WE’VE LOOKED AT the maps for a bird’s eye view of the district, glanced at the big institutions in the neighbourhood, the local environment, and the house from outside and in, so in this chapter we’re looking down at the street from inside the house, as Dickens would have done, as a child, from an upstairs window. What might a curious little boy have observed, gazing down on the street life of this part of the metropolis from the warmth and safety of his home?
The main difficulty is that we don’t know for certain on which floor or floors the Dickenses lived at 10 Norfolk Street, but the most likely possibility is that Mr Dodd, as the owner and householder, would have kept the main floor above the shop for himself, and rented out the upper storeys.1
Upper floors in London—being less easy of access and with lower ceiling heights—have always been cheaper to rent than the grander first-floor rooms, and that would also have suited Dickens’s parents. In being posted to work at Somerset House, John Dickens’s income—curiously—had suddenly dropped: special port allowances due to him for his work in Portsea now ceased, and it appears there was no recognition in the Navy Office pay structure of the higher costs of living in central London.2 The Dickenses, faced with supporting a growing family on a reduced income, were probably glad to take Mr Dodd’s lodgings, especially since the locality was familiar and close to the homes of the extended family on both sides.
We do not know if the Dickens family had one floor or two, or if there were other lodgers in the house at the time. Close-living, or what we might regard as overcrowding, limited in scale but comfortable (as Dickens described it) was an accepted part of ordinary life for most Londoners.3 The Dickens family household now comprised his parents John and Elizabeth Dickens, the children Fanny and Charles, and soon the new baby Letitia, who was born at Norfolk Street in April 1816. Mary Allen, Elizabeth’s widowed sister, seems to have lived with the family until she remarried in 1821, and there was probably also a maid-of-all-work, whose name has not come down to us.4
Each of the floors of Mr Dodd’s house had three rooms: in the Schedule/inventory mentioned in Chapter 4, these rooms were termed ‘Sitting room’, ‘Bed room’, and ‘Breakfast room’. It is possible that there were four rooms in the attic storey at the very top of the house; the Schedule/ inventory was sadly cut off after its first mention of the ‘Atticks’, but, commonly, although there is less height, there is more floor space at the top level of the house, because there is no need for a long landing to get to a higher level. If the family had only one level, the best room (the large front room) is likely to have been chosen as the family parlour, perhaps with a sofa-bedstead, and another the parental bedroom. The two older children may have shared a room with Aunt Mary and/or the family servant.5
If this, or something like it, was the arrangement, little Charles is likely to have slept on the very top floor of the house or the one below it, and perhaps played up there too. Kneeling or standing on a chair, he would have been able to look out from high windows over the housetops, into the rooms opposite, and down onto the streets which formed his corner.6
Thinking about what Norfolk Street might have been like in the years leading up to 1820, we have to imagine all its original houses back in place, including those across the road, which would have filled his view. No. 10 Norfolk Street has a wide frontage, with three well-spaced windows, so, obliquely right and left his vista could have taken in most of the opposite side of the street, perhaps down almost to Charles Street looking left, and as far up the street the other way as the shining shop sign of the three golden balls at the top end of Norfolk Street, and the City of Hereford public house facing it from the next corner up, at the start of Cleveland Street.
