Mayhew let his subjects speak in their own words and reported his findings with a humanist’s eye. He told of Jack, a West End crossing-sweep, “a good-looking lad with a pair of large, mild eyes”; of his friend Gander, who earned extra money with his acrobatic “catenwheeling.” He described their room in the lodging house that was as clean as it could be and the old woman who cared for them as well as she was able. He told the story of the drunken prostitute China Emma, the “shriveled and famine-stricken” woman lying in “a hole … more like a beast in his lair than a human being in her home.”
It was in this world that the model for
Solomon fled to New York, but, in lieu of the notorious criminal, the authorities transported his wife and children to Tasmania. “Determined to brave it all for the sake of my dear wife and children,” Solomon sailed to join them. For want of a warrant, it was a year before Tasmanian officials could arrest him and send him back to England.
Solomon’s trial at the Old Bailey was one of the sensations of the day. But unlike Fagin, Solomon did not hang. Found guilty on two counts of theft, he was sentenced to fourteen years’ transportation and promptly sent back to Tasmania. Solomon lived out the rest of his days there. The man said at one point to be worth £30,000 died in his sixties, estranged from his family and leaving an estate of just £70.
But as well as drawing on the accounts of other peoples’ lives for inspiration, Dickens knew from his own experience how quickly a man could slide into degradation. At the same age at which Oliver Twist is confronted with the terrifying darkness of the world, Dickens had become a child laborer. His time in a blacking factory, necessitated by his father’s bankruptcy, was brief. When the family’s fortunes recovered some months later, Dickens returned to school. His parents never spoke of it again. He himself kept it a close secret, though the memory never left him. He wanted always, he said, “to present [the poor] in a favorable light to the rich.” His enduring fear of a return to poverty compelled him to work ever harder.
Dickens-mania gripped rich and poor alike. Installments of his works were read out to crowds of the urban poor, who had clubbed together to hire the latest episode from the circulating library. Dickens made the public laugh and he made them cry. His characters were as real to them as life. At New York Harbor, crowds pressed around disembarking passengers to ask about the fate of
“I have great faith in the poor,” Dickens wrote to a friend in 1844. “I shall never cease, I hope, until I die, to advocate their being made as happy and as wise as the circumstances … may admit.” In his fantastical exaggerations the radical philanthropist showed the bleakness that faced so many. For some readers, it was an illustration of their lives; it made others realize how wretched such lives could be. One American reviewer considered Dickens’ works a force for reform far more effective than anything the “open assaults of Radicalism or Chartism” could achieve.
Dickens was renowned for his wit and his marvelous talent for mimicry. He developed an extraordinarily successful second career giving public readings of his works. His mammoth tours across England and America sold out in every city. He turned his flock of offspring into an amateur theatrical troupe, performing plays in which he generally took the starring role. In the course of these ventures he met Ellen Ternan, the young actress who was the great love of his later life.
He had a reputation for oddity. He was obsessed with light, filling his brightly painted room with mirrors. When Dickens was a child, his father pointed out to him a house that, he said, would demonstrate a man’s having made it in life. So in 1856 the adult Dickens bought it—Gad’s Hill Place in Higham, Kent. He was a demanding father, while his total repudiation of his wife Catherine after over twenty years of marriage was undeniably cruel.
Dickens’ masterpiece was
