A blacking factory at twelve forged Dickens’s social eye
Charles Dickens (1812–1870), Portsmouth-born second of eight, left school at twelve for a boot-blacking warehouse when father John entered debtors’ prison. The 1836 Pickwick Papers serial—especially Sam Weller—made him famous; A Christmas Carol (1843) never left the culture.
Dickens spent his formative years, until about 11, in Chatham, Kent, a time he recalled as largely happy even though he thought of himself as a small, not especially cared-for boy. He devoured Smollett and Fielding, Robinson Crusoe and Gil Blas, reread The Arabian Nights, and at seven saw Joseph Grimaldi, the father of modern clowning, perform in Rochester.
In 1822 his father was recalled to Somerset House, and mounting debts soon put John Dickens in the Marshalsea debtors' prison in Southwark. Charles, pulled out of school, worked ten-hour days at Warren's Blacking Warehouse at Hungerford Stairs, a rotting riverside building overrun with rats; after it moved to Chandos Street in Covent Garden, passers-by stopped to watch the boys through the window. On Sundays he and his sister Frances, a Royal Academy of Music student, visited the prison he would later use in Little Dorrit.
A £450 legacy from his grandmother freed his father, but his mother did not press for Charles to leave the warehouse, a slight he said he could never forget. The indignation of those months runs through his fiction, most openly in David Copperfield, his favourite and most autobiographical novel, whose brutal Mr Creakle drew on Wellington House Academy, which he attended until March 1827.
He then clerked at a Gray's Inn law office from 1827 to 1828, mimicking clients and lawyers, and claimed to have gone to the theatre daily for at least three years. His first love, Maria Beadnell, is thought to lie behind Dora, until her parents sent her to school in Paris. By 20 he knew he wanted fame and won an acting audition at Covent Garden before the manager George Bartley and the actor Charles Kemble.
Source: Charles Dickens