Dickens himself was a coastal boy before he became a metropolitan one, and he always loved and appreciated the countryside, especially within reach of tidal waters. He later wrote a conversation in which Sam Weller commented that a rural view ‘beats chimbley pots’.7 It is possible that Dickens was aware of the aridity of Norfolk Street as a child. Although the little house the family had just left in Portsea was also urban, it did have sea spray in the air. The air of London was laden with smoke and dust, and the houses in Norfolk Street were taller than those he had left behind, so the canyon between them was correspondingly deeper.8
Nevertheless, this unassuming London side street had its compensations. From the windows on the very top floor, Dickens might have been able to see over the smoking ‘chimbley pots’ and roofs to the tree-tops of the Middlesex Hospital’s back garden and the high triple roofscape of the Hospital itself, rearing above the neighbouring houses, watch the London pigeons, and seasonal arrivals like starlings and swifts. In that direction, too, the sun set. Lowering his gaze, or observing from a lower floor, he would have taken in the windows of the houses opposite, their street-level entries, and the pavement and roadway below, looking down to get a bird’s-eye view of the tops of carts, waggons, cabs, and people.9 Like Mr Pickwick, from his lodgings he could contemplate ‘human nature in all the numerous phases it exhibits’.10
Norfolk Street itself was a short street of two rows of brick-built houses facing each other over a slender roadway. Several of the houses opposite had shops at ground level, but it is not known for certain whether any of them had Georgian bow windows, like the small run of shops that survives. That would certainly have made for a pretty street, but there are reasons for suspecting that it was not quite so. First, there is John Tallis, whose view up Norfolk Street we looked at earlier, who portrays a plain-looking street of modest flat-fronted Georgian houses, and what looks like a cobbled roadway, which would have been noisy.
The period in which these houses were built—the 1780s and 1790s—was one of plainness and simplicity in urban architecture: a Georgian variety of functional minimalism was in vogue. Most of these houses are likely to have been quite plain, and—except for their door-cases—unadorned: rather like the Workhouse, or the houses which still survive on the modest street now called Goodge Place, at the back of Dickens’s home. This austerity was part of the architectural handwriting of the age. One of the houses opposite his, at No. 21 Norfolk Street, might have been slightly more interesting to look at than the rest, or more ornate inside, because it was the Horsfall household, probably built for the local builder/developer of that name. The houses London builders erected for themselves tended to be rather finer than those they built speculatively for unknown clients.
FIGURE 23. Close-up of Tallis’s view of Norfolk Street. The road surface looks cobbled, just as the street to its east (now Goodge Place) remains today. Compare with the recent photograph (Figure 10).
It’s not easy to know whether John Tallis’s views of subsidiary streets were intended to be taken as documentary truth. Perhaps understandably, his draughtsmanly interest tails off on small streets like this one. In looking up Norfolk Street, Tallis seems not to have noticed the bow-fronted shops of Mr Dodd and his neighbours, which were certainly there when the image was made, but he does show the Georgian shop frontages at each corner on Charles Street, with their multiple panes of glass and their angled entrances similar to the one which survives at 10 Norfolk Street today.
Tallis also indicates that the shop on the right corner with Charles Street was double the size of the one opposite, and he shows more uniformity on the nearer buildings on the right of Norfolk Street than on the left. Both characteristics accord well with a contemporary numbered street plan, so Tallis’s view cannot simply be dismissed as schematic or imaginary. There is no vestige of most of these houses surviving now: the run of houses on the hospital side mostly disappeared in the early twentieth century to allow the hospital’s expansion, and except for the four which survive today, the rest of those on Mr Dodd’s side of the way were replaced by a single apartment building in the Edwardian era, so we have no guide to the original site boundaries on the ground now. Local rate-books show that in Dickens’s day most of the houses in Norfolk Street were of a lower rateable value than Mr Dodd’s, so they are likely to have been narrower, less imposing buildings, and their lack of size uniformity on the street plan suggests a variety of original builders, so quite possibly their appearances differed, too, just as Tallis seems to show.
Some of these houses may have had purpose-designed shop-fronts, which could have been quite elegant. A beautiful multiple-paned double shopfront survives further up Cleveland Street, which shows that—like Regency furniture—original frontages of that date were light and elegant, and simple in decoration.
