WHAT DICKENS KNEW 17life, the willful casting away of his wife Catherine in 1858, and the secret
affair with Ellen Ternan that occupied his last twelve years. While these and
other episodes with women make regular appearances in this book, I have
not chosen them as organizing topics both because they are quite familiar
and because we have relatively little evidence about their inner workings.
In “Another Man,” the chapter that centers on Dickens and gender, I have
suggested that Dickens’s ways of imagining women are inextricable from a
structure of rivalry and fascination among men. In “Manager of the House,”
I have treated the separation from Catherine in the context of Dickens’s
extreme propensity for managerial control.
The long shadow of the blacking warehouse offers a different challenge
to any sort of biographical study. All roads, it sometimes seems, lead back to
Warren’s Blacking. The episode provides the essential material for the second
or third chapter of any conventional biography, as well as the cornerstone of
many interpretive approaches to Dickens’s art. Ever since Dickens’s closest
friend and biographer John Forster published Dickens’s autobiographical
fragment in the first volume of The Life of Charles Dickens, it has been impos-
sible to separate Dickens from the memory of his employment at Warren’s.
Unlike other major “stories” in Dickens biography, such as the mourn-
ing for Mary Hogarth, the fights with publishers, or the separation from
Catherine, this experience is documented only retrospectively, and through a
single source alone. Yet its traces appear in Dickens’s writing in the very first
sketches, and reappear regularly through the end of his career. In giving at
the outset a brief summary of the events as we know them from Dickens’s
account, I want only to remind my readers of the experiences that Dickens
found it necessary to conceal from his readers and acquaintances so long as
he lived.
In 1822 Dickens’s father John was transferred to London from his clerical
job in the Chatham branch of the navy payroll office. Ten-year-old Charles
remained at school in Chatham for three months, and then traveled alone
to join his struggling family in depressing lodgings in Camden Town. No
provision had been made for him; he was not sent back to school, while his
sister Fanny, just eighteen months older, was sent on scholarship to study at
the Royal Academy of Music. In the hands of the improvident John Dickens,
the family finances deteriorated until his wife, Elizabeth Dickens, decided
to open a school, taking a more expensive house on Gower Street for the
purpose. This enterprise failed to produce a single student, and the family
resorted to urgent measures, such as pawning their household goods. A rela-
tive found a way that Charles could contribute a few shillings a week, and
on 9 February 1824, two days after his twelfth birthday, he was sent to work