The blacking factory

Some lives are made by the door they walk through; others by the door that closes behind them in a room they were never meant to enter. The room in question is small, river-damp, and full of pots. The boy in it is twelve. He will not speak of it for twenty-three years, and when at last he does, in a fragment passed to his friend, the whole of English fiction will have already been bent around the silence.

THE HOUSE IN BAYHAM STREET

The Dickens household had been sliding for years before it broke. John Dickens, clerk in the Navy Pay Office, genial, fluent, and incurably hopeful about money, had moved his family from Chatham to Camden Town in 1822, into a narrow brick house in Bayham Street, and from there the descent was steady. Tradesmen called and were put off. The brass knocker came down. The books were sold in batches at a shop in the Hampstead Road. Charles, the second child, who had been allowed at Chatham to read his father's small shelf of Smollett, Fielding, Goldsmith, the Tatler and the Spectator, watched the shelves empty volume by volume. On the twentieth of February 1824, two days after his twelfth birthday, his father was arrested at the suit of a baker named Karr and committed to the Marshalsea prison in Southwark. Within a fortnight the mother and the younger children moved into the prison, as was the custom; the lodgings were given up; and Charles, alone of the family, was sent to a back room at Mrs Roylance's in Little College Street, and to a deal table by a broken window at 30 Hungerford Stairs.

THE WAREHOUSE BY THE RIVER

Warren's Blacking Warehouse stood on the Strand side of the Thames, a tumble-down building lately a coal merchant's, the floors rotten, the staircase wormy, the wainscot grey with river damp. It belonged to a Mr Warren, blacking manufacturer, second cousin once removed of the better-known Warren whose advertisements ran in every London paper. The work was simple. Pots of blacking came down from the upper floor. A label was pasted to each, a square of oil-paper tied over the label with string, the string clipped, the pot set on the tray. Six shillings a week. The boy at the next stool was named Bob Fagin; the boy on the floor above, Poll Green. They were kind. They called him the young gentleman because he did not eat with them and he spoke as he had been taught at Chatham to speak. By his own later account, set down for Forster, no words can express the secret agony of my soul as I sank into this companionship. He was twelve. He had been measuring, against the broken window-pane, how long it took to finish a pot. Twenty-two seconds.

A SECOND OF TIME IN A BACK-ROOM

There is a moment, in any childhood that is going to be ruined, when the child sees the ruin entire and decides what to do with it. For Charles Dickens this moment did not arrive at the table, where he was careful to be ordinary, nor on the Sunday walk over the bridges to Southwark, where he was careful to be cheerful for his mother. It arrived, by his own telling, in the back-bedroom at Little College Street, on an evening when he had come up the Holborn end of the route alone and let himself cry, which he never did in the warehouse. He saw the years ahead with the awful clarity that comes to clever children when the adult arrangements around them collapse: that he would be Bob Fagin's man at twenty, and Warren's foreman at thirty, and that the boy who had read Smollett and meant to go up to a profession would simply not have happened. He saw that the only person on earth empowered to undo it was the father now lying in the Marshalsea, who had himself signed the articles to put him there. And so, with the deliberation of a much older creature, he made the only resolution available to him. He would do the work. He would be ordinary in the warehouse. He would never, to any soul who knew him, say what was happening. The decision was a kind of door drawn shut on the inside. I had no advice, no counsel, no encouragement, no consolation, no assistance, no support, of any kind, from any one, that I can call to mind, so help me God, he wrote, late in life, to Forster. It is the longest sentence he ever built out of a single negative, and it is the doorway he walked back through to find the writer.

