CHARLES DICKENS IS just about the most famous literary figure in London’s history, apart from Shakespeare. Yet when the Cleveland Street Workhouse was under imminent threat of demolition in 2010–11, the house in the same street, in which Dickens had lived, carried no plaque or sign whatever to announce this important fact of its history. Had there been a marker on his old home, the relationship of the two places would have been obvious to anyone who knew that the old Outpatients’ Department of the Middlesex Hospital nearby was originally a workhouse. None of the local campaign group, including myself, knew of the association at the outset, and nor did English Heritage, the government body which recommends the ‘listing’ of buildings to protect them from demolition.
The fact that Dickens had lived in this part of London, east Marylebone, had been known to scholars of his life and work as an obscure snippet of biographical data. In 1951, Leslie Staples, then Editor of The Dickensian—the journal of the Dickens Fellowship and an excellent source of detailed information about Dickens’s biography and writings—published a brief article about the house in which the Dickens family had lived, along with a photograph of the place.1 Biographers do mention the address, but they have invariably paid greater attention to Dickens’s long-demolished home in Bayham Street, Camden Town. Neither The Dickensian’s Editor nor any other of Dickens’s biographers—so far as I have been able to discover—has ever noticed that Dickens’s family home stood within doors of the Cleveland Street Workhouse.
Dickens’s novel Oliver Twist memorably opens in the lying-in (maternity) ward of a workhouse. Workhouses were publicly run institutions funded by local taxation (‘poor-rates’), which provided minimal accommodation and sustenance for the desperate poor. The baby Oliver is born on the novel’s first page, an illegitimate parish orphan. Oliver Twist is well known as Dickens’s major attack on the New Poor Law of 1834, and its worse than miserly treatment of the poor. Once it was discovered, the likely importance of the proximity of Dickens’s early home and this particular workhouse was therefore grasped immediately by Dickens readers and the international press. The existence of a workhouse doors from Dickens’s home suggested that Oliver Twist might not be wholly fictional, that like some of Dickens’s other works, it might have roots in a real place. Many people knew that in Dickens’s childhood his father had been imprisoned for debt, but a workhouse standing right by his home: that was news!
Quite why the house had no plaque to commemorate its most famous resident is a mysterious puzzle which appears to have no answer. It seems to originate in very old silences, which shroud Dickens’s association with the entire neighbourhood in which the house stands.
Charles Dickens’s first London home is mentioned only once, and only very briefly, in the great biography written by his best friend John Forster, soon after Dickens’s death in 1870.2 Forster’s biography, which provides the basis for all subsequent books on Dickens’s life, mentions the address within a discussion of a document known to history as the ‘autobiographical fragment’. This was an unfinished manuscript Dickens himself wrote about his early life, apparently only ever seen by Forster. Parts of it were eventually incorporated into Forster’s biography of Dickens. Concerning Dickens’s first childhood home in London, Forster reports as if from the ‘autobiographical fragment’:
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.3
The story of the writing of the ‘autobiographical fragment’ is important. Forster described it as having been provoked by a personal question concerning the ‘blacking factory’ period of Dickens’s childhood. This was a deeply traumatic period for Dickens’s family, when in 1824 his father John Dickens fell into debt, and was imprisoned in the Marshalsea Debtors’ Prison, near London Bridge, where Dickens’s mother Elizabeth and the smaller children joined him. At that time, debtors who could not pay off their creditors often found themselves arrested and imprisoned.
The young Charles Dickens had already been taken away from school. While his family was in the Marshalsea, he lived in lodgings, and was sent to work in a factory situated near the Strand, manufacturing and packaging shoe-polish, or ‘blacking’. Forster explained:
The incidents to be told now would probably never have been known to me, or indeed any of the occurrences of his childhood and youth, but for the accident of a question which I put to him one day in the March or April of 1847.
I asked if he remembered ever having seen in his boyhood our friend the elder Mr. Dilke, his father’s acquaintance and contemporary, who had been a clerk in the same office in Somerset House to which Mr. John Dickens belonged. Yes, he said, he recollected seeing him at a house in Gerrard Street, where his uncle Barrow lodged during an illness, and Mr. Dilke had visited him. Never at any other time. Upon which I told him that some one else had been intended in the mention made to me, for that the reference implied not merely his being met accidentally, but his having had some juvenile employment in a warehouse near the Strand; at which place Mr. Dilke, being with the elder Dickens one day, had noticed him, and received, in return for the gift of a half-crown, a very low bow. He was silent for several minutes; I felt that I had unintentionally touched a painful place in his memory; and to Mr. Dilke I never spoke of the subject again. It was not, however, then, but some weeks later, that Dickens made further allusion to my thus having struck unconsciously upon a time of which he never could lose the remembrance while he remembered anything, and the recollection of which, at intervals, haunted him and made him miserable, even to that hour.
