WELLINGTON HOUSE ACADEMY, HAMPSTEAD ROAD. ([Page 39].)
The school of Dickens, 1824-1826.
The father, on securing an appointment as a reporter for the Morning Herald, established himself and his family (including Charles), at No. 18, Bentinck Street, Manchester Square. The rate-book, however, does not give his name as the tenant of this or any other house in the street, so we must assume that the family were again merely lodgers. This house and its neighbours were recently demolished, being replaced by a row of mansions, and, oddly enough, the name of the occupier of No. 19 in 1895 bore the novelist’s patronymic.
On leaving Ellis and Blackmore’s office in November, 1828, Charles Dickens abandoned the pursuit of the law for ever.
The profession of journalism offering him superior attractions, he was tempted to become a newspaper reporter. With that object in view, he gave himself up to the study of stenography, devoting much of his time at the British Museum acquiring a knowledge of the subject, and practising in the Law Courts of Doctors’ Commons with extraordinary assiduity until he arrived at something like proficiency. The impediments that beset him are duly set forth in the pages of “David Copperfield,” the incidents there narrated being based upon the author’s heart-breaking experience in endeavouring to master the mysteries of shorthand. Like David, he passed a period of probation, lasting nearly two years, reporting for the Proctors at Doctors’ Commons, St. Paul’s Churchyard. The scene of his labours is thus described in “Sketches by Boz”: “Crossing a quiet and shady courtyard paved with stone, and frowned upon by old red-brick houses, on the doors of which were painted the names of sundry learned civilians, we paused before a small, green-baized, brass-headed nailed door, which, yielding to our gentle push, at once admitted us into an old quaint-looking apartment, with sunken windows and black carved wainscotting, at the upper end of which, seated on a raised platform of semicircular shape, were about a dozen solemn-looking gentlemen in crimson gowns and wigs.” The courts were destroyed in 1867, and in their place a Royal Court of Probate was established at Westminster Hall.
According to the autographs on certain British Museum readers’ slips, Charles Dickens was residing, in 1831, at No. 10, Norfolk Street, Fitzroy Square, the same street (now Cleveland Street, east side of Middlesex Hospital) in which his father was domiciled for a while in 1814.
About the year 1833 Charles rented bachelor apartments in Cecil Street (Strand), as evidenced by a letter of that period to an intimate friend, where he says: “The people at Cecil Street put too much water in the hashes, lost the nutmeg-grater, attended on me most miserably ... and so I gave them warning, and have not yet fixed on a local habitation.”
We learn from Charles Dickens the younger that his father, before occupying chambers in Furnival’s Inn, had apartments in Buckingham Street, and it is, therefore, not unlikely that he went thither from Cecil Street; the same authority adds that “if he lived in David Copperfield’s rooms—as I have no doubt he did—he must have kept house on the top floor of No. 15 on the east side—the house which displays a tablet commemorating its one-time tenancy by Peter the Great, Czar of all the Russias.”[23] David, in describing his chambers, observes that “they were on the top of the house ... and consisted of a little half-blind entry where you could see hardly anything, a little stone-blind pantry where you could see nothing at all, a sitting-room, and a bedroom. The furniture was rather faded, but quite good enough for me; and, sure enough, the river was outside the windows.” Here, or at Cecil Street, Dickens doubtless met that martyr to “the spazzums,” the immortal Mrs. Crupp, and the “young gal” whom she hired for festive occasions, such as David’s dinner-party.
In 1832, after gaining experience at Doctors’ Commons, an opening was found for a reporter on the staff of the True Sun, a London morning paper, then just launched; and here it may be observed that newspaper reporting in those days, before railways and electric telegraphs, was not unattended by great difficulties and even danger, for Dickens himself relates how he had frequently to travel by post-chaise to remote parts of the country to record important speeches, and how, on the return journey, he transcribed his notes on the palm of his hand by the light of a dark lantern while galloping at fifteen miles an hour at the dead of night through a wild district, sometimes finding himself belated in miry country roads during the small hours in a wheelless carriage, with exhausted horses and drunken post-boys, and then succeeding in reaching the office in time for publication. While thus representing the True Sun he joined the reporting staff of the Mirror of Parliament (then a comparatively new paper, conducted by his uncle, John Henry Barrow, barrister-at-law), and in 1834 associated himself with the Morning Chronicle,[24] one of the leading London journals, and a formidable rival of the Times.
1 RAYMOND BUILDINGS, GRAY’S INN. ([Page 41].)
In the corner house were the offices of Ellis and Blackmore, attorneys, with whom Dickens was a clerk in 1827-1828.