Other houses in the street might originally have been intended as private residences, and this mix of purpose might have lent the street a slightly higgledy-piggedly look. In Norfolk Street, several of the ground levels were occupied by businesses and shops, perhaps not always those for which they were designed. This is a typical urban pattern of colonization in London, which can still be seen in places today: several examples survive in the older houses still standing on the northern arm of Cleveland Street. A favourite way of using the front room of a house for a shopfront or workshop was simply to extend the domestic window opening down to ground level, and insert a door. Some of the ground-floor rooms in Norfolk Street may have become open workshops, or may have had work-rooms at the rear, visible from the street. Dickens describes such a shop in Pickwick Papers: ‘a newly-painted tenement which had been recently converted into something between a shop and a private-house’, its shop sign inscribed ‘above the window of what, in times bygone, had been the front parlour’.12
Except for the pawnbroker on the corner, who used some of his upper rooms for storing pledges, upper floors opposite were mostly occupied as housing (either by the ratepayer themselves or sub-let to lodgers) so they would probably have had window curtains and/ or blinds, perhaps an occasional pot plant on a window sill. Servants might shake their dusters out of open windows, someone might sweep the front step and perhaps whiten it, sweep the street outside their house, sluice it down with water perhaps, clean the windows—all the small domestic touches which keep houses trim when they are lived in, and the cessation of which spells the appearance of neglect.13
Late at night the street might have presented more of a blank appearance, as indoor shutters were unfolded and closed against the weather and the night. But there were likely to have been interesting things to observe during that magical time as the light is fading, especially as the houses opposite No. 10 faced away from the sunset. Much later, the poet T. S. Eliot would characterize this hour as 6 p.m. in winter (the fag end of the day, he calls it) and he described that urban time before street lights are lit, when people might have lights on indoors before the closing of shutters and curtains: ‘and then the lighting of the lamps’.14 This is the time when a stroller, or an observer opposite, might be able to see into neighbours’ windows—see pictures on the walls, furnishings. Norfolk Street not being very wide, the view into the houses opposite might have revealed people reading, sewing, talking, playing, arguing, working—multiple lives passing in their own domestic spaces, simultaneously.
People in Tottenham Street kept chickens in their backyards, so the neighbourhood might have been woken in the mornings at cock crow, and the noise of carts and waggons passing on the cobbles.15 The Workhouse bell clanged at 6.30 a.m., and on weekdays a variety of working sounds from the Workhouse and surrounding streets would gradually have risen. During the day, the child Dickens would have been able to watch daily events and characters in motion along the street: horses, coal and milk deliveries, building works, postmen, tradesmen, muffin-men, street sellers, street sweepers, funerals, ragand-bone men, old-clothes-men, ballad-sellers: the sheer variety of London life as later recorded by Henry Mayhew would have passed along Norfolk Street at some time or another: it was not a quiet street.
From his upper window, young Dickens could have pondered the shop signs opposite, the lettering of shop names, and goods out on the pavement. A leather-cutter who dealt in huge hides, for example, occupied No. 17; a plumber and glazier at No. 24 with sheets of lead and glass to cut, form, and deliver; a coach trimmer at 27, mending or rejuvenating the upholstery of gentlemen’s carriages (such as doctors’ gigs); and at No. 28 was a cabinet maker who might be seen planing, sanding, and polishing the furniture he had created, or making repairs. This was a street mainly of artisans, any and all of whom would have been displaying goods outside, using the street as a storage space and occasional workshop, unloading a variety of curious materials and loading finished goods into barrows or delivery carts, all within the purview of the windows of No. 10.16
If something unusual caught the boy’s interest—like a funeral or a street band, a muffin-man with his bell, a rag-and-bone man’s call, the hubbub of an injured workman being rushed to the hospital by his workmates—he would not have been slow to go round to the side window to see if the spectacle was passing along Tottenham Street. We know from the records of the Old Bailey that shops on Tottenham Court Road were often targeted by shoplifters, who would run down side streets like Tottenham Street to get away.17 This description of a crowd chasing a thief from Oliver Twist, can be read as if from above, and reinhabits the view for us:
