Charles Dickens: A Life by Claire Tomalin Read Free Book Online Page A

London make crucial turning points in his novels, for good or ill, and in July 1822 he made just such a crucial journey, aged ten, and alone. At the end of term Mr Giles gave him a copy of Goldsmith’s
The Bee
27 to remember him by, his few clothes were packed up, he was given sandwiches for the journey and put into the London coach. It happened to be empty, and he travelled with no one at his side through the Kentish countryside on a rainy summer’s day, and into the heart of London. He remembered it as a damp and sorrowful journey.

4
     
    The Journalist
     
1834–1836
     
    He had a foot on the path to success, but he was still poor, at twenty-two still living with his parents, still a freelance. Even the excitement of his sketches coming out each month was clouded by their being unpaid work, especially when one was taken over by a well-known playwright, John Buckstone, and made into a farce, produced and published without acknowledgement. Dickens remained good-tempered, acknowledged that Buckstone had put in material of his own and realized that more good than harm would come of his piracy. At home, life was not always easy. His sister Fanny left the Royal Academy this year, was honoured with an associate honorary membership, was a true musician and admired when she sang at public concerts, but she was not going to be a star; there was no question of her becoming an opera singer, and she cannot have earned much. Letitia was often ill, and John Dickens was no longer working for his brother-in-law’s
Mirror of Parliament
, and falling into debt yet again. Of the three younger boys, Augustus was six, Alfred twelve and Fred fourteen, and their future needed to be thought of. Charles must have doubted that their father would be capable of planning for his brothers. Here was another cause for anxiety.
    John Barrow continued to welcome Charles at home in Norwood, and he was often out at his uncle’s house. He had also built up a group of friends with whom he took long tramps and rides, the occasional river trip, evening parties – ‘having a flare’, as he put it – and companionable smoking and drinking. There were Kolle and Mitton, and now Tom Beard, a fellow reporter, five years older than Dickens, a quiet, steady Sussex man, dullish, and always ready to help when asked. Another new friend was Henry Austin, architect and engineer, a pupil of Robert Stephenson, and soon to work with him on the building of the London and Blackwall railway through the East End. 1 Austin was up to date, intelligent and concerned with social issues, and Dickens liked him so much that when he moved into a place of his own at the end of the year, he invited him to share with him. Austin declined – he was living comfortably with his mother – but they remained close, and their friendship was strengthened when Austin married Letitia Dickens in 1837.
    For the moment Dickens was in the House reporting for the
True Sun
and the
Mirror
. The most important debates that summer were on proposed amendments to the Poor Law. Conditions were very bad all over the country, half-starved agricultural workers protesting, burning ricks and attempting to form trade unions. When a group of Dorset labourers was sentenced to transportation for this last offence, they were called the ‘Tolpuddle Martyrs’ by other trade unionists and a protest march was held in London on their behalf. The view of most parliamentarians was that the poor needed tough treatment, and if they could not support themselves, through old age, misfortune or having too many children to feed, or were laid off by their usual employers, rather than being given piecemeal payments by the parish to keep them going in their cottages, they should be forced into enlarged workhouses. Here they would be housed, scantily fed and humiliated by being made to wear uniforms, and their families would be broken up, husbands and wives, mothers and children, put into separate dormitories. To most landowners