The Story Behind the Poems
Charles Dickens
Charles Dickens’s pain and humiliation in childhood at being sent out to work in a boot polish factory is well known, and widely regarded as the mainspring of the passionate social concerns of his mature fiction.
It is perhaps for this reason that no scholar before Dr Drew considered the possibility of any later dealings between Dickens and the factory owner, Jonathan Warren, or his brother and rival Robert. Nevertheless the novels themselves contain many light-hearted references to the Warren product (Sam Weller speaks of “the amiable Mr Warren”) and on at least two occasions Dickens describes down-at-heel authors earning small sums by writing “puff verses” extolling the merits of Warren’s Blacking.
Dickens was released from the drudgery of factory work at the age of thirteen or fourteen, and, after brief spells of formal education and office work for law firms, became a freelance shorthand writer, working in a variety of courts. His most useful ally and mentor at this time was his maternal uncle, John Henry Barrow, a barrister turned journalist, who founded a weekly Hansard-style publication, The Mirror of Parliament. Dickens was reporting Parliamentary debates for the Mirror in 1831, and also between March and August the following year for a radical evening newspaper The True Sun. The columns of both journals have been scrutinised in vain by scholars for anything that could be clearly attributed to the young author; but it seems that no one before Dr Drew thought of looking at the advertisements. He noted that within the time frame of Dickens’s brief association with it The True Sun carried a series of verse advertisements for Warren’s Blacking.
Despite the coincidence of time and place (Warren’s factory and The True Sun were both located on the Strand) any association between Dickens and these compositions would have remained mere speculation if Dr Drew had not observed an extraordinary correlation between one of the verses and an entry in the diary of senior reporter on The Morning Chronicle who interviewed Dickens for a job in 1833.
The full story of this discovery and its implications are revealed in Dr Drew’s introduction. To anyone interested in this great writer’s emergence from obscurity it will prove fascinating.
Further Reading
“The trauma of his boyhood experiences in a blacking factory has long been seen as crucial to Charles Dickens's career, but newly discovered early work challenges the legend.”
John Drew, Saturday November 1, 2003, The Guardian
Boot polish jingle blackens Dickens' tale of woe
John Ezard, Saturday November 1, 2003, The Guardian
Related Links
- Dickens on The Victorian Web
- The Dickens Fellowship
- Dickens House Museum
- Dickens London Map (Warren's Boot Blacking Factory)
- Charles Dickens - Wikipedia
- Charles Dickens - Project Gutenberg
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