‘Stop thief! Stop thief!’ There is a magic in the sound. The tradesman leaves his counter; and the carman his waggon; the butcher throws down his tray; the baker his basket; the milk-man his pail; the errand-boy his parcels; the schoolboy his marbles; the paviour his pick-axe; the child his battledore. Away they run, pell-mell, helter-skelter, slap-dash: tearing, yelling, screaming: knocking down the passengers as they turn the corners: rousing up the dogs, and astonishing the fowls; and streets, squares, and courts, re-echo with the sound.18
The Tottenham Street side of Mr Dodd’s house faced a row of modest houses and shops connecting Norfolk Street to busy Tottenham Court Road. More or less opposite the side window was a narrow alley in the direction of the Workhouse, and a small public house called the Lord Monson’s Arms, which doubtless had its own interest at different times of day in terms of sweeping or swilling out, the delivery of barrels by the fine working horses and brawny men of the brewers’ drays, the great iron-clad trapdoors in the pavement being lifted to take the great rolling barrels and for closure after deliveries, and all the other goings-on that a Victorian public house might generate, like scenes of conversation, sociability, laughter, raucous singing, drunkenness, ribaldry, arguments, perhaps hungry children hoping their parents might buy them some food before the money was drunk away, and sporadic late-night fights. When it was quiet, Mr Bumble and Monks, the gothic villain of Oliver Twist, might have sat to talk in just such a back-street public house.19
From that side of the house, too, the flank and roof of the Workhouse would have been visible during the day above the intervening houses; a more formidable presence after dark, whose curious sounds might punctuate the night when quietness reigned at last. The boy might have lain awake at night pondering these sounds, imagining the dark pavements and the interiors of the Hospital and the Workhouse. During the day, young Dickens doubtless observed other children on Norfolk Street, heard street cries, saw beggars and poor elderly, perhaps sad families on their way to or from the Workhouse. He would have grown to recognize the street in the variety of its comfort and poverty: not understanding everything, but puzzling and observing the business of life as it proceeded below.
While he might have been horrified by the ragged and hungry appearance of some of these poor people, Dickens’s humane stance in later life came from education and example, from exposure to them, and from his parents’ attitudes towards them. He was educated to feel Christian sorrow and pity for these pitiful folk in their predicament, and to recognize his own good fortune, despite his own family’s difficulties. It is possible, too, that Mr Dodd had ways of showing kindness: being the first food shop that side of the Workhouse he was probably frequently importuned. As an adult, Dickens attended a local Unitarian chapel in Little Portland Street, a few blocks away from Norfolk Street, but we do not know which church he attended on Sundays as a child. It is most likely to have been Old Marylebone Church, where his father (and perhaps Mr Dodd) had been christened.20 It is clear from his writings that Dickens’s knowledge of the Bible, especially the New Testament, was profound and heartfelt.
Charles Dickens was a hyperactive adult, so when he wasn’t unwell, he was probably much the same as a child. This is how Forster describes him:
He was a very little and a very sickly boy … 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.21
The interest in looking out of the window and journeying up and down to the basement kitchen most likely wore thin before too long. Like most children, he probably disliked being cooped up indoors for long. In later life Dickens is said to have ridden or walked miles daily, a journeying habit rooted in a natural restlessness, which he likely suffered as a child: something difficult to deal with in confined lodgings, especially before the boy could entertain himself by reading.
During much of this stay in Norfolk Street, Mrs Dickens was pregnant and then nursing the new baby, and perhaps easily tired.22 It could have been important to distract her little boy, to get him out of the house as much as possible. Aunt Mary might have been happy to take him to see various local relatives—the Charltons in Berners Street, Grandmother Dickens at Uncle William’s shop in Oxford Street, or perhaps further afield.23
The servant might have been asked to take the boy out on errands to local shops, or perhaps for a romp on Primrose Hill or a trek to Hyde Park, or even to take him with her on visits to her own family. Very little seems to be known about the servant/nurse who worked for the Dickens family in Norfolk Street: she may have been one of the child carers Dickens later described as relishing his discomfort by telling him terrifying stories.24 If so, she may also have relished terrifying him about the Workhouse, too, or—fearful herself—may have wanted to cross over the road to avoid its shadow (or the gruff gatekeeper and his ragged charges waiting by the gate) and may well have found other ways to teach the boy to feel the potency of the place.