Very shortly afterwards I learnt in all their detail the incidents that had been so painful to him, and what then was said to me or written respecting them revealed the story of his boyhood. The idea of David Copperfield, which was to take all the world into his confidence, had not at this time occurred to him; but what it had so startled me to know, his readers were afterwards told with only such change or addition as for the time might sufficiently disguise himself under cover of his hero. For the poor little lad, with good ability and a most sensitive nature, turned at the age of ten into a ‘labouring hind’ in the service of ‘Murdstone and Grinby,’ and conscious already of what made it seem very strange to him that he could so easily have been thrown away at such an age, was indeed himself. His was the secret agony of soul at finding himself ‘companion to Mick Walker and Mealy Potatoes,’ and his the tears that mingled with the water in which he and they rinsed and washed out bottles.
It had all been written, as fact, before he thought of any other use for it; and it was not until several months later, when the fancy of David Copperfield, itself suggested by what he had so written of his early troubles, began to take shape in his mind, that he abandoned his first intention of writing his own life. Those warehouse experiences fell then so aptly into the subject he had chosen, that he could not resist the temptation of immediately using them; and the manuscript recording them, which was but the first portion of what he had designed to write, was embodied in the substance of the eleventh and earlier chapters of his novel. What already had been sent to me, however, and proof-sheets of the novel interlined at the time, enable me now to separate the fact from the fiction, and to supply to the story of the author’s childhood those passages, omitted from the book, which, apart from their illustration of the growth of his character, present to us a picture of tragical suffering, and of tender as well as humorous fancy, unsurpassed in even the wonders of his published writings.4
David Copperfield was published in instalments during 1849–50, a couple of years after the ‘fragment’ had been drafted. Contemporary readers may indeed have wondered about the derivation of parts of the story, but no one beyond Dickens’s own close family circle, apart from Forster, knew that the hero’s experiences were so very closely modelled on Dickens’s own life. The factory experiences of the book’s hero are based on those of Dickens himself as a boy, and the Micawbers’ imprisonment for debt in the King’s Bench prison approximates to that of his own parents in the Marshalsea.
Materials from the manuscript ‘autobiographical fragment’ were never made public during Dickens’s lifetime.5 Knowledge of the dark time when young Dickens was a factory boy and his father a prisoner Charles Dickens said he kept even from his wife.
These parts of his life are thought by many scholars to have scarred Dickens’s soul, caused him deep sorrow and shame, and created a well of resentment against his parents’ fecklessness, which seems to have been lifelong. Dickens mellowed towards both his parents as he grew older, recognizing and even saluting their valiant merits as he matured. But as he developed as a famous writer he was careful to keep these dark days from public view, and they remained publicly unknown until after his death.
Since his death, however, Dickens’s personal mortification about the debtors’ prison and the blacking factory has not prevented his association with the Marshalsea Prison or the whereabouts of the blacking factory from becoming very generally known. Hungerford Stairs, near the present Hungerford Bridge, where the factory was first situated, has since disappeared, swept away when the Victoria Embankment was being built in the 1860s. But plaques currently mark as significant locations in Dickens’s biography the remains of the Marshalsea Debtors’ Prison and the factory’s subsequent site in Chandos Street, Covent Garden. London has more than twenty plaques commemorating Charles Dickens’s associations with various places in the metropolis. There is even a plaque for one of his more obscure characters (Mr Kitterbell, in his Sketch ‘The Bloomsbury Christening’) on a house in Great Russell Street. So it seems quite incomprehensible that no plaque or sign whatever marked the house which had been Dickens’s first home in London, and where he had lived for more than four years before he wrote Oliver Twist.
Until late in 2010, it seems to have been almost forgotten that Dickens had ever lived there. Indeed, an urban legend was circulating to the effect that out of Dickens’s many homes in London, only a single survivor was still standing: the house in Doughty Street, which is now the Dickens Museum. An otherwise excellent online ‘Camden Dickens Walk’ stated this as if it was a fact in November 2010: ‘48 Doughty Street is the only surviving one of Dickens’s main London homes.’6
The urban legend cannot entirely be blamed on those who have given it currency by repetition, because both Dickens and Forster were hardly forthcoming about the time the Dickens family spent in the house by the Workhouse. Historically, Norfolk Street has been submerged to a degree even deeper than the blacking factory. References to debtors’ prisons and shoe-blacking emerge sporadically in Dickens’s writings, but the street in which his first home stood does not, and there is no further mention of it in Forster’s book.7
Who was responsible for the lack of emphasis upon Dickens’s Norfolk Street home in Forster’s biography isn’t clear, but Forster would surely have been more forthcoming if Dickens had written at any length about it, so it is likely that Dickens himself downplayed its significance. Whether this was because it really was insignificant, or because he regarded it as such, or for some other reason; or, because he actually wanted to keep it obscure as a location of importance in his own biography, we shall see. If the latter is the case, Dickens succeeded for nearly 150 years.8 Forster’s treatment of Norfolk Street, which has influenced all biographies of Dickens to date, might be rooted in his own ignorance or neglect; after all, the two men did not become friends until 1836, when Dickens was already married, and living in Furnival’s Inn, on High Holborn, and about to move into 48 Doughty Street. Forster may never have perceived the locality as important, or Norfolk Street as significant, or he may have picked up Dickens’s unwillingness to mention it.
