Death and Mr. Pickwick (122 page)

I am bound to conclude that the Nimrod Club was never presented to Dickens as an idea in the first place. As my mother said, it was the Pickwick Club from the start.

I have never felt that my father would be proud of me. Perhaps at this moment if he knew what I had done, he would, in a small way, at last be proud.

I have decided to draw one more picture. I have sometimes wondered whether, in Dickens's
Christmas Carol
, the character of Jacob Marley is an allusion to my father. What is Marley but a man who comes back from the dead to accuse his partner? So I have now drawn Dickens, as best as I can, wrapped in chains, inch by inch, yard by yard. The ends of the chains are held by messrs Winkle, Tupman, Snodgrass and Pickwick, who dance around Dickens as though he were a maypole. I drew it quickly which, as I have said before, makes my style look closer to my father's.

I have placed the drawing on the mantelpiece. It is a sort of Christmas card to myself, for that unpleasant season approaches. No one has sent me a card for years. I do not remember the last time I sent one. I shall let the picture stay in place for a few days, before it too goes on the fire, or is fed to the mouse.

 

*

‘WE CAN ACTUALLY DIG A
little deeper into Dickens's machinery-of-the-club statement, Scripty,' said Mr Inbelicate. ‘Unknown to Seymour's son, the
Westminster Review
, in a review of
Pickwick
, had in fact used the expression “the machinery of the club”. They had criticised the characters of the Pickwickians as too commonplace and vaguely drawn. Dickens was obviously responding to the criticism. In his preface, he was crying out, “It's not my fault, sir – the characters were imposed upon me!” The
Westminster Review
specifically said, of Mr Winkle, that the character wasn't new. And is it not significant that Dickens, in a later preface, talks of Seymour's sporting proposals as “not new”?'

 

*

AS I CONTINUE TURNING OUT
the trunk, I come across newspaper clippings from the 1830s, 40s and 50s. The papers had found out that
Pickwick
began with my father, and not in the way that Dickens claimed. I have here an especially interesting cutting. It is a report from April 1850 of a speech Mr Ebenezer Landells gave to the Annual Dinner of the Artists' Amicable Society. Landells is a credible witness if ever there was one, because he actually worked for Chapman and Hall at the very time that
Pickwick
was published – he did the woodcutting for my father's picture illustrating Dickens's ‘Tuggs's at Ramsgate'. Here is what Landells said: ‘It is not generally known that poor Seymour conceived the characters of Pickwick and Sam Weller before even a line of the work was written.'

It is not surprising that these reports appeared in the press. People had seen my father's preliminary drawings for
Pickwick
, long before Dickens came on the scene. He had discussed his plans for the work with various people.

I remember when I was about nineteen or twenty, my mother decided that she had had enough. We were struggling for money again. She wrote to Dickens once more, pleading for his help.

Soon afterwards she received his reply. Dickens turned down her request for money. He said that her account of my father's connection with him was untrue, and he declined any further contact with her.

She was determined that Dickens must be exposed. She formed the idea of publishing a pamphlet, an account of the real origin of
Pickwick
. In this endeavour, she received only half-hearted support from Uncle Edward, and in due course his opposition hardened. I must say – I would have been on Uncle Edward's side. My mother was prone to exaggeration if she thought it would help her cause. If she had only sat down and written a calm response, and subjected Dickens to rigorous scrutiny, she would have truly exposed him. That was not her way. I was in the music room when she and Uncle Edward argued.

‘People flocked to buy the second part of
Pickwick
,' she said, ‘because they believed they were buying Robert's last work.'

‘I do not believe that is true,' replied Uncle Edward.

‘Dickens could drop his assumed name because of Robert! Robert was the reason that
Pickwick
succeeded. Dickens did not sell a
thing
before he met Robert.'

‘You go too far, Jane. Think of what hell could descend upon us if Dickens should bring an action for libel.'

‘Dickens's works were quite unsaleable before he met Robert. Chapman told me that Dickens earned nothing before
Pickwick
. Robert was the foundation of the fortune he made. I will do whatever I can to put this right!'

I remember how she sat at the kitchen table and began work on the pamphlet. As my father had burnt his papers about
Pickwick
, she had virtually no evidence to build her case upon. In the end she adopted the course that, if Dickens could lie in his prefaces, then so could she. She took Dickens's letter about the dying clown, which had survived, and omitted certain lines, so as to completely alter its meaning. In her version, there was no criticism of my father's drawing. In this version, Dickens wanted another drawing of the clown – so that it could be given as a gift.

I remember the despair on Uncle Edward's face and how he begged her not to proceed.

‘Dickens is in debt to Robert for ever!' she cried out, shaking all over. ‘Dickens gathers up gold like a miser – gold which he would
never
have had without Robert! Yet he could not even concern himself to enquire after our family. He tells the public blatant lies – well, if he can twist facts, we will too if it will bring Dickens to heel!'

She went so far as to have the pamphlet printed, persuading a printer that the demand would be so great for the true origin of
Pickwick
that he would make a handsome profit.

Thankfully, Uncle Edward made her see sense, and the copies were destroyed before distribution. It was his threat of throwing her out, and never helping her again, that finally made her desist.

*   *   *

There is one last thought I have to give about Dickens. When I have looked through his works, trying to find clues to his treatment of our family, I have been struck by one thing: his characters are for the most part fixed. They may be alive, in their own way, and yet they are stuck as what they are. Is that not rather like a character in an illustration, who is frozen for ever? My father and Mr Dickens had much in common.

*   *   *

I have just returned from the off-licence. Mrs Shadick said that she had borrowed the ginger tom, and put it in my room. I dashed upstairs, but I was too late, and I found the cat torturing the mouse. I held the cat at bay. I had to hit the poor mouse with a shoe to put it out of its misery.

*   *   *

I am now seventy-four years old. In a week, it will be Christmas. At this time of year especially, so many people take
Pickwick
down from the shelves. There is no escaping the reminder of our family's tragedy then. Such has been the Seymour experience of Christmas for nearly seventy years.

I shall post this manuscript. Then I shall go for another walk to the river.

 

*

HE COULD HOLD HIS BREATH
no more, he could not stop his arms thrashing, and then came the rush of water inside his lungs. His chest was on fire within. Then there were knives within too, lacerating the flesh. But then – all was smooth. Cosy. He was in bed. A warm, blanketed bed. His father was coming to kiss him. His father leant over, and smiled. And after the kiss left his cheek, he sank into the softness of the feather-filled pillow. And as he descended, it seemed soft, softer and softest.

 

*

FRIDAY MORNING.

The errand boy at the nursery gardens went down to the river and saw a floating ball.

He
thought
it was a ball.

The boy ran to fetch a policeman, chattering incessantly on the way back to the river, repeating details he had already given.

‘I thought the ball would do for my little sister to play with. It was only when I got closer I realised it was the back of a man's head. So I waded in and pulled him out on to the bank. It was so strange to see him there because he was fully dressed and his hat was still on. You never think of a drowning body with the hat on. But it was firmly on his head.'

The policeman went through the drowned man's pockets. He put the objects on the grass. There was sixteen shillings and sixpence in silver. Also a purse, which contained fourpence. A bunch of keys. A pair of spectacles. And a little pocket book with a railway worker's pass to London, which would probably enable identification.

*   *   *

At the inquest into the death of Robert Seymour, son of Robert Seymour, the verdict was simply ‘found drowned'. In his summing-up, the coroner made the observation that the deceased had lived a mystery and died a mystery.

 

*

‘IT IS MY FEAR, FORSTER,
that – perhaps after I am dead – this matter will be picked up.'

‘Seymour burnt his documents.'