Dressed to go out (perhaps not always quite so immaculately as he later described in the Soho Bazaar episode) and being brought out of the front door onto Norfolk Street, young Dickens would see the entire streetscape in a different way. Now he could see the familiar shops and houses opposite at their own level, and now too those on his own side of the way, as well as the entire view down to the crossroads at Charles Street, where wider streets led in different directions from the front of the Hospital: out east and west to the coaching roads, and south to Oxford Street, Soho, and eventually the River.
Outside the house, he could compare Mr Dodd’s shop window display with that of his arch competitor for local trade, Mr Stamp, the grocer and tea dealer right next door. One of Dickens’s Sketches by Boz concerns the family of a London grocer on a holiday at Ramsgate, which describes a family of four who inherit some money, take on airs and graces, and are swindled by fraudsters, for which Mr Dodd or the Stamps next door might have been a model.25 Then there was the discreet window of Mr and Mrs Bridger, makers of ladies’ stays and gowns, and so on down to Charles Street.
In the mid-twentieth century, Mr Dodd’s shop was occupied by an undertaker, who hung a painted board on the railings outside, advertising his services.26 It is quite possible that the undertaker’s notice was a distant replacement of hoardings originated by Mr Dodd, which would have been visible a good way down the street. Such boards—like other local shop signs—could have been among the first things upon which young Dickens tried out his alphabet: D-O-D-D, C-H-E-E-S-E in all the confusions of script and capital letters. The shop boards of Norfolk Street, and the street signs on Charles Street, might well have been where Dickens first learned to apply what his mother and aunt would have been teaching him upstairs.
From street-level the boy could try out the foot-scraper, or ponder the covered manholes in the pavement, down which he had seen the sooty coalman—shiny with coal tar—shoot the raw coal from huge sacks stiff with coal dust. He could peep down through the railings into the area below the shop, and into the bright kitchen window of Mr Dodd’s basement, greet the cook, smell the savoury odours wafting up, or the domestic smell of boiling, or the scorched smell of ironing freshly starched laundry. As a small child, Dickens would surely have been profoundly impressed, even awed, had he happened to be playing by the front door when Mr Bumble the Beadle, or his equivalent, passed by on parish business: striding along Norfolk Street in full regalia, wielding his staff of office.27
Looking up the street (beyond the Workhouse) the long vista of Cleveland Street led north towards the green open fields and the northern heights of London: Hampstead, Holloway, and Highgate. From outside Mr Dodd’s shop door, one could also peer around the corner towards the Regency Theatre on Tottenham Street to observe the Monson’s Arms from a different angle, the shops and pie-houses, print-shops and timber-sellers, and in the distance the graveyard of Whitfield’s Tabernacle (where body-snatchers had been caught) and the passing coaches, trundling wagons, and other traffic on the way to or from the turnpike at Tottenham Court.
Living on a corner has a special kind of potential, which is lacking in a mere component part of a long terrace of other houses. The similarity is noticeable between Mr Dodd’s corner and the building on Wellington Street, Covent Garden, which Charles Dickens later chose for his editorial office of All the Year Round between 1859 and his death, with his own bachelor flat upstairs. That was also a corner shop facing west, with windows overlooking two streets, up towards Covent Garden Theatre and Long Acre, and down towards the Strand. It stood inside the parish of St Paul Covent Garden, and, curiously, the old name for one of the streets he overlooked there, too, was Charles Street.
Towards the later end of the period Charles Dickens first lived in Norfolk Street, when he was aged nearly 5, he might have been allowed out on short errands nearby without adult supervision, perhaps with his older sister Fanny. They might run down to pay the postman for a delivery, or a muffin-man, for example, or visit the bakery or the pie-shop round the corner on Tottenham Street, within sight of the side window, where—when the grown-ups were busy, and the servant occupied in the basement—the children might safely have run round to get a loaf, a hot pie for supper, or a treat of gingerbread.
