Charles Dickens: A Life Read Online Free PDF Page B

high in the Navy Pay Office. John Barrow published poetry and a historical novel, and started his own newspaper, and Edward Barrow was a good amateur musician with artistic tastes – he married a painter of miniatures from a family of artists – and he worked as a parliamentary reporter. They were all helpful to their sister and brother-in-law, and became significant figures in Charles’s young life.
    When he was only five months old the family was obliged to move to a smaller house on a poor street, with no front garden. 12 They were already short of money, and the house would have matched the one described by Jane Austen in
Mansfield Park
at exactly this time, where Fanny Price visited her parents in Portsmouth, and found the passage and stairs so narrow and the walls so thin that you could hear all the noises from room to room. 13 Here a third child, Alfred, was born, and died at six months in September 1814. The family moved again, to a better house in Portsea, at No. 39 Wish Street, and a nurse cared for Fanny and Charles; he claimed to remember her carrying him out to see the soldiers exercising. That winter their father was summoned to work at Somerset House, and the family went with him to London. They left Portsmouth under snow, according to Dickens’s own recollection, and did not return. 14
    They found lodgings in Norfolk Street (Cleveland Street today), only recently paved over and transformed from one of the old ‘Green Lanes’ out to the country into a residential road that took you to the new suburbs of Somers Town and Camden Town. This was the north edge of London, where big town houses were under construction in Fitzroy Square, while to the east of Tottenham Court Road there were still farms and fields. John Dickens’s brother, William, was still running his coffee shop in Oxford Street, and in 1815 he married; but John, in spite of his steady employment with the Navy Pay Office, where he was now earning £200 a year, found it as hard to manage as ever and took to asking their mother for money, as she noted when she came to write her will. Whether old Mrs Dickens ever sat with Fanny and Charles while their mother was busy, or told them stories, is not recorded. In April 1816 a fourth Dickens child was born – Letitia, who was to outlive all the others. 15
    While the younger Dickenses were in London the war against Napoleon and the French finally came to an end in 1815. Now that the Navy needed fewer officers, the work of the Pay Office was changing, and in December 1816 John Dickens was sent out of town again. This time it was only thirty miles away, to Kent. He went first for a few weeks to Sheerness dockyard, where the River Medway runs into the Thames estuary through the salt marshes, and then on to Chatham, where Rochester Castle stands above the bridge over the Medway, and Chatham and Rochester are effectively one town folded around the spectacular double curve of the river, with the Kentish hills rising sharply above. The Romans settled there, and it had a great castle and a cathedral, a medieval bridge, ancient streets, inns and houses, fine dwellings for the naval officers and great industrial buildings in the dockyards. The newest construction was Fort Clarence, a gigantic brick-built defence meant to deter Napoleon, put up in 1812 and named for the Lord High Admiral of the Navy, Prince William, Duke of Clarence, destined to become King in 1830. Landscape and buildings are dramatic, and they imprinted themselves strongly on the imagination of the small boy. Here Dickens became fully aware of the world around him and began to store up impressions.
    He arrived round about his fifth birthday, with his two sisters, seven-year-old Fanny and baby Letitia. Their father was busily engaged, in and out of the vast Chatham dockyard, often aboard the old Navy yacht
Chatham
, sailing up the Medway to Sheerness and back. He installed his family in another small, neat, Georgian terraced house at the top of