Charles Dickens - Social Reformer. William Walter Crotch

      CHAPTER I. FORMATIVE INFLUENCES OF EARLY LIFE

      " To leave one's hand . . . lastingly upon the time, with one tender touch for the mass of toiling people that nothing can obliterate, would be to lift oneself above the dust of all the Doges in their graves and stand upon a giant's staircase that Samson could not overthrow."

      In those words Charles Dickens, the premier novelist of our age, crystallized the master-passion of his life. The sentiment was no transient one; it was no fleeting aspiration evoked by one of his many moments of deep sympathy with the poor; it was rather the careful asseveration of a profound and long-cherished conviction. He had returned from Venice, overflowing with the exhilaration which new scenes and fresh sensations of beauty invariably create in the mind of man.

      " Lofty emotions rise within me when I see the sun set on the Mediterranean," he had written during his stay at the little villa which he rented outside Genoa; and all that was majestic and all that was resplendent under the undying glory of Italian skies had excited his warmest admiration. But the spectacle of natural glories and the joy which comes of the contemplation of hitherto unseen richness in art and architecture were as nothing to him beside the pursuit of what might have been regarded as the humble, but abiding, purpose of his life. " To strike a blow for the poor " — this was his heart's desire; " to leave one tender touch for the mass of the toiling people " — this was alike the permanent hope and the constant purpose of all his work. In this was his destiny fulfilled. Circumstance, that heedless arbiter of men's lives, had willed it so. Into the very fibre of his being was woven his love of the poor; upon the tablets of his experience was enshrined the record of their miseries, their sufferings, their endurance, their weaknesses, their needs, and their follies. All the emotions of his childhood stirred his manhood to a keen appreciation of social injustice; all the bitterness of poverty which, as a lad, he endured warmed the heart of his age to active compassion for misfortune; like Robert Louis Stevenson, " the sights and sounds of his youth pursued him always."

      The early, if not the earliest, associations of Charles Dickens were with debt and poverty. The impressions which first stamped themselves upon his young mind were of financial difficulties, of worries which grew to miseries, of embarrassments which became slow agonies as his family sank, gradually but surely into the pit of penury and want. At nine or ten years of age his home was in a mean tenement in a squalid Camden Town slum, and from " the little back garret in Bay ham Street " he derived his first knowledge of the struggles which the poor daily wage against poverty. That he understood it all then, he in after life affirmed again and again, and it was this intimate knowledge which produced his passionate zeal for social reform, and made him, to the day of his death, the unflinching champion of the weak and oppressed.

      Dickens, however, was doomed not only to be a spectator of the miseries of the poor, but to feel the poignant pain of hunger himself. When we laugh at the foibles and smile at the pecuniary embarrassments from which Mr. Micawber was scarcely ever free, we are likely to forget the tragedy which those same difficulties involved for his counterpart in real life. As the elder Dickens fell into deeper and deeper straits, the family were compelled to endure greater and greater privations. A removal to Gower Street North, where the boy's mother set up a school in the hope of stemming the inrushing tide of debt and of restoring the lost prosperity of the family, proved quite unavailing. " We got on very badly with the butcher and the baker," says Dickens himself, referring to those stressful days, and " very often we had not too much for dinner, and at last my father was arrested." Then, by degrees, almost everything in the little home was sold or pawned to buy bread, and the boy went through those experiences which he ascribes to David Copperfield, and which he touches lightly in his description of Master Peter Cratchit, who " might have known, and very likely did, the inside of a pawnbroker's." Eventually the house was denuded of everything save a few chairs, a kitchen table, and some beds, and there, in the two parlours of the emptied house, the family encamped night and day.

      Even worse was to follow, for a little later we find the boy " a child of singular abilities, quick, eager, delicate, and soon hurt, bodily and mentally," as he described himself in a fragment of autobiography, working as a poor little drudge in a blacking factory at Hungerford Stairs for a wage of six shillings per week. Never came bird of paradise into more dismal region. The memory of that time and place seared itself on his brain. He described it as "a crazy, tumble-down old house, abutting of course on the river, and literally overrun with rats." " Its wainscoted rooms and its rotten floors and staircase and the old grey rats swarming down in the cellars, and the sound of their squeaking and scuffling coming up the stairs at all times, and the dirt and decay of the place rise up visibly before me as if I were there again. The counting-house was on the first floor, looking over the coal-barges and the river. There was a recess in it, in which I was to sit and work. My work was to cover the pots of paste blacking; first with a piece of oil-paper and then with a piece of blue paper; to tie them round with a string, and then to clip the paper close and neat all round until it looked as smart as a pot of ointment from an apothecary's shop. When a certain number of grosses of pots had attained this pitch of perfection, I was to paste on each a printed label and then go on again with more pots." His companions were two or three ragged urchins — children of the slums — and no words, he later avowed, could express the secret agony of his soul as he sank into these circumstances. " The deep remembrance of the sense I had of being utterly neglected and hopeless, of the shame I felt in my position, of the misery it was to my young heart to believe that, day by day, what I had learned and thought and delighted in, and raised my fancy and my emulation up by, was passing away from me never to be brought back any more, cannot be written." He little dreamed then of the influence which these things were exerting upon him, or how, out of all the tragic squalor of his life, there were being born the elements, by means of which, he was afterwards to render yeoman aid to the race of men.

      It has been said again and again that he never forgot that time; that to the end of the chapter he remained in many things a dreary boy-drudge. The first contention is undoubtedly true. After a silence of a quarter of a century he wrote: " Until old Hunger ford Market was pulled down, until old Hungerford Stairs were destroyed and the very nature of the ground changed, I never had the courage to go back to the place where my servitude began. I never saw it. I could not endure to go near it. For many years, when I came near to Robert Warren's in the Strand, I crossed over to the opposite side of the way to avoid a certain smell of the cement they put upon the blacking corks, which reminded me of what I was once."

      Robert Buchanan used to prefer to think and write of Dickens as a great, grown-up, dreamy, impulsive child, who had learnt the things which made some of his characters immortal, not by poring over books within college walls, but by brooding life in stirring streets. Others of our modern men of letters have emphasized the same view, declaring that he never escaped the fog of the dingy warehouse in which he was