Dickens · 1824
The blacking factory
In February 1824, when Charles Dickens was twelve years old, his father John Dickens was arrested for debt and committed to the Marshalsea prison in Southwark. The household goods were sold; his mother and the younger children moved into the prison itself, which was the practice; Charles was lodged in a back room in Camden Town and put to work at Warren's Blacking Warehouse, 30 Hungerford Stairs, on the Strand, pasting labels on pots of bootblack for six shillings a week. He worked there for, by his own account, about five months. His father came out of the Marshalsea in May. Dickens told nobody about the warehouse for the next twenty-three years. He told the autobiographical fragment to his friend John Forster in 1847. He never wrote it down for publication. The whole of *David Copperfield* and most of his fiction about childhood comes out of those five months in the warehouse and the back-bedroom in Camden Town.
It is a Monday morning in March 1824, on the river-stair side of 30 Hungerford Stairs, by the Strand, in a tumble-down warehouse that was once a coal merchant's and now belongs to Mr Warren, blacking manufacturer, second cousin once removed of the better-known Warren of the Strand. He is twelve years old. He is Charles John Huffam Dickens, son of John, who is in the Marshalsea this week and will be the next, and the next. He has been put to work for six shillings a week.
He is at a deal table on the river side of the room, by the window. The window is broken in three places and the panes have been mended with paper. Through the gap below the lower sash, he can see, when he looks up, the brown river going by on the tide. The blacking comes down to him in pots from the boy on the upper floor; he has a pile of pots at his elbow, a pile of small printed labels, a paste-pot, a brush. He pastes a label on the pot, ties a piece of blue paper over the label, ties a string around the blue paper, snips the string, sets the pot on the finished tray. He does it in twenty-two seconds. He has been measuring it.
He thinks: the boy with me at this table is called Bob Fagin. The boy on the floor above is called Poll Green. They are both kind to me. They both think I am a young gentleman because I do not eat with them in the warehouse and I speak as I speak.
He thinks: my mother is in the Marshalsea. My father is in the Marshalsea. My brother and my sisters are in the Marshalsea. I am at this table, and I sleep in a back-room in Mr Roylance's lodging-house in Little College Street in Camden Town, and on Sundays I go down to the Marshalsea on foot from Camden Town to spend the day with my family in a single room with seven of us in it.
He thinks: I am twelve years old. I have read Smollett and Fielding and Goldsmith and the Tatler and Spectator, and at Christmas of last year I was at school. I shall not be at school again. The school is forty pounds a year and there is no forty pounds.
He does not cry at the table. He has not cried at the table at any point in the five months. He has cried only on the walks from Hungerford Stairs to Camden Town in the late afternoon, on the Holborn end of the route, alone in the noise. He has been careful to be ordinary in the warehouse. The boy Bob Fagin notices nothing. The man at the desk notices nothing. The thing that is happening to him is happening in his head and in the back-bedroom and on the walk through Holborn.
He thinks: I am being sunk for life. I am being sunk into Bob Fagin's table at twelve and I will be Bob Fagin's man at twenty and Mr Warren's foreman at thirty, and I will marry a girl out of a tenement, and my children will go into the warehouses, and the boy who read Smollett at twelve will not have happened.
He thinks: the only person on earth who could stop this is my father, and my father has signed the articles for me to be here.
He thinks: I will not say what is happening to me to anyone in this warehouse, ever.
He kept that promise the rest of his life. His father came out of the Marshalsea in May 1824 on a small inheritance from his mother. The blacking job continued for some weeks afterward, until the firm moved to Chandos Street and his father quarrelled, by Dickens's recollection, in some dignity, with Mr Lamert who was managing it. He was put back into school at Wellington House Academy in Hampstead Road. He did not tell his sister Fanny that he had been at the warehouse. He did not tell his wife Catherine for twenty years of marriage. He told John Forster, in a fragment of autobiography Forster preserved and quoted at length in the Life of 1872, two years after Dickens's death. The whole architecture of the fiction, the abandoned children of Oliver Twist and David Copperfield and Great Expectations, the Marshalsea precisely reconstructed in Little Dorrit, the lifelong horror of debt and the lifelong solidarity with the labouring poor, came out of five months at the table at the broken window above the brown river. Hungerford Stairs is gone; Charing Cross station stands where it stood. The pots of blacking were sold at Warren's into the 1860s. The boy at the table never went back into the warehouse, and never quite got out of it.