CHAPTER II.
BOYHOOD AND YOUTH IN LONDON.
It was in the early spring of 1823 that Charles Dickens made acquaintance with London for the second time, that vast Metropolis which henceforth continued to exercise a fascination over him, and in the study of which, as well as of its various types of humanity, he found a perpetual charm. His early impressions, however, were not of the brightest, having (as he subsequently observed) exchanged “everything that had given his ailing little life its picturesqueness or sunshine” for the comparatively sordid environment of a London suburb, and suffered the deprivation of the companionship of his playfellows at Chatham to become a solitary lad under circumstances that could not fail to make sorrowful the stoutest heart, not the least depressing being his father’s money involvement with consequent poverty at home. John Dickens, whose financial affairs demanded retrenchment, had rented what Forster describes as “a mean, small tenement” at No. 16 (now No. 141), Bayham Street, Camden Town, to-day one of the poorest parts of London, but not quite so wretched then as we are led to suppose by the reference in Forster’s biography. The cottages in Bayham Street, built in 1812, were comparatively new in 1823, and then stood in the midst of what may be regarded as rural surroundings, there being a meadow at the back of the principal row of houses, in which haymaking was carried on in its season, while a beautiful walk across the fields led to Copenhagen House. Dickens averred that “a washer-woman lived next door” to his father, and “a Bow Street officer lived over the way.” We learn, too, that at the top of the street were some almshouses, and when revisiting the spot many years later Dickens told his biographer that “to go to this spot and look from it over the dust-heaps and dock-leaves and fields at the cupola of St. Paul’s looming through the smoke was a treat that served him for hours of vague reflection afterwards.” A writer who vividly remembered Camden Town as it appeared when John Dickens lived there has placed upon record some interesting particulars concerning it. He says: “In the days I am referring to gas was unknown. We had little twinkling oil-lamps. As soon as it became dark, the watchman went his rounds, starting from his box at the north end of Bayham Street, against the tea-gardens of the Mother Red Cap, then a humble roadside house, kept by a widow and her two daughters, of the name of Young. Then the road between Kentish and Camden Towns was very lonely—hardly safe after dark. These certainly were drawbacks, for depredations used frequently to be committed in the back premises of the houses.... The nearest church was Old St. Pancras, then in the midst of fields.”[17] Exception has been taken to Forster’s use of the word “squalid” as applied to the Bayham Street of 1823, and with justification, for persons of some standing made it their abode, and we learn that in certain of the twenty or thirty newly-erected houses there lived Engelhart and Francis Holl, the celebrated engravers, the latter the father of Frank Holl, the Royal Academician; Charles Rolls and Henry Selous, artists of note; and Angelo Selous, the dramatic author. Thus it would appear that Bayham Street, during the early part of its history, was eminently respectable, and we are compelled to presume that Dickens’s unfavourable presentment of the locality was the outcome of his own painful environment, such as would be forcibly impressed upon the mind of a sickly child (as he then was) and one keenly susceptible to outward influences. Undoubtedly, as Forster remarks, “he felt crushed and chilled by the change from the life at Chatham, breezy and full of colour, to the little back garret in Bayham Street,” and, looking upon the dingy brick tenement to-day, it is not difficult to realize this fact; for, although the house itself could not have been less attractive than his previous home on “the Brook” at Chatham, the surroundings did not offer advantages in the shape of country walks and riverside scenery such as the immediate neighbourhood of Chatham afforded.[18]
16 (NOW 141) BAYHAM STREET, CAMDEN TOWN. ([Page 24].)
Dickens and his parents lived here in 1823. The house was also the residence of Mr. Micawber, and the district is mentioned in “Dombey and Son” under the name of Staggs Gardens.
Bayham Street was named after Bayham Abbey in Sussex, one of the seats of the Marquis Camden. Eighty years ago this part of suburban London was but a village, and Bayham Street had grass struggling through the newly-paved road. Thus we are forced to the conclusion that the misery and depression of spirits, from which little Charles suffered while living here, must be attributed to family adversity and his own isolated condition rather than to the character of his environment. At this time his father’s pecuniary resources became so circumscribed as to compel the observance of the strictest domestic economy, and prevented him from continuing his son’s education. “As I thought,” said Dickens on one occasion very bitterly, “in the little back-garret in Bayham Street, of all I had lost in losing Chatham, what would I have given—if I had had anything to give—to have been sent back to any other school, to have been taught something anywhere!”
