Authors: Sarah Wise

The Italian Boy (54 page)

BOOK: The Italian Boy

11.03Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub

ads

There is anecdotal evidence that as early as the age of fourteen, Charles Dickens was attempting to sell penny-a-line journalism that he had produced on a speculative basis. Samuel Carter Hall, in his 1883 memoirs,
Retrospect of a Long Life
, recalls the boy calling at the office of the newspaper the
British Press
, where Hall worked alongside Dickens’s father, John. Charles would drop off his own reports of news that, claimed Hall, had escaped the attention of the regular reporters of the
British Press
.

John Dickens had embarked on his journalistic career in the mid-1820s. He was working as a shorthand writer and reporter when the
British Press
ceased publication in the autumn of 1826; he subsequently appears to have joined the parliamentary staff of the
Morning Herald
and then the
Mirror of Parliament
, a rival to
Hansard
(the official published record of the proceedings in the Houses of Parliament), set up in 1828 by John Dickens’s brother-in-law, John Henry Barrow, the man with the
Times
connections. Another maternal uncle, Edward Barrow, was a newspaper reporter and may also have offered a helping hand to the impecunious John Dickens. Charles Dickens, meanwhile, left school in 1827, aged fifteen, and worked as a lawyer’s clerk for about two years and at seventeen or eighteen began work as a freelance shorthand reporter, renting an office at 5 Bell Yard, close by the court of Doctors Commons, where he obtained most but not all his work; he did not relinquish this office until April 1832. By some point in 1831, Charles was also working for the
Mirror of Parliament
, alongside his uncle and father. (I have followed W. J. Carlton’s attempted chronology of Dickens’s early career in
Charles Dickens: Shorthand Writer
[1926].)

Precise dates and employers (and knowledge of which stints of moonlighting overlapped with which bouts of more established, regular employment) are maddeningly hard to come by for Charles Dickens’s very early career, and even W. J. Carlton found himself flummoxed when attempting a definitive chronology—a likely result of Dickens’s own attempts to make murky his early years. Dickens rarely spoke or wrote about his pre-1834 career—1834 being the year in which he gained a full-time staff position (as parliamentary reporter) on a noteworthy publication (the
Morning Chronicle
), at a salary of five guineas a week. Presumably in reply to a specific inquiry from novelist and friend Wilkie Collins, Dickens wrote, on 6 June 1856, an uncharacteristically imprecise and unmistakably disdainful summary of his early working life: “I was put in the office of a solicitor, a friend of my father’s, and didn’t much like it; and after a couple of years (as well as I can remember) applied myself with a celestial or diabolical energy to the study of such things as would qualify me to be a first-rate parliamentary reporter.… I made my debut in the Gallery (at about 18, I suppose) engaged on a voluminous publication no longer in existence called
The Mirror of Parliament
. When the
Morning Chronicle
was purchased by Sir John Easthope and acquired a large circulation, I was engaged there, and I remained there until I found myself in a condition to relinquish that part of my labours. I left the reputation behind me of being the best and most rapid reporter ever known, and could do anything in that way under any sort of circumstances, and often did” (quoted in Carlton’s
Charles Dickens: Shorthand Writer
).

“[He] was extremely sensitive as to the possibility of any rubbish being given to the public in the form of ‘early writings’…” wrote Dickens’s sister-in-law Georgina Hogarth to H. G. Kitton, who was compiling a memorial volume of tributes to Dickens,
Charles Dickens by Pen and Pencil
. Hogarth recalled an incident when a female friend from Dickens’s late adolescence proudly presented the now famous novelist with the manuscript of a play he had written in 1833. “He made a bargain with her,” Hogarth told Kitton, “by making her a present of a Christmas Book just completed, on condition that she gave up the boyish production to him, which he had the satisfaction of putting into the fire with his own hands.” Dickens wrought a campaign of ruthless destruction on his personal archive: for all the volumes of Dickens’s letters that have been found and published, an even greater number were destroyed at his hands or by friends at his request. On 3 September 1860, he was observed building a bonfire in his garden and committing to the flames caches of letters and papers.

Furthermore, Dickens came to disapprove strongly of newspaper accounts of murderers in the dock, execution scenes, last words, and official confessions. It is difficult to date with precision this change of heart, the point at which the author of such Grand Guignol passages as the death of Bill Sikes, the murder of Nancy, and Fagin’s last night alive decided that criminals’ final hours should not be committed to print; but the conviction was certainly strongly felt by 1849. On 17 November of that year Dickens wrote to the
Times
to express his disgust at public executions. (He had recently gone to Horsemonger Lane Gaol, Newington, and reported on the dreadful public scenes at the hanging of husband and wife Charles and Maria Manning, condemned to death for killing a former lodger.) “I would place every obstacle in the way of his sayings and doings being served up in print on Sunday mornings for the perusal of families,” wrote Dickens of the executed murderer. Seven years later he expanded on this theme—claiming that the way in which the press reported the final days of murderers made killers appear noteworthy, even admirable—in two articles in his magazine,
Household Words
, “The Demeanour of Murderers” (published 14 June 1856) and “The Murdered Person” (published 11 October 1856).