THE WALK TO SOUTHWARK

The days settled into a shape. Up at six in the back-bedroom. A penny loaf and a slice of saveloy for breakfast on the way down to the Strand. Ten hours at the table by the window, the brown river going by on the tide, gulls quarrelling on the stairs. A penny cottage-loaf and a piece of cheese in the middle of the day, or, on better days, a plate at a pudding-shop in the Strand. The walk home through Holborn in the late afternoon, the gas-lamps coming up, the crossings raw with horse-dung and straw. On Sundays he called for his sister Fanny at the Royal Academy of Music in Tenterden Street, where she was a boarder on a scholarship the family had somehow contrived to keep, and the two of them walked together over Blackfriars Bridge to the Marshalsea, where the seven of them sat in a single room and ate what could be afforded. He noticed everything. He noticed the turnkey's wife. He noticed the collegians on the staircase and the woman with the snuff-box and the man with the long story about his commission. He stored it all without knowing he was storing it.

THE RELEASE

In late May 1824 John Dickens came out of the Marshalsea on a small inheritance from his mother. The discharge under the Insolvent Debtors' Act was signed, the rooms in the prison given up, the family reassembled at Mrs Roylance's and then in lodgings in Johnson Street, Somers Town. The blacking work, by the boy's own reckoning, continued some weeks more. The firm moved across to a corner of Chandos Street, where the work was done in a window onto the street and passers-by stopped to watch the boys tying their pots, an exhibition the father, when at last he came to see it, found intolerable. There was a quarrel with James Lamert, the cousin who had got Charles the place, on a point, the son recalled, of dignity. A letter went back from Lamert to John Dickens; the boy was dismissed. His mother, by his account, was warm for my being sent back. He never quite forgave her. He was returned instead to school, at Wellington House Academy in the Hampstead Road, and the warehouse closed behind him as if it had not been.

THE SILENCE

He told no one. Not the schoolfellows at Wellington House, who knew him as a clever boy with a turn for theatricals. Not the clerks at Ellis and Blackmore, where he went at fifteen to copy briefs. Not the reporters in the gallery at Doctors' Commons, nor the press-men at the Mirror of Parliament, nor the editors who took the early sketches signed Boz. Not his sister Fanny, who had walked with him over Blackfriars Bridge on Sundays and might have guessed and seemed not to. Not Catherine Hogarth, whom he married in 1836 and to whom over twenty years he never spoke of it. The silence was not forgetfulness. It was a deliberate withholding, the same door drawn shut at the back-bedroom and held against the latch for twenty-three years. In 1847, in the middle of his life, talking with John Forster in a chop-house about a chance remark someone had made concerning a Mr Dilke and a boy seen in a warehouse off the Strand, the door opened a crack. Forster pressed. Some months later a small autobiographical fragment came across to him in manuscript, never to be published in the writer's lifetime, and from that fragment, two years after Dickens died, the world learned what every novel had been built out of.

THE RETURN

The architecture is plain once one has the key. The abandoned children of Oliver Twist, the warehouse at Murdstone and Grinby's in David Copperfield where the labels are pasted by a boy named David and the boy at the next stool is called Mealy Potatoes, the Marshalsea reconstructed brick for brick in Little Dorrit with the turnkey's daughter and the room on the staircase, the convict on the marshes and the forge and the rise out of shame in Great Expectations: all of it issues from the table by the broken window and the back-bedroom in Camden Town. He gave evidence in Parliament for the children in the factories. He campaigned for ragged schools and for sanitary reform and for the abolition of imprisonment for debt. He never went to Hungerford Stairs again. The warehouse was pulled down in 1862 when the South Eastern Railway built Charing Cross station on the river-stairs and the wharves. The pots of Warren's blacking, with their printed label and their square of oil-paper, were sold in London chemists into the 1860s. The boy who had measured twenty-two seconds against a broken pane never quite came out of the room; he furnished it instead, and lit it, and let the whole of English fiction walk through it.

Fate sometimes makes a writer not by what she gives but by what she lets the child decide, alone, in a back-room, never to say. The hinge is small. A boy at a deal table, the river going by below the window, a resolution taken without witness. Out of that resolution a literature. In the British Museum sits the small printed label, blue paper, black lettering, that was tied with string over a pot of Warren's blacking in the year 1824.