She highlights the young boy’s discipline – he would parcel out his wages into money for days of the week – and the stories he would tell to the little maid who worked for his family: Much has been made of Charles’s childhood year at Warren’s factory, labeling pots of blacking, but I think Dickens would appreciate Tomalin’s handling of it. Alas, he eventually found himself at leisure in the Marshalsea debtor’s prison.
Working as a clerk in the Royal Navy Pay Office, John Dickens had aspirations to be a gentleman of leisure. John’s office – and then inquire in a thick-tongued speech if he might, just perhaps, have a glass of gin punch?Īs Tomalin tells it, his taste for the good life and the thickness in his speech he inherited from his father, the Micawberesque John Dickens. Running his hands through his long hair and turning his soulful eyes on the nearest lady, he will launch into an apology for his tardiness – he has walked the full fifteen miles from St. He will arrive in a gust of energy and attention, clicking his patent toed boots against the stone steps. What’s more, I have no doubt, the whole crowd will be waiting for Charles Dickens. Someday, hopefully in the far distant future, Claire Tomalin will be there too, sampling the dates and sipping Chianti with Pepys and Austen.
I picture it much like a Pompeiian garden – a statue-strewn lawn where David McCullough and Doris Kearns Goodwin can lounge around in togas and quiz John Adams on his medical history. In my own, admittedly, rather odd version of heaven, God reserves a special place for biographers.
Charles Dickens: A Life by Claire Tomalin
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