But, since the proximity of the Workhouse has been recognized, the question has emerged: what if this neglect was a studied neglect, or if Dickens deliberately kept Forster ignorant of the street’s importance? These notions would indicate to modern eyes that—just as Dickens’s lifetime embargo on the factory/prison episode revealed—Norfolk Street might actually be a matter of some considerable significance. Either way, a reconsideration of Norfolk Street as a location in Dickens’s life is of value in reassessing a neglected part of his biography, and perhaps uncovering traces of things he might have wanted to conceal.
For many people it is almost impossible to think of the workhouse regime of the Poor Law without thinking also of Dickens’s novel Oliver Twist, and it is probably true to say that modern-day conceptions of the workhouse as an institution have been fundamentally influenced by the novel. That such a strong influence should have persisted is hardly strange, because Oliver Twist has always been one of the best known and most widely read of all Dickens’s novels ever since it was first written, and in our time the story has been given wide added currency in other media: children’s books, film and TV versions on video and the internet, not to mention the famous Lionel Bart musical Oliver!
Oliver Twist; or, The Parish Boy’s Progress was originally published in monthly parts. It appeared in a new magazine called Bentley’s Miscellany, which Charles Dickens edited under his pen name, ‘Boz’. Oliver Twist offered a marked contrast to the existing work for which ‘Boz’ was known: his many short and clever Sketches, and Pickwick Papers, which by then had become a publishing sensation. Pickwick had begun publication by Chapman and Hall in March 1836, appearing monthly in its own wrappers. Sales took off during midsummer 1836, when Dickens introduced the wonderful Cockney character of Sam Weller. Pickwick was a phenomenon, there was a Pickwick fever, and a snowstorm of plagiarisms and unauthorized merchandising, cashing in on the story’s huge popularity.9 Oliver Twist began in February 1837, when Pickwick was at its height, and the two stories ran in parallel for the next nine months, until Pickwick concluded in October 1837.10 Oliver Twist continued publication until March 1839, by which time Dickens was already more than halfway through his next novel, Nicholas Nickleby.
While Pickwick was a loose cluster of adventures interspersed with stories, light-hearted and picaresque, from the outset Oliver Twist was altogether a more serious and tightly plotted novel. It opens with a birth and a death, the mother unmarried and the child illegitimate, or, as Dickens describes him, a burden on the rates. Dickens’s style in the opening chapters of Oliver Twist is satirical and knowing, he exposes the small-minded meanness and cruelty of the workhouse regime, the ways in which the innocent were treated, and pillories the entire inhumane system. There is a satirical edge to his voice in the book, which is quite unlike Pickwick, and which probably disconcerted some readers, who were expecting more light-hearted fun from Boz’s pen. The prose is witty, but it is also highly political and extremely topical.
The older system of support for the poor went back to Elizabethan times, and was organized at a parish level. Recognizing that wages were low, especially for working people with families, parishes provided family support subsidies and poor-house accommodation for the sustenance of those who could not provide for themselves: orphans, deserted women, sick, disabled, insane, and injured people, the infirm, and the elderly. In times of recession parishes often provided help for the unemployed to earn their bread through publicly funded work projects, like road-mending. It wasn’t an ideal system, but it was rooted in Christian charity, and recognized the humanity of the poor: valuing family ties and endeavouring to keep families together. The new system enshrined in the New Poor Law of 1834 instead repudiated traditional responsibilities towards the poor, refusing all help unless it be inside the workhouse, where families were separated, and harsh conditions were deliberately cultivated so the poor would not seek to enter. Inmates had to wear uniforms and were forced to work for the meagre diet provided. Harsh punishments for ‘refractory’ behaviour were instituted, including the withdrawal of food. The system was under the centralized control of the Poor Law Commission. The new workhouses were effectively a sort of prison system to punish poverty.
Like many other people at the time, Dickens thought the New Poor Law cruel and deeply unchristian. His subtitle for Oliver Twist—The Parish Boy’s Progress—was taken from John Bunyan’s allegory, The Pilgrim’s Progress. But Oliver’s progress was to London, not to a Celestial City: ‘a dirtier or more wretched place he had never seen’. In place of angels to greet him, he fell into the clutches of Fagin.
Dickens was not writing documentary history. Both the magazine format and the treatment of the workhouse in Oliver Twist clearly presented the story as fictional, and Dickens located the story in a geographically indeterminate town and set the story a little back in time. However, once the Workhouse in Cleveland Street is recognized to have been a possible source of inspiration for Oliver Twist, it becomes evident—as we shall see—that Dickens probably did have a particular workhouse in mind. But, like the English artist William Hogarth, who famously elevated Drury Lane into allegory as ‘Gin Lane’, Dickens transformed a place he knew into a symbolic workhouse, recognizable by everyone, something that stood for the cruelties of the system as a whole.
The discovery that Dickens had lived close to the Cleveland Street Workhouse came about during the height of the campaign to save the Workhouse and while it was under imminent threat of demolition. It happened because I had approached the subject from the direction of the Workhouse, rather than from Dickens’s biography. Much later in his life, when he was a great and famous Victorian novelist, Dickens had publicly supported an organization founded by Joseph Rogers, the reforming doctor about whom I’d written, who for years had worked as the Poor Law Medical Officer inside that Workhouse.11 In seeking new evidence to support the building’s preservation, I wondered how far back Dickens’s knowledge of the Cleveland Street Workhouse actually went. I began to wonder about the precise location of the blacking factory, and whether it might have been within the parish of St Paul Covent Garden, the parish which had originally built the Workhouse in the eighteenth century, and which was still responsible for running it when Dickens was a factory boy. If the blacking factory had stood inside the Covent Garden parish boundary, I thought it could be possible—even likely—that Dickens had worked alongside parish apprentices sent out from Cleveland Street, and so could well have heard far more about the place than had previously been supposed.
