The youth of Charles Dickens was usually spent alone, and he was constantly unhappy. The financial failings of his father, who wound up in debtor’s prison forced Charles to work, at the age of twelve, in a shoe blacking factory. But Dickens’s personal sense of abandonment also later matured into a sense of abandonment of a cultural base; something slipping away and his own feelings of contemplating his work as uncomprehending and unseeing; out of touch with a new world and gripping to a classic tradition that in previous millennia had lent art its reason and purpose.
When Dickens, on his six shillings a week salary, could resist the stale pastry of the confectioners on Tottenham Court Road, he would go out for a special dinner. In the Strand, or in Drury Lane, or in the Adelphi, the little boy would eat in the place of his choice. In Clare Court there were two of the best known alamode beef shops in London. Charles’s attention was certainly attracted, and one day he went by himself to one of these beef houses.
Little Nell and her grandfather. The Old Curiosity Shop
Tucked under his arm was his own bread wrapped in a piece of paper so as to look like a book. He went into the best dining room and ordered a plateful of larded beef. ”What the waiter thought of such a strange little apparition, coming in all alone, I don,t know, ” he wrote; ”but I can see him now, staring at me as i ate my dinner, and bringing up the other waiter to look. I gave him a half-penny, and i wish now, that he hadn’t taken it. ”
William Powell Frith Derby Day. 1856. ''All different social classes rubbed up against each other at the Derby, and the picture was a sensation. Frith's painting, showing aristocrats, criminals, tumblers, a kept woman and dozens of others, was so popular that a stout rail and even stouter policeman had to be stationed in front, to keep back the crowd. One witness described them 'sniffing it like bloodhounds'. The crowd were thrilling to a recognition of themselves. Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/tvshowbiz/article-1144168/Why-Dickens-despise-Victorian-art-asks-Jeremy-Paxman.html#ixzz0le7T1jbg''
”No advice, no counsel, no encouragement, no consolation, no support, from anyone I can call to mind,” Dickens wrote later, discussing with acute self-pity the plight of his young self almost as though this sad little boy was someone else. ” I know i do not exaggerate , unconsciously and unintentionally, the scantiness of my resources and the difficulties of my life. …I know that I worked from morning to night, with common men and boys, a shabby child. I know that I tried, but ineffectually, not to anticipate my money, and to make it last the week through; by putting it away in a drawer I had in the counting house, wrapped into six little parcels, each parcel containing the same amount, and labelled with a different day. I know that I have lounged about the streets, insufficiently and unsatisfactorily fed. I know that, but for the mercy of God, I might easily have been, for any care that was taken of me, a little robber or a little vagabond.”
The Railway Station.''Like Dickens, Frith was simultaneously fascinated and appalled by the modern world, and a large part of him yearned for the perceived stability, the slow unchanging rhythms of another, slower, more innocent time. But he soon realised that to make his name, and his fortune, sooner or later he would have to turn to the painting of contemporary life. ''
One evening on his visit to the family in the Marshalsea debtor prison, Charles broke down and cried bitterly. He was all the more upset for he had up until then, confided his loneliness and misery to no one. He had ” never said, to a man or boy” how he came to be working in the blacking warehouse; he never ”gave the least indication” that he was sorry to be there. That he suffered ”in secret,” and that he suffered ”exquisitely,” no one had known but he.
Frith: Regent Street. noon. ''Painting is what Frith did. He was not interested in breaking the boundaries of art, in launching attacks on the Royal Academy, in an alliance with the French Impressionists, some of whom he outlived...''
But now he could not control his tears; and his father, immediately touched by the unhappiness Charles had succeeded in hiding from him, made arrangements for the boy to move from Mrs. Roylance’s to a little back attic in Lant Street, Southwark, occupied by a good hearted fat old man with a gentle wife and a ”very innocent grown up son”, lame like his father. The room looked out over a timberyard, and the family, later to become the plump and placid Garland family of the ”Old Curiosity Shop” , was kind and understanding. All three of them sat up one night by Charles bedside when he had an attack of his recurrent illness. Charles, after moving there from Camden Town, thought it all ” a Paradise”.
William Powell Frith
”Frith may have felt licensed to paint this dangerously suggestive scene precisely because Derby Day was itself insitutionally recognised, in mid-nineteenth-century Britain, as a kind of state-sanctioned bacchanalia – a day when all social distinctions might be allowed to collapse, but only temporarily, in a communal letting off-of steam. It was the only true national holiday in the entire calendar, and was seen as a sort of one-day revolution allowed to prevent the real thing ever happending. In the words of the Illustrated London News, “Liberty, equality and fraternity” were “very strongly insisted upon on the Derby Day … the day when poverty elbows pride, and wretchedness stalks cheek-by-jowl with wealth … the snob pushes by the gentleman, and the cad insinuates himself among the cream of the land.” ( Andrew Graham Dixon )
William Powell Frith. Retribution. 1880.
”These were story-telling pictures with a Dickensian sweep, Sam Weller jostling Sidney Carton, Mr Bumble clambering into a carriage with Edwin Drood, and Olivers and Dorrits everywhere. We have lost the knack of reading pictures, of identifying tinker and tailor, beggarman and thief; we can no longer, given such characters, construct the consequences of their contiguity and tell ourselves the tale of the swell, the pickpocket and the Peeler, of the country bumpkin and the bookie’s runner, of the mountebank child diverted from her father’s histrionics by the picnic of the carriage-folk, partridge, lobster and pork pie. When, as a lasting cliché, “every picture tells a story” entered idiomatic English early in the 20th century…, Frith had for his whole working life been telling a dozen tales and more on the great canvases that made him rich.” ( Brian Sewell, London Evening Standard )
William Powell Frith; private view
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