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- [00:00]
Afua Hirsch
Wondery subscribers can binge seasons of legacy early and ad free. Join Wondery plus in the Wondery app or on Apple podcasts.
- [00:16]
Narrator
A father and son are walking along a path. They pause, as they often do, at the bottom of a hill. Above them, the sun reflects off the windows of a large, elegant house with views across the county as far as the River Thames. The boy looks up at the house and says, papa, I want to live there someday, to have that house for my own. His father looks down at him. One day it might be possible if you were to be very persevering and work very hard.
- [00:49]
Peter Frankopan
The man was John Dickens.
- [00:52]
Afua Hirsch
The boy, his son Charles.
- [00:55]
Peter Frankopan
Hello, and welcome to this brand new series of Legacy. We're going to be talking about the man who reinvented the novel for many. He's Britain's greatest novelist, still selling books by the cartload two centuries on. And he's the author of some of the greatest and most famous works in the English language. Great Expectations, A Tale of Two Cities, Bleak House, and of course, A Christmas Carol. And he's a man who's quoted by everyone from Margaret Thatcher to, well, Karl Marx. Arguably, he was the first international celebrity at a time when it was starting to be possible to spread news globally. He was mobbed when he toured the United States, for example. And some think of him as the man who really invented Christmas.
- [01:42]
Afua Hirsch
Or did he? Perhaps Charles Dickens is not quite the man we assume him to be. Is he really the quintessential Victorian, the pillar of 19th century Englishness? Or did the man who brought the streets of London to life for so many of us actually prefer Paris? Was he, as his daughter said, no gentleman at all?
- [02:15]
Peter Frankopan
From Wondery and Goal Hanger. I'm Peter Frankopan.
- [02:18]
Afua Hirsch
I'm Afua Hirsch.
- [02:20]
Peter Frankopan
And this is Legacy, the show that tells the lives of the most extraordinary men and women ever to have lived and asks if they have the reputation that they deserve.
- [02:39]
Afua Hirsch
This is Charles Dickens, episode one, Hard Times.
- [02:57]
Peter Frankopan
So that house on the hill is Gad's Hill Place in Kent, the county where Dickens spent part of his childhood.
- [03:04]
Afua Hirsch
And remember that name because it's going to pop up in our story again. It's a very Dickensian image, isn't it, Peter? The poor boy at the bottom of the hill with dreams of making to the big house. When I think about Charles Dickens, I certainly think about class, poverty, social mobility and what it tells us about the gap between the have and the have nots. What do you think of when you think about his work?
- [03:28]
Peter Frankopan
Chimney stacks, pollution early mortality, you know, terrible conditions, slums and like you said, those questions of inequality, both of gender, but also above all, the social. Do you remember the first time you came across Dickens work?
- [03:42]
Afua Hirsch
I definitely read A Christmas Carol as a child and loved it. I read Oliver Twist at school. I'm going to be really honest on this podcast and confess that I started Great Expectations, Bleak House and A Tale of Two Cities multiple times and only finished them for the first time when I knew we were going to do this podcast. Obviously it's not because he's not an incredible novelist, but he does tend to go round the houses in his writing and storytelling style.
- [04:13]
Peter Frankopan
I remember we had to do Oliver Twist at school, and even as a boy, I remember thinking, why are we being asked to read this story that basically is about school and about abuse and being grateful for food and being warned of the dangers of being a pickpocket and getting busted?
- [04:28]
Afua Hirsch
Oh, I actually feel that reading Dickens, I mean, the books I did manage to finish when I read them when I was younger did actually give me insight into the society I was living in. Not so much a kind of sophisticated analysis of class inequality, but more just a cultural understanding of where some of the ideas we have about ourselves come from. There's a particular nostalgia we have about Dickensian streets and scenes. And only when I started reading his work did I understand how important his role was in creating that identity for people as Londoners, as English people, as Brits. He was such a creator of a sense of what it meant to come from this place.
- [05:13]
Peter Frankopan
I had Bleak House as one of my A level set texts. And can you imagine a question in an A level? You've got an hour to answer, whatever it might be. How you're supposed to dig out quotes from a thousand page book that you're not allowed to take into the exam with you?
- [05:25]
Afua Hirsch
That's really tough.
- [05:26]
Peter Frankopan
I did very well, by the way, so. Of course you did.
- [05:28]
Afua Hirsch
I mean, it was the right challenge for the right student.
- [05:30]
Peter Frankopan
Thank you.
- [05:31]
Afua Hirsch
So, to understand Dickens origin story, I'm going to take us back to 1812. And this was an interesting time in England. It was the height of the Napoleonic wars. And that's relevant to Dickens life because when he was born on 7 February 1812, his father John worked for the Navy, which was drawing heavily on the national finances at the time, to fight these wars. And he was the second of what were to be eight children born to his mother, Elizabeth.