I had an image in my mind’s eye of a plaque marking the site of the blacking factory, somewhere near the Strand. I remembered having been puzzled when I’d first seen it, because of a vague memory that the factory had been right by the River. So I went in search of the plaque. I eventually found it quite high up on a fine late-Victorian building which stands on the south-western corner of the junction of Bedford Street (which runs down to the Strand from Covent Garden Market) and what is now Chandos Place (Chandos Street in Dickens’s day). When I found it, it was evident to me that it was an unofficial plaque, placed there by someone who loved Dickens, and who wanted to mark one of the most momentous periods of his life: it had not been erected by English Heritage or any of the older ‘official’ sponsors of the blue plaques of London, such as the London County Council or the Society of Arts. ‘Official’ plaques in London are nowadays placed only on original buildings, which explains why English Heritage had not erected it: the site might be right, but the building isn’t the one Dickens knew. Looking at the plaque critically, as a historian, I knew that I would have to double-check its truth before I could be certain that it was reliably in the correct position; and that meant more research.
This is how one thing leads to another in historical research. Ransacking biographies and bibliographies, the Surveys of London, chronologies, volumes of Dickens’s letters, I scoured the internet, and pored over maps and microfilms. In the process, it emerged that the factory had changed site during the period of Dickens’s employment. It had originally occupied an old building at the bottom of old Hungerford Stairs, right beside the River Thames. Then the manufacturing part of the business was moved uphill to No. 3 Chandos Street, Covent Garden, which the ‘unofficial’ plaque exactly and correctly marks. Forster quotes a carefully described passage from Dickens himself from the ‘autobiographical fragment’, which provides the topography pretty near perfectly:
the blacking-warehouse was removed to Chandos Street, Covent Garden … Next to the shop at the corner of Bedford Street in Chandos Street are two rather old-fashioned houses and shops adjoining one another. They were one then, or thrown into one, for the blacking-business; and had been a butter-shop. Opposite to them was, and is, a public-house, where I got my ale, under these new circumstances. The stones in the street may be smoothed by my small feet going across to it at dinner-time, and back again.12
Crossing the same road to take a photograph of the plaque, I realized that—almost two centuries later—there was still a public house opposite.13
A careful examination of old maps and other sources concerning the parishes around the Strand revealed that when Dickens was working there, the blacking factory on Chandos Street was situated just north-east of a nest of ‘rat-deserted’ narrow alleys known as ‘Porridge Island’ at the back of St Martin’s Church, and it was just inside the boundary of the parish of St Paul Covent Garden.14 The parish boundary passes in a jagged line just behind the backs of all the houses in that row. So it was quite possible that if parish apprentices had been employed in the factory, Dickens could have heard inside stories from the Cleveland Street Workhouse. Each of the Strand parishes had their own workhouse when Dickens was a factory boy, but you couldn’t just walk in and take a look—they were more like prisons than anything else, and they had their own fearful shadow. The young Dickens would have been aware of these places: but had he been threatened with the workhouse when he was in Chandos Street (and that was a common threat for working-class children even in the 1950s, as I well recollect) it would not have been a local one that would have been meant, but the Covent Garden Workhouse in Cleveland Street.
FIGURE 2. Chandos Street from Bedford Street, Covent Garden. This is where, as a child, Dickens worked in the blacking factory window. The factory is out of view on the left-hand side, a couple of shops further along from the corner nearest the viewer, having moved here from Hungerford Stairs. The corner shop may not be the one Dickens knew, but several of the old buildings opposite would have been familiar to him in the mid-1820s, as part of the prospect from his workbench. Beyond here, on the left, was a maze of small streets known as ‘Porridge Island’. This street is now called Chandos Place. Watercolour by T. C. Dibdin, c.1851.
FIGURE 3. Church Lane, a back alley leading west from the direction of Chandos Street towards St Martin’s-in-the-Fields, through the poor district of Porridge Island. Dickens would have explored little alleys like this when he was a factory boy in the Strand area, and he might have enjoyed discovering bookshops like the one shown here. Such alleys were of course places where pick-pockets could make an easy getaway. A few very narrow alleys survive to the east of St Martin’s Lane even today, but the Strand improvements swept away Church Lane and most of the warren of Porridge Island. Watercolour by George Scharf, 1828.
With this well-gleaned knowledge of the Covent Garden parish boundary verified, I felt a lot happier about saying that Dickens could well have known more about the threatened workhouse than had previously been thought. But, by that stage something else had caught my eye.
