A Bit More Dickens and China…

A few more China moments in Dickens’ life and work following my attempt at a round up of Dickens and his China influences/references recently (see previous post). More have appeared!

• Dickens was true to Victorian perceptions in believing the Chinese especially skilled in magic. Chinese, or Europeans dressed as Chinese (as discussed before on this blog with posts on Chung Ling Soo and Alexander Hermann). According to Claire Tomalin’s excellent Dickens bio (my Christmas reading this year) Dickens would perform magic tricks for his children dressed in a Chinese gown and mask. At one party for friends around 1848/49 Dickens performed tricks claiming that he had acquired his magical knowledge from a Chinese mandarin for 5,000 Guineas who then promptly died of grief after parting with the secret! As Tomalin notes, Dickens was a fun dad!! Apparently his most famous trick was to put all the ingredients of a Christmas pudding in his hat and then, miraculously, producing a flaming Christmas Pud!!
• Dickens was also, it seems, as susceptible to the long running crazes for Chinoiserie as were most Victorians. Apparently his house at Gads Hill (now some private school) and in London had “Oriental” carpets and drapes while at Gads Hill he would hang Chinese lanterns in the conservatory and apparently sit around of an evening admiring them.
• Dickens’s first son Charles Jr (below in a rather un-Victorian Christine Keeler sort of pose!!), known as Charley in the family, was not a great success and was at one point in 1860 packed of to Hong Kong to learn to be a tea buyer meaning that for a time Dickens’s had family in China! However, there appears to be no records I can find of this Hong Kong trip of Charley’s apart from in Claire Tomalin’s new bio. I believe the whole idea of him working in the East in the tea trade must have not worked out as he was back in England by February 1861 and getting married in December 1861 – given the length of a round trip voyage from England to Hong Kong in 1860 he not only obviously took against Hong Kong but clearly took against it rather swiftly and departed post-haste ye gads!

• Obviously Charley’s trip to the Orient rather got Dickens’s thinking of the East. In one of his many Christmas short stories, written in the early 1860s, Dr Marigold’s Prescriptions, Dickens’s has several China references. Dr Marigold encounters a young deaf-and-dumb lad and is astounded that he is, “…a-going out to China as clerk in a merchant’s house, which his father had been before him.” Slightly later a young deaf-and-dumb girl he has adopted marries and leaves with her new husband for a life in China, though we never find out what happens to her there or whether she likes it or not. China is a device in this story to indicate distance and parting – it could have been Timbuktu or Tierra del Fuego but Dickens chose China, presumably because his boy Charley had just been and gone and he’d been thinking of how far it was from London.
• And thanks to reader CharlesDickensLondon (who has a rather fun Dickens site here) who, after I mentioned Dickens’ visit to the Chinese junk that came to London a a tourist attraction and moored up at Blackfriars Bridge, pointed me in the direction of this interesting article by Patrick Wright (author of the recent book Passport to Peking: A Very British Mission to Mao’s China) on the Thames junk and Dickens visit to see it.

And that’s probably enough Dickens China trivia for now – of course the old boy’ll everywhere this year what with it being the bicentenary of his birth.