‘How can we be sure he burnt everything?' said Dickens. ‘Some paper – some evidence – some conversation –
something
could come back, something could turn up after a long time. Someone could look into Seymour's life and work. My children, or my children's children – some descendant long into the future – someone of my blood could be hounded by this.'

‘If Seymour's son had any evidence, he would surely have used it by now,' said Forster. ‘In any case, would he be believed? He is the son of a man who killed himself in a fit of insanity.'

After recalling his conversation with Dickens, Forster settled back in his chair with a customary look of satisfaction.

He had, in his writings about historical events, committed certain deceptions which, so far, no one had noticed.

When writing about the Third Parliament of Charles I in 1628, in his biography of Sir John Eliot, he had invented a meeting attended by Eliot four days before the session of Parliament opened, basing his information on ‘a memorandum among Eliot's papers'.

He smiled at that. Let all the world search, and they will find no such memorandum!

When he had written about John Pym, he had, if anything, been more audacious – he had mentioned a similar meeting, prior to the parliamentary session of 1621, in which could be seen, as he put it, ‘the first formation of the system of parliamentary government which had brought such great results for good and ill in England'.

That he invented this meeting, of such extraordinary historical significance, on the basis of no evidence whatsoever, had been a considerable achievement, in his view.

He smiled with satisfaction once again. These fabrications were as nothing compared to his work on
Pickwick
. Was it possible that he had carried off the greatest literary hoax in history?

He considered again Dickens's concerns that one day the truth will out.

His own concerns about the future were not exactly the same. Successful criminals must sometimes long for their crimes to be exposed. The man who commits an enterprising murder and escapes detection, for instance – a murder so brilliant that, were it not wicked, would provoke admiration – such a murderer must sometimes wish for his genius to be made public.

In his own deception concerning
Pickwick
, all it took was for someone to insert a letter ‘R' into ‘Foster' to be on the path to the truth.

His health was not the best these days. If he were to die, he would toss the ‘R' into oblivion. How amusing if, one day, someone were to pick it up.

 

*

THE CLOCK HAD STOOD FOR
many years in the Universal Coach Office of the White Hart Inn, performing a sterling service in respect of departure and arrival times. Now it stood in a ground-floor sitting room in Henrietta Street, Bath. Staring vacantly at its dial sat Moses Pickwick.

Sometimes he muttered the maker's name – ‘William Townley, of Temple Cloud'.

He went nowhere now. No more did he cover his bald head – one day, he had hobbled over to the sideboard, aided by his blackthorn cane, placed the wig upon a broken unused lamp, patted it, and had never touched it on any subsequent occasion. It seemed to many that Moses' voice squeaked even more with the wig off.

Sometimes, on a summer's day, he would sit with a smile on his face, and then his little housekeeper, Mrs Hancock, would remark: ‘You seem happy today, Mr Pickwick.'

‘I am thinking of the takings for August and September,' he would reply. ‘Lots of passengers. Good months.'

There was a miniature portrait upon the sideboard of a young girl, believed to be a daughter who had died at an early age, but no portrait of a son. Nor was there a portrait of Mrs Pickwick, who remained as little seen in death as in life.

Moses ate roast pork daily, without fail. One day, a new butcher's boy called with a delivery, and as Moses liked to be introduced to tradesmen, the boy was taken to the ground-floor sitting room by Mrs Hancock. Moses smiled and asked his housekeeper if she would be so kind as to pour a brandy and water for himself and the boy.

As soon as Mrs Hancock had left and the boy was seated, a barrel-organ player happened to start up outside, beginning with the tune ‘Champagne Charlie'. Moses began to sing, regardless of the boy's presence.

For Champagne Charlie is my name,

Champagne Charlie is my name,

Good for any game at night, my boys,

Good for any game at night, my boys,

Champagne Charlie is my name

When the tune finished, Moses said to the butcher's boy: ‘Why do people not like organ grinders? Toss him a coin, from this purse. And take one for yourself.'