We have many Dickens London walks that cover numerous areas and districts of the capital. Each of these Walking Tours of London includes biographical details about Dickens life and touches upon one of the most traumatic periods of his childhood. A period that would effect him both emotionally and creatively for the rest of his life.
Indeed, as we explain on the various London walks we conduct around Dickens London, he would return to this period of his life time and again in his fiction.
John Dickens, Charles Dickens father, was a Clerk in the Naval Pay. He was a man who could never control his spending.
In 1816 John Dickens was transferred to Chatham, near Rochester in Kent, and Charles began the happiest period of his childhood. He received an education from a young Baptist school teacher named William Giles.
But the happy years came to an abrupt end in 1821 when John was transferred back to London.
His father’s spending continued and, to try and help the ailing famly finances Charles was found work at Warrens Blacking Warehouse, whose manager was James Lamert the stepson of his mother’s sister.
To compound the misery he began working there on his twelfth birthday 7th February 1812 Charles. The factory was accoring to his later description “a crazy tumbledown house, abutting on the river and overrun with rats.”
Aged just twelve the sudden loss of his childhood proved a huge trauma for the sensitive boy who had been convinced that he was destined to become a gentleman.
Instead he now found himself sticking lids and labels on to bottles of boot blacking surrounded by men and boys from the class he would later refer to as “Shabby Genteel” for a weekly wage of six shillings.
Many years later Charles recalled:-
“My whole nature was so penetrated with the grief and humiliation that even now, famous and caressed and happy, I often forget in my dreams that I have a dear wife and children; even that I am a man and wander desolately back to that time.”
Two weeks after Charles started work John Dickens was arrested for debt and imprisoned in the Marshal Debtors Prison in Southwark.
Charles was found lodgings, first in Camden Town, then later in Lant Street, Borough, which was close to the prison.
Each morning he would visit his father and mother and the rest of the family at Marshalsea, then go to work after which he would go back to the prison before making his way back to his lodgings in Lant Street.Left to his own devices and he began exploring London.
Walks around Covent Garden and Seven Dials introduced him to the seedier side of 19th century London amnd his wanderings would later provide him with inspiration in his books.
The blacking factory inspired him in another way. He was befriended by an older boy named Bob Fagin whose name he would ater use in Oliver Twist.
The strange thing is that his father was in receipt of payments of over £6 a week from the Naval Pay Office and yet made no attempt to clear his debts. Indeed, Dickens parents confessed that they felt more comfortable and unmolested by their creditors than they had done for a long time. It appears that they didn’t want to be released.
But then in April 1824 his father’s mother died, leaving him £450 and after three months in prison John Dickens was released.
Dickens still went daily to the blacking factory, which had transferred to Chandos Street, just off Strand.
Here he now worked in the window in full view of the public. One day his father visited and had a furious row with James Lamert and Charles was sacked.
Mrs Dickens did her best to get Lamert to take the boy back and patched things up.
She said he should go back to work but his father was adamant he should have an education and he was sent to Wellington Academy on Hampstead Road.
Dickens never forgave his mother for wanting him to return and later wrote:
“I never afterwards forgot” he wrote later “I never shall forget, I never can forget, that my mother was warm for my being sent back.
