Life of Charles Dickens | Page 8

their complaints, should
be treated with some leniency. So he had to get his learning without
tears, which was not at all considered the orthodox method in the good
old days; and, indeed, I doubt if he finally took away from Wellington
House Academy very much of the book knowledge that would tell in a
modern competitive examination. For though in his own account of the
school it is implied that he resumed his interrupted studies with Virgil,
and was, before he left, head boy, and the possessor of many prizes, yet

this is not corroborated by the evidence of his surviving fellow pupils;
nor can we, of course, in the face of their direct counter evidence, treat
statements made in a fictitious or half-fictitious narrative as if made in
what professed to be a sober autobiography. Dickens, I repeat, seems to
have acquired a very scant amount of classic lore while under the
instruction of Mr. Jones, and not too much lore of any kind. But if he
learned little, he observed much. He thoroughly mastered the humours
of the place, just as he had mastered the humours of the Marshalsea. He
had got to know all about the masters, and all about the boys, and all
about the white mice--of which there were many in various stages of
civilization. He acquired, in short, a fund of school knowledge that
seemed inexhaustible, and on which he drew again and again, with the
most excellent results, in "David Copperfield," in "Dombey," in such
inimitable short papers as "Old Cheeseman." And while thus, half
unconsciously perhaps, assimilating the very life of the school, he was
himself a thorough schoolboy, bright, alert, intelligent; taking part in all
fun and frolic; amply indemnifying himself for his enforced abstinence
from childish games during the dreary warehouse days; good at
recitations and mimic plays; and already possessed of a reputation
among his peers as a writer of tales.
FOOTNOTES:
[1] £200 a year "without extras" from 1815 to 1820, and then £350. See
"Childhood and Youth of Charles Dickens," by Robert Langton, a very
valuable monograph.
[2] Mr. Langton appears to doubt whether John Dickens was not
imprisoned in the King's Bench. But this seems scarcely a point on
which Dickens himself can have been mistaken.
[3] According to Mr. Langton's dates, he would still be drawing his
pay.
[4] See paper entitled "Our School."

CHAPTER II.
Dickens cannot have been very long at Wellington House Academy, for
before May, 1827, he had been at another school near Brunswick
Square, and had also obtained, and quitted, some employment in the
office of a solicitor in New Square, Lincoln's Inn Fields. It seems clear,
therefore, that the whole of his school life might easily be computed in
months; and in May, 1827, it will be remembered, he was still but a lad
of fifteen. At that date he entered the office of a second solicitor, in
Gray's Inn this time, on a salary of thirteen shillings and sixpence a
week, afterwards increased to fifteen shillings. Here he remained till
November, 1828, again picking up a good deal of information that
cannot perhaps be regarded as strictly legal, but such as he was
afterwards able to turn to admirable account. He would seem to have
studied the profession exhaustively in all its branches, from the topmost
Tulkinghorns and Perkers, to the lowest pettifoggers like Pell and Brass,
and also to have given particular attention to the parasites of the
law--the Guppys and Chucksters; and altogether to have stored his
mind, as he had done at school, with a series of invaluable notes and
observations. All very well, no doubt, as we look at the matter now.
But then it must often have seemed to the ambitious, energetic lad, that
he was wasting his time. Was he to remain for ever a lawyer's clerk
who has not the means to be an articled clerk, and who can never,
therefore, aspire to become a full-blown solicitor? Was he to spend the
future obscurely in the dingy purlieus of the law? His father, in whose
career "something," as Mr. Micawber would have said, had at last
"turned up," was now a reporter for the press. The son determined to be
a reporter too.
He threw himself into this new career with characteristic energy. Of
course a reporter is not made in a day. It takes many months of
drudgery to obtain such skill in shorthand as shall enable the pen of the
ready-writer to keep up with the winged words of speech, and make
dots and lines that shall be readable. Dickens laboured hard to acquire
the art. In the intervals of his work he made it a kind of holiday task to
attend the Reading-room of the British Museum, and so