CHAPTER IV.

REPORTERS' GALLERY AND NEWSPAPER LITERATURE.

1831-1835.

LONDON: 1831-2.

for the

True Sun.

DICKENS was nineteen years old when at last he entered the gallery. His father, with whom he still lived in Bentinck-street, had already, as we have seen, joined the gallery as a reporter for one of the morning papers, and was now in the more comfortable circumstances derived from the addition to his official pension which this praiseworthy labour ensured; but his own engagement on the Chronicle dates somewhat later. His first parliamentary Reporting service was given to the True Sun, a journal which had then on its editorial staff some dear friends of mine, through whom I became myself a contributor to it, and afterwards, in common with all concerned, whether in its writing, reporting, printing, or publishing, a sharer in its difficulties. The most formidable of these arrived one day in a general strike of the reporters; and I well remember noticing at this dread time, on the staircase of the magnificent mansion we were lodged in, a young man of my own age whose keen animation of look would have arrested attention anywhere, and whose name, upon enquiry, I then for the first time heard. It was coupled with the fact

C. D. first

seen by me.

1832-4.

LONDON: which gave it interest even then, that 'young Dickens' had been spokesman for the recalcitrant reporters, and conducted their case triumphantly. He was afterwards Reporting during two sessions engaged for the Mirror of Parliament, and Chron- which one of his uncles by the mother's side originated and conducted; and finally, in his twenty-third year, he became a reporter for the Morning Chronicle.

for Mirror

icle.

1833-5.

lished

piece.

A step far more momentous to him (though then he did not know it) he had taken shortly before. In the December number for 1833 of what then was called the Old First pub- Monthly Magazine, his first published piece of writing had seen the light. He has described himself dropping this paper (Mr. Minns and his Cousin, as he afterwards entitled it, but which appeared in the magazine as A Dinner at Poplar Walk) stealthily one evening at twilight, with fear and trembling, into a dark letter-box in a dark office up a dark court in Fleet-street; and he has told his C. D. loq. agitation when it appeared in all the glory of print.

On

'which occasion I walked down to Westminster-hall, and 'turned into it for half an hour, because my eyes were so 'dimmed with joy and pride, that they could not bear the 'street, and were not fit to be seen there.' He had purchased the magazine at a shop in the Strand; and exactly two years afterwards, in the younger member of Smallness a publishing firm who had called, at the chambers in

of the world.'

Furnival's-inn to which he had moved soon after entering the gallery, with the proposal that originated Pickwick, he recognized the person he had bought that magazine from, and whom before or since he had never seen.

This interval of two years more than comprised what

1834-6.

remained of his career in the gallery and the engage- LONDON: ments connected with it; but that this occupation was of the utmost importance in its influence on his life, in the Discipline discipline of his powers as well as of his character, there days. can be no doubt whatever. 'To the wholesome training of

of reporting

C. D. to

severe newspaper work, when I was a very young man, 'I constantly refer my first successes,' he said to the New York editors when he last took leave of them. It opened to him a wide and varied range of experience, which his wonderful observation, exact as it was humorous, made entirely his own. He saw the last of the old coaching days, and of the old inns that were a part of them; but it will be long before the readers of his living page see the last of the life of either. There never was,' he once wrote to me (in 1845), anybody connected with newspapers, who, in the J.F.(1845). 'same space of time, had so much express and post-chaise experience as I. And what gentlemen they were to 'serve, in such things, at the old Morning Chronicle! 'Great or small it did not matter. I have had to charge 'for half-a-dozen break-downs in half-a-dozen times as many miles. I have had to charge for the damage of a 'great-coat from the drippings of a blazing wax-candle, ' in writing through the smallest hours of the night in a swift-flying carriage and pair. I have had to charge for all sorts of breakages fifty times in a journey without ques'tion, such being the ordinary results of the pace which 'we went at. I have charged for broken hats, broken Experi 'luggage, broken chaises, broken harness-everything but Morning 'a broken head, which is the only thing they would have 'grumbled to pay for.'

ences at

Chronicle

LONDON: 1834-6.

His own

sketch of life as a reporter.

Something to the same effect he said publicly twenty years later, on the occasion of his presiding, in May 1865, at the second annual dinner of the newspaper-press-fund, when he condensed within the compass of his speech a summary of the whole of his reporting life. I am not 'here,' he said, 'advocating the case of a mere ordinary client of whom I have little or no knowledge. I hold 'a brief to-night for my brothers. I went into the 'gallery of the house of commons as a parliamentary 'reporter when I was a boy, and I left it-I can hardly 'believe the inexorable truth-nigh thirty years ago. I 'have pursued the calling of a reporter under circum'stances of which many of my brethren here can form no 'adequate conception. I have often transcribed for the 'printer, from my shorthand notes, important public 'speeches in which the strictest accuracy was required, Expresses. and a mistake in which would have been to a young

'man severely compromising, writing on the palm of my 'hand, by the light of a dark lantern, in a post-chaise and 'four, galloping through a wild country, and through the 'dead of the night, at the then surprising rate of fifteen 'miles an hour. The very last time I was at Exeter, I 'strolled into the castle-yard there to identify, for the 'amusement of a friend, the spot on which I once "took," 'as we used to call it, an election speech of Lord John 'Russell at the Devon contest, in the midst of a lively fight 'maintained by all the vagabonds in that division of the 'county, and under such a pelting rain, that I remember 'two good-natured colleagues, who chanced to be at 'leisure held a pocket-handkerchief over my note-book,

1834-6. Houses of

before

Barry.

ter's vicis

'after the manner of a state canopy in an ecclesiastical LONDON: 'procession. I have worn my knees by writing on them on the old back row of the old gallery of the old house parliament 'of commons; and I have worn my feet by standing to 'write in a preposterous pen in the old house of lords, 'where we used to be huddled together like so many 'sheep-kept in waiting, say, until the woolsack might 'want re-stuffing. Returning home from exciting political A repor'meetings in the country to the waiting press in London, situdes. '1 do verily believe I have been upset in almost every 'description of vehicle known in this country. I have 'been, in my time, belated on miry by-roads, towards the 'small hours, forty or fifty miles from London, in a wheel'less carriage, with exhausted horses and drunken post'boys, and have got back in time for publication, to be 'received with never-forgotten compliments by the late 'Mr. Black, coming in the broadest of Scotch from the John Black 'broadest of hearts I ever knew. These trivial things of the 'I mention as an assurance to you that I never have for'gotten the fascination of that old pursuit. The pleasure 'that I used to feel in the rapidity and dexterity of its 'exercise has never faded out of my breast. Whatever 'little cunning of hand or head I took to it, or acquired 'in it, I have so retained as that I fully believe I could 'resume it to-morrow, very little the worse from long 'disuse. To this present year of my life, when I sit in 'this hall, or where not, hearing a dull speech (the phe'nomenon does occur), I sometimes beguile the tedium of 'the moment by mentally following the speaker in the Imaginary 'old, old way; and sometimes, if you can believe me, I

note

taking.