- [06:00]
Peter Frankopan
Dickens father was a complicated man, even though he worked for the Navy on the administrative side he was pretty untrustworthy. And untrustworthy father figures is something that pops up again and again in Dickens writing. John Dickens described himself as a gentleman and tried to live like one. But the big problem was to live like a gentleman is expensive, particularly at a time when, as you say, Aphrodite, there's a big war going on across mainland Europe. But Dickens grows up in a life not just of poverty, but a combination of poverty and aspiration. And that, I think, is something that comes up again in a lot of the ways in which Dickens frames his characters and his plot lines.
- [06:38]
Afua Hirsch
This comes up again in Dickens own life because there was no reason for his family necessarily to live in poverty. His father had, by the standards of the time, a fairly respectable income and a steady job. But it was this constant aspiration to a higher class and a higher standard of life that led his father to live above his means to borrow. And as a result, the family was constantly moving, sometimes to avoid creditors. First they moved to London when Charles was 2, and then when he was 5, they moved to Chatham and Rochester in Kent, where his father John, was handling payroll for the Navy docks.
- [07:11]
Peter Frankopan
Rochester was a happy place for Dickens. He spent a lot of his time reading and plowing through his father's books and things like Robinson Crusoe, the Arabian Nights, fairy tales, farces and so on. But John or his father's financial incompetence is always there. So they then move out of the edge of Rochester in a nice small house facing a cornfield, into the town centre, to try and save money. And it was to do with that problem of expenditure and aspiration.
- [07:37]
Afua Hirsch
And Dickens would return in his life and his work constantly to this romanticized memory of the pretty house in Kent and its beautiful surroundings. He would write and talk about Kent with its orchards, its fields and marshes will become the stage for many of his stories, and he remembers it as one of the happiest times. But it doesn't last long, because when he's 10, his family moves yet again. Summer, 1822. Charing Cross, London. The Dover to London mail coach clatters through the low arch of the Golden Cross Innovation. Charing Cross. Charles Dickens jumps down from his uncomfortable seat on top of the coach and makes his way through the crowd to his waiting father. After finishing school for the year in Kent, he's following the family to live in their new home in Camden Town. Charles was a baby when he last lived in London, too young to remember what it was like. Now, age 10, there's so much to take In. They can't afford a hackney cab, but it's a warm evening, so they walk the two and a half miles north. It's a far cry from the countryside he's used to. The streets are noisy, crowded and dirty. The air is thick with smoke and the ground dusty and uneven. Charles and his father weave their way through street hawkers with baskets full of flowers, pies, turnips and stuff. Stinking fish. A cartoned horse rattles past without a care for what may lie in its way. Do keep up, Charlie urges his father, and Charles hurries after him. Heart pounding, he notices a smartly dressed man walking up to a pile of rags on the floor. He drops a penny into the rags and the rags come to life. They're children. Their arms look like sticks and their hands resemble claws. Fighting each other for the meager donation, they finally make it to Bayham street and the small, flat fronted terrace which is to be their new home. Feeling a million miles away from the hop fields of Kent, Charles, his siblings, his mother, father, maid and a lodger will call this place home for now.
- [10:03]
Peter Frankopan
So here's Dickens in the city with which he's going to become so closely associated. And from day one, he's a sharp observer, watching the people of London going about their sometimes difficult lives. Afri, you're a Londoner, did you grow up with the hustle and bustle? Was it something that you came to and the scale and the size of London, or is that something you just grew up with when you were small?
- [10:23]
Afua Hirsch
I am a Londoner. I've lived almost all my life in London, but I grew up in Wimbledon and I feel like that's actually an interesting question because Dickens would probably have regarded Wimbledon as a village outside London. And definitely in his day it was. I mean, people were being evacuated to not far away from Wimbledon in the war. It's become urban more recently. And I maybe can relate a bit to that first experience of actually going into the city. And I do wonder, actually, if we should be grateful that Dickens spent that part of his childhood somewhere so rural, because he did become a Londoner, but he always had that slight outside lens.
- [11:00]
Peter Frankopan
I think outsiders in history are always quite good at having a fresh set of eyes. But it must have been for Charles Dickens, overwhelming, dazzling, disturbing, frightening, because also this is not just a big city, it's one that's growing incredibly quickly. So we mentioned that Dickens is born during the height of the Napoleonic War. Now the war's over, but suddenly you have hundreds of thousands of men coming back to England, from service, from fighting and the search for jobs, the ways in which new technologies and new industries are driving urbanization. So at the Beginning of the 19th century, London is a, of about a million people. And by the end of the century it's more like 6 million. So there's huge amounts of building and what counts as the city starts to grow and grow and grow.
- [11:43]
Afua Hirsch
And the missing piece I feel from this story often is the empire. Because Britain was during this whole century in an era of massive imperial expansion and that was bringing money in, that was funding these building projects. I mean, during Dickens lifetime, the Embankment went from being this muddy, filthy riverbed to being this built up fort, structured part of London that facilitated more property development, more trade. King's Cross and Euston went from being fields to being these big railway stations. And even though all this money is coming in from the empire and all this building and all of this new wealth, the gap between rich and poor is more extreme than ever in London. And he's seeing it at very close hand. All the more so because he occupies this kind of precarious position. He's not from poverty, but constantly teetering on the brink of it.
