The Life of Charles Dickens by John Forster (Illustrated)

John Forster, Delphi Classics

• Publisher: Delphi Classics (Parts Edition)
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781786567345
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Classics
• Index: Literature

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VOLUME I

1812-1842

TO THE

DAUGHTERS OF CHARLES DICKENS,

M Y   G O D - D A U G H T E R   M A R Y

AND

HER SISTER KATE,

This Book is Dedicated

BY THEIR FRIEND,

AND THEIR FATHER’S FRIEND AND EXECUTOR,

JOHN FORSTER

NOTE TO THE PRESENT EDITION.

Such has been the rapidity of the demand for successive impressions of this book, that I have found it impossible, until now, to correct at pages , , and  three errors of statement made in the former editions; and some few other mistakes, not in themselves important, at pages , , and . I take the opportunity of adding that the mention at p.  is not an allusion to the well-known “Penny” and “Saturday” Magazines, but to weekly periodicals of some years’ earlier date resembling them in form. One of them, I have since found from a later mention by Dickens himself, was presumably of a less wholesome and instructive character. “I used,” he says, “when I was at school, to take in the Terrific Register, making myself unspeakably miserable, and frightening my very wits out of my head, for the small charge of a penny weekly; which, considering that there was an illustration to every number in which there was always a pool of blood, and at least one body, was cheap.” An obliging correspondent writes to me upon my reference to the Fox-under-the-hill, at p. : “Will you permit me to say that the house, shut up and almost ruinous, is still to be found at the bottom of a curious and most precipitous court, the entrance of which is just past Salisbury Street. . . . It was once, I think, the approach to the halfpenny boats. The house is now shut out from the water-side by the Embankment.”

Palace Gate House, Kensington,
23d December, 1871.

CHAPTER I. CHILDHOOD

1812-1822.

Birth at Landport in Portsea — Family of John Dickens — Powers of Observation in Children — Two Years Old — In London, æt. 2-3 — In Chatham, æt. 4-9 — Vision of Boyhood — The Queer Small Child — Mother’s Teaching — Day-School in Rome Lane — Retrospects of Childhood — David Copperfield and Charles Dickens — Access to Small but Good Library — Tragedy-Writing — Comic-Song Singing — Cousin James Lamert — First taken to Theatre — At Mr. Giles’s School — Encored in the Recitations — Boyish Recollections — Birthplace of his Fancy — Last Night in Chatham — In London — First Impressions — Bayham Street, Camden-town — Faculty of Early Observation — His Description of his Father — Small Theatre made for him — Sister Fanny at Royal Academy of Music — Walks about London — Biography and Autobiography — At his Godfather’s and his Uncle’s — First Efforts at Description— “Res Angusta Domi” — Mother exerting Herself — Father in the Marshalsea — Visit to the Prison — Captain Porter — Old Friends disposed of — At the Pawnbroker’s.

Charles Dickens, the most popular novelist of the century, and one of the greatest humorists that England has produced, was born at Landport in Portsea on Friday, the 7th of February, 1812.

His father, John Dickens, a clerk in the Navy-pay office, was at this time stationed in the Portsmouth dockyard. He had made acquaintance with the lady, Elizabeth Barrow, who became afterwards his wife, through her elder brother, Thomas Barrow, also engaged on the establishment at Somerset House; and she bore him in all a family of eight children, of whom two died in infancy. The eldest, Fanny (born 1810), was followed by Charles (entered in the baptismal register of Portsea as Charles John Huffham, though on the very rare occasions when he subscribed that name he wrote Huffam); by another son, named Alfred, who died in childhood; by Letitia (born 1816); by another daughter, Harriet, who died also in childhood; by Frederick (born 1820); by Alfred Lamert (born 1822); and by Augustus (born 1827); of all of whom only the second daughter now survives.

Walter Scott tells us, in his fragment of autobiography, speaking of the strange remedies applied to his lameness, that he remembered lying on the floor in the parlor of his grandfather’s farm-house, swathed up in a sheepskin warm from the body of the sheep, being then not three years old. David Copperfield’s memory goes beyond this. He represents himself seeing so far back into the blank of his infancy as to discern therein his mother and her servant, dwarfed to his sight by stooping down or kneeling on the floor, and himself going unsteadily from the one to the other. He admits this may be fancy, though he believes the power of observation in numbers of very young children to be quite wonderful for its closeness and accuracy, and thinks that the recollection of most of us can go farther back into such times than many of us suppose. But what he adds is certainly not fancy. “If it should appear from anything I may set down in this narrative that I was a child of close observation, or that as a man I have a strong memory of my childhood, I undoubtedly lay claim to both of these characteristics.” Applicable as it might be to David Copperfield, this was simply and unaffectedly true of Charles Dickens.

