Charles Dickens: A Life Read Online Free PDF

relations.’ 7 John Dickens also developed his own habits of extravagance and debt, which nearly wrecked his son’s life and drove him to rage and despair. 8
    John Dickens was a character – he was the model for his son’s most famous character, Micawber. He was also lucky. In 1806 John Crewe was raised to the peerage by Fox, who died that year. George Canning, no Whig but a liberal Tory, and the cleverest of the younger generation of politicians, had become a friend of the Crewes, and since he was Treasurer of the Navy from 1804 to 1806, he was in a position to hand out a job to the son of their housekeeper. 9 She was now an elderly woman and delighted the Crewe grandchildren with her storytelling. And when Sheridan followed Canning as Treasurer, he was also in a position to have John Dickens promoted. Two years later John’s salary was up to £110 and he was able to marry, in June 1809, just before his transfer to the Portsmouth dockyard. Sheridan died in 1816, Lady Crewe in 1818 and her onetime housekeeper in 1824: old Mrs Dickens left enough money to help her son John out of the trouble he had got into, but she died too soon to see the achievements of her grandson Charles, or to tell him tales of life at Crewe Hall and Lower Grosvenor Street.
    So much for the background of John Dickens, something he seems not to have spoken about to his son Charles, who in turn never said anything about it. The Navy Pay Office was a good employer and the interminable wars with the French, now almost in their twentieth year, meant there was plenty of work for him in Portsmouth. Elizabeth Dickens’s brother Thomas Barrow worked alongside her husband – this was how the couple had met – and her father, Charles Barrow, was also employed at Somerset House in London under the impressive title of ‘Chief Conductor of Monies in Town’. But little Charles never knew the grandfather for whom he was named because Mr Barrow had to leave England suddenly in 1810 when it was discovered that he had been defrauding the Navy Pay Office for seven years. Life was hard with ten children, he pleaded, and he had been driven to it by need, but criminal proceedings were started and he fled across the Channel. This was only a few months after witnessing the marriage of his daughter to John Dickens at the church of St Mary-le-Strand in June 1809. She was in Portsmouth when he was disgraced and made his secret escape abroad, and, while the subject would surely not have been mentioned at Mile End Terrace, it meant there was a secret hanging in the air, a story that could not be told. Both Charles Dickens’s grandfathers were unknown and unmentioned figures.
    As daughters often do, Elizabeth had chosen a husband who shared some of her father’s traits, and in particular the taste for living above his income. John Dickens was expansive by nature, with a tendency to speak in loose, grand terms, and an easy way with money. When required to describe himself he wrote ‘gentleman’ on documents and announced himself as ‘Esquire’ in the newspaper announcement of his first son’s birth. 10 He liked to dress well, as young Regency bucks did, he bought expensive books and enjoyed entertaining friends, from whom he might later ask for a loan. His voice had a slight thickness, as though his tongue was a little too large for his mouth, but he was likeable, plump and full of fun, and he and Elizabeth made a cheerful couple.
    She was a slim, energetic young woman, and she allegedly spent the evening before the birth of her son out dancing. 11 She also appreciated music and books, and knew some Latin. Her father, before he went to work for the Navy Pay Office, had been an instrument-maker and music teacher, and also ran a circulating library in London. The Barrows were better educated than the Dickenses, and she had talented brothers. Thomas, her husband’s colleague, overcame the matter of his father’s fraud by his own trustworthiness and diligence, and rose