- [12:39]
Peter Frankopan
It's interesting you mention about empire and I think it's. You can't argue with that. The reason why London grows is to do with resources, wealth and materials, exploitation, all those things. But funnily enough, Dickens is quite useful as a guide to Victorian England because he doesn't really mention that, you know, for Dickens, London is the world, you know, you don't need to look beyond.
- [12:58]
Afua Hirsch
And that's problematic because he also wrote the story that has educated generations of us about what Victorian London and England was. And by erasing that of where the money was coming from, what was happening outside, he's helped inadvertently further this idea that it was separate, that you could understand London and England and Britain as an entity apart.
- [13:22]
Peter Frankopan
It is a place where life is cheap and life is short. So by the middle of the 19th century, life expectancy for the city as a whole is 37. And that's below the national average. And it's just about half of that, you know, less than 20 in parts of the East End. So those high mortality rates are to do with malnourishment, they're to do with disease, tuberculosis, smallpox, cholera, rickets, you know, all those kinds of things that happen when you have lots of people jostling side by side without enough resources to go around. But you know, at one point, Dickens's mother takes him to go and see Quintuplets who've been born dead to a poor neighbor, which is sort of itself such an odd thing to do, a sort of curiosity. But it's because, I guess, death, mortality are much more normalized. People's expectations are different. But it makes a huge impression on Dickens, who writes later and says, I was introduced to the five deceased young people lying side by side on a clean cloth on the chest of drawers, reminding me by homely association of pigs feet as they are usually displayed in a neat tripe shop. And that kind of experience of seeing suffering, death, poverty, you're not asking questions about empire or where this is all coming from. It's just that's what daily life looks like.
- [14:37]
Afua Hirsch
This was a city and a country where there was no safety net, there was no welfare state, no unemployment benefit, no social housing, no health care. There were workhouses or the gutter, and the workhouses were massively underfunded and didn't have the resources to help everyone. Undesirable a choice as they were. But it's interesting that Dickens had the empathy and the attention to notice and really start documenting those small daily tragedies. I mean, the death of quintuplets is not a small tragedy, but the way he writes about it as if they were pig's feet in a trit shop, I think captures both the horror of that and also the ordinariness of it.
- [15:19]
Peter Frankopan
So Dickens arrival in London in 1822 marks the beginning of a new chapter in his young life, but not in the way he'll have wanted it to. That's because things are about to take a turn for the worse. All thanks to the actions of his father.
- [15:54]
Afua Hirsch
The Dickens family are standing right on the poverty trap door. John earns a decent wage, but he spends far beyond his means. And it's his family who pay the price.
- [16:06]
Peter Frankopan
They have to move regularly around Camden and Somerstown, running away from John's creditors. And there's no money to send Charles to school. Then in 1823, John's debts catch up with him and he's sent to Marshalsea Debtors Prison across the River Thames in Southwark.
- [16:22]
Afua Hirsch
The debtors prison. Peter this is what all respectable families desperately sought to avoid. Your family was actually allowed to come and stay with you in a debtors prison. And after a while, Elizabeth and the younger children do move into Marshalsea with John because they've got nowhere else to live. But it's more the shame that this is really an indictment on your character in Victorian England. It's not just that you lack financial intelligence or the ability to manage your resources but you've now fallen from the ranks of respectable society.
- [16:55]
Peter Frankopan
But then I looked at John Dickens and his debt was about £40 to a local baker. And it's always hard to compare numbers in the past and today, but that's about four and a half thousand pounds. That's a lot of cakes and bread.
- [17:06]
Afua Hirsch
That'S a lot of baked goods.
- [17:08]
Peter Frankopan
I'm not quite sure how it is that he clocked that sort of debt up. But most of the prisoners in Marshalsea are there for very small amounts of money. But John Dickens is not one of the people whose, you know, just defaulted on a small amount and a small repayment and you're obliged to stay there to earn your debt back and pay it back and it accrues interest. So it's terrible conditions. But if you're a young boy and a young man coming to see your father in those conditions, you know, you can see that the complications that might lead to not just your sense of self but also your ideas about what your father has done to the family as a whole.
- [17:43]
Afua Hirsch
And it's affecting the siblings in different ways. And actually in a reversal of what we tend to expect with Victorian families, Fanny Dickens sister is actually able to maintain her education. She's a talented pianist and she's training at the newly founded prestigious Royal College of Music. But it's Dickens who the family decide now that they have no other source of income, is the child who should be sent out to work.
