Peel. Attentive as he had to be to these political manoeuvres, Dickens was now distracted by problems of his own at home, where his father had again been arrested and removed to a sponging house, in imminent danger of prison for paying neither his wine merchant nor his rent. Their landlord refused to wait any longer, and Charles feared that he might be taken too, since he was living at the same address. This would provide ‘the next act in this “domestic tragedy”’, he joked, or half joked. It happened just as he was looking at chambers in Furnival’s Inn on Holborn, with the intention of separating himself from the family, but had not yet fixed a date. So now a flurry of letters went out to Tom Mitton and Tom Beard, asking for loans and begging them to visit his father. Both obliged, Charles raised five pounds ‘from my French employer’ – an unexplained reference suggesting he had taken on more freelance work – and there was enough cash to release the elder Dickens before the younger had to leave for Birmingham, where he was due to report on a Liberal congress. 6
When he got back to London his father had taken ‘to the winds’, as he himself put it, in fact to North End, beyond Hampstead, which he thought remote enough to be out of reach of creditors. The rest of the family moved into rooms in George Street, near the Adelphi, to be close to Fanny’s singing engagements, and Charles now established himself in his own rented, unfurnished chambers in Furnival’s Inn. 7 He was paying £35 for a year’s lease, for which he had three rooms on the third floor, with use of a cellar and a lumber room in the roof. Since Henry Austin had turned down his invitation, he invited his brother Fred (Frederick, not Alfred) to join him. Although he was establishing his independence, Dickens always wanted people about him. He entirely lacked the romantic writer’s need to be alone, and instead of being glad to be rid of younger brothers he was eager to have Fred, who had a ready laugh and a wish to please. 8 They had to do their own housekeeping, and living without their mother they were soon in difficulties about their laundry. Everyone in the family was short of money, and their younger brother Alfred was forced to walk to Hampstead and back in his dancing pumps, carrying messages to and from their father, as Charles had done before him. Charles’s current shoes were also in holes, and he had nothing left to pay for repairs after moving house. Tom Beard stumped up with another loan, and Charles invited his friends to George Street to celebrate his mother’s birthday on 21 December, when she would be forty-five. There was to be another party of his own – ‘a flare’ – in his chambers, in spite of the fact that he had no dishes, no curtains and no money. No matter, ‘I have got some really
extraordinary
french brandy.’ 9
In January 1835 he was covering election meetings in Chelmsford, ‘the dullest and most stupid place on earth’, where he could not even find a newspaper on Sunday. 10 Sometimes driving a hired gig with an unpredictable horse, and sometimes taking the stagecoach, he got round Braintree, Sudbury, Colchester and Bury St Edmunds and came away with no better opinion of any of them, or of the part played by electioneering in the political process. There would be more travelling into the provinces to report on political meetings, long, damp and freezing coach journeys and dashes back to London to get his copy in before the reporter for
The Times
. Meanwhile another invitation came to write more of his London sketches or stories for a new sister evening paper to the
Chronicle.
Its co-editor was George Hogarth, like John Black a Scotsman, and both saw that Dickens was the most gifted of the young journalists on the staff. When he asked if he might be paid for his contributions to the
Evening Chronicle
, his salary was raised to seven guineas a week.
Hogarth, a fatherly fifty-year-old, invited Dickens
When he got back to London his father had taken ‘to the winds’, as he himself put it, in fact to North End, beyond Hampstead, which he thought remote enough to be out of reach of creditors. The rest of the family moved into rooms in George Street, near the Adelphi, to be close to Fanny’s singing engagements, and Charles now established himself in his own rented, unfurnished chambers in Furnival’s Inn. 7 He was paying £35 for a year’s lease, for which he had three rooms on the third floor, with use of a cellar and a lumber room in the roof. Since Henry Austin had turned down his invitation, he invited his brother Fred (Frederick, not Alfred) to join him. Although he was establishing his independence, Dickens always wanted people about him. He entirely lacked the romantic writer’s need to be alone, and instead of being glad to be rid of younger brothers he was eager to have Fred, who had a ready laugh and a wish to please. 8 They had to do their own housekeeping, and living without their mother they were soon in difficulties about their laundry. Everyone in the family was short of money, and their younger brother Alfred was forced to walk to Hampstead and back in his dancing pumps, carrying messages to and from their father, as Charles had done before him. Charles’s current shoes were also in holes, and he had nothing left to pay for repairs after moving house. Tom Beard stumped up with another loan, and Charles invited his friends to George Street to celebrate his mother’s birthday on 21 December, when she would be forty-five. There was to be another party of his own – ‘a flare’ – in his chambers, in spite of the fact that he had no dishes, no curtains and no money. No matter, ‘I have got some really
extraordinary
french brandy.’ 9
In January 1835 he was covering election meetings in Chelmsford, ‘the dullest and most stupid place on earth’, where he could not even find a newspaper on Sunday. 10 Sometimes driving a hired gig with an unpredictable horse, and sometimes taking the stagecoach, he got round Braintree, Sudbury, Colchester and Bury St Edmunds and came away with no better opinion of any of them, or of the part played by electioneering in the political process. There would be more travelling into the provinces to report on political meetings, long, damp and freezing coach journeys and dashes back to London to get his copy in before the reporter for
The Times
. Meanwhile another invitation came to write more of his London sketches or stories for a new sister evening paper to the
Chronicle.
Its co-editor was George Hogarth, like John Black a Scotsman, and both saw that Dickens was the most gifted of the young journalists on the staff. When he asked if he might be paid for his contributions to the
Evening Chronicle
, his salary was raised to seven guineas a week.
Hogarth, a fatherly fifty-year-old, invited Dickens
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