While researching the correct location of the blacking factory, I had wondered where Dickens had been living while he was working there. It turned out that he’d not lodged locally, but first in Camden Town, and then south of London Bridge with a family in Southwark, closer to the Marshalsea Prison. Seeking out his home addresses at that time in his life alerted me to a curious fact: the Dickens family had been extraordinarily itinerant. My notes included at least seventeen different addresses for Dickens before he established an independent home of his own at the age of 22, and there were probably more: I wasn’t certain I’d noted down every known one of them, or indeed, that all of them are actually known. Even seventeen made the average stay in any one place only about 15 months. Many of the dates of arrival and removal are still vague or unknown.
The family had moved usually to follow John Dickens’s employment but, on occasion, to evade importunate creditors. This itinerancy was an interesting phenomenon in itself, but one of the addresses called double attention to itself, because the family had lived there twice: sometime before and sometime after the Marshalsea Prison episode. The address was: 10 Norfolk Street, Middlesex Hospital.
The Middlesex Hospital part of the address made me sit up, because I knew the Workhouse was close to that hospital. But Norfolk Street was not a street name with which I was familiar. I’ve lived in London all my life, and have been immersed in London’s history for much of that time, so my ignorance of it made me curious. That part of London, Marylebone, has always been an expensive district, so it seemed an unlikely place for this impecunious family to settle. Even more intriguingly, not long before their second stay in Norfolk Street, the family had been evicted from a house in Somers Town, north of King’s Cross, which was a poorer and more peripheral part of London. I couldn’t figure out how the family could have made the transition to Marylebone.
The current London A to Z lists no Norfolk Street in that district now, which explained why I didn’t know it. Might it have been bombed or redeveloped, or erased for some ugly housing estate or a busy road? The archives beckoned again, now, urgently. I knew that Cleveland Street itself bordered onto Marylebone, and that since the address included the words ‘Middlesex Hospital’, there was a good chance that Dickens might have known the area around the Workhouse from having to pass through on his way somewhere. It seemed to me that since the family had lived there twice, there had to be something about the street which brought them back. The two periods of Dickens’s life during which he was there—as a child and as a near-adult—seemed to me to be likely to have been significant for reasons of his personal development. At that stage, these were hunches, no more.
Nothing in my wildest dreams prepared me for what came next. Poring over an old map with a magnifying glass in the Westminster Archives, after several false starts, I at last found the words ‘Norfolk Street’, and nearly fell off my chair. The words were actually placed along the southernmost arm of Cleveland Street itself, the very same street as the Workhouse! Norfolk Street had not been bombed or redeveloped, but simply renamed. It formed one boundary of the block occupied by the Middlesex Hospital. What remains of it now lies alongside the eastern flank of the vast field of broken bricks which marks where that great hospital stood for 250 years. Norfolk Street was the same street as Cleveland Street. So, Dickens had inhabited the same street as the Workhouse … and twice!
Knowing that I might have found something really important for the Workhouse, at this stage I deliberately restrained my excitement, because it was imperative that everything should be verified. A rigorous double-checking process had to be done, to prove to myself that all the details I had were genuine and really correct, and also to find out if anyone had done all this before. The work had to be reliable: no wishful thinking!
So off I went to the British Library, checked all the sources I could lay my hands on, examined more maps, checked the internet, requested all the biographies I could find, and avidly read them through to see if anyone had done this work before. It turned out that most of Dickens’s biographers had paid scant attention to his life in Norfolk Street. If they mentioned it at all it was usually just as Forster had done: describing the street as Dickens’s first London home for a brief period in his infancy. The place was apparently unimportant to his biography. Most of Dickens’s biographers glide over the early period in a sentence, many of them passing straight from Portsmouth to Chatham, missing out his initial two years in London entirely; they generally ignore the second period in Norfolk Street by focusing elsewhere—looking at his working life, not his domestic setting at all. In this way the period of four or more years Dickens spent in Norfolk Street has become, until now, a peculiar biographical void.
The best work I found for my purposes was Michael Allen’s beautiful little book Charles Dickens’ Childhood, which has a good short chapter on his first stay in Norfolk Street, but sadly stops before the second. But not a single writer could I find who mentioned the proximity of the Workhouse.15
At this stage the work felt ready to share, and I decided to take it first to Heidi, the remarkable local woman who had recruited me to the campaign. I took all my evidence down to her home in Fitzrovia. With the maps and the other documents laid out on her kitchen table, I talked her through the whole process behind the discovery, explaining exactly what I’d found. Her excitement rose as my narrative unfolded. We both knew in our bones that this evidence might save the Workhouse.
The exact whereabouts of the house in which the Dickens family had actually lived seemed from existing sources to be No. 22 Cleveland Street, at the corner with Tottenham Street, but once again, it was crucial to be certain. We couldn’t go public with information of such importance without having verified it properly for ourselves.
It was clear from the first old map I had examined that Norfolk Street was not lengthy as London streets go, only a block in extent, whereas Cleveland Street was (and still is) a very long street of many blocks and intersections. The western side of what was Norfolk Street—the Middlesex Hospital side—has now completely disappeared, and only a handful of the original houses are left standing on the other side of the way, one of them being No. 22. But there was no plaque to mark it, and we wondered why not. Dickens is so famous that it seemed inexplicable: surely the house would have had a plaque if it really was his old home? Perhaps the attribution of the street number in our sources was wrong, or perhaps there was some other kind of uncertainty.
