Chronicling and Sketching Life (1834–36)

Abstract

The years Dickens spent as reporter and sub-editor of the Mirror of Parliament were years in which, as he later reminisced to a certain Maria Winter, ‘the qualities which have done me most good since’ — earnestness, energy, giant-killing determination — ‘were growing in my boyish heart.’ As ‘pocket Venus’ Maria Beadnell, Mrs Winter had been the ‘driving force’ of Dickens’s ambitions since 1829, for her father was a high-ranking City bank clerk, who clearly did not look kindly on a suitor from an impoverished background.¹ In November 1831 the hapless John Dickens had been gazetted, and he was to be arrested for debt for a second time in November 1834. Nevertheless, he and Barrow set to work to help Charles to something more permanent and secure than the freelance and sessional work he had been picking up. The plan was to ‘puff him for a job on the reporting staff of the Morning Chronicle, the most respected of the Whig dailies and the most serious rival to the ascendancy of The Times.