Instead of improving, the elder Dickens’s affairs grew from bad to worse, and all ordinary efforts to propitiate his creditors having been exhausted, Mrs. Dickens laudably resolved to attempt a solution of the difficulty by means of a school for young ladies. Accordingly, a house was taken at No. 4, Gower Street North, whither the family removed in 1823. This and the adjoining houses had only just been built. The rate-book shows that No. 4 was taken in the name of Mrs. Dickens, at an annual rental of £50, and that it was in the occupation of the Dickens family from Michaelmas, 1823, to Lady Day, 1824, they having apparently left Bayham Street at Christmas of the former year. No. 4, Gower Street North stood a little to the north of Gower Street Chapel, erected in 1820, and still existing on the west side of the road; the house, known in recent times as No. 147, Gower Street, was demolished about 1895, and an extension of Messrs. Maple’s premises now occupies the site. When, in 1890, I visited the place with my friend the late Mr. W. R. Hughes (author of “A Week’s Tramp in Dickens Land”), we found it in the occupation of a manufacturer of artificial human eyes, a sort of Mr. Venus, with his “human eyes warious,” as depicted in “Our Mutual Friend”; while there was a dancing academy next door, reminiscent of Mr. Turveydrop, the professor of deportment in “Bleak House.” The Dickens residence had six small rooms, with kitchen in basement, each front room having two windows—altogether a fairly comfortable abode, but minus a garden. The result of Mrs. Dickens’s enterprise proved as disastrous as that of Mrs. Micawber’s. “Poor Mrs. Micawber! She said she had tried to exert herself; and so, I have no doubt, she had. The centre of the street door was perfectly covered with a great brass plate, on which was engraved, ‘Mrs. Micawber’s Boarding Establishment for Young Ladies’; but I never found that any young ladies had ever been to school there; or that any young lady ever came, or proposed to come; or that the least preparation was ever made to receive any young lady.” The actual facts are thus recorded in fiction, and the futility of Mrs. Dickens’s excellent intention to retrieve the family misfortunes seemed inevitable, in spite of the energy displayed by the youthful Charles in distributing “at a great many doors a great many circulars,” calling attention to the superior advantages of the new seminary. The blow proved a crushing one, rendering the prospect more hopeless than ever. Importunate creditors, who could no longer be kept at bay, effected the arrest of John Dickens, who was conveyed forthwith to a prison for debtors in the Borough of Southwark; his last words to his heart-broken son as he was carried off being similar to those despondingly uttered by Mr. Micawber under like circumstances, to the effect that the sun was set upon him for ever.
Forster says that the particular prison where John Dickens suffered incarceration was the Marshalsea, and this statement appears correct, judging from the fragment of the novelist’s autobiography which refers to the unfortunate incident: “And he told me, I remember, to take warning by the Marshalsea, and to observe that if a man had twenty pounds a year, and spent nineteen pounds nineteen shillings and sixpence, he would be happy; but that a shilling spent the other way would make him wretched.” Another of Mr. Micawber’s wise sayings, be it observed. That impecunious gentleman (it will be remembered) suffered imprisonment at the King’s Bench, and it may be surmised that the novelist purposely changed the locale that old memories should not be revived. Of debtors’ prisons considerable knowledge is displayed in his books, his personal acquaintance with them dating, of course, from those days when the brightness of his young life was obscured by the “falling cloud” to which he compares this distressing time. Realistic and accurate pictures of the most noteworthy of these blots upon our social system may be found in the forcible description in the fortieth chapter of “Pickwick” of the Fleet Prison, of which the last vestiges were removed in 1872, and the site of which is now covered by the Memorial Hall, Farringdon Street, and by Messrs. Cassell and Co.’s printing works; the King’s Bench Prison (long since demolished) figures prominently in “David Copperfield”; while many of the principal scenes in “Little Dorrit” are laid in the departed Marshalsea, which adjoined the burial-ground of St. George’s Church in the Borough. The extreme rear of the Marshalsea Prison, described by Dickens in the preface to “Little Dorrit,” was transformed into a warehouse in 1887.
