Charles Dickens of the Westcountry

By Lucy Simister

Charles Dickens was an abrupt, excitable young man driven to succeed. He would always be distressed by the humiliation he experienced as a young child, at the hands of his frivolous parents. His Parents were well off and educated coming from middle-class backgrounds and he enjoyed that standard of living. Charles was well educated, well read and enjoyed music and acting. 
When his parents were put into the debtor's prison and he was sent out to work in a factory labeling and potting jar with shoe polish was for him utter degradation. What made it worse was no matter how poor they were his sister's piano lessons were always paid for. Charles moved into scant lodgings and learnt to manage and fend for himself. His friends Green and Fagin looked out for him in those backstreet days of misery. When he was very young he had gone a school and wore an Eton type uniform and was teased by some of the boys, here he now was among the poorest who would have jeered and bullied him. 
All of this drove his desire to succeed, the young Charles Dickens had become self-aware of his circumstances at a very early age and these experiences created the writer Charles Dickens. 
This book looks at his life under a magnifying glass concentrating on the domestic side of his life in the Westcountry.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lucy Simister
• Release date: Apr 26, 2015
• ISBN: 9781516304752

Lucy Simister

Lucy Simister has written several biographical books and her subjects include John Keats, Elizabeth Barrett and Charles Dickens. In 2012 she wrote the book for the children’s musical ‘Trouble at Mill,’ and in 2014 wrote and published the comedy play ‘The Jolly Sailor’ - full of piratey goings on based in Plymouth. She works for Children’s Amateur Theatre Society and can be found most weekends on the road playing in one of several bands. With her writing, drama and gigs life can get pretty busy!

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Edited by John Martin

Cover design by Jacqui

ISBN 0 9526222 3 8

All rights reserved Lucy Simister 1997

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Second edition revised April 2015

Charles Dickens was restless, hard working and energetic, with an instinctive ability to memorise detail; no experience or conversation was ever wasted – everything would find itself on the canvas of his imagination.

As a young man Charles Dickens had long wavy hair, generously parted on one side, resulting in the constant habit of having to comb it every few minutes. He particularly liked to wear brightly coloured velvet waistcoats and multi-coloured neckties with tartan trousers.

He was abrupt, excitable and impatient, desperate to succeed.  And being modest was something he had to make a conscious effort to do; he believed himself incapable of making a wrong decision.  Yet this same man would suck his thumb and twist his hair into tight curls as he wrote, often moving himself to tears as he paced around the round with his thoughts.

Dickens and the Exeter Elections

On January 6th 1835, Charles Dickens and fellow journalist Tom Beard, plus five other reporters from the London press arrived in Exeter on the mail coach to cover the elections.  They stayed at the New London Inn.  It was central to the Guildhall, Castle Yard and Rougemont Castle.  There they waited anxiously for a few days for the election results to break, followed by the public response and acceptance speeches before racing back to London with the news.

Prior to his first publication Dickens worked as a political journalist for ‘The Mirror of Parliament’ a newspaper managed by his uncle John Henry Barrow an acclaimed journalist.  It was sitting in the reporters’ gallery at Westminster where he was exposed to justice, injustice, sincerity and hypocrisy. But found elections exhilarating, ‘busy, exciting and competitive, rattling across country, arriving at strange towns and inns in the middle of the night; and playing bagatelle through the night with the other reporters in their bedrooms.’

Both Dickens and Tom Beard ‘managed to bribe the post boys,’ in advance, to get the fastest possible transport back to London from Exeter.  It was agreed Dickens would leave his luggage at The New London Inn, so as to travel light and give him extra room in the carriage for writing his notes.  Charles claimed to have been first back to London after 13 hours non-stop travel, with the ‘The Times’ coming a close second.

‘The Times’ reporters, John Neilston and James Denison insist that they beat Dickens back by half an hour, they said they ‘rode the back way into the Golden Lion at Honiton and obtained fresh horses and got ahead of him.’  Dickens claims his paper had the story by 4.00 a.m. and was longer by one and a half columns.

In a note to Tom Beard still at the New London inn he writes ‘the first stage of the journey we had very poor horses.  At the second stop ‘The Times’ and I changed horses altogether - they had a 3 minute start, I bribed the post boys tremendously, we came literally neck and neck – the most beautiful sight I ever saw.’  He finishes his letter by asking him to forward his luggage and the Devonshire cream he bought, on the next coach.  ‘For I have not got a clean shirt...’ and was not on the best of terms with the laundry lady at his flat for suggesting she might want to do his washing on a Sunday.

Dickens wrote of his journalistic days ‘I do believe I have been up turned in almost every kind of vehicle known in this country.  I have had in my time, been belated on miry by-roads, in the small hours, forty or fifty miles from London, in a wheel less carriage.  With exhausted horses and drunken post boys and still got back in time for publication... often having to transcribe for the printer from my shorthand notes, important speeches in which the strictest accuracy was required, using only the palm of my hand, by the light of a lantern in a post chaise and four, galloping through the countryside at the dead of night, at the then surprising rate of 15 miles an hour.’

‘I have had to claim for at least half a dozen break downs in half a dozen times in as many miles and charge for the damage of my greatcoat from the drippings of blazing wax from the candles whilst writing through the night in a swift flying carriage. I have had to charge for broken hats, broken luggage.... Everything but a broken head, which