My colleague and I arranged to meet up again at the Westminster Archives to try to verify exactly where No. 10 Norfolk Street had stood. I can still see her beautiful finger with its long red fingernail pointing to the house number on the old map that the archivist dug out for us, when we asked if there was such a thing as a map of the right historical period which showed house numbers. We had checked the rate-books already and knew that the landlord’s name was correct. It turned out that No. 10 really did occupy the corner of Tottenham Street, so the stories were correct: that it is indeed now No. 22 Cleveland Street. Remarkably, the old house is still standing. The landlord in Dickens’s time was a man called John Dodd, a cheesemonger and grocer, who kept the corner shop. When we counted, we found that the Workhouse was only nine Georgian doors away.
There was clearly a lot more research to be done concerning the history of the Workhouse and Dickens’s residence in Norfolk Street, but these discoveries were enough, we felt, to transform our position from beleaguered small fry to confident and fearless campaigners. We knew that we now had something of inestimable value with which to defend the Workhouse.
Dickens never actually finished the autobiography he had begun, and the manuscript ‘autobiographical fragment’ remained forever incomplete. This is in many ways a pity, but as Forster knew, its contents re-emerged in a different form. Like other writers before and since, Dickens drew on his own autobiography in his work, and while transmuting his own life experience into fiction, he concealed it in obvious places. As Forster put it: ‘the idea of David Copperfield… was to take all the world into his confidence’. Taking ‘all the world into his confidence’ was not a process of truth-telling in a factual sense, but fiction-spinning. The world grew to know that this extraordinary man had a very wide swathe of observation: that, as his Editor at the Morning Chronicle newspaper once observed, Boz ‘has spent his time in studying life’.16
FIGURE 4. Potter’s Map of Marylebone, 1832, showing Norfolk Street with all its house numbers. The long boundary—between St Pancras (shown blank on the right) and St Marylebone—runs the length of Cleveland Street, and passes directly behind the rear wall of No. 10 Norfolk Street, on the south-eastern corner of Tottenham and Norfolk Streets (A). The Workhouse itself is not shown, since it stood over the border in St Pancras, but its site is marked with a dark line just opposite Foley Street (B). Peter Potter, Cartographer, 1832.
There must, of course, always be extreme caution about stating as fact that this or that event related by Dickens corresponds with this or that event in his life. But it is known that many episodes in his writings do so correspond. Forster knew this in Dickens’s lifetime, and revealed some of what he knew after his death. He says in the extract quoted above that parts of the autobiographical fragment more or less became passages of David Copperfield, and that Dickens had disguised himself under cover of his hero.
In the years since Dickens’s death, the reading world has continued ‘in his confidence’, as far as David Copperfield is concerned. Yet the silence about Norfolk Street in the autobiographical fragment as reported by Forster meant that at the time we were endeavouring to preserve the Workhouse, no one had thought to mark the house in which Dickens first experienced London, and in which he had spent several important years of his life. The world was ‘in his confidence’, yet Norfolk Street was an inconsequential location in his biography.
Dickens was never incarcerated inside a workhouse himself, and nor was he ever a pickpocket, so he clearly did not make the same direct transcription from life to tale in Oliver Twist as he did later in David Copperfield. But where did his passionate writing in that book come from, why did he choose to write on such a painful and powerful topic at such an early stage in his writing life? From where did he acquire his inside knowledge of the workhouse? Could his time living only doors from the Cleveland Street Workhouse have influenced his writing? I think the answer to that last question must be the same as others would give to questions concerning the influences wrought by his time in Chatham or in Chandos Street: it must be yes.
As a young man, Dickens trained himself to become a shorthand writer. His work was to transcribe present events into code, for later decipherment. This may have been a role he sustained in altered form for the rest of his life. Dickens’s great inclination was for theatre and fiction, and his own code hid within his splendid fictions, characters, and events re-presented to the public as deeply familiar and satisfying transcriptions of the realities he perceived around him.
Fiction is never a straightforward transcription of reality, and great swathes of his work were replayings and confections drawn from his own imaginative life. Yet tucked in amongst his writings there are nuggets of autobiographical transcription, transformed into tales, or elements of tales. Dickens’s transformations of reality take many forms, and numerous critics have expended great and unremitting efforts to decipher and interpret the nature of his genius. Biographers have spent their own lifetimes pulling together hints and images to help understand and elucidate his life and work. Dickens’s tales play knowing games with the reader’s credulity, and we read them and enjoy them knowing that his stories are stories; they tell only so much, and take the reader into the author’s confidence only so far.
In reality, Dickens was a very private and rather secretive person, who came from a private and secretive family. It is said that after their period of incarceration in the Marshalsea Debtors’ Prison the family never spoke of it, that Dickens told no one about either the prison or the blacking factory, and that his own children were surprised to learn of the story after his death.17
At certain points in his life Dickens burned vast quantities of private letters and other personal materials. The interminable rollcall of the letters he destroyed or caused others to destroy, which is recounted in the opening pages of the great Pilgrim Edition of his collected letters, reads like a long wail of scholarly dismay. Until the mid-twentieth century it was not widely known that towards the end of his life Dickens had a long-term relationship with the actress Ellen Ternan, and even today, whether or not they lost a child is a matter of dispute. His private life Dickens wished to remain strictly private.
