A Boy Called Dickens - Deborah Hopkinson [1]
“But where could he go?” asks Bob Fagin.
“I wondered that very thing,” says Dickens, his eyes alight. “It seems that the boy—he said his name was David—was heading to Dover, near the sea. He hoped to throw himself on the mercy of an aunt he’d never set eyes on. Aunt Betsey, he called her.”
Bob Fagin whispers, “Go on. What happened next?”
Before Dickens can answer, the door flies open and the foreman strides in.
“Silence!” he commands. “Back to work.”
We must wait a long time for the workday to be done—ten hours. Finally, Dickens and the other boys spill out into the darkness.
Dickens shoves his hands into his pockets to keep them warm. He starts home through the crowded streets, passing vendors who bellow,
He stops to buy his meal—a penny loaf of bread, a small hunk of cheese—and splurges on a four-penny plate of beef from a cookshop.
Then Dickens walks on, surrounded by pickpockets; ladies with shattered hopes; a miserly old man; a young gentleman with great expectations; a proud, heartless girl. There are lawyers, clerks, convicts, and keepers of old curiosity shops.
There are even ghosts and spirits. And children like Dickens, trying to hold on to a dream.
All these characters and their stories swirl about the boy like the fog. They follow him to a dingy house, where he climbs a narrow staircase to a tiny attic room. Inside are his cot, a washbasin, and the shelf to hold half of his loaf of bread for morning.
Dickens carefully lights a candle and reaches under the thin blanket for his most prized possessions—a pencil and slate. For the first time, he smiles.
Soon his drab room disappears. All day long, the story of the runaway boy called David has filled his thoughts. Now he begins to scratch out David’s journey—as the runaway trudges day after day, stopping to sell his jacket for a few pennies to buy some bread, reaching his aunt’s house at last.
Dickens stops writing and closes his eyes, picturing the scene in his mind.
Aunt Betsey is in her garden when she spies David. “Get along! No boys here!”
“If you please, aunt, I am your nephew,” he replies, surprising her so much that she sits down flat on the garden path.
Dickens tries to imagine what David will say to convince his aunt to take him in.
But by now his eyes are heavy with sleep. He blows out the candle and pulls his thin blanket close. He is all alone.
Is the boy called Dickens an orphan like the runaway boy in his imaginary tale? Reader, he is not. Where, then, is his family?
That mystery must wait for morning.
When Dickens wakes, it is Sunday. He will not go to church, but instead makes his way to Marshalsea Prison.
Yes, prison. Here, huddled in a room, are his mother and father, sister Letitia, and little brothers Frederick and Alfred.
Mr. Dickens has been put into debtors’ prison for not paying his forty-pound debt to the baker. Since his wife and younger children have nowhere else to go, they live here too.
“Take a warning from your poor, pitiful father, Charles,” Mr. Dickens tells his son as he stirs the fire. “If a man is paid twenty pounds a year, and spends nineteen pounds, nineteen shillings, and sixpence, he will be happy. But even one more shilling spent will make him as wretched as me.”
Young Dickens looks into the fire. He misses the old days, when they all lived together. He misses his books and school. If things go on like this, he will lose hope of growing up to be someone—maybe even a writer.
WINTER GIVES WAY to the pale light of spring. And one May morning, the Dickens family, bags and bundles in hand, walk away from prison at last.
Mr. Dickens has settled his debt. A friend will take them in. An inheritance is on the horizon. In other words, something has turned up. The family is saved.
But has the boy been saved?
By now the family can get by without the six shillings he brings home. But though he has devoured books the way most boys eat candy; though he can tell tales that hold listeners spellbound,