by TIM PARKS
British author Charles Dickens (1812-1870) with his daughters, Catherine Elizabeth Macready Dickens (standing) and Mary “Mamie” Dickens in 1865 in the garden at Gad’s Hill. PHOTO/Guardian
Great Expectations: The Sons and Daughters of Charles Dickens by Robert Gottlieb
Farrar, Straus, 239 pp, £16.99, December 2012, ISBN 978 0 374 29880 7
In 1850 Dickens invented a little game for his seventh child, three-year-old Sydney, the tiniest boy in a family of short people. Initially, in fun, Dickens had asked Sydney to go to the railway station to meet a friend; innocent and enterprising, to everyone’s amusement the boy set off through the garden gate into the street; then someone had to rush out and bring him back. The joke was repeated, and the five-year-old Alfred was sent with him; but when the boys had got used to being rescued, Dickens changed the rules, closed the gate after them, and hid in the garden with some of the older children. In Great Expectations: The Sons and Daughters of Charles Dickens, Robert Gottlieb quotes the letter in which Dickens explains to his wife what happened: ‘Presently, we heard them come back and say to each other with some alarm: “Why, the gate’s shut, and they are all gone!” Ally began in a dismayed way to cry out, but the Phenomenon [Sydney], shouting “Open the gate!” sent an enormous stone flying into the garden (among our heads) by way of alarming the establishment.’ ‘This,’ Gottlieb remarks of the anecdote with a warmth he sustains throughout his book, ‘was a boy after his father’s heart.’
…
The desire to have this experience authenticate Dickens’s adult concern for the urban poor and explain his later depiction of any number of child waifs (one critic counted 318 orphans in Dickens’s fiction) tends to obscure the real nature of the young Dickens’s suffering as he later and very emotionally recalled it for his friend and biographer, John Forster. He was not beaten, starved or ill-treated in any way. The factory was run by an acquired cousin, the son of a widower who had married Dickens’s aunt. He worked there for a year or less before returning to school and normal middle-class life. What upset the boy was that he was the only member of the family to be sent off to earn his keep in demeaning circumstances. His elder sister Fanny continued to study at the Royal Academy of Music where the fees were 38 guineas a year (he was earning six shillings a week at the factory). Apparently she had a bright future and he did not. His younger siblings lived with their mother and father in the Marshalsea prison. For Dickens, alone in cheap lodgings, ‘utterly neglected’, the experience was one of unnecessary, even vindictive exclusion from the family circle– the gate inexplicably shut, the father hiding – and what he begged for initially was not to be spared the factory, but to be lodged nearer the prison so he could have meals with his parents. There was also the shame, as this ambitious middle-class child saw it, of being obliged to consort with ‘common men and boys’ and worst of all of being seen among them by friends of the family who came to the factory shop. Dickens was meant for better things and better company.
London Review of Books for more