Death and Mr. Pickwick (113 page)

But then I was traced by a strange little man called Dyster, or Dyer or Dexter or something similar, who was striving to put together – as he called it – ‘a perfect
Pickwick
in parts'. We sat opposite each other in a tiled café, and he had such evident joy in saying those ‘p's together – his lips puffing out, spraying saliva with every alliteration, which, incidentally, did not concern him one jot, even when I brushed the evidence off my face, even when a drop hit my coffee.

‘I am afraid so many
Pickwicks
were rendered instantly imperfect,' he told me, ‘when the parts were taken to a bookbinder down the road, and your father's wrappers torn off, without a second thought, and all was bound together in calf or morocco.'

He explained that he had devoted many years to his quest and, as an obsession within an obsession, he had thoroughly researched the printed illustrations of
Pickwick
.

One of his most important discoveries, he explained with enormous enthusiasm, was evidence of
two versions
of my father's drawings for the first number of
Pickwick
– versions differing in minute details, noticeable only to a person with an obsessive interest in the subject. For who else would concern himself with whether Mr Jingle's gun, in my father's drawing
The Sagacious Dog
, did or did not possess a tiny T-shaped hammer?

He triumphantly told me that one set of my father's drawings was used in no more than fifty copies, he estimated, of the initial print run, and then never used again. The reason was obvious: the plates showed tremendous degradation in quality, even over that small print run. ‘Your father,' he said, ‘etched on plates of defective steel, which were being squeezed visibly flatter with every turn of the press. As a result, he had to re-etch his drawings for the first number of
Pickwick.
'

The scales fell from my eyes.
This was why there was the entry in my father's workbook.
I realised that I had no reason for rejecting my mother's beliefs about
Pickwick
.

I made some excuse for leaving. I shook the man's hand and walked out of the café. I had to think this through.

*   *   *

In a library, I sat with
Pickwick
open at Dickens's 1847 preface, in which he gave his account of the origin of that work. There were other books I examined too, including one with extracts of a letter by Edward Chapman of 1849, which supposedly confirmed the truth of Dickens's account. I read these items through, and anything else the library held on Dickens which might be relevant. I sat and I thought.

The first flaw in Dickens's account which struck me was his claim that there were already discussions, even when my father was alive, to reduce the number of plates, and increase the quantity of letterpress. ‘We started with a number of twenty-four pages instead of thirty-two, and four illustrations in lieu of a couple,' said Dickens. ‘Mr Seymour's sudden and lamented death before the second number was published, brought about a quick decision upon a point already in agitation; the number became one of thirty-two pages with two illustrations and remained so to the end.'

This seemed absurd. Would Chapman and Hall
really
want to reduce the illustrations at this early stage? My father died on 20 April 1836 – that is, when the first number was still on sale on the streets and before the second number of
Pickwick
was published. If Dickens was to be believed, it meant that Chapman and Hall were considering changing course
even before the first number's sales figures were known
. I found it difficult to believe that any sensible publisher would behave like that.

So I was suspicious. I now read the accounts of Dickens and Chapman even more carefully.

I noted the following statement by Dickens:

My views being deferred to, I thought of Mr Pickwick and wrote the first number, from the proof sheets of which Mr Seymour made his drawing of the club and the happy portrait of its founder.

Now taken on its own, Dickens's statement could be true; but the point is, it is
not
to be taken on its own, because Edward Chapman wrote a letter in support of that statement, which Dickens afterwards cited to buttress his position. Chapman said that Dickens's statement was completely true; but then Chapman made the following statement of his own:

As this letter is to be historical, I may as well claim what little belongs to me in the matter, and that is the figure of Pickwick. Seymour's first sketch was of a long, thin man. The present immortal one he made from my description of a friend of mine at Richmond – a fat old beau who would wear, in spite of the ladies' protests, drab tights and black gaiters. His name was John Foster.

It is when one tries to put these two statements together that problems occur. I would emphasise that they are
meant
to be put together, because in a later preface Dickens says, regarding the drawing of the founder of the club: ‘the latter on Mr Edward Chapman's description of the dress and bearing of a real personage whom he had often seen'.

Dickens's statement clearly puts himself and his manuscript at the centre of the creation of Mr Pickwick. It suggests the following sequence of events:

1. Dickens thinks of Mr Pickwick, and he writes his manuscript, which is handed to the printers.

2. The proof sheets are then handed to my father.

3. My father does his drawing of Mr Pickwick and his club.

Chapman's statement, added to that of Dickens, leads to these following additional steps:

4. Chapman looks at the drawing that my father has produced.

5. Chapman doesn't like this drawing, and asks my father to alter it.

6. Chapman describes a friend of his, John Foster.

7. My father does a drawing based upon this description.

8. The text and picture are published together.

But if this sequence of events really happened,
then the details of Chapman's description should not be in Dickens's text
. They would originate at stage 6, after the text was produced, when Chapman described his friend Foster. Here is the problem: those details – the tights and the gaiters which Chapman specifically mentions, as well as elements of Mr Pickwick's face which one might have expected Chapman to have mentioned – namely Mr Pickwick's bald head and glasses –
do appear in Dickens's text
. So how did they get there? This is a fundamental contradiction. It is a glaring inconsistency.

I could put it like this: either the proofs come first, and the image of Mr Pickwick follows, or the image of Mr Pickwick comes first and the proofs follow. One or the other. They cannot
both
be true, as Dickens claims – it cannot be the case that my father drew the image of Mr Pickwick from the proofs, on the basis of Chapman's description. Someone – either Dickens or Chapman, or both of them – isn't telling the truth about my father.