Dickens and his older sister might occasionally have been allowed to play with other children known to the family, which did not involve going far afield, or they might have been thought sensible enough to run round together with a note or a special cake or pie to their great-aunt’s home round the block in Berners Street. London children were much freer in the past than they are today, and parents far less fearful: short errands were a good way to allow a child to learn the important skill of becoming street-wise.28 Despite the family’s money problems, Dickens’s mother was a sensible and intelligent woman, and her children probably were, too. It is quite possible that Dickens learned to navigate the local area in a simple way under the tutelage of Fanny, or the young servant, during this first stay in Norfolk Street.
Whether or not this was so, one cannot fail to wonder what little Dickens might have thought about the great Hospital and the Workhouse, so close by. The Middlesex Hospital may have been less noticeable, as it was hidden behind the houses opposite; but the Workhouse was by far the largest building on the street, surrounded by smaller houses. Did the mystery of its interior provoke his curiosity? He would certainly have heard it spoken about, might have heard stories, seen sorry folk, and heard sorry tales. He would have become familiar with its bleak outside wall and gateway, seen the sculpture of the old man and may have tried to read his message—AVOID IDLENESS AND INTEMPERANCE—would have heard the Workhouse bell and other more curious sounds from within, might have witnessed wretched queues of people waiting to go in, or crocodiles of poor children forming up under their task-master, to be conducted to church on a Sunday.
My own childhood was passed in a district of London which housed a large convent surrounded by a high wall, which was always quiet. It is not easy to say what kind of influence this place had on the area—its great silent presence was akin to a black hole in the street plan, something we had to skirt round to get home from school. None of us had any real understanding of what went on inside. I always sprinted through its shadow if I had to pass by alone.29 Our local workhouse infirmary was known as ‘the Knacker’s Yard’, and other kids told me that when the workhouse chimney was smoking they were burning the bodies of those who had died in there. The Workhouse on Cleveland Street was a social black hole, but not a silent one. In the mornings, it too would have made a shadow on the street, and screams and moans, cries, shouts, the sounds of daily working, and of course the workhouse bell would surely have been audible in its vicinity. Coffins went through the gate. We do not know what stories local children heard or told each other about the Workhouse in Norfolk Street, what they believed about the fate of those who entered there, what hushed or fearful tones might have been used when speaking of it, or whether children learned to cross the road to avoid its malevolent shadow.
As well as deliveries, and arrivals and departures at the Workhouse gate, there might well have been moments which would have lent themselves to an observant eye. In an important early sequence in Oliver Twist, Dickens has a passing master-sweep halt to read the notice fixed on the Workhouse gate, offering the child for disposal with a five-pound premium:
It chanced one morning … that Mr. Gamfield, chimney-sweep, went his way down the High Street, deeply cogitating in his mind, his ways and means of paying certain arrears of rent, for which his landlord had become rather pressing. Mr. Gamfield’s most sanguine estimate of his finances could not raise them within full five pounds of the desired amount; and, in a species of arithmetical desperation, he was alternately cudgelling his brains and his donkey, when, passing the workhouse, his eyes encountered the bill on the gate.
‘Wo—o!’ said Mr. Gamfield to the donkey.
The donkey was in a state of profound abstraction: wondering, probably, whether he was destined to be regaled with a cabbage-stalk or two, when he had disposed of the two sacks of soot with which the little cart was laden; so, without noticing the word of command, he jogged onward.
Mr. Gamfield growled a fierce imprecation on the donkey generally, but more particularly on his eyes; and, running after him, bestowed a blow on his head, which would inevitably have beaten in any skull but a donkey’s. Then, catching hold of the bridle, he gave his jaw a sharp wrench, by way of gentle reminder that he was not his own master; and by these means turned him round. He then gave him another blow on the head, just to stun him till he came back again. Having completed these arrangements, he walked up to the gate, to read the bill.