He has often told me that he remembered the small front garden to the house at Portsea, from which he was taken away when he was two years old, and where, watched by a nurse through a low kitchen-window almost level with the gravel walk, he trotted about with something to eat, and his little elder sister with him. He was carried from the garden one day to see the soldiers exercise; and I perfectly recollect that, on our being at Portsmouth together while he was writing Nickleby, he recognized the exact shape of the military parade seen by him as a very infant, on the same spot, a quarter of a century before.

When his father was again brought up by his duties to London from Portsmouth, they went into lodgings in Norfolk Street, Middlesex Hospital; and it lived also in the child’s memory that they had come away from Portsea in the snow. Their home, shortly after, was again changed, on the elder Dickens being placed upon duty in Chatham dockyard; and the house where he lived in Chatham, which had a plain-looking whitewashed plaster front and a small garden before and behind, was in St. Mary’s Place, otherwise called the Brook, and next door to a Baptist meeting-house called Providence Chapel, of which a Mr. Giles, to be presently mentioned, was minister. Charles at this time was between four and five years old; and here he stayed till he was nine. Here the most durable of his early impressions were received; and the associations that were around him when he died were those which at the outset of his life had affected him most strongly.

The house called Gadshill Place stands on the strip of highest ground in the main road between Rochester and Gravesend. Often had we traveled past it together, years and years before it became his home, and never without some allusion to what he told me when first I saw it in his company, that amid the recollections connected with his childhood it held always a prominent place, for, upon first seeing it as he came from Chatham with his father, and looking up at it with much admiration, he had been promised that he might himself live in it, or in some such house, when he came to be a man, if he would only work hard enough. Which for a long time was his ambition. The story is a pleasant one, and receives authentic confirmation at the opening of one of his essays on traveling abroad, when as he passes along the road to Canterbury there crosses it a vision of his former self:

“So smooth was the old high-road, and so fresh were the horses, and so fast went I, that it was midway between Gravesend and Rochester, and the widening river was bearing the ships, white-sailed or black-smoked, out to sea, when I noticed by the wayside a very queer small boy.

“‘Holloa!’ said I to the very queer small boy, ‘where do you live?’

“‘At Chatham,’ says he.

“‘What do you do there?’ says I.

“‘I go to school,’ says he.

“I took him up in a moment, and we went on. Presently, the very queer small boy says, ‘This is Gadshill we are coming to, where Falstaff went out to rob those travelers, and ran away.’

“‘You know something about Falstaff, eh?’ said I.

“‘All about him,’ said the very queer small boy. ‘I am old (I am nine), and I read all sorts of books. But do let us stop at the top of the hill, and look at the house there, if you please!’

“‘You admire that house?’ said I.

“‘Bless you, sir,’ said the very queer small boy, ‘when I was not more than half as old as nine, it used to be a treat for me to be brought to look at it. And now I am nine, I come by myself to look at it. And ever since I can recollect, my father, seeing me so fond of it, has often said to me, If you were to be very persevering and were to work hard, you might some day come to live in it. Though that’s impossible!’ said the very queer small boy, drawing a low breath, and now staring at the house out of window with all his might.

“I was rather amazed to be told this by the very queer small boy; for that house happens to be my house, and I have reason to believe that what he said was true.”

The queer small boy was indeed his very self. He was a very little and a very sickly boy. He was subject to attacks of violent spasm which disabled him for any active exertion. He was never a good little cricket-player. He was never a first-rate hand at marbles, or peg-top, or prisoner’s base. But he had great pleasure in watching the other boys, officers’ sons for the most part, at these games, reading while they played; and he had always the belief that this early sickness had brought to himself one inestimable advantage, in the circumstance of his weak health having strongly inclined him to reading. It will not appear, as my narrative moves on, that he owed much to his parents, or was other than in his first letter to Washington Irving he described himself to have been, a “very small and not-over-particularly-taken-care-of boy;” but he has frequently been heard to say that his first desire for knowledge, and his earliest passion for reading, were awakened by his mother, who taught him the first rudiments not only of English, but also, a little later, of Latin. She taught him regularly every day for a long time, and taught him, he was convinced, thoroughly well. I once put to him a question in connection with this to which he replied in almost exactly the words he placed five years later in the mouth of David Copperfield: “I faintly remember her teaching me the alphabet; and when I look upon the fat black letters in the primer, the puzzling novelty of their shapes, and the easy good nature of O and S, always seem to present themselves before me as they used to do.”

