Consensus prevails among scholars about Dickens’s financial astuteness. John Dickens perennially incompetent with money, Charles, even from his blacking days, able to anticipate tomorrow by making parcels of his modest weekly pay. Each day’s allowance received its appropriate label, the means by which this shrewd small boy disciplined himself in an attempt to dole out his pennies for the six working days of the week. And when he had no money, he recalls, “I took a turn in Covent Garden Market, and stared at the pineapples.” Son in no way like the father, distinctly a chip off an entirely different block. Thus a small boy called Charles Dickens when he began the world and found it not to his liking; much the same as an adult, internationally renown and the protective owner of a trade name of his own making. Dickens stands alone among novelists for the way in which he successfully fashioned himself as a public persona worth a good deal of money.
