creature) for a week together. I have sustained my own idea of Roderick Random for a month at a stretch, I verily believe. I had a greedy relish for a few volumes of Voyages and Travels—I forget what, now—that were on those shelves; and for days and days I can remember to have gone about my region of our house, armed with the center piece out of an old set of boot-trees—the perfect realization of Captain Somebody, of the Royal British Navy, in danger of being beset by savages, and resolved to sell his life at a great price.”
Not only did the little Charles read all he could lay hands upon; he made up stories, too, which he told to his small playmates, winning thereby their wondering admiration. Some of these tales he wrote down, and thus he became an author in a small way while he was yet a very small boy. His making believe to be the characters out of books shows another trait which clung to him all his life—his fondness for “play-acting.” It was, in fact, often said of the mature Dickens that he would have made as good an actor as he was a novelist, and Dickens’s father seems to have recognized in his little son decided traces of ability; for often, when there was company at the house, little Charles, with his face flushed and his eyes shining, would be placed on a table to sing a comic song, amid the applause of all present.
His early days were thus very happy; but when he was about eleven years old, money difficulties beset the family, and they were obliged to move to a poor part of London. Mrs. Dickens made persistent efforts to open a school for young ladies, but no one ever showed the slightest intention of coming. Matters went from bad to worse, and finally Mr. Dickens was arrested for debt and taken to the Marshalsea prison. The time that followed was a most painful one to the sensitive boy—far more painful, it would seem, than to the “Prodigal Father,” as Dickens later called him. This father, whom Dickens long afterward described, in David Copperfield, as Mr. Micawber, was, as his son was always most willing to testify, a kind, generous man; but he was improvident to the last degree; and when in difficulties which would have made melancholy any other man, he was able, by the mere force of his rhetoric, to lift himself above circumstances or to make himself happy in them.
At length all the family except the oldest sister, who was at school, and Charles, went to live in the prison; and Charles was given work in a blacking-warehouse of which a relative of his mother’s was manager. The sufferings which the boy endured at this time were intense. It was not only that the work was sordid, monotonous, uncongenial; it was not only that his pride was outraged; what hurt him most of all was that he should have been “so easily cast away at such an age,” and that “no one made any sign.” He had always yearned for an education; he had always felt that he must grow up to be worth something. And to see himself condemned, as he felt with the hopelessness of childhood, for life, to the society of such boys as he found in the blacking-warehouse, was almost more than he could endure. During his later life, prosperous and happy, he could scarcely bear to speak, even to his dearest friends, of this period of his life.
Though this period of his life seemed to him long, it was not really so, for he was not yet thirteen when he was taken from the warehouse and sent to school. Once given a chance, he learned rapidly and easily, although in all probability the schools to which he went were not of the best. After a year or two at school he again began work, but this time under more hopeful circumstances. He was, to be sure, but an under-clerk—little more than an office-boy in a solicitor’s office; but at least the surroundings were less sordid and the companions more congenial. However, he had no intention of remaining an under-clerk, and he set to work to make himself a reporter.
Of his difficulties in mastering shorthand he has written feelingly in that novel which contains so much autobiographical material—David Copperfield. “I bought an approved scheme of the noble art and mystery of stenography ... and plunged into a sea of perplexity that brought me, in a few weeks, to the confines of distraction. The changes that were rung upon dots, which in such a position meant such a thing, and in such another position something else, entirely different; the wonderful vagaries that were played by circles; the unaccountable consequences that resulted from marks like flies’ legs, the tremendous effect of a curve in the wrong place; not only troubled my waking hours, but reappeared before me in my sleep.”
When Dickens once made up his mind to do a thing, however, he always went through with it, and before so very long he had perfected himself in his “art and mystery,” and was one of the most rapid and accurate reporters in London.
At nineteen he became a reporter of the speeches in Parliament. Before taking up his newspaper work, he made an attempt to go upon the stage; but it was not long before he found his true vocation, and abandoned all thought of the stage as a means of livelihood. In 1833 he published a sketch in the Old Monthly Magazine, and this was the first of those Sketches by Boz which were published at intervals for the next two years.
The year 1836 was a noteworthy one for Dickens, for in that year he married Catherine Hogarth, the daughter of an associate on the Chronicle; and in that year began the publication of The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club. The publication of the first few numbers wakened no great enthusiasm, but with the appearance of the fifth number, in which Sam Weller is introduced, began that popularity which did not decline until Dickens’s death. In fact, as one writer has said, “In dealing with Dickens, we are dealing with a man whose public success was a marvel and almost a monstrosity.” Every one, old and young, serious and flippant, talked of Pickwick, and it was actually reported, by no less an authority than Thomas Carlyle, that a solemn clergyman, being told that he had not long to live, exclaimed, “Well, thank God, Pickwick will be out in ten days anyway!”
Oliver Twist followed, and then Nicholas Nickleby; and by this time Dickens began to get, what he did not receive from his first work, something like his fair share of the enormous profits, so that his growing family lived in comfort, if not in luxury. When the Old Curiosity Shop, and, later, Barnaby Rudge, appeared, the number of purchasers of the serials rose as high as seventy thousand.