A genuine change of heart, doubtless, but was it also informed by the wish to shake off his past career? The epitome of the nineteenth-century self-made man, Dickens was never generous in acknowledging sources, influences, and helping hands. He wished to appear as though he had sprung from nowhere. Hence his slightly sniffy denials in response to queries about inspirations, role models, his early years. If he had indeed been part of the tribe of shabby, opportunistic penny-a-liners who made a living, and received useful introductions, at courthouses and inquests, he is very likely to have made every effort to suppress any reminders of that past. Unless a letter by, or addressed to, Dickens comes to light or a manuscript memoir from a contemporary of his early reporting years turns up, the authorship of “The Most Deathlike Silence” must remain, like so much else in this case, a mystery.

Chapter Twelve: A Newgate Stink

1
. Reprinted in [Harmer?],
The History of the London Burkers
(1832).

2
. “A Visit to Newgate,”
Sketches by Boz
(1836).

3
.
Facts Relating to the Punishment of Death in the Metropolis
by Edward Gibbon Wakefield (1831); [Harmer?],
Old Bailey Experience
(1833);
The Hangmen of England
by Horace Bleackley (1929). The condemned cells stood near to where the Old Bailey’s current service road abuts Newgate Street.

4
. Quoted in
The Life and Work of Astley Cooper
by R. C. Brock, p. 15.

5
. Forty-eight-year-old Wontner had only one leg, after a fall from a horse in 1821; he would die in 1833 and his successor, William Cope, would prove incompetent.

6
.
Report and Evidence of the Select Committee Appointed to Inquire into the Cause of the Increase in the Number of Commitments and Convictions in London and Middlesex
(1828), p. 307.

7
. [Harmer?],
Old Bailey Experience
, p. 339.

8
. Corporation of London Records Office,
Report Delivered to the Court of Aldermen by the City Gaols Committee
,
on the Conduct of the Reverend the Ordinary Cotton
, Key Rep 1831/32, p. 163.

9
. If these sheets should ever come to light they would help fill the many vast gaps in what is known of the London resurrection community.

10
. [Harmer?],
Old Bailey Experience,
p. 105. In extraordinary circumstances, a “writ of error” could overturn a verdict, but only by challenging a point of law. The author of
Old Bailey Experience
could recall only one instance in which a writ of error had overturned a death sentence.

11
. Fontblanque,
England under Seven Administrations
, p. 161.

12
. Extract from
Cotton’s Book of Reports and Occurrences
, copied into the
Report Delivered to the Court of Aldermen by the City Goals Committee,
p. 163.

Chapter Fourteen: Day of Dissolution

1
. This is where the
Morning Advertiser
’s reporter was stationed; he only knew the execution had happened by the reaction of the crowd.

2
. Bean’s evidence to the Court of Aldermen, 28 December 1831; Corporation of London Records Office, Key Rep 1831/32, p. 175.

3
. Edward Pearson, porter to the Royal College of Surgeons, had bought refreshments for the twelve policemen on duty at Hosier Lane and along the route: four half-quartern loaves, 1s and 6d; one and a quarter pound of cheese, 11d; six pints of porter, 2s (manuscript diaries of William Clift, Royal College of Surgeons Library, 5 December 1831).

4
. Calcraft (1800–79) had been in the job only two years. He was originally a cobbler.

Chapter Fifteen: The Use of the Dead to the Living

1
.
Morning Advertiser
, 7 December 1831.

2
. Guthrie’s letter quoted by Jessie Dobson in her essay “The Anatomising of Criminals,”
Annals of the Royal College of Surgeons of England
9, no. 2 (August 1951): 112.

3
. Letter forwarded to Tuson from the police, Public Record Office, Metropolitan Police Outgoing Correspondence, 3 December 1831–16 March 1832, MEPO 1/8/10163-12032.

4
.
Times
, 29 December 1831. Superintendent Thomas had presented, or perhaps sold, Bishop’s apprentice indentures to Egan too, which Egan claimed were signed “Thomas” Bishop; however, the killer had an elder brother called Thomas (born on 5 January 1794), and it is likely Superintendent Thomas had acquired the wrong document—or had perhaps been sold a fake memento. Needless to say, Superintendent Thomas had no right to sell these objects.
Clift’s drawing of Williams’s tattoo is to be found in his diaries, housed in the library of the Royal College of Surgeons; entry dated 5 December.

5
.
Lancet
, 14 January 1832.

6
. Gall, quoted by Elliotson in
Lancet
, 14 January 1832, as part of the report of Elliotson’s London Phrenological Society lecture on Bishop and Williams. Elliotson (1791–1868) was University College London’s first professor of the principles and practice of medicine, in 1832. He became a personal friend of Charles Dickens, and the two men shared an interest in mesmerism, the field that Elliotson moved on to when he had tired of phrenology.