- [18:10]
Peter Frankopan
Of course there's the shame of Dickens going to visit his father in prison. And it's not just that his father has made a mistake, it's that, as we'll see, his father makes mistakes again and again and it's always the same one. And it's that sort of Dickensian Del Boy, you know, this time next year we're going to be millionaires. It's all going to be okay. The idea that you might reset and get back up on your feet and show everybody your true self, it's very confusing for a young man. February 1824. Hungerford Stairs, Banks of the River Thames, London. Charles Dickens heart sinks as he walks up the rickety wooden stairs for yet another shift at the blacking warehouse. He couldn't dislike this job more. 10 hours a day, 6 days a week for a pitiful 6 shillings. As he makes his way to his workstation, taking care not to put his foot through any of the rotting floorboards, he curses his parents. This is their fault. A family friend had suggested Charles might work here, a vain attempt to help them out of their debt. And his parents had agreed. In fact, they'd been positively happy with the proposal. If it isn't the young gentleman, mocks Dickens colleague Bob Fagin. This is what they call Dickens because he tries to look smart. He wants to look like he doesn't belong here. He doesn't. He smiles thinly and attempts to smooth down the suit he wears every day. He puts on his apron, sticky from the glue of previous shifts, and his stomach rumbles. He's always hungry. Dickens sets to work, covering the already filled earthenware pots of blacking with a piece of oil paper and then blue paper on top. He ties string around the pot, folding the top edges of the paper over. Fagin had shown him how to create the perfect knot in the string once a few pots had been wrapped. The next task is to paste the warren's label onto each one and then around and around again, accompanied by the rats squeaking in the basement. He was promised lessons at lunchtime so that he could have an education of sorts, but they've already fallen by the wayside. Charles feels an agony in his soul. He's plagued by shame and thinks bitterly of his parents. How could they have done this to him, a boy of such promise? He needs to be in school. This cannot possibly be his destiny. Something has got to change.
- [20:49]
Afua Hirsch
You know, we often use a bit of dramatic license for these scenes, Peter, but in this case, so much of this comes from Dickens own description of how traumatic he found that period. He later wrote of his experiences in the factory. No words can express the secret agony of my soul, the sense I had of being utterly neglected and hopeless, of the shame I felt in my position. My whole nature was penetrated with grief and humiliation. And it's about a year and a half he works in that factory. But it does seem to have been incredibly formative in his relationships with his parents, which are permanently damaged by that sense of betrayal, in his insecurity about his social position, which he never really feels fully secure in again, and, of course, in his work, because now he's really experienced life pretty close to the bottom.
- [21:42]
Peter Frankopan
I think the two things that are interesting is first, that kind of rage that it builds up in him, you know, that he does feel that he wants to get out and that drives him. But I suppose the second thing is that he's hardly alone, right? There are so many other people in that position who maybe have the similar drive but don't get out. But Dickens has something special about him that pushes him onwards. And in fact, he sort of uses that to propel him. I mean, again, it's something we've talked about with lots of the figures we talk about in legacy. Complicated relations with fathers in particular, but also the ways in which people are put down early and made to suffer can give this very strong sense of drive. But, you know, for every single person that makes it out of that, there are so many that don't. I mean, I wonder whether you think that Dickens is exceptional and where that exceptional quality comes from.
- [22:29]
Afua Hirsch
For me, this is such an important moment in his life because just thinking about what it takes to survive an experience like that, of course you don't know you're going to come out of it successful. You don't know your life is going to be different from the other people who are stuck in that factory until they die. You have to do something to strengthen yourself. And in his case, I think harden yourself. I think he kind of hardened his heart and shut something down that would have made him vulnerable to that despair and that, for me, and it's not an excuse at all, but might help to explain later some of the things he does that seem very cruel and difficult to understand. But for now, he does make it out and he seems to forgive his parents and they do continue to be part of his life, but it is not the end of his money troubles and having to bail his parents out. In fact, later in life he actually takes out a newspaper ad declaring publicly that he will not be responsible for his father's debts. I mean, what a thing to have to do.
- [23:34]
Peter Frankopan
So John Dickens keeps borrowing money, he keeps writing to Charles Dickens, keeps writing to Charles Dickens friends to ask for cash. And I do take your point, Aphrodite, that it drives him forward, but he doesn't talk about this stuff. You know, he spends years not addressing or not sharing, I guess, his early experiences until he discusses it with his friend and his first biographer, John Forster, a couple of decades later. But I think that the way that his father behaves is one thing, but his mother makes him go back to the factory. And although Dickens writes later that he's not resentful or angry, for I know how these things have worked together to make me who I am. I never afterwards forgot, I shall never forget. I never can forget that my mother was warm for me being sent back. So he blames his mother for what he had to go and do.
- [24:20]
Afua Hirsch
He does write again and again the character of the abused, mistreated child. I mean, without that experience we might have never got Oliver, Florence or Little Dorrit or Tiny Tim, Pip. They're such iconic characters. And going back to what he went through, you can see how that sense of betrayal manifests in the way he tells a story through a child's lens.
