DICKENS AT THE BLACKING WAREHOUSE. ([Page 29].)
From a drawing by Fred Barnard. Reproduced by kind permission of Messrs. Chapman and Hall.

Failing, by means of a certain “deed,” to propitiate his creditors, John Dickens continued to remain within the gloomy walls of the Marshalsea. The home in Gower Street was thereupon broken up, and Mrs. Dickens, with her family, went to live with her husband in the prison. Little Charles, however, was handed over as a lodger to a Mrs. Roylance, a reduced old lady who afterwards figured as Mrs. Pipchin in “Dombey and Son.” Mrs. Roylance, long known to the family, resided in Little College Street, Camden Town; it became College Street West in 1828, and the portion north of King Street has been known since 1887 as College Place. The abode in question was probably No. 37, for, according to the rate-book of 1824 (the period with which I am dealing), the house so numbered (rated at £18) was occupied by Elizabeth Raylase[20] until the following year, and demolished about 1890, at which time the street was rebuilt.

The boy still carried on his uncongenial duties at the blacking warehouse with satisfaction to his employers, in spite of the acute mental suffering he underwent. Experiencing a sense of loneliness in being cut off from his parents, brothers, and sisters, he pleaded to his father to be allowed to lodge nearer the prison, with the result that he left Mrs. Roylance, to take up his abode in Lant Street, Borough, where, in the house of an insolvent court agent, a back attic had been found for him, having from the little window “a pleasant prospect of a timber-yard.” Of Lant Street, as it probably then appeared, we have a capital description in the thirty-second chapter of the “Pickwick Papers,” for here it was that Bob Sawyer found a lodgment with the amiable (!) Mrs. Raddle and her husband, in the identical house, maybe, as that tenanted by the insolvent court agent. “There is a repose about Lant Street, in the Borough, which sheds a gentle melancholy upon the soul. There are always a good many houses to let in the street; it is a by-street, too, and its dulness is soothing. A house in Lant Street would not come within the denomination of a first-rate residence in the strict acceptation of the term, but it is a most desirable spot, nevertheless. If a man wished to abstract himself from the world, to remove himself from within the reach of temptation, to place himself beyond the possibility of any inducement to look out of the window, he should by all means go to Lant Street.

“In this happy retreat are colonized a few clear-starchers, a sprinkling of journeymen bookbinders, one or two prison agents for the insolvent court, several small housekeepers who are employed in the docks, a handful of mantua-makers, and a seasoning of jobbing tailors. The majority of the inhabitants either direct their energies to the letting of furnished apartments, or devote themselves to the healthful and invigorating pursuit of mangling. The chief features in the still life of the street are green shutters, lodging-bills, brass door-plates, and bell-handles, the principal specimens of animated nature, the pot-boy, the muffin youth, and the baked-potato man. The population is migratory, usually disappearing on the verge of quarter-day, and generally by night. His Majesty’s revenues are seldom collected in this happy valley; the rents are dubious, and the water communication is very frequently cut off.”

LANT STREET, BOROUGH. ([Page 34].)
Showing the older residential tenements. The actual house in which Dickens lived as a boy is now demolished.

Lant Street, as Bob Sawyer informed Mr. Pickwick, is near Guy’s Hospital, “little distance after you’ve passed St. George’s Church—turns out of the High Street on the right-hand side of the way.” It has not altered materially in its outward aspect since the time when little Charles Dickens slept there, on the floor of the back attic, an abode which he then thought was “a paradise.” We may suppose that such accommodation, poor as it must have been, yielded some consolation to the lonely child by reason of the fact that he was within easy reach of his parents, and also because his landlord—a fat, good-natured old gentleman, who was lame—and his quiet old wife were very kind to him; and it is interesting to know that they and their grown-up son are immortalized in “The Old Curiosity Shop” as the Garland family. Little Charles looked forward to Saturday nights, when his release from toil at an earlier hour than usual enabled him to indulge his fancy for rambling and loitering a little in the busy thoroughfares between Hungerford Stairs and the Marshalsea. His usual way home was over Blackfriars Bridge, and then to the left along Charlotte Street, which (he is careful to tell us) “has Rowland Hill’s chapel on one side, and the likeness of a golden dog licking a golden pot over a shop door on the other,” a quaint sign still existing here. He was sometimes tempted to expend a penny to enter a show-van which generally stood at a corner of the street “to see the fat pig, the wild Indian, and the little lady,” and for long afterwards could recall the peculiar smell of hat-making then (and now) carried on there.