Yet we also know that Dickens certainly used autobiographical materials in his work, and moreover that he often presented such materials to the public (as in David Copperfield) as if they were in his own voice, inviting or enticing identification. His playful art of whimsical confabulation is part of the reason Dickens has been and is so greatly loved. Readers often become deeply involved in his writings not just because they are compelling and satisfying fictions full of brilliant observation, indignation, remarkable imagery, good-heartedness, and wit, but also because they present rich and many-layered fictions, which can engender processes of recognition and anticipated identification in his readers.
Readers’ reactions often include the desire to know more about the material basis for the stories, especially since so many of them intriguingly have apparently real places at their heart. Numbers of his locations—like Seven Dials, or the City of London Guildhall—appear in his writings as real places, which his contemporaries would personally have known, or would have known genuinely existed, either from having witnessed them or by repute, perhaps from factual writing, such as guidebooks. The stories which include such locations depend upon a stratum of public knowledge and understanding about the real world which his readers shared, and can still share today.18 Places described in Dickens’s books—such as Jacob’s Island, an important location in Oliver Twist—often have a solid topographical basis, which Dickens was careful to research and, occasionally, forthright to defend.19 In other instances, his topography is deliberately vague, or concealed in some way. In Pickwick Papers, Dickens introduces his coverage of Mr Pickwick’s record of the election at that puzzlingly unknown place called Eatanswill with the following important words:
Mr. Pickwick, with that anxious desire to abstain from giving offence to any, and with those delicate feelings for which all who knew him well know he was so eminently remarkable, purposely substituted a fictitious designation, for the real name of the place in which his observations were made.20
Dickens is describing his own practice here. He, too, often disguises by renaming, or by a process of deliberate transposition—lifting a place from its actual location into some new geographical position, so as to preserve its personality, but alter its identity. When he wrote this passage Dickens was still signing his works with his pen name ‘Boz’, and clearly gained writerly pleasure by sharing with his readers the open secret that Mr Pickwick gives real places fictitious names, just so that they know. These in-joke transformations partake of his love of the flying carpet from the Arabian Nights, and sometimes more seriously of the work of William Hogarth. As one commentator has noted: ‘This was part of Boz’s system; he supplied the thing accurately enough and the locality, but shifted or transposed the name—generally by design.’21
A very brief but characteristic instance has the Pickwickians on a fast coach galloping towards Dingley Dell at Christmas time. Rattling through ill-paved streets, they are about to change horses at an inn-yard, when:
Mr. Winkle, who sits at the extreme edge [of the coach’s roof], with one leg dangling in the air, is nearly precipitated into the street, as the coach twists round the sharp corner by the cheesemonger’s shop, and turns into the market-place.22
That sharp corner could have been any shop—a bookshop or a barber’s—but it’s a cheesemonger’s, like Mr Dodd’s, which has the air of a kindly in-joke for the friends of ‘Boz’, because he has just been reminiscing about family Christmases, and has only just noticed a family throwing an extra log on the fire in preparation for their father’s return.23 Examples of this kind arise repeatedly in Dickens’s work, and have been noticed by readers and scholars over the years.24 Indeed, a great deal of writing on Dickens concerns itself with the topography of his novels, such as, for example, the actual route of Little Nell’s final journey in the Old Curiosity Shop, or the real location of Dickens’s original for the graveyard in Bleak House, which are likely to be difficult to trace because they are from the geography of his imagination.
But Dickens also sometimes mentions places he knew as a child quite straightforwardly. He had been living away from Norfolk Street for almost thirty years, when on 1 January 1859 he published an essay in his own magazine Household Words on the theme of New Year’s Day. The exchange of gifts often traditionally took place on that day when he was a child, rather than on Christmas Day, and Dickens described in some detail being taken on a childhood walk by a rather formidable elderly woman in black mourning. The object of the journey was a visit to the ‘Soho Bazaar’, which was a well-known semi-charitable indoor emporium or hypermarket of many stalls, selling a wide variety of handmade goods. It was situated at the north-west corner of London’s Soho Square, near to the junction of Oxford Street and Tottenham Court Road. The essay typifies Dickens’s style in so far as it ranges widely around its theme in a series of entertaining episodes. At its heart is a memorable description of this childhood excursion. These are Dickens’s own words:
When I was a little animal revolting to the sense of sight (for I date from the period when small boys had a dreadful high-shouldered sleeved strait-waistcoat put upon them by their keepers, over which their dreadful little trousers were buttoned tight, so that they roamed about disconsolate, with their hands in their pockets, like dreadful little pairs of tongs that were vainly looking for the rest of the fire-irons); when I was this object of just contempt and horror to all well-constituted minds … when I was this exceedingly uncomfortable and disreputable father of my present self, I remember to have been taken, upon a New Year’s Day, to the Bazaar in Soho Square, London, to have a present bought for me. A distinct impression yet lingers in my soul that a grim and unsympathetic old personage of the female gender, flavoured with musty dry lavender, dressed in black crape, and wearing a pocket in which something clinked at my ear as we went along, conducted me on this occasion to the World of Toys. I remember to have been incidentally escorted a little way down some conveniently retired street diverging from Oxford Street, for the purpose of being shaken; and nothing has ever slaked the burning thirst for vengeance awakened in me by this female’s manner of insisting upon wiping my nose herself (I had a cold and a pocket-handkerchief), on the screw principle. For many years I was unable to excogitate the reason why she should have undertaken to make me a present. In the exercise of a matured judgement, I have now no doubt that she had done something bad in her youth, and that she took me out as an act of expiation.
