Charles Dickens: A Life Read Online Free PDF Page A

shillings extra for every day of actual attendance. This was a fortune compared with anything his father had ever earned.
    Why was John Dickens favoured in this way? The assumption is that the Crewes put forward his name to Canning in gratitude to his mother for being a loyal servant. His elder brother, William, however, made his own way, running a coffee shop in Oxford Street. What made the difference between Mrs Dickens’s two sons? John saw himself as a man of taste, with cultural interests. Another thing we know about him is that he acquired quite a large collection of books, essays, plays and novels of the eighteenth century: was he given them? 5 Books were expensive. Living in a grand household, where he could observe and hear brilliant people, appears to have had an effect on him, and the Crewe household was where you might overhear some of the best conversation in the land. John Crewe’s wife, Frances, was well read, well informed and witty, as well as a noted beauty, and around the Crewes a remarkable circle of politicians and writers gathered, the most eminent being Charles James Fox, Edmund Burke and Richard Brinsley Sheridan, the playwright, theatre-owner and politician who became the darling of society. During the election of 1784 Frances Crewe led a canvassing party, and when victory was celebrated at her house, the Prince of Wales made the toast ‘True blue and Mrs Crewe’ and she replied ‘True blue and all of you’, expressing her sense of the fellowship among the Whig group. She conducted a long love-affair with Sheridan, who had dedicated his play
The School for Scandal
to her in 1777. In 1785 the affair was still causing distress to Sheridan’s wife, Elizabeth, who wrote to her friend Mrs Canning, ‘S is in Town – and so is Mrs Crewe. I am in the country and so is Mr Crewe – a very convenient Arrangement, is it not?’ 6 Both Sheridans were nonetheless regular visitors to Crewe Hall, and in 1790 Mrs Sheridan had another story to tell, of how her husband was found locked in a bedroom in an unfrequented part of the house with the governess. He was notoriously promiscuous, but his behaviour was far from unusual in the circles in which he mixed. He also became Treasurer of the Navy in 1807, the year John Dickens got his promotion.
    John Dickens may have been the son of the elderly butler, but it is also possible that he had a different father – perhaps John Crewe, exercising his
droit de seigneur
, cheering himself up for his wife’s infidelities, or another of the gentlemen who were regular guests at the Crewe residences. Or he may have believed that he was. His silence about his first twenty years, his habit of spending and borrowing and enjoying good things as though he were somehow entitled to do so, all suggest something of the kind, and harks back to the sort of behaviour he would have observed with dazzled eyes at Crewe Hall and in Mayfair. This was the style of Sheridan, and also Fox, who gambled away several fortunes and borrowed from all his friends without a thought of ever repaying any of them. What is worth noting is that he can be presumed to have grown up with a group of men as models who were, as well as gamblers and drinkers, the most eloquent of their time. The housekeeper’s boy developed his own elaborate turns of phrase, which his son found entertaining enough to record, and to turn to comic use in his writing; he described, for instance, a letter from his father in which he wrote that ‘he has reason to believe that he will be in town with the pheasants, on or about the first of October’, and went on to observe that his father has discovered on the Isle of Man ‘troops of friends, and every sort of continental luxury at a cheap rate’. Another of his grand pronouncements, putting down a boastful friend, was ‘The Supreme Being must be a very different individual from what I have every reason to believe him to be, if He would care in the least for the society of your