Death and Mr. Pickwick (101 page)

In response, the applause dampened, to merely polite levels. Boz in the flesh was not great enough. Surely this could not be the fellow behind Mr Pickwick – he was too thin. This could not be Sam Weller's creator – there wasn't enough bare-faced cheek.

‘I don't believe that man is Boz at all,' said a woman in the third row. ‘It's an actor they have hired.'

‘It's a hoax by someone from the audience who's got up on stage, that's what it is,' said her husband.

‘How can we know whether it is Boz or not?' said a man in the row behind, leaning forward. ‘No one knows what he looks like.'

‘The whole idea is vulgar anyway,' said that man's wife. ‘To turn oneself into a performer, receiving applause, like the actors – no, it shouldn't be done.'

*   *   *

Boz imagined the weather at Christmas: he wrote of a rough cold night, with wind bringing the snow drifting across the fields in a thick, white cloud; and for this he drew upon his childhood, when a snowstorm came on the night of Christmas Eve. He remembered that people woke shivering, and that the water was frozen in the jugs and handbasins. He drew too upon the descriptions of Christmas in the works of Washington Irving, and thought of benevolent old country families and the way they celebrated the season. There was also a song he had written, which he inserted in the number, called ‘A Christmas Carol' – with a minor distortion of the metre, it could fit to the tune of ‘Old King Cole':

But my song I troll out, for Christmas stout,

The hearty, the true, and the bold;

A bumper I drain, and with might and main

Give three cheers for this Christmas old.

His description appeared in the
Pickwick
published on the last day of the year – but as fate would have it, that Christmas ushered in a great white storm across the country, with snow reaching depths of five feet, and in some parts fifteen feet. The mail coaches could not run, and postmen struggled through the snow with their bags, their hats frozen to their coat collars. The coincidence that the ice and snow of the physical world accorded with the ice and snow of the Pickwickian world had an extraordinary effect: never did the population feel closer to Boz. It seemed that Christmas should always be snowy, and the hearts of the public were warmed by a letterpress coal fire, beside which the Pickwickians drank hot sweet wassail, as much as the bodies of the public were warmed by the real coal fire in their hearths.

Boz also decided that the Pickwickians would hear a Christmas story by the fireside, and for this, as with the weather, his pen returned to childhood.

*   *   *

He was a boy in the cavern below St Mary's Church as the goblins came leaping from the depths like grasshoppers, springing over their own ranks, bounding off the chalk walls, a swarm of grinning lips, lolling tongues and conical hats. The points and buckles of their medieval shoes scratched his cheek as they jumped past or used his shoulder as a stepping stone, and they grinned close to his nose for the sheer fun of fear. But they did not want him that night. Their prey lay beyond.

Teeming from the cavern, they clambered to the graveyard above.
There
was their man – a thin, misanthropic gravedigger, whose enjoyment at Christmas was to shovel soil by lanternlight, rather than dance under a chandelier, who swilled cold rotgut from a bottle as he rested his boot upon a spade, rather than take a ladleload of steaming mulled wine by a glowing hearth among merry, cheering company.

As the gravedigger drank himself into seasonal oblivion, what horrible visions might he see? Why – goblins! Hordes of goblins, leapfrogging among the tombstones.

Boz needed a name for this man.

After a little thought, he had it: Gabriel Grub. Gabriel, from the angel of the Annunciation, who brought the Virgin Mary the good news for mankind, and began Christmas for all, and Grub, for he worked the soil like a loathsome burrowing larva. This Gabriel hated man. He hated woman. He hated, especially, child. He would deliver a glancing blow with his gravedigger's lantern to the head of a happy boy, just to knock the happiness out. His one solace was drink. Though, unlike Mr Pickwick, who drank in company, Gabriel Grub would only drink alone. It would take supernatural intervention, in the form of the goblins, to make this man change his ways.