- [24:44]
Peter Frankopan
But Dickens, despite all of that, is remembered as a happy, mischievous boy keen on pranks, you know, so he and his friends, they pretend to be beggars on the streets of Camden, to beg from rich women. He might have had miserable times, but he's not a miserable boy. So biographies describe him as good company. He's a snappy dresser, he's clever, he's a natural performer. And by the time he's 15, he's starting to use some of that charm, I think, is what that really brings him. When he's 15, he goes to work becoming a clerk for a law firm in Gray's Inn Road. And he and the other clerks like to flick cherry stones at well dressed passersby to mob up or tease the people who are more successful is a way of engaging, I think, with the idea that there is a social hierarchy that you're trapped into.
- [25:29]
Afua Hirsch
And he's walking to work from his home in Northampton, the family still moving around regularly as he did to the factory and as his characters later will. And as he's walking, he's creating these short scenes and character sketches of what he sees on those walks. Then, in 1829, having been doing this writing for himself, he now gets his first writing job. And there's nothing that creative or sexy about it. He's a shorthand reporter in a doctor's court. One of his jobs is to select and pass on the juiciest cases from this court to the newspapers.
- [26:06]
Peter Frankopan
So that's basically how we teach history at university, right? Find the best short bits, find the best nuggets and work out where there's a narrative to tell in those. And for someone who turns out to be incredibly creative and thinking of storytelling, Dickens uses this experience as a way of working out how to frame stories, how to explain beginnings and ends, how to work out where the balance is between things that are funny and things that are tragic.
- [26:30]
Afua Hirsch
I have a little. You were a court reporter because I was the legal correspondent for the Guardian, were you? That was my first proper newspaper job. And people don't realize, I think sometimes that to take something as potentially dry as legal proceedings and turn it into something that any layperson could read, one, but two find enjoyable and interesting requires a lot of storytelling. There's a lot of work of translating these obscure concepts into something relatable and engaging. And it is good training for being a much more creative kind of storyteller.
- [27:07]
Peter Frankopan
And what about his love life? Aphwa? So Dickens, when he's 18 in 1830, meets and falls head over heels for Maria Beadnell, who's two years older and the daughter of a wealthy banker, which in practice means she's too good for a lowly court reporter. But do you think that that idea of passionate falling in love is to do with the fact that he's blurring the lines between fiction and reality, aiming for someone who probably is both too old and too posh and too rich?
- [27:32]
Afua Hirsch
Yeah. And also speaks to his social aspiration that he, a bit like his father, kind of sees himself as a gentleman or wants to be. I don't know how much it was really Maria Beadnell or how much it was the idea of her and the idea of being a partner to this woman that he fell in love with. But he definitely was smitten. At least he thought he was. And he wrote that I have never loved and never can love any human creature breathing but yourself. And he became pretty bitter about the way that relationship worked out, partly because.
- [28:07]
Peter Frankopan
She played along and then dumped him at his 21st birthday party. Years later, he writes to Marie and says that he'd been reluctant to show emotion with his children as well as with people around him. And I guess it's because he had had such a enclosed, difficult childhood that. That ability to express yourself honestly and clearly.
- [28:25]
Afua Hirsch
Yes, but he blamed her. He wrote to her and said it was her fault that he'd becomes emotionally suppressed and cold because she had wasted these tender years in which he had loved her.
- [28:37]
Peter Frankopan
He's not the first man to blame a woman for his own shortcomings, is he?
- [28:40]
Afua Hirsch
And he won't be the last.
- [28:41]
Peter Frankopan
No. But we're gonna talk about the way in which he describes women in his different books. I think it's really important about how one tries to explain that. Whether that's just a product of his time, whether that's Dickens own personal experiences. But, you know, the frustrated first love is something that you can feel, I think, in some of his books about that feeling that he's owed something by a pretty rich woman. And that feeling of reject is one that comes back again and again. So it's often overlooked that Dickens first trade was as a journalist. And from his early 20s he starts writing for newspapers and was a really effective reporter and commentator. But he might have preferred to have a career in the theatre. And he loved the theatre. He loved acting. He even managed to get an audition at Covent Garden Theatre, but had a bad cold and so he missed it and the chance went. But he then moves from being a doctor's court reporter to a reporter for a parliamentary newspaper, staying up late into the night to scribble down speeches in shorthand and then write them up. But that brings him a lifelong contempt for Parliament and for politicians.
- [29:42]
Afua Hirsch
It's a really interesting time that he's reporting on parliamentary proceedings, because the poor laws are being debated in Parliament. They'll eventually be passed later in 1834. And this is also the beginning of Dickens professional identity as a social reformer. Somebody who has really strong views about the unfairness and injustice of these laws and begins to formulate a vision for the kind of society he thinks would be fairer, which he describes as a democratic, kingless society, free from the shackles of class rule. You can see why he pops up in Marx.
- [30:20]
Peter Frankopan
Uncle Carl sees in Dickens the sort of factories that driven urbanization and, you know, really the fact that the means of production are all controlled by elites who try to keep the poor in their place. And I think that the challenge is when you have such high mortality, such massive income inequalities and such bad living conditions, and then debates in Parliament about how to keep the poor in their place and how to make sure that labour is available at the best possible prices is a challenge.
