Two Letters of John Dickens from 1835

The end of the year 1834 was a difficult time for the Dickens family. John Dickens was arrested for debt late in November and only narrowly avoided a repeat of the imprisonment he had suffered ten years earlier.¹ The family was constrained to leave the home it had occupied for two relatively settled years in Bentinck Street and to disperse. Elizabeth Dickens took her two daughters and two youngest sons to cheaper lodgings in the Adelphi. The 22-year-old Charles, together with his eldest brother, went into rented accommodation in Furnival’s Inn. John himself was left, as he remarked with a characteristic flourish, “to the winds.”² This essay, by referring to two previously un-noted letters, contributes to what is known of his activity at this time.

The Dickens Family Disperses

Charles Dickens’s account of the family break-up in 1834 occurs in several letters written as he struggled to extricate the family from its difficulty. In one, written late in November to the family friend Thomas Beard, he succinctly assigned a cause to the problem:

I have already, more than once, hinted to you my fears that the state of my father’s affairs, and his want of attention to them would render a change in our situation, imperative. […] My father I apprehend will not re-join his family for some time (Letters 1: 47).

He anticipated his own arrest: “I have not yet been taken, but no doubt that will be the next act in this ‘domestic tragedy’” he wrote gloomily to his friend the solicitor Thomas Mitton (Letters 1: 45). However, with the help of Beard, Mitton and probably his maternal uncle Edward Barrow, Charles managed to extricate his father from his immediate difficulties (Letters 1: 43–49). Thereafter, it was decided that the family disperse.

John Dickens, in a letter to Beard of 4 December, gave his take on the affair.

For various reasons, which it was supposed would justify the end, we have been living in apartments the expenses of which were much beyond my means, and with other expenses consequent thereupon. The expectations which it was supposed would justify this expenditure have not been realized, and the result is what might have been expected, and which I, without the power of preventing it, have long foreseen.

I cast no blame upon any one but myself, I ought never to have allowed myself to be party to an arrangement, for appearances sake, which was to lead to my own undoing, more particularly after the experience I had already had, shipwrecking at once the adage that “experience makes fools wise.” Suffice it to say what the result is, which has been hastened by Charles’s determination to leave home, on the first occasion of his having an annual engagement. I need not say what drawbacks the vacations of the last two years were, all expenses going on upon the same scale as though we had Saturday’s Bag³ to put our hand into.

Under the circumstances of the case, it may be better that the separation which has taken place between myself and family, may be permanent, but on no other ground than that they may be enabled to obtain the smaller amount of accommodation they shall require in a particular locality at a cheaper rate.

(Dexter 265–66)

The “expectations” that may have prompted John’s overspend are not clear. Perhaps a respectable address (Bentinck Street, north of Oxford Street and close to Cavendish Square, was a relatively prosperous area) had been thought likely to enhance the employment prospects of himself or perhaps the opportunities available to his eldest daughter, then on the brink of a career as a concert singer (Carlton “Fanny Dickens”).⁴

The “vacations” mentioned in John’s letter refer to those periods when Parliament was in recess. At these times, his otherwise regular income as a reporter, at one time for the Mirror of Parliament, the weekly periodical edited by his brother-in-law John Henry Barrow, and, latterly, for the Morning Herald (Carlton “John Dickens”) dried up...