Then followed the preparatory day-school, a school for girls and boys to which he went with his sister Fanny, and which was in a place called Rome (pronounced Room) Lane. Revisiting Chatham in his manhood, and looking for the place, he found it had been pulled down to make a new street, “ages” before; but out of the distance of the ages arose nevertheless a not dim impression that it had been over a dyer’s shop; that he went up steps to it; that he had frequently grazed his knees in doing so; and that in trying to scrape the mud off a very unsteady little shoe, he generally got his leg over the scraper. Other similar memories of childhood have dropped from him occasionally in his lesser writings; whose readers may remember how vividly portions of his boyhood are reproduced in his fancy of the Christmas-tree, and will hardly have forgotten what he says, in his thoughtful little paper on Nurses’ stories, of the doubtful places and people to which children may be introduced before they are six years old, and forced, night after night, to go back to against their wills, by servants to whom they are intrusted. That childhood exaggerates what it sees, too, has he not tenderly told? How he thought the Rochester High Street must be at least as wide as Regent Street, which he afterwards discovered to be little better than a lane; how the public clock in it, supposed to be the finest clock in the world, turned out to be as moon-faced and weak a clock as a man’s eyes ever saw; and how in its town-hall, which had appeared to him once so glorious a structure that he had set it up in his mind as the model on which the genie of the lamp built the palace for Aladdin, he had painfully to recognize a mere mean little heap of bricks, like a chapel gone demented. Yet not so painfully, either, when second thoughts wisely came. “Ah! who was I that I should quarrel with the town for being changed to me, when I myself had come back, so changed, to it? All my early readings and early imaginations dated from this place, and I took them away so full of innocent construction and guileless belief, and I brought them back so worn and torn, so much the wiser and so much the worse!”

And here I may at once expressly mention, what already has been hinted, that even as Fielding described himself and his belongings in Captain Booth and Amelia, and protested always that he had writ in his books nothing more than he had seen in life, so it may be said of Dickens in more especial relation to David Copperfield. Many guesses have been made since his death, connecting David’s autobiography with his own; accounting, by means of such actual experiences, for the so frequent recurrence in his writings of the prison-life, its humor and pathos, described in them with such wonderful reality; and discovering in what David tells Steerforth at school of the stories he had read in his childhood, what it was that had given the bent to his own genius. There is not only truth in all this, but it will very shortly be seen that the identity went deeper than any had supposed, and covered experiences not less startling in the reality than they appear to be in the fiction.

Of the “readings” and “imaginations” which he describes as brought away from Chatham, this authority can tell us. It is one of the many passages in Copperfield which are literally true, and its proper place is here. “My father had left a small collection of books in a little room up-stairs 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, and my hope of something beyond that place and time, — 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. It is astonishing to me now how I found time, in the midst of my porings and blunderings over heavier themes, to read those books as I did. It is curious to me how I could ever have consoled myself under my small troubles (which were great troubles to me), by impersonating my favorite characters in them. . . . 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 centre-piece out of an old set of boot-trees: the perfect realisation 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. . . . When I think of it, the picture always rises in my mind, of a summer evening, the boys at play in the churchyard, and I sitting on my bed, reading as if for life. Every barn in the neighborhood, every stone in the church, and every foot of the churchyard, had some association of its own, in my mind, connected with these books, and stood for some locality made famous in them. I have seen Tom Pipes go climbing up the church-steeple; I have watched Strap, with the knapsack on his back, stopping to rest himself upon the wicket-gate; and I know that Commodore Trunnion held that club with Mr. Pickle, in the parlor of our little village ale-house.” Every word of this personal recollection had been written down as fact, some years before it found its way into David Copperfield; the only change in the fiction being his omission of the name of a cheap series of novelists then in course of publication, by which his father had become happily the owner of so large a lump of literary treasure in his small...