The second chapter of Forster’s biography makes dismal reading, relating, as it does, the bitter experiences of Charles Dickens’s boyhood—experiences, however, which yielded abundant material for future use in his stories. With the breadwinner in the clutches of the law, the wife and children, left stranded in the Gower Street house, had a terrible struggle for existence; we are told that in order to obtain the necessaries of life their bits of furniture and various domestic utensils were pawned or otherwise disposed of, until at length the place was practically emptied of its contents, and the inmates were perforce compelled to encamp in the two parlours, living there night and day. At this juncture a relative, James Lamert (who had lodged with the family in Bayham Street), heard of their misfortunes, and, through his connection with Warren’s Blacking Manufactory at 30, Hungerford Stairs, Strand, provided an occupation there for little Charles by which he could earn a few shillings a week—a miserable pittance, but extremely welcome under the circumstances, as, by exercising strict economy, it enabled him to support himself, thus making one mouth less to provide for at home. Hungerford Stairs (in after-life he used to declare that he knew Hunger-ford well!) stood near the present Charing Cross railway bridge (which usurps the old Hungerford Suspension Bridge, transferred to Clifton), and the site of Hungerford Market is covered by the railway station. Dickens has recorded that “the blacking warehouse was the last house on the left-hand side of the way, at old Hungerford Stairs. It was a crazy, tumble-down old house, abutting, of course, on the river, and literally overrun with rats. Its wainscotted rooms and its rotten floors and staircase, and the old grey rats swarming down in the cellars, and the sound of their squeaking and scuffling coming up the stairs at all times, and the dirt and decay of the place, rise up vividly before me, as if I were there again.” The blacking factory, which disappeared when Hungerford Market went, is faithfully portrayed in the eleventh chapter of “David Copperfield,” thinly disguised as Murdstone and Grinby’s Warehouse, “down in Blackfriars.” Dickens, like David, was keenly sensible of the humiliation of what he could not help regarding as a very menial occupation—the tying-up and labelling innumerable pots of paste-blacking—which he was now destined to follow, and for the remainder of his life he never recalled this episode without a pang.
He reminded Forster how fond he was of roaming about the neighbourhood of the Strand and Covent Garden during the dinner hour, intently observing the various types of humanity with precocious interest, and storing up impressions which were destined to prove invaluable to him. One of his favourite localities was the Adelphi, and he was particularly attracted by a little waterside tavern called the Fox-under-the-Hill; doubtless the incident narrated in the just-mentioned chapter of “Copperfield”—the autobiographical chapter—is true of himself, when he causes little David to confess to a fondness for wandering about that “mysterious place with those dark arches,” and to wonder what the coalheavers thought of him, a solitary lad, as he sat upon a bench outside the little public-house, watching them as they danced.[19] The pudding-shops and beef-houses in the neighbourhood of St. Martin’s Lane and Drury Lane were familiar enough to him in those days; for, with such a modest sum to invest for his mid-day meal, he naturally compared notes as to the charges made by each for a slice of pudding or cold spiced beef before deciding upon the establishment which should have the privilege of his custom. He sometimes favoured Johnson’s in Clare Court, which is identical with the place patronized by David Copperfield—viz., the “famous alamode beef-house near Drury Lane,” where he gave the waiter a halfpenny, and wished he hadn’t taken it. In the recently demolished Clare Court there existed in those days two of the best alamode beef-shops in London, the Old Thirteen Cantons and the New Thirteen Cantons, and we read in a curious book called “The Epicure’s Almanack” (1815), that “the beef and liquors at either house are equally good, and the attention of all who pass is attracted by the display of fine sallads in the windows, which display is daily executed with great ingenuity, and comprehends a variety of neat devices, in which the fine slices of red beetroot are pleasingly conspicuous.” The New Thirteen Cantons was kept by the veritable Johnson himself. We are further informed that he owned a clever dog called Carlo, “who once enacted so capital a part on the boards of Old Drury,” and whose sagacity “brought as many customers to Mr. Johnson as did the excellence of his fare.” Dickens, however, did not become acquainted with Carlo, who, a few years before the lad knew the shop, paid the penalty of a report that the famous animal had been bitten by a mad dog. “There were two pudding-shops,” said Dickens to his biographer, “between which I was divided, according to my finances.” One was in a court close to St. Martin’s Church, where the pudding was made with currants, “and was rather a special pudding,” but dear; the other was in the Strand, “somewhere in that part which has been rebuilt since,” where the pudding was much cheaper, being stout and pale, heavy and flabby, with a few big raisins stuck in at great distances apart. The more expensive shop stood in Church Court (at the back of the church), demolished when Adelaide Street was constructed about 1830, and may probably be identified with the Oxford eating-house, then existing opposite the departed Hungerford Street; the other establishment, where Dickens often dined for economy’s sake, flourished near the spot covered until quite recently by that children’s paradise, the Lowther Arcade. The courts surrounding St. Martin’s Church were formerly so thronged with eating-houses that the district became popularly known as “Porridge Island.”