A goblin poked his finger in Gabriel Grub's eye, and it was so sore it felt as though a blanket had rubbed there, but showing no mercy, another goblin stuck the very tip of his pointed hat into the wounded eye, and bounced away, laughing as he leapt. Another kicked Grub in the small of the back, another on the shoulder, and still others administered all the violence and spite that one saw in the very best of pantomimes, but for real, not in play. Boz himself happened to be afflicted that winter with rheumatic pains and headaches, and every discomfort he felt he transferred straight to Gabriel Grub.

Then the goblins magically transported Gabriel Grub through the ground, to the cavern below St Mary's. Here they would teach him to mend his ways. Here they would show him visions.

Suddenly Boz was back with Mary Weller, watching the magic-lantern show. He smelt the bacony odour of the sperm lamp, and saw the beam across the darkened room. The images on the calico became the visions the goblins showed the gravedigger in the cavern.

‘Show the man of misery a few of the pictures from our own great storehouse,' said a goblin. There was a thick cloud, which billowed in the cavern until it rolled away to reveal a scene of a small bedroom, where a child lay dying.

As the slide in the magic lantern changed, so the visions changed for Gabriel Grub. A goblin pointed a sharp fingernail in Grub's direction. ‘Show him some more!'

The cloud dissipated, and a rich and beautiful landscape appeared to the gravedigger.

As Boz's story came to its conclusion, Gabriel Grub awoke beside a grave, an empty bottle at his side. Perhaps the goblins had been a hallucination brought on by alcohol. But whether or not that was so, Gabriel Grub was a changed man.

*   *   *

The Christmas number of
Pickwick
was the tenth number, and when Boz had finished the quota of manuscript pages, he wrote a notice, when ten dripping icicles clung to the window in front of his desk, confirming that the work would be issued for another ten months only, and would then be complete. Which is to say: within a year, the club's papers would be posthumous. Groping for a way to express a lively sense of mortality, he seized upon an event which had recently been reported in the newspapers: the death of John Richardson, of the famous shows at Bartholomew Fair. He recalled the show he had seen as a boy, and in particular his first clown – he thought of the wan head and the blood-coloured lips and the emphasised eyebrows all thrust between the stage curtains. The frantic miscellany of a Richardson show had much in common with Pickwickian fare. So Boz wrote:

‘With this short speech, Mr Pickwick's Stage-Manager makes his most grateful bow, adding, on behalf of himself and publishers, what the late eminent Mr John Richardson of Horsemonger Lane, Southwark and the Yellow Caravan with the Brass Knocker, always said on behalf of himself and company, at the close of every performance – “Ladies and gentlemen, for these marks of your favour, we beg to return you our sincere thanks; and allow us to inform you that we shall keep perpetually going on beginning again, regularly, until the end of the fair.”'

With the eventual demise of
Pickwick
now formally announced, demand for the monthly parts surged higher still. The machines of Bradbury and Evans worked day and night to cope, while Mr Aked now headed an entire pool of women who all stabbed the three holes with a needle, pulling through the thread on the monthly parts.

And Hicks called over the printer's devil. ‘The etching plates are being worn down with so many copies,' he said. ‘Look at
these
.' He showed the boy the faint and blurred prints of the Christmas illustrations, one showing a goblin sitting on a tombstone, the other showing Mr Pickwick sliding on ice. ‘Go to Browne and tell him to re-etch them immediately.'

‘Yes, Mr Hicks.'

‘Hold your horses, I haven't finished. It's not just the latest number – it's the plates for all the previous numbers that need to be done as well. Tell him to produce an entire duplicate set, right back to the start, Seymour's pictures included. The reprinting has turned them into absolute skeletons.'

*   *   *

‘There is someone you should meet straight away,' said the party's expensively cologned host to Boz, ‘because if I don't introduce you, he'll make me.'

The host took Boz to the other side of the room, weaving between the guests and their wine glasses, towards a tall, thickset man of about Boz's own age.

The host said: ‘This is—'

‘John Forster,' said the man. ‘
The Examiner
. Your hand, sir! The very hand that writes
Pickwick
!'