Table of contents

• Title page
• CHARLES DICKENS
• COPYRIGHT
• Charles Dickens: Parts Edition
• Parts Edition Contents
• The Life of Charles Dickens by John Forster
• CONTENTS
• VOLUME I
• NOTE TO THE PRESENT EDITION.
• CHAPTER I. CHILDHOOD
• CHAPTER II. HARD EXPERIENCES IN BOYHOOD.
• CHAPTER III. SCHOOL-DAYS AND START IN LIFE.
• CHAPTER IV. REPORTERS’ GALLERY AND NEWSPAPER LITERATURE.
• CHAPTER V. FIRST BOOK, AND ORIGIN OF PICKWICK.
• CHAPTER VI. WRITING THE PICKWICK PAPERS.
• CHAPTER VII. BETWEEN PICKWICK AND NICKLEBY.
• CHAPTER VIII. OLIVER TWIST.
• CHAPTER IX. NICHOLAS NICKLEBY.
• CHAPTER X. DURING AND AFTER NICKLEBY.
• CHAPTER XI. NEW LITERARY PROJECT.
• CHAPTER XII. THE OLD CURIOSITY SHOP.
• CHAPTER XIII. DEVONSHIRE TERRACE AND BROADSTAIRS.
• CHAPTER XIV. BARNABY RUDGE.
• CHAPTER XV. PUBLIC DINNER IN EDINBURGH.
• CHAPTER XVI. ADVENTURES IN THE HIGHLANDS.
• CHAPTER XVII. AGAIN AT BROADSTAIRS.
• CHAPTER XVIII. EVE OF THE VISIT TO AMERICA.
• CHAPTER XIX. FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF AMERICA.
• CHAPTER XX. SECOND IMPRESSIONS OF AMERICA.
• CHAPTER XXI. PHILADELPHIA, WASHINGTON, AND THE SOUTH.
• CHAPTER XXII. CANAL-BOAT JOURNEYS: BOUND FAR WEST.
• CHAPTER XXIII. THE FAR WEST: TO NIAGARA FALLS.
• CHAPTER XXIV. NIAGARA AND MONTREAL.
• CORRECTIONS MADE IN THE LATER EDITIONS OF THE FIRST VOLUME.
• VOLUME II.
• CHAPTER I. AMERICAN NOTES.
• CHAPTER II. FIRST YEAR OF MARTIN CHUZZLEWIT.
• CHAPTER III. CHUZZLEWIT DISAPPOINTMENTS AND CHRISTMAS CAROL.
• CHAPTER IV. YEAR OF DEPARTURE FOR ITALY.
• CHAPTER V. IDLENESS AT ALBARO: VILLA BAGNERELLO.
• CHAPTER VI. WORK IN GENOA: PALAZZO PESCHIERE.
• CHAPTER VII. ITALIAN TRAVEL.
• CHAPTER VIII. LAST MONTHS IN ITALY.
• CHAPTER IX. AGAIN IN ENGLAND. 1845-1846.
• CHAPTER X. A HOME IN SWITZERLAND.
• CHAPTER XI. SWISS PEOPLE AND SCENERY.
• CHAPTER XII. SKETCHES CHIEFLY PERSONAL.
• CHAPTER XIII. LITERARY LABOUR AT LAUSANNE.
• CHAPTER XIV. REVOLUTION AT GENEVA, CHRISTMAS BOOK, AND LAST DAYS IN SWITZERLAND.
• CHAPTER XV. THREE MONTHS IN PARIS.
• CHAPTER XVI. DOMBEY AND SON.
• CHAPTER XVII. SPLENDID STROLLING.
• CHAPTER XVIII. SEASIDE HOLIDAYS.
• CHAPTER XIX. HAUNTED MAN AND HOUSEHOLD WORDS.
• CHAPTER XX. LAST YEARS IN DEVONSHIRE TERRACE.
• VOLUME III.
• CHAPTER I. DAVID COPPERFIELD AND BLEAK HOUSE.
• CHAPTER II. HOME INCIDENTS AND HARD TIMES.
• CHAPTER III. SWITZERLAND AND ITALY REVISITED.
• CHAPTER IV. THREE SUMMERS AT BOULOGNE.
• CHAPTER V. RESIDENCE IN PARIS.
• CHAPTER VI. LITTLE DORRIT, AND A LAZY TOUR.
• CHAPTER VII. WHAT HAPPENED AT THIS TIME.
• CHAPTER VIII. GADSHILL PLACE.
• CHAPTER IX. FIRST PAID READINGS.
• CHAPTER X. ALL THE YEAR ROUND AND THE UNCOMMERCIAL TRAVELLER.
• CHAPTER XI. SECOND SERIES OF READINGS.
• CHAPTER XII. HINTS FOR BOOKS WRITTEN AND UNWRITTEN.
• CHAPTER XIII. THIRD SERIES OF READINGS.
• CHAPTER XIV. DICKENS AS A NOVELIST.
• CHAPTER XV. AMERICA REVISITED: NOVEMBER AND DECEMBER 1867.
• CHAPTER XVI. AMERICA REVISITED: JANUARY TO APRIL 1868.
• CHAPTER XVII. LAST READINGS.
• CHAPTER XVIII. LAST BOOK.
• CHAPTER XIX. PERSONAL CHARACTERISTICS.
• CHAPTER XX. THE END.
• APPENDIX.
• The Delphi Classics Catalogue