- [30:45]
Afua Hirsch
I mean, we'll talk about this more. But it's really interesting that he has those views because he isn't a straightforward socialist or somebody of very progressive ideology. His views are quite mixed and quite nuanced. So he is relentless in his belief in social reform. But even though Marx can selectively cite him, I think it's important to say that he wasn't necessarily somebody who would have sided with the modern left in politics.
- [31:12]
Peter Frankopan
No, but what he does do is he gives a voice to the poor, he gives a voice to the oppressed, he gives a voice to children, he gives a voice to people who don't have novels being written about them. You know, there's none of the genteel Jane Austen of looking at polite country societies and who gets to marry whom. What the local vicar might be up to. Dickens is quite revolutionary, I think, in the idea of recognizing that societies are mixed and they're stratified. That vocalization of city life is something that Dickens is a pioneer of and changes the landscape of writing as a result. But I think he gets there not just because of his Family experiences, but because of his day job as a reporter and as someone who has to work and has to earn a living. And Dickens, you know, one thing that you can say about him is that he really does put in a shift. You know, he writes and writes and writes. And that work ethic is something I think that's come from his childhood.
- [32:01]
Afua Hirsch
Absolutely remarkable work ethic. And as we go through his life, we'll see more and more how ceaseless it is. But he doesn't want to put all that hard work into telling other people's stories. What he really wants to do is create his own. And he knows he can write now. He knows he can get published. But as a reporter, the question now is, can he pluck up the courage to find a way into a new world of writing the stories he wants to tell?
- [32:53]
Peter Frankopan
It's the winter of 1833, and of course, because this is a Dickens story, it's cold and it's Snowy. Dickens is 21 years old and he creeps down Johnson's Court, a dark alley off Fleet street in London, and he is delivering a manuscript. Let's let him describe how he did it. Afwa.
- [33:12]
Narrator
Stealthily, one evening at twilight, with fear and trembling, into a dark letterbox in a dark office up a dark court.
- [33:22]
Peter Frankopan
He had waited until the office was shut, and he sticks the manuscript through the letterbox of Monthly magazine and then scurries away. And as he waits to find out if he's going to be published for the first time, he writes to a friend. I'm so dreadfully nervous that my hand shakes to such an extent as to prevent my writing a word legibly. No one forgets the first time they were published. Do you remember the first time you saw your words in print?
- [33:45]
Afua Hirsch
I do.
- [33:45]
Peter Frankopan
You do? You're smiling. I tell you.
- [33:46]
Afua Hirsch
I was a teenager and I. I wrote an article for the Voice newspaper, which is Britain's oldest black newspaper.
- [33:52]
Peter Frankopan
Wow, that's a good debut.
- [33:53]
Afua Hirsch
It was really cool. And even though I wrote the piece and I was so proud of it, it was when I actually held a copy. And this was before online. It was 1995, I think, holding a copy of this newspaper in my hand. It was only then that it really dawned on me that it had been published. You know, it's like a weird cognitive dissonance. You have to really see it and feel it to believe it. What about you? What was your first time in print?
- [34:18]
Peter Frankopan
My first time in print was writing a review of a choral concert. I did lots of music when I was young and was asked to write one. And I had no idea how to review a choral performance. I had no idea how to review anything. So I read lots of other people's reviews and probably wrote something that was very generic. But seeing something in print, it's kind of amazing, really. I think you assume that things aren't gonna get printed. So Dickens, when he goes to Johnson's Court and writes to his friend afterwards, it's as much the excitement that might get printed as will someone take the opportunity to cut me down. That's why his hand is shaking. He's worried that it's going to be no. But he does get it published. And that first story is a comic piece called A Dinner at Poplar Walk. And it fills nine pages of the magazine. And he buys a copy from the shop in the Strand and walks over to Westminster. And he says, that turned into a half an hour walk because my eyes were so dimmed with joy and pride. But they couldn't bear the street and they were not fit to be seen there. You know, that's quite something for one of the most famous writers in history to feel moved to tears and didn't want to meet anybody because he's worried he's going to start blubbing in front of them. So the magazine where he publishes is called the Monthly Magazine, and they want more and they're keen to get him to write a string of stories. And as is quite usual for the time, most newspaper articles don't have a byline at all. Dickens uses an assumed name or a nickname. And the nickname he comes up with is Boz. And that's because when his younger brother Moses was growing up, he had a cold and his name came out as Boses. And so that's why he became known in the family as Boz. So Dickens is using basically his brother's nickname to get his pieces published. And this is also at a time when publishing and literacy are booming as well.
- [35:58]
Afua Hirsch
It's huge boom time for newspapers. I mean, modern journalists can only dream of this kind of exponential growth. The Times sells 10,000 copies in 1834, and by 1844, a decade later, that's more than doubled, doubled to 23,000 copies. And by 1851 it's doubled again to 40,000. And even though literacy is on the rise, not everyone can read and write. But newspapers get read out in public places so that people can listen. There's just huge appetite to be across the news for this new mechanism for being plugged into what's going on in society. And he is really riding that wave. He publishes more of his sketches as well as his day to day reporting. And he's beginning to build up a fan base and a publisher begins knocking on the door.
- [36:47]
Peter Frankopan
And that publisher gets him to put all of his articles together into something called Sketches by Boz, illustrative of everyday life and everyday people. And it's published in two volumes on the 8th of February in 1836, the day after he turns 24. So he's still a young man, but remember that life expectancy in London is only 37, so you know, he's not quite as young as when we felt like we were. We were 24, just starting out. And those sketches by Boz are really important, informing people about what life looks like for different kinds of people. So there's one in a gin shop, another one in a church, one written about Christmas dinner. But the most striking ones are the stories from the streets. And that's really important because the working classes are just not being written about like this.
- [37:29]
Afua Hirsch
And he's not shying away from the bleakest places. His last story in this series is from a visit to Newgate Jail, at the time a notorious jail in London. And he visits the women's cell and then what passes hardly meets up to its name as a school for imprisoned children. Perhaps you never know. Catching a glimpse of the future. Artful dodger. And he finishes by looking into a condemned cell where those who are awaiting death penalty are imprisoned. And he sees this small cell and imagines what someone imprisoned there, facing his final night on earth, might go through.
- [38:12]
Narrator
Hush. What sound was that? He starts upon his feet. It cannot be two, yet hark. Two quarters have struck the third, the fourth. It is six hours left. He buries his face in his hands and throws himself on the bench, worn with watching and excitement. He sleeps and the same unsettled state of mind pursues him in his dreams. He wakes, cold and wretched. The dull grey light of morning is stealing into the cell. Confused by his dreams, he starts from his uneasy bed in momentary uncertainty. It is but momentary. Every object in the narrow cell is too frightfully real to admit of doubt or mistake. He is the condemned again, guilty and despairing. And in two hours more we'll be dead.
- [39:08]
Peter Frankopan
So, I mean, that's quintessentially Dickens, you know, the use of language, his sentence construction and, you know, describing what's happening from the point of view of the condemned man. So I mean, it's kind of amazing that Dickens in his early manifestations already has A kind of style that is recognizable. But those sketches by Boz, it's very well reviewed and it also sells well and it's a good start to what's going to become a memorable year.
- [39:32]
Afua Hirsch
And it was a memorable year. Peter, what was going on in 1836? Well, elsewhere, Darwin was returning from his five year voyage on the Beagle, but Dickens was preoccupied with matters closer to home. Two years earlier, Dickens had met a young woman called Catherine Hogarth whose family were from Edinburgh. Her father, George Hogarth, was the editor of the Chronicles evening paper and a friend of Walter Scott's. So Dickens, through his courtship of Catherine, is now being welcomed into this literary respectable family and quietly falls in love with this quiet 19 year old young woman and within six months they're engaged. So it's not a very long courtship.
- [40:18]
Peter Frankopan
No, it's quite speedy and you know, we know she's not pregnant or anything like that, but it's a little bit strange or mysterious, I guess, about what it is that he sees with Catherine. I suppose one obvious answer is that it provides order. You know, the Hogarths are well connected, Catherine is young. Dickens is becoming, you know, well known, moderately successful I suppose, still at this stage, but maybe because he's had not so much control over his youth that when he finds Catherine, he thinks having a wife and a family would allow him to detach from his own upbringing. So on 2 April 1836, Dickens and Catherine marry at St Luke's Church in Chelsea and they set off on honeymoon. But it's not quite as romantic as one might have hoped.
- [41:00]
Afua Hirsch
April 4, 1836, Chalk Kent. Sitting by the fireside in the small clapperboard cottage rented for their honeymoon, Catherine Dickens works on her embroidery. Little more than two days into her marriage, she didn't expect to be spending quite so much time alone. Ever since they met on her new husband's 23rd birthday last year, she'd known they would do things his way. It's his job to work and he works hard and it's hers to keep him happy. He's told her it's her kind looks and gentle manner that he so enjoys seeing when he's finished for the day. He has no patience for any of her moods. He's told her before, you ought not to be feeling low, little mouse. You're very ungrateful if you are. She's not ungrateful. They do love each other, she's certain of that. But it seems the options for the week are long walks around the Kent marshes, sitting alone Whilst he writes or marital relations. She gets up from the seat by the fire to stretch. She's been bent over her embroidery for too long. Catching her reflection in the mirror, she sees a young pretty woman with a good figure for luck, voluptuous blue eyes and her hair a deep brunette. She jumps when she sees Charles standing behind her. I am worn out, he says, but I shall have to work until the early hours. Catherine sighs more audibly than she means to. Now, now, he says. Don't be, cos it's their pet word for cross. He turns his back on her, heading into the room that he has commandeered as his study. As the door closes behind him, Catherine wonders if this is a sign of things to come.
