In Chapter 22 of Nicholas Nickleby (1839) by Charles Dickens, the eponymous hero and Smike travel from London to Portsmouth to seek their fortunes. They stop at an inn on the London Road twelve miles from the city and there meet Mr Vincent Crummles, theatrical manager and impresario:

‘Now listen to me, Smike,’ said Nicholas, as they trudged with stout hearts onwards. ‘We are bound for Portsmouth.’

Smike nodded his head and smiled, but expressed no other emotion; for whether they had been bound for Portsmouth or Port Royal would have been alike to him, so they had been bound together.

‘I don’t know much of these matters,’ resumed Nicholas; ‘but Portsmouth is a seaport town, and if no other employment is to be obtained, I should think we might get on board some ship. I am young and active, and could be useful in many ways. So could you.’
[...]
There was to be a gathering, it seemed, of the different ladies and gentlemen at Portsmouth on the morrow, whither the father and sons were proceeding (not for the regular season, but in the course of a wandering speculation), after fulfilling an engagement at Guildford with the greatest applause.

‘You are going that way?’ asked the manager.

‘Ye-yes,’ said Nicholas. ‘Yes, I am.’

‘Do you know the town at all?’ inquired the manager, who seemed to consider himself entitled to the same degree of confidence as he had himself exhibited.

‘No,’ replied Nicholas.

‘Never there?’

‘Never.’

Mr Vincent Crummles gave a short dry cough, as much as to say, ‘If you won’t be communicative, you won’t;’ and took so many pinches of snuff from the piece of paper, one after another, that Nicholas quite wondered where it all went to.

While he was thus engaged, Mr Crummles looked, from time to time, with great interest at Smike, with whom he had appeared considerably struck from the first. He had now fallen asleep, and was nodding in his chair.

‘Excuse my saying so,’ said the manager, leaning over to Nicholas, and sinking his voice, ‘but what a capital countenance your friend has got!’

‘Poor fellow!’ said Nicholas, with a half-smile, ‘I wish it were a little more plump, and less haggard.’

‘Plump!’ exclaimed the manager, quite horrified, ‘you’d spoil it for ever.’

‘Do you think so?’

‘Think so, sir! Why, as he is now,’ said the manager, striking his knee emphatically; ‘without a pad upon his body, and hardly a touch of paint upon his face, he’d make such an actor for the starved business as was never seen in this country. Only let him be tolerably well up in the Apothecary in Romeo and Juliet, with the slightest possible dab of red on the tip of his nose, and he’d be certain of three rounds the moment he put his head out of the practicable door in the front grooves O.P.’

‘You view him with a professional eye,’ said Nicholas, laughing.

‘And well I may,’ rejoined the manager. ‘I never saw a young fellow so regularly cut out for that line, since I’ve been in the profession. And I played the heavy children when I was eighteen months old.’
[...]
‘What’s to be got to do at Portsmouth more than anywhere else?’ asked Mr Vincent Crummles, melting the sealing-wax on the stem of his pipe in the candle, and rolling it out afresh with his little finger.

‘There are many vessels leaving the port, I suppose,’ replied Nicholas. ‘I shall try for a berth in some ship or other. There is meat and drink there at all events.’

‘Salt meat and new rum; pease-pudding and chaff-biscuits,’ said the manager, taking a whiff at his pipe to keep it alight, and returning to his work of embellishment.

‘One may do worse than that,’ said Nicholas. ‘I can rough it, I believe, as well as most young men of my age and previous habits.’

‘You need be able to,’ said the manager, ‘if you go on board ship; but you won’t.’

‘Why not?’

‘Because there’s not a skipper or mate that would think you worth your salt, when he could get a practised hand,’ replied the manager; ‘and they as plentiful there, as the oysters in the streets.’

‘What do you mean?’ asked Nicholas, alarmed by this prediction, and the confident tone in which it had been uttered. ‘Men are not born able seamen. They must be reared, I suppose?’