Nearly lifted off my legs by this adamantine woman’s grasp of my glove (another fearful invention of those dark ages—a muffler, and fastened at the wrist like a handcuff), I was haled through the Bazaar …. I was put before an expanse of toys, apparently about a hundred and twenty acres in extent, and was asked what I would have to the value of half-a-crown? Having first selected every object at half-a-guinea, and then staked all the aspirations of my nature on every object at five shillings, I hit, as a last resource, upon a Harlequin’s Wand—painted particoloured, like Harlequin himself.
Although of a highly hopeful and imaginative temperament, I had no fond belief that the possession of this talisman would enable me to change Mrs. Pipchin at my side into anything agreeable. When I tried the effect of the wand upon her, behind her bonnet, it was rather as a desperate experiment founded on the conviction that she could change into nothing worse, than with any latent hope that she would change into something better. Howbeit, I clung to the delusion that when I got home I should do something magical with this wand; and I did not resign all hope of it until I had, by many trials, proved the wand’s total incapacity. It had no effect on the staring obstinacy of a rockinghorse; it produced no live Clown out of the hot beefsteak-pie at dinner; it could not even influence the minds of my honoured parents to the extent of suggesting the decency and propriety of their giving me an invitation to sit up to supper.
The failure of this wand is my first very memorable association with a New Year’s Day.25
I have given this passage at length here because it is an important piece of reminiscence and storytelling from Dickens’s pen, which relates to a real place in the vicinity of his first childhood home in London. From his description of his own height (the woman nearly lifted him by his muffler, her pocket was near his ear) Dickens was probably quite a small child when this experience occurred, which seems to date it to the family’s time in Norfolk Street, when he was between the ages of almost 3 to almost 5.
The lady in black, Michael Allen has suggested, is likely to have been Dickens’s paternal grandmother, who lived just around the corner from the Soho Bazaar. To visit her at home would have involved being taken for a walk down Norfolk Street, crossing Charles Street (now Mortimer Street) and passing down the entire length of Newman Street in the direction of the tower of St Anne, Soho, still visible today above the houses. Across Oxford Street, a little way east, another Charles Street led south into Soho Square. Grandma Dickens lived a few doors further along Oxford Street towards St Giles’s Church.
Dickens refers to the woman as a Mrs Pipchin, and it seems to be widely understood among Dickens scholars that the character of that name in Dombey and Son was based upon a Mrs Roylance, a widow of the family’s acquaintance, with whom Dickens later lodged miserably for a while when he was in the blacking factory. But the discovery that Dickens’s grandmother was living only a few doors from Soho Square at that time means it is much more likely that she was the person in question. Whoever she was, and however much of her description is subsequent elaboration, her punitive manner of wiping his nose certainly feels real enough.
Oxford Street was a busy shopping street, and the difficulty of navigating it safely with an active and perhaps wayward child may well have been what provoked the shaking in the by-street. The Soho Bazaar had first opened its doors in the spring of 1816, so the date of this expedition is most likely to have been at the turn of the next new year in 1817, when Charles Dickens was nearly 5, perhaps only days before the whole family left London for Sheerness and Chatham.
This is the description by an adult of a childhood memory. One of the most interesting things about it is the level of detail the child apparently noticed and the adult recollected: the smell of the woman’s clothes, the clink in her pocket, the humiliation of being shaken in a by-street, his desire for the more expensive toys, and for vengeance. How much of this is the post hoc elaboration of a man who was by that time the father of a large family himself is difficult to tell, but the atmosphere of this journey, the rapid revision of expectations, and the character of the relationship between old woman and young boy has the feel of authentic memory. The sheer powerlessness of the child in the hands of this curiously munificent but aggressive adult is a strong theme of the essay, along with the impotence of magic to improve matters: despite the child’s concentrated investment in the power of the wish.
Beneath the reminiscence, we are permitted to see that this is fundamentally a lucky child. Although the piece makes evident the fact that Dickens’s parents were not ‘carriage-folk’, he presents the boy as well dressed, he is taken individually to have half-a-crown spent upon him, he visits as a purchaser the emporium of toys exhibited for sale in the Soho Bazaar, he already knows who Harlequin is, and there is both a rocking horse and a beef-steak pie at home. When the essay was written, the child had survived the high infant mortality of London to be able to reminisce over forty years later about these events from the safe retrospect of his own journal. Though clearly a child deprived of much personal agency—and taken off-street to be given a good shake if he exhibited any—the young Charles Dickens as presented here was emphatically not deprived in the sense the young Oliver Twist was.
So where did Dickens’s empathy with the plight of the bereft orphan workhouse boy come from? Might he have witnessed or overheard something at an early age, which made him ponder his own fortunate position, the blighted possibilities of poorer lives, experiences more bitter than his own?
