In die maanden is er nog iets gebeurd, dat misschien meer dan het voorgaande laat zien hoe
shabby-genteel vader en zoon waren. Voordat hij al deze gebeurtenissen in het leven van de jonge
Chareles uit diens autobiografische fragmenten weergeeft, schrijft Forster:
The incidents to be told now would probably never have been known to me,
or indeed any of the occurences of his childhood and youth, but for the
incident of a question which I put to him one day in the March or April
of 1847. I asked him if he remembered ever having seen in his boyhood
our friend the elder Mr.Dilke, his farther "s acquaintance and
contemporary, who had been clerk in the same office in Somerset House to
which Mr. John Dickens belonged. Yes, he said, he recol-lected seeing him
at a house in Gerrard Street, where his uncle Barrow lodged during an
illness, and Mr.Dilke had visited him. Never at any other time. Upon
which I told him that someone else had been intended in the mention made
to me, for that the reference implied not merely his being seen
accidentally, but his having some juvenile employment in a warehouse
near Strand; at which place Mr.Dilke, being with the elder Dickens one
day, had noticed him, and received in return for a gift of a half~crown,
a very low bow. He was silent for several minutes; I felt I had
unintentionally touched a painful place in his memory; and to Mr.Dilke I
never spoke of the subject again. It was not however then, but some
weeks later, that Dickens made further allusion to my having thus struck
unconsciously upon a time of which he could never lose the remembrance
while he remembered anything, and the recollection of which, at
intervalshaunted him and made him miserable, even to that hour.
De vader wil jegens zijn collega niet erkennen, dat dat schamele arbeidersjongetje zijn zoon is en
zijn zoon stemt daarmee in! En wat schreef de zoon zelf later aan Forster?
From that hour until this at which I write, no word of that part of my
childhood which I now gladly brought to a close, has passed my lips to
any human being. I have no idea how long it lasted; whether for a year,
or much more, or less. From that hour, until this, my father and mother
have been stricken dumb upon it. I have never heard the least allusion
to it, however far off and remote, from either of them. I have never,
until I now impart it to this paper, in any burst of confidence with any
one, my own wife not excepted, raised the curtain I then dropped, thank
God.
Until old Hungerford Market was pulled down, until old Hunger ford
Stairs were destroyed, and the very nature of the ground changed, I
never had the courage to go back to the place, where my servitude began.
I never saw it. 1 could not endure to go near it. For many years, when I
came near to Robert Warrens in the Strand, I crossed over to the
opposite side of the way, to avoid a certain smell of the cement they
put upon the blacking-corkswhich reminded me of what I was once. It
was a very long time before I liked to 90 up Chandos Street. My old way
home by the borough made me cry, after my eldest child could speak.
In my walks at night I have walked there often, since then, and by
degrees I have become to write this. It does not seem a tithe of what I
might have written, or of what I meant to write.
Al deze gebeurtenissen moeten een grote invloed gehad hebben op Dickens' karakter. Hierover
schreef Forster:
What at once he brought out of the humiliation that had impressed him so
deeply, though scarcely as yet quite consciously, was a natural dread of