He had swollen lips and his hair grew in abundance. Although he could not be described as handsome, his eyes were overwhelmingly charming, softening any resistance, and focused completely on Boz, who felt immediately at ease. The man's voice was
not
charming, though – it was loud. There was, in its tone, the suggestion of a commanding officer, or an engineer in charge of a great project of London construction. There was also a hint of a north-eastern accent; as it was only a hint, the voice itself was perhaps a great project of construction.

‘Mr Forster,' said Boz, ‘I have been both stabbed by your pen
and
stroked by it.'

‘Monstrous exaggeration! Monstrous! Just because I wasn't too keen on that libretto you did.' His laugh was one of the loudest Boz had heard. ‘Now, sir – I have been told that you have undergone legal training – but even if I hadn't been told, I would have known it in an instant. My own background, sir.'

‘You do not practise?'

‘No, it's intolerable. Here, girl – more wine.' He ordered over the servant as though she were his own. ‘You are all right for wine, I see. But let her top you up in any case. No, the law's not for me, and it's not for you either. We're not the sort. But I can run an eye over a contract, and know whether it is tight. Now I trust that our host will sit us next to each other at dinner, and if not I shall insist upon it.'

During dinner, the same girl dropped a spot of gravy between them, but closer to Boz than to Forster. ‘What are you doing, girl? Look at this! Look at this!' Forster stared across to the host. ‘Are you going to put up with this girl? If she were working for me, she would no longer be working for me.' The girl shook, and dripped another small spot. ‘Don't tell me she has done it again!'

Forster turned towards Boz and with a smile enveloped the author in friendship.

At the end of the evening, Forster said, ‘If I can
ever
assist you.' There was no doubt in Boz's mind that this man
would
assist him. Already, it seemed impossible for the situation to be otherwise.

*   *   *

The twelfth number of
Pickwick
.

It was unfortunate that a compositor was doubled up with a coughing fit during the setting of a paragraph in which a small boy attempted to attract the attention of Sam Weller at the bar of the George and Vulture. Although the compositor recovered after several backslaps from a colleague, the coughs returned spasmodically. This led the compositor to pick up a ‘b' instead of a ‘d', and also to set the three letters ‘ion' as ‘ino'.

So when Sam Weller inspected a Valentine's card in a shop window, a pictorial cupid – who should have been described as ‘a decidedly indelicate young gentleman in a pair of wings and nothing else' – came to be described as a ‘decidedly
inbelicate
young gentleman'. A few lines later, ‘a written inscription' in the same shop's window, testifying to the large assortment of cards within, became ‘a written
inscriptino
'.

The watchful eye of Hicks did discover these errors, but not before several cartloads of copies had been sewn and distributed.

*   *   *

The thirteenth number of
Pickwick
.

The number had just appeared when Boz moved to a three-storey house in Doughty Street, set between two of the gates of Bloomsbury. It may not have been a coincidence that the porter who patrolled between the gates wore mulberry livery, just like a character who is worthy of special mention. For if Mr Pickwick could have a companion in the form of Sam Weller, so too could Jingle, who enjoyed an association with the mulberry-wearing Job Trotter. Jingle and Trotter were as much a pair of scoundrels as Mr Pickwick and Sam Weller were good-hearted souls. But the mulberry porter at Doughty Street was anything but a scoundrel. His eminently respectable presence at his lodge seemed to say: this is the street where lives the man who has risen because of
Pickwick
. The porter's gold-trimmed hat, and his buttons bearing the crest of the Doughty family, emphasised that Boz was a man with more than theoretical prospects.

The thirteenth number was also memorable for the visit of Mr Samuel Pickwick to Bath. It was read by Mr Moses Pickwick in the parlour of the Hare and Hounds.

*   *   *

Moses Pickwick had always suspected it was more than a coincidence.

The publication was called
Pickwick
; his own surname was Pickwick. There was an inserted tale about the history of Prince Bladud; Moses Pickwick took a special interest in Prince Bladud. There was a great deal of coaching in the story, and visits to inns; Moses Pickwick ran a coaching company, and also two inns. But Moses Pickwick's suspicions soared when he read the description of the judge in Mr Samuel Pickwick's trial for breach of promise: