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As far as charitable activities were concerned, Urania Cottage was far
from being Dickens's only major project. During the 1840s and 1850s he
also initiated a number of elaborate fund-raising amateur theatrical
productions for one charitable purpose or another. The plays he chose were
Jonson's Every Man in His Humour and Shakespeare's The Merry Wives of
Windsor and, later, a specially-written comedy with a contemporary setting
written by his literary idol Bulwer Lytton (who later persuaded him to alter
the ending of Great Expectations). Dickens played Bobadil in Every Man
and Justice Shallow in The Merry Wives as well as leads in the various
hyperactive farces that rounded off each evening's performance. He was a
superb actor (if he were to turn professional he would, said Thackeray,
'make his £20.000 a year') but revelled especially in the role of actor-
manager. He operated a fierce rehearsal schedule, concerned himself with
the minutest details of staging, costumes and publicity, also coping with the
major logistical problems involved in touring the plays by rail to the great
cities of the North and to Scotland. Towards the end of his life, he told a
friend that his 'most cherished day-dream' was that of holding 'supreme
authority' in the direction of a great theatre with 'a skilled and noble
company'. The pieces acted, he said, 'should be dealt with according to my
pleasure the players as well as the plays being absolutely under my
command'. His passion for order and control no doubt had something to do
with Dickens's vivid memories of the somewhat chaotic life-style into which
his debt-afflicted parents had fallen when he was ten years old. The family
had to move house frequently and his father even had a brief spell in the
Marshalsea debtors' prison while young Charles, his schooling broken off.
was sent to paste labels on bottles in a rat-infested blacking manufactory off
the Strand. For all the care that was taken of him at this time, he wrote later,
he might well have become 'a little robber or a little vagabond', the fate so
narrowly escaped by little Oliver Twist. As a writer his imagination was
haunted by the idea of 'vagabondage', that is, of being a homeless wanderer.
In a haunting essay called 'Night Walks', written in 1860 for his journal All
The Year Roundhe takes the name of 'Houselessness' and vividly describes
the experience of wandering all night through the spectral streets of London.
His imagination was strongly drawn also, by a process he described as 'the
attraction of repulsion', to the depiction of disorder, whether this took the
form of Mrs Jellyby's shambolic housekeeping in Bleak Housewith
envelopes floating in the gravy at dinner-time, or of the vaster, terrifying
chaos of savage, rioting mobs in his two historical novels, Barnaby Rudge
and A Tale of Two Cities. In both stories the riots climax in the tearing down
of a great prison, that ultimate symbol of repressive order towards which
Dickens had always such a deeply ambivalent attitude.
It is hardly surprising that someone so concerned with controlling
everything and everyone about him as Dickens was should have quarrelled
