How Charles Dickens’s Troubled Childhood Influenced His Literary Output

By February 1844, Dickens could smilingly assume that his was a cue for universal joy. Earlier, the world seemed more inclined to demean or discard him. In 1823, not yet twelve and “such a little fellow” as he plaintively put it, he was removed from school and sent out to work to help defray the debts of his improvident father.

His parents, interned in the Marshalsea prison until they settled with John Dickens’s creditors, deposited Charles with a crabby crone who rented rooms to children; from Monday morning to Saturday night he pasted labels onto bottles of shoe polish in a warehouse just off the Strand, storing a small loaf and a piece of cheese in the old woman’s cupboard for his suppers. His Sunday treat was to visit his parents in the prison. After a year, a legacy enabled his father to pay off what he owed. Let out of the Marshalsea, he extricated Charles from the blacking factory, though his mother favored leaving him there.

Shamed and lastingly wounded by his ordeal, Dickens kept it a secret and only disclosed the details in a memoir that he entrusted to John Forster in 1847. His tone in this fragment of autobiography is cheerlessly ironic. “It is wonderful to me,” he wrote, “how I could have been so easily cast away at such an age”: wonderment here means numb disbelief. He was also a castaway of a peculiar kind, not the victim of a shipwreck far from home like Robinson Crusoe or Walter Gay in Dombey and Son, since he had been cast out by those who should have taken care of him.

With the same sharp-edged resentment, he described his drudgery as a professional initiation, the start of his “business life.” His task was to cover the pots with layers of paper, tidy up the edges and then, once they had attained a “pitch of perfection,” apply the printed labels. “Perfection” was his sour joke about an aesthetic standard; “pitch” made it sound as if he was already dabbling in black ink. Summing up, he declared that during this period he had “no advice, no counsel, no encouragement, no consolation, no support, from any one that I can call to mind, so help me God.” His abiding grievance punctuates this enumeration of parental failures, and the concluding oath gives the accusation a legal force.

Fifteen years later he referred in a letter to “the never-to-be-forgotten misery of that old time” and tried to forget the misery by transferring it to “a certain ill-clad, ill-fed child”—an indigent, anonymous waif he might have seen in the street, his undersized Doppelgänger. Reversing biological precedence, Wordsworth maintained that “The child is father of the man” and hoped never to lose the boyhood spirit of “natural piety” on which his poetry depended. Dickens paraphrased that declaration but dented its glad hope in a Household Words account of a childhood outing, when he described an unkempt boy whom he then identified as the “exceedingly uncomfortable and disreputable father of my present self.”

Dickens retained the fresh and vibrant vision that Charles Baudelaire envied in children, who “see everything as a novelty” and seem “always intoxicated,” yet his exhilaration was always edged with dread. In one of Wordsworth’s poems about his own early years, a boy cups his hands at his mouth and blows “mimic hootings to the silent owls / That they might answer him”; the hallooing develops into screams of delight which Wordsworth soberly summarizes as “concourse wild / Of jocund din!”

Dickens’s boys are more likely to be begging or picking pockets than romping through the landscape duetting with birds, and his closest equivalent to those poetic hootings comes in David Copperfield when a filthy dealer in used clothes—a “drunken madman” who is said to have sold himself to the devil—peppers his every utterance to David with the ejaculation “Goroo” and extends this rasping outburst into “a sort of tune…like a gust of wind.”

For Wordsworth, childhood was a paradise that was lost in time but could be regained in space, and he recovered it on his perambulations through the landscapes in which he grew up in Cumberland. Dickens, however, thought of childhood as a hell that was always liable to return from the old time to ensnare him, even though in space he made conscientious efforts to avoid it: in middle age he still looked the other way when walking past Charing Cross, so as not to see the street running down to the river where the blacking factory was located.

Two exchanges in Dombey and Son convey his conviction that his childhood, rather than being mislaid, had been stolen from him. Doctor Blimber, headmaster at the school in which the disconsolate Paul has been enrolled, asks a rhetorical question about his ailing pupil: “Shall we make a man of him?” Paul replies, “I had rather be a child,” but that is not an option. Nor is it for Edith, who cynically marries Paul’s father after his first wife dies. “When was I a child? What childhood did you ever leave to me?” she asks her mother, the raddled coquette Mrs. Skewton, who raised her with the sole purpose of beguiling and entrapping a rich man. Her mother “gave birth,” Edith says, “to a woman.”

A blithe childhood like Wordsworth’s was a luxury, as Dickens recognized when he wrote a pair of sentences that he eventually deleted from the manuscript of Little Dorrit because the truth they told was too caustic: “The poor have no childhood. It must be bought and paid for.” In the absence of anyone to pay, his Christmas story The Haunted Man and the Ghost’s Bargain shows us the unaccommodated child. A tutelary phantom points to a sleeping boy and calls him “the last, completest illustration of a human creature,” “abandoned to a worse condition than the beasts,” unalleviated by any “humanising touch.” The child is the phantom when young, and in looking back he echoes Dickens’s lament in his memoir. “No mother’s self-denying love, no father’s counsel, aided me,” he says; he compares himself, as Dickens might have done, to a bird expelled from the nest to scavenge for itself.

Dickens endows the infants in his novels with a desolate foreknowledge of what awaits them. Mr. Chillip, the physician who delivers David Copperfield, later has a child of his own, “a weazen little baby, with a heavy head that it couldn’t hold up, and two weak staring eyes, with which it seemed to be always wondering why it had ever been born,” and in Bleak House Caddy Jellyby’s baby is a “tiny old-faced mite,” sadly pensive in its crib. One of the Spirits who visits Scrooge temporizes between the first and last ages of man. He is “a strange figure—like a child; yet not so like a child as like an old man, viewed through some supernatural medium, which gave him the appearance of having receded from the view, and being diminished to a child’s proportions.”

Dickens has been reproached for not allowing his characters to grow and change; he could hardly do so, because he saw life as circular rather than developmental. Beginning and end conjoin to squeeze the middle. Mrs. Skewton, for instance, wears a traveling robe “embroidered and braided like an old baby’s,” and Little Nell’s grandfather naively falls prey to gamblers because he is a “grey-haired child.” The emotionally unawakened Sally Brass in The Old Curiosity Shop has “passed her life in a kind of legal childhood”; along the way she manages to produce an illegitimate daughter, who is equally stunted—”an old-fashioned child,” she has apparently been “at work from her cradle.” A second childhood may perhaps be happier than the first, since at least it will have a definitive terminus.

In A Tale of Two Cities Sydney Carton asks the elderly banker Lorry if in old age childhood seems remote. Lorry touchingly replies that the closer he gets to the end, the nearer he feels to the beginning: it is “one of the kind smoothings and preparings of the way.” The sentiment recurs in The Mystery of Edwin Drood, where fond recollections of “nursery time” in Cloisterham have a second coming when those who grew up there reach their “dying hours.”

In an essay on his frequent visits to the Paris morgue, Dickens speaks of childhood as an “impressible time”: his word imagines an imprint, an indentation that leaves a mark like that of inky type on a blank page, rather than a vivid unfocused sensuous impression. “An intelligent child’s observation,” he says, is remarkable for its “intensity and accuracy,” and—surely unnecessarily—he warns “some who have the care of children” against taking their young charges on outings to see the bloated corpses fished from the Seine. It is bad enough, he adds, to send children into the dark or to coop them up in a bedroom alone as prey to “the great fear”; if you treat a child in that way, “you had better murder it.”

When Wordsworth said in The Prelude that he “grew up / Foster’d alike by beauty and by fear,” he was thinking of an “impressive discipline of fear” much milder than the disabling horror experienced by Pip in the graveyard in Great Expectation when the convict Magwitch rears up behind the tombstones or by Oliver Twist when he is taken to visit Fagin in the condemned cell. Wordsworthian discipline does not extend to the flogging administered to David Copperfield by his stepfather Murdstone; at worst, Wordsworthian fear is his awed sense that nature silently reproves him when he ravages a tree to feast on its crop of hazelnuts.

Wordsworth’s account of his “seed-time” pays grateful tribute to the green earth as “the nurse, / The guide, the guardian of my heart, and soul / Of all my moral being.” At the age of six, Dickens had an amoral indoor equivalent in his nurse Mary Weller, who was only thirteen when she was engaged to look after him. He honored her as a “female bard” and thought that she must have been descended from “those terrible old Scalds,” the Skalds who recited poems about Norse heroes; despite his later warnings about frightening children, her bardic gift to him was an enjoyable terror.

At night, as he claims in The Uncommercial Traveller, she told him stories that were “utterly impossible…but none the less alarmingly real”—sagas about a swash-buckling serial killer, or a shipwright who enters into a diabolical pact and as a result is forced to sail in a vessel infested with rats, which nibble their way through the boards and sink it, drowning all hands. Nature nursed Wordsworth “with something of a Mother’s mind,” but rather than maternally soothing Dickens, Mary sent him into “the dark corners we are forced to go back to, against our wills.” He meant the inkier corners of his mind: what may sound like a punishment was also a literary initiation.

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Excerpted from Dickens the Enchanter: Inside the Explosive Imagination of the Great Storyteller by Peter Conrad. Run with permission of the author, courtesy of Bloomsbury Continuum, an imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. Copyright © Peter Conrad, 2025.