Before Dickens was a Victorian

Robert Douglas-Fairhurst’s Becoming Dickens: The Invention of a Novelist works as a companion piece of sorts to Claire Tomalin’s rival biography Charles Dickens: A Life. The clue is in the subtitle. While Tomalin takes the subject from birth to death, Douglas-Fairhurst’s book focuses on Dickens’s early years. And what early years they were.
 
With a father constantly dodging the debt-collectors, Dickens’s childhood was the very definition of unstable. The book makes much of the trauma of John Dickens being jailed in Marshalsea for debt with the young Charles forced to earn his keep by working at Warren’s blacking factory. The experience might have been brief, but the impact on Dickens’ imagination was huge. Not only did it absorb details — Bob Fagin was the name of a co-worker — but the experience haunts subsequent work, whether in telling references to ‘Warren’s blackin’ in The Pickwick Papers and ‘old blacking bottles’ in Nicolas Nickleby or filtered into bloodstream of characters like Tommy Traddles in David Copperfield or Jo in Bleak House.