Mr Vincent Crummles nodded his head. ‘They must; but not at your age, or from young gentlemen like you.’

There was a pause. The countenance of Nicholas fell, and he gazed ruefully at the fire.

Charles Dickens (b. 7 Feb. 1812; d. 9 Jun..1870) was the most popular British novelist of all time. His works are widely read and are frequently adapted as films and TV series. Dickens published 15 novels, 5 novellas, and numerous short stories during his lifetime, as well as a host of journalistic pieces. His first short stories were published in The Morning Chronicle from 1833, and due to their popularity were published as Sketches by Boz (1836). The enormous success of the serialisation of his first novel, Pickwick Papers (1836-7) cemented Dickens’s fame. His other works include Oliver Twist (1839), A Christmas Carol (1843), David Copperfield (1850), Bleak House (1853), Little Dorrit (1857), Great Expectations (1861), and Our Mutual Friend (1865). He worked as a reporter for the Morning Chronicle in the early 1830s, and was editor of [Bentley’s Miscellany] (http://www.victorianweb.org/periodicals/bentley.html), Daily News, Household Words, and All The Year Round.

Achieving a level of literary celebrity not seen since Sir Walter Scott and Lord Byron, Dickens’s works were eagerly-awaited and widely-read, and his reading tours attracted enormous audiences. Stylistically his works are unique and powerful, his love of drama and the influence of the macabre stories he heard in early childhood being evident in the psychologically-heightened theatricality of which he was capable. He is nonetheless also one of the key figures in nineteenth-century realism, his work marked by a commitment to the belief in the possibility of conveying complex representations of the social life of his era. Alongside other major writers of the period, such as George Eliot, W. M. Thackeray, and Anthony Trollope, Dickens was capable of forging extended multiple plots, and wide casts of characters from across the social classes. His work probes the human condition and often turned a critical eye on the major social issues of the day, particularly education, crime, sanitation, disease, and poverty, but rarely engage in sustained political analyses. Instead, his social vision often turns on individuals and on a sentimental appeal to readers’ emotions. Dickens remains the most prominent figure in modern Victorian Studies within English Literature scholarship.

Dickens was strongly involved in a range of charitable causes and in 1847, with Angela Burdett-Coutts, founded the Urania Cottage home for ‘fallen women’. Dickens was involved in theatrical productions, often alongside his friend and writing colleague, Wilkie Collins, and it was during a production of The Frozen Deep (1857) that he began a relationship with the actress Ellen (Nellie) Ternan, (1839–1914) who became his mistress, and who is buried in Highland Cemetery, Portsmouth. Dickens’s relationship with his wife, Catherine Dickens (1815–79), and some of his eight children was strained and difficult. Dickens died on 09 June 1870 at Higham, Kent, leaving his final work, The Mystery of Edwin Drood unfinished.

Dickens’s Portsmouth connections are primarily related to his earliest years, during which he lived at three addresses in the city before his family left for the capital in 1815. From 1809 to 1815, Dickens’ father was a clerk in the Royal Navy pay office, Portsmouth. After leaving Portsmouth Dickens lived in London, Sheerness, Chatham, and Gad’s Hill. Dickens visited Portsmouth in 1838, 1858, and 1866, but appears to have had little affection for it, as a letter to a correspondent suggests:

‘I was born at Portsmouth, an English seaport town principally remarkable for mud, Jews, and Sailors, on the 7th of February 1812. My father holding in those days a situation under Government in the Navy Pay Office, which called him in the discharge of his duties to different places, I came to London, a child of two years old’ (The letters of Charles Dickens, Pilgrim edition, Vol. 1: 1820-1839, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1965. p. 465).

University of Portsmouth staff who specialise in Dickens or who have worked on Dickens projects include Dr Chris Pittard and Dr Mark Frost (English Literature), Dr Alison Habens (Creative Writing), and Professor Brad Beaven (History).

ENTRY: Dr Mark Frost, Department of English Literature, University of Portsmouth.
If you have any comments or suggestions please email: mark.frost@port.ac.uk