The gentleman with the white waistcoat, was standing at the gate with his hands behind him, after having delivered himself of some profound sentiments in the board-room. Having witnessed the little dispute between Mr. Gamfield and the donkey, he smiled joyously when that person came up to read the bill, for he saw at once that Mr. Gamfield was exactly the sort of master Oliver Twist wanted. Mr. Gamfield smiled, too, as he perused the document; for five pounds was just the sum he had been wishing for; and, as to the boy with which it was encumbered, Mr. Gamfield, knowing what the dietary of the workhouse was, well knew he would be a nice small pattern: just the very thing for register stoves. So, he spelt the bill through again, from beginning to end; and then, touching his fur cap in token of humility, accosted the gentleman in the white waistcoat.
‘This here boy, sir, wot the parish wants to ’prentis,’ said Mr. Gamfield.
‘Ay, my man,’ said the gentleman in the white waistcoat, with a condescending smile. ‘What of him?’
‘If the parish vould like him to learn a right pleasant trade, in a good ’spectable chimbley-sweepin’ bisness,’ said Mr. Gamfield, ‘I wants a ’prentis, and I am ready to take him.’30
Dickens shows this man’s ill education in his efforts to read the notice, and his ingrained inhumanity in his treatment of his donkey. But worse yet is the complacent man in the white waistcoat, who has a duty to care for the children in his charge, and who approves this wretch as a suitable employer for little Oliver. These events take place in the street outside the workhouse in which Oliver Twist was born.
A late twentieth-century work on the topography of Dickens’s life and fiction dismissed the two years Dickens spent in Norfolk Street as a child in the following terms:
In 1816 John Dickens was transferred briefly to London, and Charles, aged four, entered the first of his many London homes, in Norfolk Street, off Fitzroy Square, St Pancras. We shall meet him there again in young manhood, but his first stay was not significant.31
Dickens’s own discretion about his family’s association with Norfolk Street seems to have contributed not only to the neglect of this locality in his biography, but also to the circulation of nonsense such as this, almost every element of which is inaccurate: the ‘brief’ transfer to London actually lasted two full years—January 1815 to January 1817—Dickens probably passed his third and fourth birthdays there; Norfolk Street is not situated ‘off Fitzroy Square’, and nor is it in St Pancras. How can anyone expect us to believe that this first stay—40 per cent of his life when he left there at almost 5 years old—was ‘not significant’?
We have no way of knowing exactly how significant this first stay in Norfolk Street really was for Dickens, beyond our own sense that all childhood experience is formative, and that in every child’s development the years between 3 and 5 are of deep importance. The years of childhood are so often and so evocatively featured in Dickens’s works that it is perverse to think that this period in Norfolk Street might have been unimportant to him. Had Dickens spent these years anywhere else—in a mining village for example, or in a travelling showman’s caravan, in a rural vicarage, or in the keeper’s lodge of a zoological garden, or, indeed in a stately home—his biographers would not have been so very slow to speculate about the likely impact on his imagination and his later writing, or so swift to dismiss these years as ‘insignificant’.
Dickens himself was highly conscious that he was the product of his own past, and equally aware of the contingencies of biography: how slight changes or chances can profoundly alter human trajectories. His silence about Norfolk Street bears an affinity to that which surrounds his social origins in the servant class, his fugitive grandfather Barrow, the Marshalsea Prison, and the blacking factory.32 Each of these matters came to public knowledge only after his death, some of them long afterwards. Each of them, too, is now recognized as vital to his biography and to his development as a novelist.
Dickens’s silences reveal that he was highly sensitive about his social origins: that he felt himself vulnerable to social snobbery, and to the family shame of financial failure and scandal. His cultivation of an oyster-like secrecy concerning these matters is informative, as it reveals that they were actually the reverse of insignificant to Dickens himself. Whether the reasons for his reticence about Norfolk Street were of similar origin, or if there might have been some other explanation for its almost complete obscurity in Forster and elsewhere is not known. Was this simply social embarrassment about being discovered to have lived over a cheesemonger’s, a few doors away from a Workhouse?