It might be suggested: perhaps the apparent contradiction could be explained by Dickens seeing my father's drawing, and deciding to amend his text at the proof stage so as to include the details of the description. But if so, what was in the original manuscript? One possibility to consider is that the original text said
nothing
about Mr Pickwick's appearance. This is virtually inconceivable. Dickens pays the most meticulous attention to his characters' descriptions, so he is hardly going to have left his principal character as just a blank. The alternative is that there was another, earlier description of Mr Pickwick, who did not look like the one we know, which Boz dropped in favour of the one portrayed in my father's picture. But this would imply a complete change of the relationship between author and illustrations. Contrary to what Dickens said, the image of Mr Pickwick would not derive from the manuscript and the proofs, but rather – the corrected proofs would derive from the image.

So either Dickens … or Chapman … is not telling the truth. Or both are liars, with untruth piled upon untruth.

The only thing which
is
consistent with Edward Chapman's statement is that Dickens's text does not specifically say that Mr Pickwick was a fat man – a most peculiar omission for Dickens to make, as this was the most important aspect of Mr Pickwick's appearance. This omission might be expected, however, if Dickens was working from pictures supplied by my father – that is, doing exactly the reverse of what he claimed, and producing letterpress according to the illustrator's wishes. Then, it would hardly be necessary for Dickens to mention that Mr Pickwick was fat, because my father's picture was dominated by Mr Pickwick's enormous belly, drawing the eye of the viewer immediately towards the bulge.

I suspect that Dickens and Chapman seized upon the omission of the word ‘fat' as a loophole by which they could work their scheme, and hoped that no one would notice the inconsistencies of the two statements. Well, I notice!

There is still that friend of Chapman's, John Foster. I do not know what to make of him. But I am suspicious. One finds characters who look remarkably like Mr Pickwick in the works of my father prior to his involvement with Dickens. In fact, I am more than suspicious. I think it is a lie. And for this reason.

In his 1847 preface, Boz pretends he does not know who originated the club – was it, he muses, William Hall or my father? In passing, I might note that this isn't strictly consistent with a later statement, when Dickens claims, in a tone of complete certainty, that my father was responsible
only
for the sporting tastes of Mr Winkle. But that is an aside. The point I wish to make is that Edward Chapman, in commenting on Dickens's preface, says: ‘It is so correctly described that I can throw but little additional light on it.' Well, one bit of additional light Chapman could have thrown was who originated the club concept. Chapman could not have forgotten who originated the club, even if Dickens had. He would
know
whether it was his partner or not. Yet Chapman chose not to comment – and leaves ambiguous the very bit of the statement which it was so important to clarify! And as for the ‘so correctly described' – he approved the statement of Dickens's about Mr Pickwick's image deriving from the proofs, which cannot be reconciled with his own statement.

Let me also consider Chapman's account of meeting my father. Even that arouses my suspicions. This is what he says: ‘In November 1835, we published a little book called
The Squib Annual
, with plates by Seymour; and it was during my visit to him to see after them, that he said he should like to do a series of cockney-sporting plates of a superior sort to those he had already published. I said I thought they might do, if accompanied by letterpress and published in monthly parts.' So Chapman claims credit for the idea of letterpress. Now think of what he has said. If my father had envisaged plates of ‘a superior sort', then would that mean of a superior artistic quality? If so, why would Chapman say that they ‘might do' if accompanied by letterpress? They would surely not only ‘do' on their own, they would be
better
than those already published. An alternative reason for superiority was that my father saw the drawings as improved by being embedded in narrative, rather than standing as illustrations on their own – but then that would imply
that my father thought of adding letterpress, not Chapman
.

As I sat in the library and worked all this out over a number of days, I knew that a falsehood had been foisted upon the world by Dickens and Chapman. That whatever the true story of
Pickwick
's origin, it was not what we had been told.

 

*

MR INBELICATE, WHO HAD BEEN
following my progress through the manuscript, now snatched it away, despite my protests.

‘People may doubt the integrity of the Seymour family,' he said, ‘but here was someone honest enough to suggest that his father modified his plans, in accordance with Dickens's desires, because of an entry in a workbook. If Seymour's son had been a complete villain, seeking to enlarge his father's role, he would never have mentioned that workbook because it would diminish his father's role.'

‘I agree, it is a measure of his honesty that he mentioned it.'

‘But we will return to Robert Seymour, son of Robert Seymour, in a little while,' he said. ‘The time has come for us to talk about that friend of Edward Chapman's, John Foster.'

He opened a storage cupboard. He brought out the flip chart I had glimpsed on the very first day I had come to the house – the chart which bore the heading: ‘Where is Chapman's friend?'

Mr Inbelicate proceeded to make a statement which was, at every point, supported by the use of notes upon this chart.

‘He is a curious man, this John Foster of Richmond in Surrey,' he began. ‘No one has
ever
found a trace of evidence for his existence.

‘In the Land Tax Assessment for Surrey, there is a Mrs Foster who lived in Richmond around 1788. There is a John Foster of Stoke D'Abernon. There is a Richard Foster, sometimes spelt Forster, who lived at Marshgate Road in Richmond, and who was buried in 1833. But where is John Foster of Richmond?

‘A search through the wills held at the Prerogative Court of Canterbury reveals there is indeed one John Foster, of Richmond, whose last will and testament survives – except that he is a John Foster of Richmond, Virginia, USA, whose will received its probate in England. A search through the records of diocesan courts for Surrey reveals no John Foster. There is no John Foster recorded as born in Richmond from 1720 to 1780. There is no record of a John Foster being born or buried in Richmond between 1781 and 1840. There is no mention of John Foster in local rate books. There is no monument to John Foster in the cemetery.