The Secret of Dickens
Charles Dickens
By Alan Dilnot
“A wonderful fact to reflect upon, that every human creature is constituted to be that profound secret and mystery to every other.”
--Charles Dickens
Charles Dickens was born on the 7th day of this month exactly 200 years ago. When he died in 1870 there was one secret that he had kept almost completely all his adult life. This secret concerned his time working in a blacking factory when he was twelve years old. He may have told his wife Catherine about it. He certainly told his friend and eventual biographer John Forster about it. But his children, other friends, and the wider public who had come to hero-worship the novelist, knew nothing about it.
Why was this? Although his employment in the blacking factory was brought about by the actions of other people, Dickens felt a deep sense of shame concerning it. This was partly on account of the nature of the work, which involved pasting labels on a procession of bottles containing blacking (i.e. boot polish), and then tying paper caps on the bottles with lengths of string. This was clearly manual labour – Dickens’ hands got dirty and the work was repetitious.
Perhaps more wounding for Dickens was the fact that he was only in the factory because his father had been imprisoned for debt. But whereas his parents and his younger siblings went to live in the Marshalsea Prison for the period of his father’s incarceration, and his elder sister Fanny enjoyed a scholarship to the Royal College of Music, Charles was sent out to work. He lived in lodgings and had to support himself on his meagre salary of six shillings a week. He felt abandoned and forgotten by his family and could see no likely end to the drudgery he had to endure.
There came relief, however. Dickens Senior was able to get out of gaol. Dickens’ grandmother died and left a substantial legacy to Dickens’ father, which enabled him to satisfy his creditors. Charles therefore then expected to be released from the factory and to go back to school. Dickens’ mother, however, ensured that Dickens continued at the factory and contributed his income to the family budget.
Dickens later commented “I never afterwards forgot, I never shall forget, I never can forget, that my mother was warm for my being sent back.”
It may well be that some of Dickens’ satirical portraits of middle-aged women derive from lingering resentment of his mother. Some of this resentment may possibly have eventually been transferred to the mother of his ten children, Catherine, when she became middle-aged. At all events it is safe to say that Dickens’ views on social and sexual matters were largely formed as a result of what happened to him at the age of twelve.
His attitude to work itself also dates from this period. Although he hated his blacking factory tasks, he was determined to be exemplary in his performance of them, to stand out from his fellow workers. He adopted the same attitude with all his later commitments – as a writer, as an actor, as an editor and as a reader of his own writings. Nevertheless, he kept this secret as if the secrecy gave him extra power.
He flirted with the idea of revealing it; every novel of his contains some reference to blacking. Notably, in Great Expectations, when Joe Gargery goes up to London to visit Pip he doesn’t go to see such landmarks as Westminster Abbey or the Tower of London but instead gazes at Warren’s Blacking factory – quite inexplicably as far as the uninformed reader is concerned.
This undoubtedly was the chief psychological wound in Dickens’ life, but out of it there seems to have come the drive to achieve success, to mount above drawbacks by force of personality and to utilise in novels of social criticism those hardly-gained glimpses of lower-class life.
There was an element of self-pity in this, but Dickens’ imagination enabled him to understand the sufferings of other human beings as if they were his own, and to feel compassion for them. Likewise, he was able to enter into their joys and delights.
He remembered too that the best times in the blacking factory had come when he was able to entertain his workmates by telling them the stories that he had read in his father’s little collection of eighteenth-century novels (before they were taken to the pawnbrokers). He discovered that the storyteller has the power to bridge the gaps between people; that storytelling can be a force for social cohesion; that well-pointed and especially humourous fiction, told in an engaging and entertaining way, can bring about social reform.
Dickens was strongly aware that every human individual embodies a secret. Dickens himself closed the book on some parts of his life. But for a while when we read one of his books the barriers between us and him are partly dismantled and we can hear him speak, be moved by his pathos, laugh at his comedy and be stirred by his social conscience even though two centuries have passed since he was born.
Dr Alan Dilnot is an Adjunct Senior Lecturer in the School of English, Communications and Performance Studies at Monash University