- [42:52]
Peter Frankopan
I mean, not great to be working on a honeymoon, but I mean, I guess two things. First, no iPhones. So, you know, it's quite boring.
- [43:00]
Afua Hirsch
I mean, isn't this kind of the idea of having a companion that it's someone you enjoy spending time with?
- [43:06]
Peter Frankopan
Well, I'm familiar with the theory and I'm very lucky that I do have one of those, as it happens. But, you know, I think that that idea that Dickens has to work is probably partly to do his work ethic and it's partly to do with, you know, when you're on your honeymoon or any point you've got your long walks, sitting alone and doing embroidery, it's. How do you kill the time when it gets dark at 4 or 5 o'clock in the afternoon? This is April. The light goes. There's a bit of marital relations, as you very politely put it, aphwa, but even that on honeymoon, I suppose, you know, doesn't take up. Why are you looking at me like that? Doesn't take up that long.
- [43:37]
Afua Hirsch
I mean, I'm just laughing because, you know, young virgins in the Victorian era were. Weren't necessarily expected to have very wild ideas about sexual fulfillment either. So that was probably not going to be the most exciting thing. I don't actually have any beef with Dickens having work to do. I mean, if that was me, I would have work to do. I guess it just points to an issue which is pervasive throughout this era in his life, that it was so asymmetrical. Men like Dickens had a lot of work to do and we're grateful that he did it, but women didn't. They weren't expected to write or have any other projects, really, apart from a few very wealthy, privileged philanthropists and the very few women who were breaking through as novelists at the time. But, you Know, the idea of being expected to sit there bent over your embroidery all evening, super dull, while your husband's off creating interesting worlds and fulfilling his dreams as a writer, it was just so unfair for women, really.
- [44:34]
Peter Frankopan
I get that. But at least he's there in the room writing, rather than playing bridge or gin rummy with with his officer friends and drinking boards and gambling the house away. So, I mean, at least he's there. I mean, I guess it's that the question is, does Dickens feel that this is his moment? Those kind of creative juices are flowing. He's in love, he's married, he's an adult, he wants to earn money, you know, and so that work ethic, we can, I think, be slightly down on it.
- [44:57]
Afua Hirsch
I'm not judging him harshly, I think I'm judging the social norms harshly. That it was unfair that women were expected to sit around looking pretty and then bearing endless numbers of children.
- [45:07]
Peter Frankopan
Correct.
- [45:07]
Afua Hirsch
While men followed their dreams.
- [45:09]
Peter Frankopan
So that honeymoon in chalk. When it's done and dusted, the young couple return to London. Dickens is convinced that he's in love with his wife, Catherine. But there's already a nagging doubt somewhere in his head that maybe they're chalk and cheese.
- [45:21]
Afua Hirsch
That's for the future, though, because he is now becoming admired and publishers are literally knocking down his door, offering him deals, asking for more of his sketches. And the stage is set for Charles Dickens to become something more, much, much bigger than a sketch writer, a literary superstar.
- [45:42]
Peter Frankopan
Get ready for Dickens mania. That's next time on Legacy.
- [46:03]
Afua Hirsch
Follow Legacy on the Wondery App, Amazon Music or wherever you get your podcasts. You can binge seasons early and ad free right now by joining Wondery plus in the Wondery app or on Apple Podcasts. Before you go, tell us about yourself by completing a short survey@wondery.com survey from Wondery in Goalhanger. This is the first episode in our series about Charles Dickens.
- [46:27]
Peter Frankopan
A quick note about our dialogue. We can't know everything that was said or done behind closed doors, particularly when we go far back in history. But our scenes are written using the best available sources. So even if a scene or conversation has been recreated for dramatic effect, it's still based on biographical research.
- [46:45]
Afua Hirsch
We've used many sources for this series, including Claire Tomalin, A Life, Simon Callow, Charles Dickens, Jenny Hartley, the Selected Letters of Charles Dickens, Dickens and Lucinda Hawksley.
- [46:58]
Peter Frankopan
Charles Dickens and special thanks to Emma Harper and the Charles Dickens Museum.
- [47:03]
Afua Hirsch
Legacy is hosted by me, Afwahersh and me, Peter Frankopan. Scene Writing by Stephanie Power for Goal Hanger.
- [47:09]
Peter Frankopan
Our series producers are Jane Morgan and Anoushka Lewis. Robin Scott Elliott is associate producer. Our production managers are Izzy Reid and Alex Hack Roberts. The executive producers are Tony palace and Jack Davenport.
- [47:23]
Afua Hirsch
This series of Legacy is sound, designed and engineered by Will Farmer.
- [47:27]
Peter Frankopan
Music supervision is by Scott Velasquez for Fritz and Sink.
- [47:31]
Afua Hirsch
Our producer for Wondery is Emanuela Quinote Francis and our managing producer is Rachel Sibley.
- [47:36]
Peter Frankopan
Executive producers for Wondery are Estelle Doyle, Chris Bourne, Morgan Jones and Marshall Louis.