‘Dickens’s Favourite Blacking Factory’ is the extraordinary story of Charles Day, a self-made nineteenth-century boot-blacking entrepreneur, the dispute over whose Will led Charles Dickens to create the apparently endless case of ‘Jarndyce and Jarndyce’ in his novel ‘Bleak House’. In this remarkable and highly imaginative telling of a true story, after a decades-long search for information on his ancestor, the author makes a fluke discovery, revealing a sweeping story of Regency and early-Victorian London. An actual 170,000-word document uncovered in the National Archives exposes the tragic last two months of the life of Charles Day. This includes his deteriorating mental faculties resulting from tertiary syphilis, his remarkable philanthropy, blackmail by a dodgy solicitor, the inertia of the contemporary legal system and the shame of illegitimacy, particularly in the wealthy classes. Perhaps the plot of Dickens’s ‘Bleak House’ even reflects aspects of Charles Day’s own life?