The autobiographical record discloses another characteristic incident, which was afterwards embodied in the eleventh chapter of “Copperfield.”

One evening little Charles had acted as messenger for his father at the Marshalsea, and was returning to the prison by way of Westminster Bridge, when he went into a public-house in Parliament Street, at the corner of Derby Street, and ordered a glass of the very best ale (the “Genuine Stunning”), “with a good head to it.” “The landlord,” observes Dickens, “looked at me, in return, over the bar from head to foot, with a strange smile on his face; and instead of drawing the beer, looked round the screen and said something to his wife, who came out from behind it, with her work in her hand, and joined him in surveying me. Here we stand, all three, before me now, in my study at Devonshire Terrace—the landlord in his shirt-sleeves, leaning against the bar window-frame, his wife looking over the little half-door, and I, in some confusion, looking up at them from outside the partition. They asked me a good many questions, as what my name was, how old I was, where I lived, how I was employed, etc., etc. To all of which, that I might commit nobody, I invented appropriate answers. They served me with the ale, though I expect it was not the strongest on the premises; and the landlord’s wife, opening the little half-door and bending down, gave me a kiss that was half-admiring and half-compassionate, but all womanly and good.” I am sure “so juvenile a customer was evidently unusual at the Red Lion”; and he explains that “the occasion was a festive one,” either his own birthday or somebody else’s, but I doubt whether this would prove sufficient justification in the eyes of the rigid total abstainer. In “David Copperfield” we find an illustration of the scene depicted in a clever etching by “Phiz.” The public-house here referred to is the Red Lion, which has been lately rebuilt, and differs considerably from the unpretentious tavern as Dickens knew it; unfortunately, the sign of the rampant red lion has not been replaced, but in its stead we see a bust of the novelist, standing within a niche in the principal front of the new building.

By a happy stroke of good fortune, a rather considerable legacy from a relative accrued to John Dickens, and had been paid into court during his incarceration. This, in addition to the official pension due for long service at Somerset House, enabled him to meet his financial responsibilities, with the result that the Marshalsea knew him no more. Just then, too, the blacking business had become larger, and was transferred to Chandos Street, Covent Garden, where little Charles continued to manipulate the pots, but in a more public manner; for here the work was done in a window facing the street, and generally in the presence of an admiring crowd outside. The warehouse (pulled down in 1889) stood next to the shop at the corner of Bedford Street in Chandos Street (the southern corner, now the Civil Service Stores); opposite, there was the public-house where the lad got his ale. “The stones on the street,” he afterwards observed to Forster, “may be smoothed by my small feet going across to it at dinner-time, and back again.” The basement of the warehouse became transformed in later years into a chemist’s shop, and the sign of the tavern over the way was the Black Prince, closed in 1888, and demolished shortly afterwards to make room for buildings devoted to the medical school of the Charing Cross Hospital. His release from prison compelled the elder Dickens to seek another abode for himself and family, and he obtained temporary quarters with the before-mentioned Mrs. Roylance of Little College Street. Thence, according to Forster, they went to Hampstead, where the elder Dickens had taken a house, and from there, in 1825, he removed to a small tenement in Johnson Street, Somers Town, a poverty-stricken neighbourhood even in those days, and changed but little since. Johnson Street was then the last street in Somers Town, and adjoined the fields between it and Camden Town. It runs east from the north end of Seymour Street, and the house occupied by the Dickens family (including Charles, who had, of course, left his Lant Street “paradise”) was No. 13, at the east end of the north side, if we may rely upon the evidence afforded by the rate-book. At that time the house was numbered 29, and rated at £20, the numbering being changed to 13 at Christmas, 1825. In July of that year the name of the tenant is entered in the rate-book as Caroline Dickens, and so remains until January, 1829, after which the house is marked “Empty.”